For two days my neighbors in the group chat called the biker in 2F a menace, and I liked every post. Then he stepped back from the widow’s door at the end of our walkway, and Susan yelled, “Somebody stop that animal before he hurts her.” He kicked it in anyway. What he handed me afterward still keeps me up.
The beeping started Wednesday, a little after six in the evening.
Three short notes, a pause, three more. It seemed to come through the wall I shared with 2F.
So I blamed Marc.
Everybody did. Marc Bauer was fifty-six, wide as a doorframe, with a silver beard cropped close and faded ink from both shoulders down to his wrists.
He kept three motorcycles under a blue tarp in the carport, and the leasing office had fined him twice for oil on the concrete.
He said good morning to all of us. Hardly anyone said it back.
By Thursday morning Susan Abernathy from 2A had posted in the tenants’ chat.
“Whoever has the dying smoke detector, CHANGE THE BATTERY. Some of us work for a living.”
Somebody answered that it was probably 2F’s junk in the carport. Somebody else sent a skull.
I put a thumbs-up on Susan’s post.
I’m telling you that because it’s true.
Marc never wrote a word in that chat. Thursday afternoon he walked the whole length of our walkway with his head tipped sideways, stopping at each unit like a man tuning a radio.
He stopped at 2G.
Diane Khoury lived in 2G. She was eighty-two, she’d buried a husband and a sister in the six years I’d lived next to her, and every morning she watered a fern on her step that had been dead since spring.
I hadn’t seen her with the watering can since Tuesday.
Marc knocked. Then he knocked with his whole fist.
After that he went down to the leasing office. From my kitchen window I could see Kurtis, who was twenty-seven and wore his lanyard like a badge, shaking his head behind the glass.
Marc told me later how that went.
“We can’t open a unit without a request from family,” Kurtis had said. “That’s policy.”
“She hasn’t got family.”
“Then there’s nothing I can do for you, sir.”
Thursday night the beeping went on and on.
I turned my box fan to high and slept with a pillow over my ear.
Friday morning I came out with my coffee and Marc was at 2G again, his ear pressed to the paint, one hand spread flat beside it.
“Marc, it’s seven in the morning,” I said.
“That’s no smoke detector,” he said. “That’s an oxygen machine. My dad was on one four years.”
“You can’t know that from out here.”
“I know the noise it makes when the tube slips off.”
I went back in. I want to be honest about that part. I went back in and drank my coffee.
Around four that afternoon, the beeping stopped.
The whole walkway went quiet at once. Susan posted, “Thank GOD.”
I felt better.
Marc’s screen door banged off the railing.
“When those run on battery and the beeping quits,” he said, to nobody, to me, “it means the battery’s what quit.”
He was already dialing. I heard him give our address, the unit, her age. I heard him say forty-six hours.
Then he dropped the phone into his vest pocket, still on the line, and hammered 2G with the side of his fist.
“DIANE. It’s Marc from next door.”
Nothing came back.
Susan was out on her own step by then, phone held up, filming him.
“Somebody stop that animal before he hurts her,” she said. “Do NOT touch that door. I’m calling the police on you right now.”
“Good,” Marc said. “Tell them to hurry.”
He looked at the door for maybe three seconds.
Then he backed up two steps to the railing.
“Marc,” I said.
His boot hit just under the knob.
The whole frame jumped.
Susan was shouting our address into her phone, saying a man was breaking into an old woman’s apartment, that he was dangerous, that everybody here knew it.
He kicked again.
The door swung in and slammed the wall.
The smell reached us first. Stale air, and the hot-plastic smell of a machine run too long.
Marc went in.
Nobody followed him. Not me. Not Susan. Not the man from 2C who’d come out in his socks.
We stood on that walkway and listened to a chair go over. I heard him say her name, low now, again and again.
“Okay. Okay, Diane. I’ve got you.”
Then louder, toward the door.
“She’s down by the bed. TELL THEM SHE’S BREATHING.”
Susan let her phone drop to her side.
Sirens, at the bottom of the hill.
Marc came back to the broken doorway. He wasn’t carrying Diane.
He had her cell phone, the kind with big gray buttons, and he held it out across the threshold. Not to Susan.
To me.
“It was in her hand,” he said.
The screen was still lit. Three calls out on Wednesday night, eleven minutes apart.
All three to the same number.
Mine.
My phone sends everyone but my favorites to silence after nine. I had never thought to make Diane one.
Thursday morning there had been three missed calls from a number I didn’t have saved. I’d swiped them away with my coffee in my other hand.
Marc looked at me the way he’d looked at that door.
“Why didn’t you pick up, Talia?”
The gray buttons
“I had it on silent,” I said. “I didn’t have her saved.”
That was the whole answer. It was true and it sounded like nothing.
Marc didn’t say anything back. He just kept holding the phone out until I took it.
It was warm from her hand. Somebody had put a strip of masking tape on the back with a phone number on it, her own, I guess, in case she forgot it.
The paramedics came up the stairs two at a time with a bag and a board. Marc stepped back against the railing to let them through and pointed.
“Left of the bed. Her tube’s off. The machine’s dead, there’s a plug-in one in the closet, I saw it.”
One of them nodded at him like he was on the crew.
Then a police car pulled in behind the ambulance, and Susan went down the walkway to meet the officer at the top of the stairs. She already had her phone up again, showing him the video.
I looked down at the screen in my hand. I pressed the green button once, the way you would to call back.
It didn’t call. It brought up the contact for the last number dialed.
The name Diane had typed in, one slow letter at a time on those big gray keys, was BETH NEXT DOOR.
The index card
I’d forgotten I ever gave it to her.
It was the week after her sister Renata’s funeral, a year ago last March. Diane knocked on my door holding a three-by-five card and a black marker, and she asked if I’d write my number on it big enough for her to read without her glasses.
“For the icebox,” she said. “In case I go down and can’t find the book.”
I wrote it. I wrote BETH NEXT DOOR across the top because she asked me to, and I told her to call me anytime, day or night. I meant it the way people mean it at funerals.
She taped it to her refrigerator while I stood there.
Then she said one more thing, at the door, and I can tell you exactly where I was looking when she said it, which was at my own phone.
“I put you down at the office, too. When I signed the new lease. I hope that’s all right.”
“Sure,” I said. “Of course.”
I didn’t ask what she meant. I didn’t save her number. I went home and made dinner.
That same spring was when the fines started for Marc. Susan photographed the oil spots under his bikes and took the pictures down to Kurtis, who wrote every complaint into a green spiral notebook he kept by the office phone. Marc showed me the fine once, out by the mailboxes. It had Susan’s unit and the time of her call written on it, copied right out of that notebook. 2A, 7:52 a.m.
“She gets up early,” was all Marc said about it.
Out on the walkway, the officer had Marc turned toward the wall with his hands flat on the stucco.
“He’s been trying to get somebody to open that door since Thursday,” I said. “He went to the office. I saw him.”
The officer looked at me, and then at the paramedics bringing Diane out on the board with a mask over her face, and he let Marc turn around.
Kurtis came up the stairs last, lanyard swinging, and stopped in front of 2G with his mouth open.
“Okay,” he said. “So who’s paying for that door?”
Seventeen units
Susan posted the video at 9:14 that night.
She’d cut it so it started with Marc backing up to the railing and ended on the second kick. You couldn’t hear him say “Tell them to hurry.” You couldn’t see the paramedics.
Under it she wrote, “This is who we live next to. An old woman alone and he kicks her door in. I’m done being nice.”
By ten it had nineteen reactions. The man from 2C wrote, “Scared the hell out of me.” Somebody I’d never met in person wrote that she had grandkids who visit and she didn’t want them near “that kind.”
I typed for a long time before I sent anything.
“He’s the one who called 911. She was on the floor. He’d been trying since Thursday.”
Susan answered in under a minute.
“He broke a door and scared the whole building. Two things can be true, Talia.”
Eleven people put a thumbs-up on that. I counted them. I knew most of the faces. A couple of them I’d lent things to.
Saturday morning I took my coffee out on the walkway and the plywood was already up over Diane’s doorway. Marc had screwed it into the frame and put a hasp and a padlock on it. The fern was still on her step. Somebody had knocked it over, and somebody else had stood it back up.
Marc came out of 2F with a drill in his hand. He looked tired. He said good morning.
I said it back.
He nodded at the plywood. “The office wanted it open till Monday. I said no.”
At noon Susan posted again.
This one was a document. A formal complaint, typed, addressed to the property management company, not to Kurtis. It asked that the tenant in 2F be served a notice for “destruction of property, threatening behavior and a pattern of disregard for community rules.”
At the bottom it said, “Submitted on behalf of the following units,” and then a list.
“Seventeen units out of eighteen,” Susan wrote. “That’s everybody but him. Anybody who liked my posts this week, I counted you in. Message me if you want off, but I hope you won’t.”
I scrolled down to the list.
2E was on it. That’s mine.
I read it again, slower, all the way down, because one of the numbers didn’t make sense.
2G was on it too.
Room 412
The hospital let me up Sunday after lunch because I told them I was her emergency contact.
I said it to get past the desk. I didn’t know yet that it was true.
Diane was sitting up with a tube under her nose and a tray she hadn’t touched. She looked smaller than she did on her step. Her hands were the same, though, spotted and busy, folding the edge of the sheet over and over.
“Talia,” she said, like I’d come to borrow sugar.
I gave her the phone. I’d charged it. I didn’t know what else to bring.
She held it in her lap and looked at it for a while.
“I called you,” she said.
“I know. I saw. I’m so sorry, Diane. My phone was on silent and I didn’t know it was you, and I…”
She waved her hand at me, the way you’d wave at a fly.
“I got down by the bed to plug in the big machine and the tube came off. And then I couldn’t get up. I had the phone because I’d been sitting with it.” She folded the sheet again. “After the third time I dropped it, and it went under the bed rail, and I couldn’t reach it anymore.”
So the phone in her hand on Friday. Marc must have found it on the floor and put it there, or she got it back somehow at the end. I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know which.
“Is it Marc who came?” she said.
“Yes.”
“I told the boy at the office about Marc once. That he carried my groceries up. The boy laughed at me.”
She closed her eyes for a minute and I thought she’d gone to sleep. Then she opened them.
“You know Susan wrote me down on her paper,” I said. “Against Marc. Your unit’s on it.”
Diane didn’t say anything to that. She looked at the window.
“I need my blue folder,” she said. “From the drawer by the icebox. They keep asking me for papers here and I don’t have any of my papers.”
“I’ll get it tonight.”
“Bring my robe too. The green one.” She squeezed my hand once. “And take my card off the icebox and put it in your pocket. You’ll want it.”
The blue folder
Marc opened the padlock for me at seven that evening and then went back into 2F and left me alone in there. I was grateful for that.
The apartment was the same layout as mine, flipped. The machine she’d been on was tipped on its side by the bed, the tube still hooked to it and lying across the carpet. The other machine, the plug-in one, was standing by the closet where Marc had dragged it Friday.
On the refrigerator, under a magnet shaped like a cardinal, was the card.
BETH NEXT DOOR, in my handwriting, and my number, and under it, in pencil, a little check mark. Then another. Then another.
Three.
I took it down and put it in my pocket like she said.
The drawer by the refrigerator had rubber bands and coupons and a church bulletin from last year, and under all of it the blue folder. Her Medicare card. Her husband Patrick’s death certificate. A lease, the new one, from last March.
Stapled to the back of the lease was a one-page form from the leasing office. At the top it said RESIDENT EMERGENCY CONTACT, and under that, a line in small print. In the event the resident cannot be reached, management will attempt to contact the person listed below before requesting a welfare check.
The person listed below was me.
Talia Powell. 2E. My cell number, in Diane’s careful print, the numbers made too big for the boxes.
Relationship. She’d written, Neighbor, like family.
At the bottom there was a signature line for management, and it was signed. Kurtis had initialed it and dated it. He had put the office stamp on it.
I stood there in her kitchen and looked at the date and did the math on Thursday afternoon.
At twenty to three on Thursday I’d been at work with my phone on my desk, ringer on, all the way up.
I went out onto the walkway with the folder under my arm. Marc’s door was open a crack and the TV was on.
“Marc,” I said. “What time do they open tomorrow?”
The green notebook
The notice was taped to Marc’s door when I came out Monday at seven-thirty.
Fifteen days to cure or vacate. A charge of $1,180 for the door, the frame and “emergency labor.” It said the complaint had been received from multiple residents.
Marc was standing in the carport reading his copy with his reading glasses on. He’d taken the tarp half off one of the bikes, like he’d started to do something with it and then stopped.
“I’m going down there,” I said.
“You don’t have to.”
“She put me down, Marc.”
He folded the notice in half and came with me.
Susan was already in the office when we got there. She was in a chair by Kurtis’s desk with a printed copy of her complaint and a pen, going down the list of units with him like a teacher taking roll. She saw Marc and stopped talking. Then she saw me and smiled a little, like she thought I’d come to sign.
I put the blue folder on the desk and opened it to the form with his initials and his stamp.
Kurtis looked at it for a long time.
“I don’t…” he said. “This is from her lease file.”
“It’s her copy,” I said. “You had my number.”
“Okay, but Thursday, the gentleman didn’t say anything about an emergency contact, he just said he heard a noise…”
“He said she hadn’t been out,” I said. “Your form says you call me.”
Kurtis looked at Susan. It was a short look but everybody in that office saw it.
Susan saw it.
“Don’t you dare put this on me,” she said. “I did what anybody in this building would have done. I saw a man I do not trust going door to door, trying doors, putting his ear to old women’s apartments, and I called the office, and I told this young man not to let him into anybody’s unit. That’s called being a neighbor. That’s called paying attention.”
“You called Thursday,” I said.
“Of course I called Thursday.”
Kurtis had the green notebook open in front of him by then. I don’t think he meant to. I think his hands went to it because that’s where his hands went when somebody complained.
I could read it upside down. Thursday. 2A, 2:31 p.m. Biker 2F trying doors, do NOT let him in any unit. Mrs. A.
Nine minutes later he’d told Marc there was nothing he could do for him.
“You’re going to stand there and tell me I should have handed that man a key?” Susan said. “Look at him. Look at what he did to that door. You’ve all seen the video. I am not the one who kicked in a door on a woman who was lying on the floor. Somebody had to say something about him, and nobody in this building ever does, so I did. I’ve been saying it since spring. You can ask Kurtis. Kurtis, tell her.”
Kurtis didn’t tell me anything. He looked at the form with his own initials on it.
I took out my phone. I took a picture of the form, and a picture of the notebook page before he could close it, and I opened the tenants’ chat.
I put up both pictures. Then a screenshot of my own phone from Thursday morning, three missed calls, unknown number, swiped.
I typed one line under them.
“She called me three times. I was her emergency contact and I didn’t pick up. Marc knocked. Take my name off, and take hers off, she was on the floor.”
Susan’s phone buzzed in her lap.
She read it. I watched her read it, and then I watched it buzz again, and again. The man from 2C. Then the woman with the grandkids. “Take 2C off.” “Take us off.” “I didn’t know she put Talia down.”
“This is a private building matter,” Susan said, to the phone, to the room. “You don’t post people’s lease papers in a group chat, Talia. That’s her private business. You have no right.”
“She told me to bring it,” I said.
Susan stood up. She put her copy of the complaint face down on Kurtis’s desk.
Kurtis picked up the notice with the $1,180 on it and held it like he didn’t know where it had come from.
“I’ll have to call my regional,” he said. “About the door. I’ll, ah. We’ll hold the charge. For now.”
Susan was already at the door. She pushed it open hard enough that the bell over it rang twice, and she didn’t look back.
Nine-forty
Diane came home three weeks later, on a Thursday, with a new machine that had a battery that ran eight hours and a louder alarm. Marc carried it up. He’d hung a new door for her the Saturday before, a steel one, and painted it the same green.
Kurtis’s regional sent Marc a letter dropping the charge. Nobody sent one about the fifteen days. It just stopped coming up.
Susan took me out of the tenants’ chat that first Monday afternoon. Some of the people who’d put a thumbs-up on my post still don’t look at me by the mailboxes. I don’t blame them much. I said it out loud, what I did, and people don’t like standing next to that.
Marc says good morning to everybody, same as before. More of them say it back now.
The card from Diane’s icebox is on mine, with her three pencil marks still on it.
That first night she was home, I sat on my couch and opened my contacts and typed her in. Diane Next Door. I pressed the little star.
At nine-forty my phone rang. It rang out loud, the whole ring.
I picked up before the second one.
“It’s me,” Diane said. “I’m just checking that it rings.”
If this one got to you, check who’s on your phone’s favorites tonight, and call the one who isn’t but should be.
For more unsettling biker encounters and family secrets, read the rider who took a grandmother’s ring during a wedding and the old rider who knew a startling story about Grandpa. There’s also the pawn slip a husband left his quiet granddaughter.
