The Spare Room

Chapter 1: The Key

The cab dropped Romy at the corner of Flushing and Kent, where a converted warehouse squatted against the February sky like something that had forgotten how to be beautiful. She stood on the curb with two suitcases, a duffel bag slung over one shoulder, and the particular hollow feeling that comes from having nowhere else in the world to go.

She checked her phone again. The last text from her cousin was twelve days old.

*Door's always open. Key under the fire extinguisher on 3. Make yourself at home, Ro.*

Twelve days. She'd texted back four times since then. Called twice. Nothing.

The building had once been a garment factory, according to the faded lettering above the loading dock. Someone had converted it into lofts sometime in the last decade, but the renovation had been done on the cheap—the kind of conversion where they slapped up some drywall, ran new plumbing, and called it luxury living. The front entrance was a heavy steel door with a keypad. Romy punched in the code from the text chain—4-7-2-1—and heard the lock click.

The lobby was a concrete corridor with a single fluorescent tube buzzing overhead. Mailboxes lined one wall, the old brass kind with tiny windows. She found 3B—her cousin's unit—and peered through the glass. Stuffed full. Junk mail, by the look of it. Catalogs and credit card offers compressed into a dense brick of paper.

Her stomach tightened.

She hauled her bags up the stairwell, which smelled of paint thinner and something sweet she couldn't identify. Third floor. The hallway was wider than she'd expected, the old factory proportions giving it an almost institutional feel. Unit 3B was at the end, past a fire extinguisher mounted on the wall in a rusted bracket.

Romy crouched and felt behind it. Her fingers found the key—a single brass key on a plain ring, taped to the back of the bracket with electrical tape. She peeled it free and stood there for a moment, holding it.

She'd rehearsed this in her head during the five-hour bus ride from Rochester. She'd knock first, because maybe he was just bad at checking his phone. Maybe he'd been on a trip, or lost the phone entirely. She'd knock, and he'd open the door, and he'd look the way he always looked—a little disheveled, a little too thin, with that crooked grin that made you forgive him for being unreliable. And he'd say something like, *Ro, you look like hell,* and she'd say, *Thanks, you too,* and they'd order Thai food and she'd sleep in the spare room and tomorrow she'd start figuring out the rest of her life.

She knocked.

Nothing.

She knocked again, harder. The sound echoed down the hallway.

"He's not there."

Romy turned. A woman had emerged from the unit across the hall—3A. She was maybe thirty, with dark hair pulled back in a messy bun and a bartender's posture: one hip cocked, arms folded, weight on her back foot like she was ready to move in any direction.

"Sorry?" Romy said.

"Your cousin. He's been gone." The woman studied her with frank curiosity. "You're Romy, right? He mentioned you might be coming."

"He mentioned me?"

"Weeks ago. Said his cousin might need the spare room." She shrugged. "I'm Gina. Gina Carrasco."

"Nice to meet you." Romy looked back at the door. "How long has he been gone?"

"Week and a half? Maybe more. I'm not great with time." Gina pulled her phone from her back pocket, glanced at it, put it away. "You should talk to Carla. The super. She's in 1A."

"Has anyone—I mean, is anyone worried?"

Gina's expression didn't change, but something shifted behind her eyes. A door closing. "Your cousin kept to himself. People come and go in this building. You want Carla, she's downstairs."

She stepped back into her apartment and shut the door. Not a slam—just a firm, definitive close.

Romy stood in the hallway with her key and her suitcases and the growing certainty that something was wrong.

---

Carla Stossel was a broad-shouldered woman in her fifties with reading glasses on a chain and the demeanor of someone who had seen too many tenants come and go to get excited about any of them. She answered her door in paint-spattered overalls, holding a caulking gun like a sidearm.

"You're the cousin," she said, before Romy could introduce herself.

"Word travels fast."

"It's a small building. Eight units, only six occupied. Everybody knows everybody's business." She set the caulking gun on a shelf just inside her door. "Come in. I'll make coffee."

Carla's apartment was the superintendent's unit—ground floor, smaller than the lofts upstairs, but meticulously organized. Every surface was clean. Tools hung on a pegboard in the kitchen. The coffee maker was the old percolator kind, and Carla filled it with the practiced efficiency of someone who'd done it ten thousand times.

"Your cousin paid three months in advance," Carla said, her back to Romy. "Cashier's check. That was about six weeks ago. Rent's covered through the end of March."

"And nobody's seen him in—"

"Ten days, twelve days. Somewhere in there." Carla turned around. "Look, I'm going to be honest with you. I thought about filing a report, but I didn't. You know why? Because your cousin was the kind of guy who'd disappear for a weekend and come back like nothing happened. He kept odd hours. Sometimes I wouldn't see him for five, six days and then he'd be out front at three in the morning, smoking and talking on his phone. That was just how he was."

"But ten days—"

"Is longer than usual. I know." Carla poured two cups of coffee and handed one to Romy. "I was going to give it another week and then call the non-emergency line. But here you are."

Romy wrapped her hands around the mug. The coffee was strong and slightly burnt. "Do I have any right to be in his apartment? Legally, I mean."

"He told me you were coming. Told me to let you in if he wasn't around. I've got it in a text message." Carla pulled out her phone and showed Romy the screen. There it was, from six weeks ago: *My cousin Romy might be staying in the spare room. She's got a key. Let her in if I'm not around.*

"He planned for this," Romy said quietly.

"Planned for what?"

"For not being here when I arrived."

Carla looked at her over the rim of her glasses. "Maybe. Or maybe he just figured he'd be out running errands. Don't jump to conclusions."

But the mailbox was stuffed. The phone was dead. And the cousin who'd promised her a soft landing had vanished into thin air.

---

She let herself into 3B and stood in the doorway, trying to reconcile what she saw with what she'd expected.

The loft was big—maybe nine hundred square feet, with the original factory windows running along one wall, filling the space with gray winter light. The ceilings were high, the ductwork exposed, the floors a scarred hardwood that had probably been beautiful once. It was the kind of space that should have felt expansive and alive.

Instead, it felt like a place someone had abandoned in a hurry.

There was a mattress on the floor in the corner—no frame, no sheets, just a bare mattress with a single pillow and a bunched-up comforter. A folding table served as a desk, and on it sat a laptop with a cracked screen, its power light blinking amber. The kitchen area had a mini-fridge, which Romy opened to find a single bottle of hot sauce and a container of baking soda. The cabinets held two plates, two glasses, a coffee mug with a chipped rim.

No clothes in the closet. No shoes by the door. No books, no photos, no art on the walls. The bathroom had a bar of soap, a toothbrush still in its packaging, and a roll of toilet paper.

The spare room—her room—was completely empty. Four walls, a window, a closet with wire hangers.

Romy set her suitcases down and sat on the mattress. It smelled faintly of detergent. She stared at the laptop.

Her cousin had always been like this, she reminded herself. Even as a kid, he'd traveled light. When they were teenagers and their families would rent a cabin together in the Finger Lakes, he'd show up with a backpack while everyone else had carloads of gear. He'd wear the same three shirts all week and spend his time on a borrowed laptop, teaching himself to code, to trade, to build things out of nothing.

But this was different. This wasn't traveling light. This was a life stripped to the studs.

She picked up the laptop and opened it. The screen was cracked diagonally, a spiderweb of fracture lines running from the upper left corner, but it still displayed. The desktop was nearly empty—default wallpaper, no files, no applications pinned to the taskbar. She opened the file explorer.

Nothing. No documents, no downloads, no pictures. The browser history had been cleared. The recycle bin was empty.

Except.

There was one folder, buried in the root directory, labeled with a string of random characters: *x7kR9mW2.*

She double-clicked it. A password prompt appeared.

Romy tried the obvious things. His birthday. Her birthday. The building's entry code. The name of the dog they'd had growing up—his family's dog, a beagle named Drumstick. Nothing worked.

She closed the laptop and lay back on the mattress, staring at the ceiling. The ductwork threw shadows in the fading light. Somewhere in the building, she could hear music—something with a heavy bass line, muffled by walls and floors.

She was thirty-four years old. She had eleven hundred dollars in her checking account, no job, no apartment, and a divorce that had cost her everything except the clothes in her suitcases and a stubborn refusal to go back to her mother's house in Syracuse. Her cousin had offered her a lifeline, and the lifeline had frayed to nothing.

But she was here. She had a key. She had a roof.

And she had a folder she couldn't open on a laptop that had been wiped clean of everything else.

She'd start there.