“Yes. Let’s not talk about it.”

“Heard that. Want to play cribbage until lunch? If you don’t know how to play, I can teach you.”

“I know how, but I don’t want to. Think I’ll go back to my room for awhile.”

“Consider your situation?”

“Something like that. See you at lunch.”

“When the ding-dong goes,” she said. “It’s a date. Cheer up, little hero, and gimme five.”

She raised her hand, and Luke saw something pinched between her thumb and index finger. He pressed his white palm to her brown one, and the folded scrap of paper passed from her hand to his.

“Seeya, boy.” She headed for the playground.

Back in his room, Luke lay down on his bed, turned on his side to face the wall, and unfolded the square of paper. Kalisha’s printing was tiny and very neat.

Meet Maureen by the ice machine near Avery’s room ASAP. Flush this.

He crumpled the paper, went into the bathroom, and dropped the note into the bowl as he lowered his pants. He felt ridiculous doing this, like a kid playing spy; at the same time he didn’t feel ridiculous at all. He would have loved to believe there was at least no surveillance in la maison du chier, but he didn’t quite believe it.

The ice machine. Where Maureen had spoken to him yesterday. That was sort of interesting. According to Kalisha, there were several places in Front Half where the audio surveillance worked poorly or not at all, but Maureen seemed to favor that one. Maybe because there was no video surveillance there. Maybe it was where she felt safest, possibly because the ice machine was so noisy. And maybe he was judging on too little evidence.

He thought about going to the Star Tribune before meeting Maureen, and sat down at his computer. He even went as far as Mr. Griffin, but there he stopped. Did he really want to know? To perhaps find out these bastards, these monsters, were lying, and his parents were dead? Going to the Trib to check would be a little like a guy wagering his life’s savings on one spin of the roulette wheel.

Not now, he decided. Maybe after the humiliation of the thermometer was a bit further behind him, but not now. If that made him a chickenshit, so be it. He turned off the computer and took a walk to the other wing. Maureen wasn’t near the ice machine, but her laundry cart was parked halfway down what Luke now thought of as Avery’s hallway, and he could hear her singing something about raindrops. He went to the sound of her voice and saw her putting on fresh sheets in a room decorated with WWF posters of hulking beefcakes in spandex shorts. They all looked mean enough to chew nails and spit out staples.

“Hey, Maureen, how are you?”

“Fine,” she said. “Back aches a little, but I’ve got my Motrin.”

“Want some help?”

“Thanks, but this is the last room, and I’m almost finished. Two girls, one boy. Expected soon. This is the boy’s room.” She gestured at the posters and laughed. “As if you didn’t know.”

“Well, I thought I’d get some ice, but there’s no bucket in my room.”

“They’re stacked in a cubby next to the bin.” She straightened up, put her hands in the small of her back, and grimaced. Luke heard her spine crackle. “Oh, that’s lots better. I’ll show you.”

“Only if it’s no trouble.”

“No trouble at all. Come on. You can push my cart, if you want to.”

As they went down the hall, Luke thought about his researches into Maureen’s problem. One horrifying statistic in particular stuck out: Americans owed over twelve trillion dollars. Money spent but not earned, just promised. A paradox only an accountant could love. While much of that debt had to do with mortgages on homes and businesses, an appreciable amount led back to those little plastic rectangles everyone kept in their purses and wallets: the oxycodone of American consumers.

Maureen opened a little cabinet to the right of the ice machine. “Can you get one, and save me stooping down? Some inconsiderate somebody pushed every damned bucket all the way to the back.”

Luke reached. As he did, he spoke in a low voice. “Kalisha told me about your problem with the credit cards. I think I know how to fix it, but a lot of it depends on your declared residence.”

“My declared—”

“What state do you live in?”

“I . . .” She took a quick, furtive look around. “We’re not supposed to tell any personal stuff to the residents. It would mean my job if anyone found out. More than my job. Can I trust you, Luke?”

“I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

“I live over in Vermont. Burlington. That’s where I’m going on my outside week.” Telling him that seemed to release something inside her, and although she kept the volume down, the words came spilling out. “The first thing I have to do when I get off work is delete a bunch of dunning calls from my phone. And when I get home, from the answering machine on that phone. You know, the landline. When the answer-machine is full, they leave letters—warnings, threats—in the mailbox or under the door. My car, they can repo that any time they want, it’s a beater, but now they’re talking about my house! It’s paid off, and no thanks to him. I killed the mortgage with my signing bonus when I came to work here, that’s why I came to work here, but they’ll take it, and the what-do-you-call-it will be gone—”

“The equity,” Luke said, whispering it.

“Right, that.” Color had bloomed in her sallow cheeks, whether of shame or anger Luke didn’t know. “And once they have the house, they’ll want what’s put away, and that money’s not for me! Not for me, but they’ll take it just the same. They say so.”

“He ran up that much?” Luke was astonished. The guy must have been a spending machine.

“Yes!”

“Keep it down.” He held the plastic bucket in one hand and opened the ice machine with the other. “Vermont is good. It’s not a community property state.”

“What’s that mean?”

Something they don’t want you to know about, Luke thought. There’s so much they don’t want you to know about. Once you’re stuck on the flypaper, that’s where they want you to stay. He grabbed the plastic scoop inside the door of the ice machine and pretended to be breaking up chunks of ice. “The cards he used, were they in his name or yours?”

“His, of course, but they’re still dunning me because we’re still legally married, and the account numbers are the same!”

Luke began filling the plastic ice bucket . . . very slowly. “They say they can do that, and it sounds plausible, but they can’t. Not legally, not in Vermont. Not in most states. If he was using his cards and his signature was on the slips, that’s his debt.”

“They say it’s ours! Both of ours!”

“They lie,” Luke said grimly. “As for the calls you mentioned—do any of them come after eight o’clock at night?”

Her voice dropped to a fierce whisper. “Are you kidding? Sometimes they call at midnight! ‘Pay up or the bank’s going to take your house next week! You’ll come back to find the locks changed and your furniture out on the lawn!’?”

Luke had read about this, and worse. Debt collectors threatening to turn aged parents out of their nursing homes. Threatening to go after young adult children still trying to get some financial traction. Anything to get their percentage of the cash grab. “It’s good you’re away most of the time and those calls go to voicemail. They don’t let you have your cell here?”

“No! God, no! It’s locked in my car, in . . . well, not here. I changed my number once, and they got the new one. How could they do that?”

Easily, Luke thought. “Don’t delete those calls. Save them. They’ll be time-stamped. It’s illegal for collection agencies to call clients—that’s what they call people like you, clients—after eight o’clock at night.”

He dumped the bucket and began to fill it again, even more slowly. Maureen was looking at him with amazement and dawning hope, but Luke hardly noticed. He was deep in the problem, tracing the lines back to the central point where those lines could be cut.

“You need a lawyer. Don’t even think about going to one of the quick-buck companies that advertise on cable, they’ll take you for everything they can and then put you into Chapter 7. You’ll never get your credit rating back. You want a straight-arrow Vermont lawyer who specializes in debt relief, knows all about the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, and hates those bloodsuckers. I’ll do some research and get you a name.”

“You can do that?”