Page 74 of The Progressions

“Call me if there’s anything,” I told Iva before I returned to the office, and she said she would. Miss Gail got worried about leaving but we all said that she had to go, and that we were looking forward to having her home soon.

I was in the trailer by myself, writing emails and answering calls, when the walkie talkie on my desk beeped. “Oren?” I asked into it. “Did you do that on purpose?” I hadn’t seen him around this morning but the walkie talkie had already been gone when my dad and I arrived. I’d locked the door to the trailer, but he had a master key. So I kept a pair of scissors close at hand and I kept my phone close, too.

The radio beeped again and maybe it was a trick, but I wanted to figure this out. I put on my coat before I left because it was chilly this morning, cold enough that Miss Gail had donned a down wrapper that went past her knees and had a hood. My coat was just wool, but it was fine for me as I went to walk around the complex to find him. “Oren?” I called, and I remembered Tyler saying that our maintenance man might already have known that he was in trouble with the police. He might have been mad—

Hands yanked me off the path, too quickly for me to reach into my pocket to grab the scissors I’d brought, and just as quickly, a heavy palm covered my mouth. “Shh,” he said. I did not “shh” and I fought, too, which made him shake me like a dog did toa toy. Oren was stronger than I realized. He pulled me back between the buildings and stopped at a window, one of the weird ones that these condos had that looked out into nothing. But even as I fought, I saw something through it. In the bedroom behind the glass, I spotted someone who shouldn’t have been there.

Cody. Cody, my tormentor from high school, was inside that condo. And he was opening drawers in a bureau and digging his hands around inside them, like he was looking for something.

I stopped fighting against Oren’s grip as I stared. This wasn’t Cody’s water delivery day and it wasn’t one of the units where he brought his bottles. And anyway, he shouldn’t have been inside any of these places, let alone rifling through someone’s stuff. Oren let go of me to take out his phone, and I watched him get a picture. Then he walked back toward the pathway.

I followed him. “What’s going on?” I asked. I rubbed my mouth with my coat sleeve, wiping away the grime from his palm.

“Your boyfriend is a thief.”

I had heard Oren speak before, but only once or twice, and it surprised me to hear him answer with words now. “Cody’s not my boyfriend,” I told him, which was really beside the point. “What’s going on?” I repeated, but a lot louder.

“He gets in by pushing the button under the lock and jiggling the handle,” Oren said, and that was my trick! “I’ve seen him do it.”

The locks at our complex were the same as the water heaters and the insulation in the walls: old and substandard. “He’s coming here and stealing?” I said. I couldn’t really believe it.

But Oren nodded. “I always saw his van around the corner when I took smoke breaks. Why was he in the area so much, that was what I wanted to know. I followed him and I told my mom.”

“Your mom?” I echoed. “Why would she care?”

She cared, it turned out, because she was the boss two above Iva in the main office, the one who had called me to talk about the police. She was the reason that our maintenance man had never been fired, no matter how many days of work he’d missed or how much he messed up.

“My mother got me the job here after the snowblower went missing, to keep an eye on you and the other girl,” he explained.

“On Iva and me? You guys thought that we stole equipment?”

He nodded. “And I needed a job,” he continued. “I got fired from my last one.”

That was the least shocking thing I’d heard from him yet. “So you were…a spy at this complex?”

He nodded again. “I have a hard time holding down anything steady because of my skiurophilia. I don’t touch them, I only watch and enjoy myself,” he clarified.

I had no idea what he was talking about but I was pretty sure it was something awful, and I actually didn’t want to know. “And the police are aware of all this?”

“They know a little about the skiurophilia,” he answered. “We were going to call about the thefts when my mom got back from Utah, but he’s in there taking shit. So I called today. They’re coming.”

And then he left, walking off as I asked another question and then said, “Oren!” There was no way that I was going back to the office alone with all this happening, not even with my scissors for protection. Now that I knew that Cody was aware of the lock trick, I also knew how he’d gotten in while I’d napped on the floor—and he could again, whenever he wanted. I ran to Tyler’s condo instead.

“Damn,” Iva breathed after I told her, my dad, baby Balderston, and Oisín, the mollusk expert with whom they were video chatting when I burst in. “Damn!”

“He’s in there right now?” my dad asked. “Your old boyfriend is stealing from the residents?” He wasn’t aware of all my problems with Cody, but he knew we’d broken up and how much I hated the guy.

“What did the maintenance man say was his trouble with employment?” Oisín asked from Iva’s phone. “Repeat that term, please.” I did, as best as I could remember it, and he said that he thought he got it.“‘Skiouros’is the Greek word for squirrels, and ‘philia’ relates to love. When used in this context, it would be an abnormal love.”

“I don’t want my baby to hear this,” Iva said, and I didn’t want to hear it, myself.

But thankfully, the police were knocking because they had just arrested Cody, and they wanted to talk to us, too. And it turned out that Oren had a warrant and also drugs in his pocket, as well as a sixteen-inch knife stuck in his belt, under his coat. He was in the back of a different squad car.

“This is too much,” my dad said. “Kasia.”

I looked over at him from where I sat at Tyler’s kitchen island with an officer that I’d recognized as a guy who had gone to my high school, a few years ahead of me. “Dad, are you ok?” I asked, but he just stared. “Sweet Jesus!” I was running to catch him as he fell from the couch, but I didn’t make it and he tumbled to the floor. “Daddy! He’s having a stroke. Help!”

Tobin Whitaker, the police officer, was already using his radio to summon that and then he knelt down to loosen my dad’s collar. “Try to stay calm,” he said, and he meant me. Baby Balderston had started screaming and Iva tried to calm him, too. “He’s breathing,” Tobin announced.

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