Free Blackberry Winter: A Novel by Sarah Jio Page A

were, until I reached for the door handle and looked up. “I’m sorry,”I said, confused, staring out the window at Café Lavanto, its green awning dusted with snow. “I must have given you the wrong address. This can’t be right.”
    “Forty-three ninety-five Fifth Avenue, right?” he said, looking up at the address placard on the café’s window.
    I glanced at my notebook, shaking my head. “Well, that’s what I wrote down, anyway.” I paid the fare and stepped out onto the sidewalk. My breath turned to steam as soon as it hit the icy air.
    The café was quiet, with just a single customer in an upholstered chair by the fireplace. I found Dominic at the bar. He wiped the counter with a dishcloth and flung it over his shoulder. “Late afternoon cocoa craving?”
    I shook my head. “If I told you, you’d never believe me.”
    “Try me.”
    I pulled out the file folder in my bag and set it down on the counter, opening it up to a photocopied news clipping from 1933, with Daniel Ray’s haunting face in blurred black and white. “This little boy,” I said. “He used to live here.”
    “Here?”
    I looked up at the ceiling, imagining the building’s layout overhead. “Well, upstairs, probably. The apartments must have been built early in the last century, possibly even before that.”
    “Makes sense,” Dominic said, having a closer look at the news story. “The floors above the loft are empty, just storage, but I think they used to be apartments at one point. Most of the buildings on this street were old tenement houses. Almost all have been converted into office space, or luxury condos.” He looked around the café with admiration. “I could never sell this building.”
    I smiled. “You really love this place, don’t you?”
    “I do,” he said simply. “It saved me, in a sense. I came to workhere when I thought I’d lost everything, when I didn’t know how to move forward. And now I’m the owner. I feel pretty lucky.”
    I smiled, pointing to the door that led to the upper story. “The loft you told me about yesterday,” I said. “Would you mind letting me have a look? I wonder if that was the apartment Daniel and his mother might have shared?”
    “Sure,” he said, leading me down the hallway and to the base of a little flight of stairs much too narrow to satisfy current building codes. I nodded, following him up, stairs creaking underfoot, into what might have been a small living room decades ago. It connected to a tiny, primitive kitchen in disrepair. The ivory cupboards looked tired, and cracks zigzagged through the old porcelain sink, yellowed from years of wear with rust spots near the drain.
    I noticed another small staircase to the right. I looked at Dominic. “What’s up there?”
    “Just a little room,” he said. “An attic, really. We keep boxes of paperwork there. It might have been a bedroom, I suppose.”
    “Do you mind if I have a look?”
    “Not at all,” he said.
    The staircase seemed to bow with each step, and I felt Dominic’s hand on my back, steadying me just before I nearly slipped on the second-to-last step. Since the hospital stay, my balance had been off, and the deficiency made me feel like a little old lady at times.
    “Thanks,” I said a little nervously.
    I walked into the room and crossed my arms for warmth.
    “Sorry,” Dominic said. “I don’t keep this floor heated. Got to save money where we can these days. Besides, the old owner put in baseboards and they’re energy hogs.”
    I walked over to an old single-paned window, which looked outover the alley and a large tree stump below, then turned back to Dominic and took a deep breath. “Do you ever get a
feeling
about a place? A certain vibe?”
    He nodded. “To be honest,” he said, “this room has always given me the creeps.”
    I studied the walls, with layers of peeling paint and remnants of wallpaper from decades past. “You can almost feel it,” I said.
    “Feel what?”
    I pulled the