Chapter 1
“Awhat?”
“A survey. A comprehensive survey,” I explained. “I need to make a list of the problems here. All of them.”
“All of them?” The man in the puffy coat screwed up his face. “How long do you have? Because there are a couple things...”
I nodded and took out my work tablet in its orange case. “I have time,” I said briskly. “I’m here to get this done.”
“Okey dokey,” he told me. “Where do you want to start?”
I looked around and considered. I had never been out here before, and I’d had no idea how large this place was. When I’d driven around a curve in the narrow road and saw the orange building—and then saw more and more of the orange building, and then more—I’d realized that my survey might take forever.
But I’d been pleasantly surprised when this guy in the big coat, the facility caretaker, had escorted me through the front door.“This isn’t bad,” I’d remarked as I had glanced around the lobby. Actually, there hadn’t been anything for me to note on my tablet, because it all looked good. Fresh paint, no gouges out of the walls. The floors were clean and the glass door didn’t even have fingerprints.
“I don’t know what you’re looking for,” he had told me, so I had explained about the survey. That was what my boss Mr. Gowan had called it, but he’d been very vague about what I was supposed to find.
“There are problems,” he’d said on his way out the door. “Go to the Woodsmen practice facility and document them, comprehensively. I need to get to the airport because I’m off to La Jolla.”
I’d had the idea that things here would be terrible but again, I’d been pleasantly surprised. “I’ll just put down stuff about having someone check the roof,” I said as we walked through the spacious room. Old photos of football players in retro uniforms decorated the walls. “I’ll say that they should hire an inspector to look.” That was vague enough to cover my butt if anyone ever noticed any real problems up there. “Let’s walk through a few more areas and then I’ll leave.” This would definitely end before five and I didn’t plan to spend an extra minute in this building…although it wasn’t like I wasn’t in a hurry to be somewhere else.
The man in the coat got little worried. “If your survey has to be comprehensive, there’s a lot to show you.”
He explained things as we walked. The part of the facility that we were currently touring belonged to the Woodsmen team,the professional club that competed in the United Football Confederation—aka, the big league. Their season was over but they would use this place again in the summer for their training camp. I saw their nice locker room (one of the showers dripped, so I noted that), their weight room (could have used some dusting), and a conference room (I spotted a small scratch on the wood tabletop). Those issues were minor and easily fixable and it seemed fine to me.
So that was what I told him: “This seems fine to me.” I put the Woodsmen team-issued tablet back into the Woodsmen orange tote bag that I carried over my shoulder.
But that wasn’t all that was here.
“There’s something else. There’s more,” he told me as we approached a large door with a “no entry” sign on it. They were serious about the “no entry,” because it was padlocked.
This brought back memories of the summer I’d stayed with my aunt, my dad’s only sister. My older cousin had been dating a guy who worked at the amusement park near where they lived and she’d given me the lowdown on what really went on there. It was all fun and laughter in the guest area but in the back, where the public couldn’t venture, you would find the nitty gritty. Behind the “no entry” doors were fluorescent lights, grinding machinery, flaking cinderblock, and employees drinking from flasks and letting their friends sneak in to pick up lost phones and to loot the wallets and purses that the riders had dropped. By the end of the summer, she’d gotten enough from the visitors to buy a new gaming laptop.
Seeing that door here gave me a weird, sinking feeling. “What’s behind this?” I asked.
“It leads to the part of the facility that theJuniorWoodsmen use,” he said. He sounded sad and when I looked over at him, he wasn’t just worried. The man seemed morose. “Do you really have to do your comprehensive survey in that part?”
Now I was very curious about why he was so upset, so the answer was yes, I did. “Do you have the key to this?” I asked, rattling the lock.
He did, and he opened the door. A gritty wind billowed into our faces and I looked over at him, confused. “Why is it so dark?”
“The lights in this hallway aren’t working,” he said. “Could be the circuit breaker.” He pointed at my tablet. “That’s one for your list.”
“Why is it so cold?” I asked next, and shivered. I still wasn’t used to the temperatures here in northern Michigan. I’d heard people in my office lunchroom get excited if it reached forty degrees, like that was some kind of warmth achievement. It had been chilly in the areas that we had already toured, but the air that poured from the hallway behind the no-entry door was absolutely freezing.
“The heat doesn’t work well in this side of the building,” he explained and pointed to my tablet again. He sighed deeply. “Ready?”
It didn’t take long before my fingers were too stiff to type, but there was so, so much that I needed to write down. It wasn’t just cold and dark, it was also dirty. Not just dusty, but filthy.I used my phone to light up actual clods of muck on the floor, looking like they’d fallen off of someone’s cleats. There were muddy puddles, too, especially where the old tiles had cracked or were missing. The walls needed new paint, but not only because their yellow-green color looked like bile. It was actually scratched away in some areas, kind of like what an animal might do to its cage at a zoo—claw marks. The ceiling rose far above us but it wasn’t spacious enough to disperse the smells of sweat and mildew.
And that was just the hallway. We walked and walked, and finally arrived at a locker room that was worse. It was dingy and depressing, with broken benches, metal doors hanging off their hinges, and more muddy puddles on the ground.
“We get leaks,” the man explained. So they really did need a roofing contractor to come out here. “By the way, I’m Ed.” We shook and I noticed he hadn’t taken off his gloves. Smart move by Ed.
“I’m Cate.” I sneezed again, probably the fifth time since he’d opened the padlock.
“It’s nice to meet you,” he answered but I wanted to move past pleasantries.
“I don’t understand what’s happening here,” I said to him. I jumped over a puddle and looked into the shower area, which was both cold and moldy. “Why this place is so awful?” The other part of the building, which he had told me that the Woodsmen team used for their summer training camp, was so nice—I’d made almost no notes. And the place where I usuallyworked, which was part of the Woodsmen Stadium complex, had been totally modernized and practically gleamed.
