The apartment was the third floor of a converted house in Providence, and I took it in nine minutes because it had a bath and I had been looking for five weeks.
The landlord was a company rather than a person, which I have opinions about now. Everything was done through a portal. I never met anybody. A woman called Deb from the management office let me in for the viewing, and when I asked why it was available in October — which is a strange month for a college town — she said the last tenant left in a hurry and did not elaborate, and I was twenty-six and I wanted the bath.
Her name was Karen Solomon. I know that because for the entire first year I lived there, her mail kept coming.
Not junk. Junk you throw away without thinking. This was real mail: a credit union statement, something from the state, a dental practice, a magazine about textiles that arrived every second month with her name printed on a plastic wrapper.
I did the correct thing for four months. I wrote NOT AT THIS ADDRESS on every envelope and put it back in the box, and the mail carrier took it away, and it kept coming, which I have since learned is what happens when nobody has filed a forwarding order.
What I knew about her by Christmas, without trying:
She had been there a while. There were three different address labels on the textile magazines over the year and all of them said the same apartment, and the subscription number was the same one, and you don’t hold a magazine subscription at an address for four years if you’re passing through.
She had a dentist eight blocks away.
She sewed, or wove, or something adjacent, which fit — there were four heavy-duty anchor bolts in the ceiling of the back room that had been painted over and that I never worked out until later, and marks on the floor under them.
And she had left in a hurry in the autumn, according to Deb, in a month when nobody moves.
That was it. That was the whole picture, and it did not bother me at all. People move badly. People leave apartments in a mess and don’t forward their mail and turn up somewhere else and get on with it, and I had no reason on earth to think anything else, and if the letter hadn’t come in February I would have thrown out her magazines for another year and never thought about her again.
The letter came on a Thursday in February and it was handwritten and the return address was a name and a street in Warwick.
That was the first difference. Everything else had been printed. Institutional. This was a person’s handwriting, on a small blue envelope, addressed to Karen Solomon at my apartment, and the handwriting was not confident — it was the careful, slightly wobbly writing of somebody older.
I wrote NOT AT THIS ADDRESS on it and put it in the box.
It came back three weeks later.
Same handwriting, same return address, a new envelope, and this time under the address the sender had written, underlined twice:
PLEASE — IF YOU LIVE HERE NOW, PLEASE READ THIS.
I sat with it on the kitchen counter for two days.
I want to be straightforward about the fact that opening someone else’s mail is a federal offence and I knew that at the time. It’s not a technicality I discovered afterwards to make the story better. I sat in an apartment in Providence for two days looking at a blue envelope, fully informed, and then I opened it.
It was one page.
My name is Ruth Solomon. I am Karen’s mother. I am 71.
I have not heard from my daughter since September 2019. The police in Providence took a report in November of that year and I have called them 40 times and I no longer get a call back. I have written to this address 6 times. If someone is living here now I am asking you please to write to me and tell me if there is anything at all in the apartment. A box, papers, anything at all that got left.
I am not asking you to do anything difficult. I know you don’t know me. I am asking because I have run out of the other things.
Then her address, and a phone number, and at the bottom, on its own line:
She would not have gone without telling me.
I did three things in the next hour and I have thought about the order of them a lot since.
I read it four times.
I looked up Karen Solomon, Providence, 2019, and found one thing — a Facebook post from a community page in October of that year, seven comments, a photograph of a woman in her thirties with dark hair and glasses, and the words HAVE YOU SEEN KAREN.
And then I went into the back room, where the four painted-over anchor bolts are, and I got the stepladder, and I opened the hatch in the ceiling of the closet that I had opened exactly once when I moved in, glanced into, and dismissed as empty.
It is not a crawlspace. It’s a shallow void about eighteen inches deep over the closet, and when I moved in I had put my head in with a phone torch and seen insulation and left.
I went further this time. I got my shoulders in and swept the torch right, along the joists, into the part you can’t see from the hatch.
And about four feet back, pushed against a rafter, wrapped in a black garbage bag and taped shut, was a box.