The Back Stairs on Louisa Street

In the morning the stove is just a stove.

You check it anyway, because you are who you are. You get down on the kitchen floor with your flashlight and look at the gas line, the shutoff valve, the flex connector. Everything's tight. There's no smell. There's a single scuff mark on the floor by the back door that you could swear wasn't there yesterday, and a little curl of black tape on the porch boards outside, and that's it.

You eat cereal standing up and look across the balcony. Her curtains are shut. Her ferns are watered. The kitchen window of unit 4 has a sun-catcher in it shaped like a crescent moon, and it turns slowly in the fan's breeze like it's ignoring you personally.

Her door is locked. You knock anyway. Nothing.

So you ride your bike to work, and on the way over the St. Claude bridge you notice your rear brake feels newer than it should, tighter, like somebody adjusted it. You don't remember adjusting it.

You file that under things that make no sense. The file is getting thick.

The Department of Safety and Permits lives on the seventh floor of a building downtown where the air conditioning is set to "meat locker." Your supervisor meets you at the elevator with a stack of folders and a smile that could sell timeshares.

"There he is," says Clarisse Fortier. "The man from Ohio who actually reads the code."

She is thirty-two and lovely in the way some people are lovely on purpose: honey-blonde hair in a smooth twist, red lipstick, a pencil skirt and heels that click like a metronome. Half the office straightens up when she walks through it. She's been nothing but kind to you for two weeks, the kind of kind that makes you check your pockets afterward, though you can't say why.

"Roland's files," she says, and puts the stack in your arms. "The Bywater. All yours now."

"How's he doing?"

Something flickers over her face and is gone. "Better, I hear. He's in rehab out in Gentilly. Terrible thing. Those old houses." She touches your arm. "Don't go falling through anything, Ethan. I'd have to do the paperwork."

The first file on the stack is a Castille Crescent Holdings property on Louisa Street. A double shotgun being converted into four short-term rental units. Roland flagged the back stairs last March. Stringers undersized. Treads not to spec. Do not pass. Two weeks after that note, the file was signed off. Not by Roland.

By Clarisse.

The house on Louisa Street is mint green with white gingerbread trim and a dumpster in the side yard full of the original hundred-year-old cypress, which makes the carpenter in you want to sit down on the curb and grieve. Two workers are hanging new vinyl siding on the back like they're hiding a crime.

You park your bike, pull out your clipboard and walk around the side.

Coraline Nadeau is sitting on the bottom step of the back stairs with two iced coffees.

She's back in armor. Black lipstick. A black tank top and a long black skirt slit to the knee, combat boots, a lace parasol propped against the railing like this is 1890 and she is waiting for a duel. Her rings catch the sun. One of the workers on the ladder has stopped working entirely to look at her and is about to fall off.

"Oh," she says. "Hi. What a coincidence."

"You're sitting at my inspection."

"I was passing."

"You were passing with two coffees."

"I get thirsty." She holds one out. "Chicory, with milk. You looked like a chicory-with-milk man."

You take it, because it's ninety degrees and it's a cold coffee and she's looking at you with those tea-colored eyes like it matters whether you take it. It's exactly how you drink coffee. You don't ask how she knows.

"Coraline. What did the card say?"

"Which card?"

"Last night. The one you put your hand on. The one that made you go white and knock on my window at two in the morning."

"I don't remember."

"You're a terrible liar."

"I'm a wonderful liar. I was raised by professionals." She stands up, brushing off her skirt, and plants herself in the middle of the bottom step. "What are you inspecting today, Inspector?"

"These stairs."

"Looks fine to me."

"Can you move?"

"No."

You look at her. She looks at you. She's maybe five-foot-six in the boots and you have eight inches on her, and she's planted there like a load-bearing column.

"You can inspect them from down here," she says. "With your eyes. You're very observant. I've seen you observe a railing for nine minutes."

"Coraline."

"Ethan." She says your name back to you in exactly the same tone, and something about hearing it in her low, dry voice makes you forget what you were about to say. "Please don't climb these stairs."

"That's twice you've said please."

"I'm aware. It's humiliating."

You step around her. She grabs your sleeve. You gently take her hand off it, and her rings are cool against your fingers even in this heat, and for a second neither of you lets go.

Then you put your foot on the third tread.

It holds. The fourth holds. The fifth gives way under you with a crack like a rifle shot, the whole board splitting down the grain, and your boot goes straight through into empty air.

Your hand is already on the rail. You've been climbing stairs in bad houses for seven years; you always hold the rail. You hang there for a second, one leg dangling into the dark under the stairs, coffee everywhere, heart going like a hammer, and then you haul yourself back up onto the fourth tread and sit down hard.

Coraline is at the bottom with both hands over her mouth.

You look at the broken tread. Not rot. Not age. The board is new pine, and on its underside, just visible, there's a clean, straight saw kerf a third of the way through. Somebody cut it. Somebody cut it and painted over the cut.

"You knew," you say.

"I didn't know." Her voice shakes. "I had a feeling."

"From a card."

"From the way the men on that ladder have been not looking at those stairs all morning." She takes a breath. "Come down. Slowly. Please. That's three."

A car door slams out front.

The man who comes around the side of the house is the kind of handsome that makes other handsome men reconsider their choices. Late thirties, dark curls, green eyes, linen suit the color of sand, no tie, a dimple that appears exactly when he wants it to. He walks like the yard belongs to him. Legally, it does.

"Cora," he says warmly, and Coraline goes still in a completely different way than she did last night. "What a nice surprise. You never come see my houses."

"Thierry."

"And you must be the new inspector." He offers you his hand up the broken stairs. "Thierry Castille. Castille Crescent Holdings. Are you all right? That looked nasty."

You don't take the hand. You climb down on your own. He doesn't seem to mind; he puts it in his pocket and smiles at the broken tread like it's a puppy that made a mess.

"Old houses," he says. "You have to be so careful, Inspector. Your predecessor went through a stair just like that one."