The Sixty-First Floor, with Ines Calder

Previously: Ines and her team, staying together, found a whole floor of residents paying cash rent to someone called the Landlord, including Ostrander, who is bound by a lease bearing the Hargrove owners’ own letterhead, signed six minutes after he disappeared. Ines pocketed the lease alongside her retainer and said nothing to the group about what the two papers had in common.

She waited until Hatch and Leland had wandered off toward the taped-up photographs before she pulled Dov aside by the elbow. He had a pencil behind his ear before she finished asking. She handed him both documents, the retainer and the lease, and told him to find what they shared.

Dov read the retainer first, the number Pell had counted out in the lobby, then the lease, the one Ostrander had not agreed to and could not stop honoring. He turned each one over, checking for a printer’s mark, a routing code, anything that tied paper to paper. On the back of the lease, faint enough to miss under bad light, a routing stamp matched a line item buried three pages into the retainer’s own boilerplate.

“Both of these clear through the same account,” Dov said, keeping his voice down without being asked to. “It’s not the owners’ operating account either. It’s a shell, filed under a name that doesn’t show up anywhere else in the building’s paperwork.”

“What name,” Ines said.

“The Tally Office,” Dov said, and wrote it on his palm in pencil rather than say it twice. He had already started running the numbers in his head, the way he ran every number in his head before trusting it to paper. The building declared sixty floors to the county and collected rent on sixty-one, and the difference had been clearing through the Tally Office for longer than either document in his hand could account for.

“How long,” Ines asked.

“Longer than the lease has existed,” Dov said. “Which means whatever this account is, it predates Ostrander signing anything.” He held up the lease against the retainer, side by side, like he was checking two halves of a torn bill for a match, and the paper trembled slightly in his hand, the only sign he gave that the arithmetic bothered him.

A courier passed them in the hallway without slowing, a canvas satchel over one shoulder and a rent receipt book under one arm, headed toward the residents’ floor and then, judging by the elevator call button he pressed on his way past, headed back down after. Ines watched him go. Whatever the Tally Office was, it collected in person, on a schedule, from a building that officially had nowhere for that floor to exist.

The Vote

How does the team go after the courier?

Vote in the LinkedIn poll, and Episode 5 gets written from whatever wins.

Follow him quietly: Leland tails the courier without approaching him yet.

Stop him now: Hatch and Ines catch the elevator he’s waiting for.

Trace the route instead: Dov works the paperwork back to where the courier delivers.

Ask a resident: The woman with the rent receipt might already know his route.

The Sixty-First Floor, with Ines Calder

Previously: Ines told Dov the truth about the folder, the debt, and Alden Voss, and he took it the way he took most things, quietly and with a question ready for later. The team came down off the sixty-second floor to find the lobby of the Hargrove Building full of men in orange vests who had not been there that morning.

A banner had gone up across the main doors since they had come in, the kind printed overnight and hung crooked, announcing a demolition permit and a time: six o’clock. Ines checked her watch out of habit more than need, because she already knew it was closer to five than she wanted. A man in a gray suit stood near the security desk, not wearing a vest, reading a clipboard like it owed him money.

It was Alden Voss, and he looked exactly like a man who forges nothing himself and never has to. He saw Ines before she saw him properly, and he smiled the particular smile of someone who has been expecting you for longer than you have been expecting them. “I was wondering how long the sixty-first floor would hold your attention,” he said, and did not bother raising his voice over the noise of the vests.

“You’re tearing down a building with people still living on it,” Ines said.

“I’m tearing down a floor that was never on the deed,” Voss said. “The people on sixty-one will be somewhere else by six, one way or another, and so will you, if you’re smart about it.” He held out a business card that had nothing on it but a phone number and the word DIRECTOR.

“I have a seat for you,” he said. “Not at the Tally Office. Above it. You clear the debt, you get a title, and you never have to explain to anyone why Hargrove’s basement doesn’t match its blueprints.”

Ines did not take the card, not yet, and behind her she could hear Hatch doing the math on how many minutes were left before six and not liking the answer any better than she did. Dov had gone very still in the way he did when he was waiting to see which Ines was about to answer, the one who took jobs or the one who walked out of them. Voss kept the card held out between two fingers, patient in the specific way of a man who has never once had to chase anybody.

The Vote

Does Ines take the seat Voss is offering?

Vote in the LinkedIn poll, and Episode 10 gets written from whatever wins.

Accept the seat: She takes the card and the title that comes with it.

Refuse outright: She tells Voss what he can do with his director title.

Stall for time: She asks for until six to think it over, and means it.

Name her own price: She offers to clear the debt a different way, on terms Voss didn’t set.

The Sixty-First Floor, with Ines Calder

Previously: Ines took the folder with her name on it out of the vault without opening it in front of anyone, and the team left the records room still not knowing what was inside. She waited until the stairwell had emptied out behind her before she untied the string.

The folder held eleven pages, and Ines read them standing on the landing between the sixty-second floor and the sixty-first, because she did not trust herself to make it any farther before she had to know. Most of it was ledger entries in Voss’s hand, dates going back further than she wanted to count, each one logging a transfer from an account that had her name attached to it as the debtor. The total was on the last page, underlined twice, and it was larger than anything she had expected to owe a man she had not worked for in three years.

Dov had come back up the stairs looking for her, quietly enough that she did not hear him until he was already two steps below the landing. He heard her say a number out loud to nobody, the way people do when a number is too large to keep silently, and he heard the particular kind of quiet that came after it. He did not ask what the number was for, which was its own kind of tact, but he had clearly heard it, and now he was standing there waiting to find out if she would say anything else.

“How much of that did you hear,” Ines said, not turning around.

“Enough to know it wasn’t rent,” Dov said.

She folded the pages back along their original creases, slowly, the way a person folds something they are deciding whether to keep. Below them, Hatch’s voice carried up the stairwell asking if everyone was coming or not, and Buttress’s bell answered before anyone human did. Ines looked at Dov for a long moment, the kind of look that is doing arithmetic of its own, weighing what one more person knowing would cost against what it might be worth.

The Vote

What does Ines tell Dov?

Vote in the LinkedIn poll, and Episode 9 gets written from whatever wins.

Tell him the truth: She tells Dov exactly what the folder said and whose debt it is.

Call it old business: She tells him it’s a leftover from working for Voss, nothing that touches the job.

Ask him to drop it: She asks Dov to let it go without explaining any of it.

Hand him the folder: She lets him read the eleven pages himself.

The Sixty-First Floor, with Ines Calder

Previously: Ines pulled Hatch aside instead of the whole team and told her whose hand had written the note in the blueprint’s margin: Alden Voss, a man she had once worked for and whose signature she had spent four years learning to forge well enough to fool his own lawyers. Hatch did not ask why Ines knew that so precisely, which was itself a kind of answer.

The stairwell past the sixty-first floor was not on any blueprint the city had ever stamped, and it ran up instead of down, concrete steps with no handrail on one side. Dov counted two flights and called it the sixty-second floor before anyone had seen a door, going by nothing but the ache in his knees and a habit he had picked up counting floors since Episode 2. Buttress took the stairs without complaint this time, which worried Leland more than the stairs themselves did.

The door at the top had no knob, only a keypad gone dark and a hand-lettered sign that read TALLY OFFICE RECORDS in the same blue ink as the margin note. Hatch put her shoulder into it once out of habit before trying the handle instead, and the door opened on a room lined floor to ceiling with gray steel drawers, each one labeled with a name and nothing else. The air smelled like cold metal and the inside of a filing cabinet that had never once been aired out.

Ines walked the aisles the way she used to walk a job site before the demolition crew arrived, counting exits before she counted anything else. Dov found the drawer first, two-thirds of the way down the third aisle, and he said her last name out loud before he fully understood he was reading it off a label. CALDER, it said, nothing else, no first name, no file number, the kind of label a man writes when he already knows exactly whose it is.

The drawer slid open without resistance, oiled recently by somebody who still cared whether it worked. Inside lay a single folder, thinner than Ines had expected and heavier than it looked, tied shut with the same kind of string the Tally Office used on its satchels. Someone had written a date on the tab in Voss’s hand, a date Ines recognized immediately because it was the day she had quit working for him.

“That’s yours,” Hatch said, and did not reach for it.

Ines stood with the folder in both hands and the rest of the team watching her the way they had not watched her since the elevator doors first closed on the sixty-first floor, waiting to see what she would do with something that was, for once, actually hers.

The Vote

Does Ines read the folder here or take it?

Vote in the LinkedIn poll, and Episode 8 gets written from whatever wins.

Read it right here: She unties the string in the vault, in front of everyone.

Take it, read later: She pockets it and leaves the vault before answering any questions.

Hand it to Dov: She has Dov read it first and tell her what it says.

Leave it behind: She closes the drawer and walks out without it.

The Sixty-First Floor, with Ines Calder

Previously: The ledger man let something heavy go over the side of the barge rather than be caught holding it, and Ines went into the river after it while the barge pulled out from under the bridge. Leland and the rest reached the pier too late to do anything but watch the current close over where she went in.

The water under the bridge was colder than a Midtown lobby with a doorman had any right to produce four floors down. Ines went in feet first with Dov’s rope cinched around her waist, and the current took her sideways before it let her find bottom at all.

What the ledger man had thrown was not money. It was a document case, the hard kind with a rubber gasket, wedged between two pilings where the current couldn’t finish carrying it downriver. Ines got both hands around it and gave the rope two hard tugs, the signal for pull, and let Dov do the rest of the work.

“You went in for a briefcase,” Hatch said.

“I went in for whatever a man throws away instead of getting caught with it,” Ines said. She set the case on the iron stairs to drain before anyone else touched it.

The gasket had held. Inside, rolled tight and dry, were blueprints with the Hargrove Building’s own seal stamped in the corner, three sheets deep. The top sheet ran the tower up past sixty in pencil additions nobody had ever filed with the city: sixty-two, sixty-three, sixty-four, each one drawn in the same hand as the seal but none of them stamped.

Dov unrolled the third sheet and went quiet in a way that made Hatch ask him twice if he was all right. In the margin, next to the sixty-second floor, someone had written a note in blue ink that had survived the river better than the pencil had, three words and a date circled twice. Ines recognized the hand before she read a single word of it, because she had spent four years of her life learning to forge it.

She rolled the sheet back up before anyone else could get a look at the note, and slid the whole set into her jacket instead of laying it out on the dock for a vote. Hatch was already asking whose hand it was, and Ines was already deciding how much of the answer the team was going to get.

The Vote

Does Ines tell the team what she recognized?

Vote in the LinkedIn poll, and Episode 7 gets written from whatever wins.

Tell them everything: She lays the blueprints out on the dock and names whose hand it is.

Tell Hatch alone: She pulls Hatch aside this time, not Dov.

Claim it’s nothing: She tells them the note doesn’t mean anything and hopes nobody asks twice.

Burn it: She feeds the blueprints to the barge’s motor instead of answering anyone.

The Sixty-First Floor, with Ines Calder

Previously: Ines and her team followed a clicking radio into a hallway of unnumbered doors, lost the elevator behind them, and found a second radio, warm and running, in a room someone had left in a hurry. Another set of clicks answered back from further down the hall, and moved closer.

“We stay together,” Ines said, and nobody argued with her, which was rare enough that Dov looked up from the radio to check her face. Buttress fell in at her heel, bell silent, and the five of them walked toward the sound instead of away from it.

The clicks stopped outside a door with a peephole and a brass 61 screwed crooked into the wood, the first number they had seen since the elevator. It opened before Ines could knock. A woman in a cardigan and reading glasses stood there with a radio of her own in one hand and a rent receipt in the other, and behind her a hallway full of people looked up from card tables and half-eaten dinners like they had been interrupted mid-shift.

“You’re new,” the woman said, not unkindly. “Rent’s due Fridays, cash only, and the Landlord doesn’t do tours.”

Dov’s eyes went straight to the receipt, the way they went to any piece of paper with numbers printed on it. It listed an amount, a date, and no address anywhere on it, not even a unit number, just a line at the bottom reading paid in full. He asked to see it and she let him, more out of habit than trust.

Further in, past card tables and a wall of taped-up photographs, Ostrander sat on an overturned crate with a mug of something hot and both hands wrapped around it. He looked up when Buttress’s bell finally rang, one soft note against the crate legs, and something in his face went loose with relief before it tightened back up. “I signed something,” he said, before anyone asked. “I don’t remember agreeing to, but I signed it.”

He held out a folded lease, the paper gone soft at the crease from being read too many times, and the letterhead at the top belonged to the owners of the Hargrove Building, the same three names Pell had given Ines in the lobby six hours ago. Ines took it and read the line at the bottom twice. It named the sixty-first floor as its own address, separate from the sixty the building was permitted for, and it was signed at 2:20 in the morning, six minutes after the elevator had left him there.

“Your employer wrote this,” Ines said to the woman with the receipt.

“Our employer built this,” the woman said. “The Landlord just collects.”

Ostrander would not leave the crate, insisting the lease bound him here until someone told him otherwise, and around them the residents went back to their card games as if a new tenant showing up mid-shift was nothing worth a second look. Ines folded the lease into her jacket next to the retainer, and said nothing yet about what the two documents had in common.

The Vote

Does Ines tell the team what the lease and the retainer have in common?

Vote in the LinkedIn poll, and Episode 4 gets written from whatever wins.

Tell everyone now: She lays the lease and the retainer on the table together.

Tell only Dov: He is the one who will spot what the paperwork means fastest.

Keep it to herself: She pockets both and lets the job come first.

Confront Pell by phone: She calls the owner directly instead of telling her own team anything.

The Sixty-First Floor, with Ines Calder

Previously: The owners of the Hargrove Building hired Ines Calder to find out why its elevator recognizes a sixty-first floor that no permit admits exists, after a night guard rode up to it and never came back down. She took the retainer, rode up with her team, the goat included, and followed the sound of a clicking radio out into the hallway just as the elevator doors closed behind them.

Ines rapped twice on the door frame and the floor held her, and she was already three steps down the hall before she looked back to see if the others had followed. Hatch had a boot wedged in the closing doors, and the doors did not care. They shoved against her ankle until she pulled it free, and the car dropped away with a sound like a held breath let go.

“That’s one way to lose an elevator,” Hatch said.

“We didn’t need it,” Ines said, and kept walking toward the clicks.

The hallway ran longer than the building’s footprint should have allowed, and Dov, counting under his breath, gave up somewhere past twenty. None of the doors had numbers, brass plates, or the little paper slots some buildings used for a name card. Every few feet another door stood exactly like the last one, and Leland tried three handles before finding one that turned.

The room behind it had a bed that had been slept in, a stack of paperbacks with cracked spines, and a kitchen counter with two mugs on it. One mug was empty. The other sat next to a radio with its channel light still on, two short clicks and a pause coming out of it steady as a pulse, and when Dov touched the side of the mug it was warm.

“Someone left in a hurry,” Dov said.

“Or someone’s still here,” said Leland, and nobody answered that.

Buttress would not cross the threshold, and stood in the hallway with his bell silent, watching the door the way he watched a floor he did not trust. Ines picked up the radio and turned it over, looking for a maker’s mark or a serial number, and found the panel smooth and blank where one should have been. She thought about the panel in the elevator, sixty floors and then a sixty-one where the brass had been bare.

Hatch went to the window and pulled the blind an inch. Outside was not the city. It was a courtyard, four stories down, lit by lamps that did not match anything on the block Ines remembered walking in on.

“I’d like everyone to notice we don’t have an elevator,” Hatch said.

“I noticed an hour ago,” Ines said, though her watch read four minutes since the doors had closed.

The radio clicked twice more and went quiet, and from somewhere down the long hallway another radio answered it, clicks coming back the other way, two short and a pause, moving closer.

The Vote

What does the team do next?

Vote in the LinkedIn poll, and Episode 3 gets written from whatever wins.

Stay together: The team moves as one group toward the answering clicks.

Split up: Half the team follows the clicks while the rest search the nearby rooms.

Barricade the room: They lock the door and wait to see who is knocking back.

Send Buttress ahead: He is the only one who has not been wrong about a floor yet.

The Sixty-First Floor, with Ines Calder

Ines Calder counted the retainer twice, standing at the lobby desk of the Hargrove Building at five past four in the morning while the owner watched her do it. It was in a bank envelope, and it was all there. She put it inside her jacket and looked at the elevator, which had a brass plate above the buttons that said sixty floors.

“Can you make it stop?” said Pell, who owned the building with two cousins in Connecticut.

“That depends whether you want it stopped or gone,” Ines said.

“It was inspected in March,” said Pell.

The fire marshal had a certificate of occupancy in a plastic sleeve, and he read from it twice: sixty floors. The night guard, Ostrander, had ridden the elevator up at 2:14 a.m., and the car had come back down empty. At the dispatch desk his radio had been keying ever since, two short clicks and a pause, two short clicks and a pause.

Dov Abelard had taken the controller log from the building engineer and was reading it under the lobby’s one good lamp, moving a pencil down the column. Hatch Pruitt, who had flown salvage runs until one in the morning, sat on the base of the security desk with her boots crossed and her eyes shut. Leland Cho stayed by the front doors with Pell and the marshal and asked them, in turn, about their weekends.

Buttress stood on the marble in the middle of the lobby, and the bell on his leather collar rang once each time he shifted his weight. He had refused the carpeted runner by the mailboxes and the stairs to the mezzanine, and he had crossed the marble without hesitating. Ines trusted his opinion of a floor over any inspector’s she had ever paid.

“The controller logged the car at sixty-one,” Dov said, and turned the page.

“Is the goat coming?” Hatch asked, without opening her eyes.

“He goes where the floor holds,” Ines said.

The lobby car left at 4:31 with four passengers, one of them on hooves. Ines pressed sixty and held it until the light behind the button went steady. Nothing rattled and nothing slowed, and above the sixty on the panel, where the brass had been bare, a sixty-one lit up.

“I’d like it on record that I said,” Hatch began, and the doors opened.

The carpet in the hallway was the color of wet slate, and it was damp. Buttress held one hoof over it and set it back on the car floor. From the far end of the hall came two short clicks and a pause. Ines rapped twice on the door frame and stepped out, and the floor held her. Behind her the doors began to slide shut, and Hatch got a boot in the gap.

The Vote

What does Ines do next?

Vote in the LinkedIn poll, and Episode 2 gets written from whatever wins.

Follow the clicks: Ines heads straight down the hall toward the sound.

Try the nearest door: Ines opens the first door she passes and looks inside.

Hold the elevator open: Hatch and Ines try to keep the car at sixty-one so it cannot leave.

Send the goat back down: Buttress rides the car to the lobby alone while the others explore.