The Queen of Ocean Parkway

1

The Accidental Spy

Roya called the boys from 6D Bumblebee and Bear for the podcast--though those were not their real names, of course. She watched them leave the apartment building, living up to their code names as Bumblebee flitted about in bursts of energy while Bear cuddled close to his dad.

They were on their way to summer camp, and Roya didn’t like the little garden snake that was twisting its way around her stomach. She knew what it was: jealousy. That they had someplace to go, someplace that--from everything she had heard and read--sounded like it was filled with archery and electric scooters and swimming around in a gigantic pool right at the edge of the Verrazzano Bridge. She was even jealous that they had each other to chatter to: siblings seemed like built-in friends.

But this wouldn’t do at all. Jealousy was a feeling that Roya couldn’t find a solution for. And Roya was a girl who liked solutions, a problem-solver. That’s why she was so good at her job.

Okay, fine, that’s why Aty, her mom, was so good at her job. As the super of their large Brooklyn apartment building, Aty was in charge of seventy-two apartments and over 250 tenants. But even if Roya wasn’t technically on the payroll, she knew she was a large part of her mom’s success. After all, how else would Aty have known that Mrs. Bernstein in 4E needed an ambulance called because she hadn’t gone to visit Mrs. Kowalska in 3E for a whole day and a half? Or that someone (namely, two-year-old Josh in 1K, known to Roya’s listeners as Kleptosaurus) was stealing all the plastic T. rexes that were in the community playroom?

And then there was Roya’s other job: her secret one, the one she turned to now in her most desperate time of need--otherwise known as the bottomless boredom of a summer vacation spent alone in her apartment. Roya Alborzi: podcast host.

“What can be the cause of the Great Bathtub Clog of 5J?” Roya spoke in a low voice into her pocket recorder. “A Guinness World Record–setting hairball? A naked mole rat? A portal into another dimension? Whatever it is, this reporter is determined to get to the bottom of it.” She had moved to the storage room in the basement, the one she’d discovered had the best acoustics for recording. The voice recorder had been a gift from her parents for her eleventh birthday, at her dad’s suggestion since he and Roya listened to all those science podcasts together. Though neither Aty nor Baba had been privy to anything she had made on it--for obvious reasons.

Roya waited to turn the recorder off before letting out a sigh, tapping her pen on the open page of her journal. She didn’t have a full script yet. And to be honest, she wasn’t feeling too confident that this was going to turn into the riveting episode she was striving for.

She flipped through her notes just to see if there was another apartment or tenant that might make for a better episode. The red leather-bound journal was supposed to be her “feelings journal,” which was code for “anger journal”--and why, Roya suspected, Aty had chosen the red color. But Roya had quickly found that a better way to control her feelings, including anger, was not to write about them, but to write about other people. Particularly the other people in her building.

And Roya did consider it her building. Even though it had been built over a hundred years before she was born, she doubted anyone knew more about the regal bricks, the rickety, old-fashioned elevators, or even the hidden graffiti on the bottom of the stairs between floors three and four. Her parents had moved here when Aty was five months pregnant with Roya, so every single one of her memories was tied to this grand, old building with the weeping willow in the front. Roya once heard an older resident call the building the Queen of Ocean Parkway, and that’s exactly how she’d thought of it ever since. She’d even named her podcast after it.

And this Queen was alive. Sure, she was old, and there wasn’t a first-time delivery person who didn’t get confused by having to manually pull open the door of the ancient elevator, but this Queen had seen more things--more lives, more stories, more wars, more pandemics, more births, and more deaths--than any one person in existence.

Roya dedicated the journal to her, and it now did double duty as her manual for both of her jobs. She used the journal to document ordinary things like when the elevator broke down (at least once every other week) and when the boiler needed fixing--things she’d need to report to her mom. But she also wrote about the residents, facts and observations and speculations that often found their way into her podcast. Each episode was dedicated to one apartment and the residents who lived in it, though for their privacy, and hers, she changed their names. Even the Queen went by her initials--the podcast was titled QOOP on all platforms. In her heart of hearts, Roya suspected that she was born to be an investigative journalist: someone who found out the truth about things. Though, right now, she settled for honing her storytelling skills--like when she took a deep dive into why exactly the family in 4J (the Wacky Thwackers) could sometimes be heard hammering deep into the night: Were they experimental percussionists deeply invested in their craft, or were they practicing for a prison break?

But nothing seemed to be holding Roya’s interest for long today. She left the storage room, thinking maybe she’d try again after a snack. She was lost in her thoughts when the elevator door opened, revealing two people.

“Good morning, Roya.” It was Katya and Stefanie from 3G. Katya had a basket of laundry in her arms, and Stefanie was in her maroon hospital scrubs.

“Good morning,” Roya said enthusiastically. Katya and Stefanie were two of her very favorite tenants. They were in their late twenties, and when they’d gotten married two years ago, Roya and her parents had been guests. Stefanie was an ER resident too and usually had some interesting story to tell about who had walked into her hospital that week.

“Did you see that a new restaurant opened on Church Avenue?” Katya asked Roya. “I think it’s called Taste of Bangla. Do you want to try it out with us next week?”

“I’d love to,” Roya said.

“It’s a date! Right, Stefanie?” Katya turned to Stefanie, and Roya was surprised to see that Stefanie didn’t look enthusiastic at all. In fact, she was frowning.

“Right,” she mumbled. The two of them had already started to walk away when Stefanie added to Katya, “In order for us to go on this date, you would still have to be here next week.”

“Of course I’m going to be here,” Katya said with a laugh. “Where else would I be?”

They had turned the corner and their voices were fading away when Roya heard Stefanie say, “I don’t know! Where did all the rest of your family go? You know that fortune is cursed!”

Hold up, what? The elevator door closed, and Roya let it without getting on. Instead, she tiptoed a little farther down the hall and crouched behind one of the concrete pillars that hid her from view of the laundry room. Now she could hear better as Katya gave a snort. “Stefanie. You’re a doctor. A curse? Really?”

“That’s what your grandmother said too!” Stefanie replied. “And your great-grandmother. And your aunt.” Roya peeked out from behind the pillar. A flush that matched Stefanie’s scrubs had crept over her rich brown skin. “And you know where they all ended up, Katya?”

“No,” Katya replied, her own pale skin remaining cool and unchanged, her blond bun still perfectly in place. She was calmly loading laundry into one of the machines.

“Exactly!” Stefanie’s long indigo and black braids swished in irritation. “Nobody knows. They’re gone. Grandmother is not a chance to change our fortunes. She’s a curse.”

“But she did change our family’s fortunes,” Katya said as she pushed the door of the washing machine closed and put in her quarters. Roya held her breath, desperate to hear more. “And I don’t believe in curses. But I know we need that money.” She pressed a button to start the machine’s gentle cycle before she scooted her laundry basket close to the pillar, just a few inches from Roya’s nose, and turned on her ballet flats. From her low vantage point, Roya could see how worn down the soles were.

“What good is money if you’re gone, Katya?” Stefanie pleaded. They were heading back to the elevator, and Roya had to employ some ninja-like tactics to move herself around to the other side of the pillar without being noticed. Just in time too.

“I won’t disappear. I’ve taken precautions,” Katya said as they headed down the hallway, their voices fading.

“Precautions? What possible precautions could guarantee you’d be safe?”

“Twenty-first-century precautions that the rest of my family never had access to. Trust me. I’ll be fine. Besides, I’m not even technically my aunt’s ‘daughter,’ like the fortune said. Probably nothing will happen at all.”

The elevator door slid shut on their conversation.

But Roya had heard enough: A fortune? A curse? She had to get to the bottom of this. It was perfect podcast material. She would start by snagging an interview with Katya and Stefanie.

Except that twenty-four hours later, Katya was gone.

2

A Familiar Stranger

As soon as she got back to her apartment that morning, Roya wrote down the date and time that she’d seen Katya and Stefanie in the laundry room, that they’d thrown around the words curse and fortune, and mentioned something about Katya’s relatives disappearing. She was thinking about recording an intro when 5J’s bathtub overflowed again and Aty called Roya and an army of old towels to active duty.

But that night, when Roya went to put the dirty towels into one of the washing machines, she was surprised to find that Katya’s clothes had been left in a brown laundry basket on one of the tables. The residents would occasionally unload someone else’s laundry when they needed a machine. Sometimes clothes could even be left for a few hours, but this was now closing in on almost twelve hours later.

Roya inspected the clothes briefly--they seemed pretty standard: T-shirts and underwear and socks. She made a note in her journal about them being left there. It felt mysterious, so maybe she could use it as a cliff-hanger for a segment of her podcast. She went to sleep thinking about how she might work it in.

The next morning, Aty sent her out to the corner hardware store to get a new drain snake for the bathtub in 5J. Which was why Roya saw the two police officers leave the building but missed the entire conversation they had with her mom.

“What happened?” Roya asked Aty. “Was it about Katya?”

“Yes,” Aty said as she took the drain snake from her. “How would you know that?”

“Because I overheard Katya and Stefanie having a strange conversation yesterday. And then they didn’t pick up her laundry last night,” Roya replied.

“Overheard?” Aty squinted her eyes in that X-ray vision way she sometimes had with her daughter.

“Yup,” Roya said. She didn’t really need to go into details about her little spy experiment.

“I see,” Aty said. “Why don’t you go try to catch the officers outside and tell them.”

Roya raced out the door, past the small courtyard, and down the few stairs at the front of the Queen, but she didn’t see anyone. The cop car that had been illegally parked at her corner was no longer there.

She walked back into the building dejectedly. “They’re gone,” she said as the door shut behind her, but she was speaking to an empty lobby. Aty was gone too.

“For what it’s worth, I don’t think they would have listened anyway,” came a small voice.

Okay, so the lobby wasn’t empty. A boy about Roya’s age sat on the bottom stair across from her apartment. He was dressed in khaki shorts and a black T-shirt with the letter F in an orange circle printed on it. He must belong to the family that had moved into the building only a couple of weeks ago. Roya had helped Aty put up Welcome Home balloons in the lobby the week they’d moved in, but the family had, up until now, kept to themselves. Which was why Roya didn’t know the boy. Yet.

“Hi,” she said as she walked over. “I’m Roya. I’m the super’s kid.” She pointed toward 1A, where the word SUPER was stuck on with mailbox letters she and Aty had picked up from the hardware store a few years ago.

“Amin,” the boy said. “We just moved into--”

“2A,” Roya replied. “I know. So did you hear what the cops asked?”

Amin nodded. He had a large mass of jet-black hair so shiny, it could have come from one of the creepy porcelain dolls that Mrs. Sweetin in 1H was always trying to get Roya to show interest in. “Officer Park said”--Amin cleared his throat and put on a slightly deeper voice--“ ‘I don’t want you to worry. We just got a call from a Ms. Turner in apartment 3G. Her wife, an Ekaterina . . .’ And here, the officer checked his notes before continuing, ‘An Ekaterina Petrov apparently left yesterday and hasn’t returned.’

“And then his partner, Officer Robbins, said”--Amin pitched his voice a little higher--“ ‘In most cases, they turn back up. Most likely she and Ms. Turner had a fight, and Ms. Petrov went somewhere to cool off. But we figured we’d ask if you know anything about them as a couple, whether they fought a lot or anything like that. We’ll take a statement.’ ”

Roya watched Amin, slightly in awe. “Is this a word-for-word reenactment of their conversation?”

Amin shrugged. “I have an echoic memory. It’s kinda like a photographic memory, but for sounds.”

“Wow,” Roya said. “That’s amazing.”

“Some people call it annoying?”

“Who?” Roya asked.

“Uh . . . sometimes my dad. Like when my mom tells him she told him to do something and he says she didn’t, and then she turns to me to prove that yes, she did.” He gave a shy smile.

“Like a human recorder. Wow.” Roya returned his smile. “I write down things that happen in my journal, but otherwise I wouldn’t be able to remember anything so well. Anyway, go on. What happened next?”

Feeding off Roya’s enthusiasm, Amin jumped up and proceeded to reenact the rest of the conversation, leaping from one side of the staircase to the other when he was playing Officer Park, Officer Robbins, or Aty--whose Persian accent he had down pat too. It was like watching a one-man play.