Gone by Morning

by Michele Weinstat Miller

“Thank you,” she said when she approached them.

  Emily was pretty sure she was thanking them for more than getting her out of jail. This reunion with Lauren was a moment she must have imagined a million times.

  “I’ve kept your money for collateral,” Lauren said, drawing Kathleen back from making any assumptions about the state of their relationship.

  Her statement had its desired effect. Kathleen’s face retracted behind a neutral expression. Emily sunk into herself too. A part of her was so damn happy that Kathleen was her grandmother. The other part reminded her that she had a compulsive liar for a grandmother, which was no cause for celebration. Still, it hurt to glimpse Kathleen’s pain at Lauren’s greeting.

  “The money was always there for a rainy day,” Kathleen said. “I hope you have it someplace safe.”

  “I do.”

  Kathleen petted Rusty and gave him a scratch behind his ears. “Hey, little one.”

  “Come on,” Lauren said, walking away.

  Emily followed behind Kathleen with Rusty. He pranced alongside her, always seeming to see the bright side of every situation.

  * * *

  They took the bus back over the long bridge to the Queens mainland. They were the only ones on the bus this time. It rattled and creaked on the narrow roadway. Outside its windows, nighttime had overtaken the long summer dusk. Beyond the black water, Emily could see the distant lights of a LaGuardia runway.

  “What’s up with the name?” Lauren asked.

  Kathleen was sitting between Lauren and Emily, the three of them on a sideways bench of seats near the back exit.

  “Ah. My last name?” Kathleen said. “I changed it after I finished parole. When they began to digitalize criminal records and my conviction showed up on the first page of the Google results, I didn’t want strangers perusing my background so easily. The police always have my fingerprints, but everyone in the world doesn’t have to know my past. And I stopped using Kat years ago. I grew out of it.” Kathleen turned to Emily. “I’m sorry I lied to you.”

  “You’re Sophie?”

  “Yes.”

  Emily felt the blood rising to her cheeks. “I was friends with an imaginary person. That is so humiliating.”

  “And for all that,” Lauren piled on, “you put her in the cross hairs of a murder case.”

  Kathleen barked out an angry laugh, her eyes glistening. “You can’t seriously believe that helping her get an interview for a City Hall job and renting her an affordable apartment was putting her in the cross hairs. That’s what you want, Lauren? To make it all fit your narrative of the terrible mother you wrote off? So you can believe it was worth it that we missed over thirty years together, even though I was clean?”

  “You call running a brothel clean? Give me a break.”

  Emily watched the two women, still stunned at the truth: her mother and her grandmother. She could see the resemblance. They even had the same quiver of their chin when angry. They were initially arguing about her, but they’d basically forgotten she was there.

  “Do you know how hard it is to get a job when you have a felony conviction, especially back then? When I got out of prison, I hadn’t worked in over eight years and my record said I murdered someone. I tried to get a job for months. Running a brothel was the best career path available to me.”

  Lauren blinked hard, processing that.

  “Walk in my shoes, Lauren,” Kathleen continued. “I know the ones you inherited from me gave you blisters. I couldn’t be more sorry about that. Really. I worried about you every night in my cell for five years. The only reason I didn’t kill myself after losing you and your father and ending up in jail was that I needed to find you. You were out there alone in the world, just a kid. I was terrified for you.

  “When I came out and finally found you, you were safe. Not just safe—flourishing. That was such a relief. But you wanted nothing to do with me. I got that. You were justified in feeling that way. So I gave you your wish.”

  Lauren seemed to soften, her eyes tearing up. But when they left the bus and Kathleen and Lauren sat in the front seat of the car, Lauren didn’t let up.

  “Emily can stay the weekend in your rental. It’s the dog’s last weekend, but I want her to come home after that.”

  “No,” Emily said from the back seat.

  The two women turned back, as if just remembering her.

  “I have a grandmother who—how can I put it?—took inappropriate steps to get to know me,” Emily said. “She deceived me so I could have a nice apartment near her. And yes, I am highly disappointed that I didn’t earn the City Hall interview.” She took a deep breath. “So now I know I’m no better than Silver Spoon Max …”

  Kathleen began to protest. Emily put up her hand to stop her.

  “I’ll stay the weekend with Kathleen. I’ll decide after the weekend where Skye and I will live. I don’t have to make that decision now. But Mom, I will be the one to decide.”

  CHAPTER

  50

  THEY RODE PAST cookie-cutter houses with penny-sized lawns toward the highway. Kathleen thought things over for a few minutes, ironically grateful for the awkward silence in the car. She felt deeply thankful to be out of jail, even though her problems and the prospect of prison still loomed large. She looked out the window. She considered how much she would tell Lauren and Emily, and why. She didn’t want to be alone with the situation. She wanted their help and support. But she also wanted to salvage her reputation. She wanted Emily and Lauren to know she was telling the truth about her innocence. She wasn’t naturally a liar.

  She hadn’t planned to sink to such depths of deception to get to know Emily. Friending her had seemed innocuous in the beginning. She’d never intended to do more than witness her granddaughter’s life. She’d been impressed that Emily had finished graduate school and begun a challenging career while a single mother with a young baby. So Kathleen had ended up helping her here and there—that didn’t make her a criminal. She’d left the old life behind a long time ago. She needed Lauren and Emily to know that. But Lauren still had a point.

  “Emily, you are more than welcome to stay with me, but I may agree with your mother about finding someplace else … after the weekend.”

  “What?” Emily said with surprise.

  “I had a visitor at the jail.”

  “Okay.” Emily drew the word out, not getting the relevance.

  “One of our neighbors, Antonia. She said her partner, Javier, saw someone going into the building right before the fire started.”

  “She told you but not the cops?” Lauren asked.

  “Her partner is an undocumented immigrant. He won’t go to the cops. But the surprising thing is that he was sure the man was a cop.”

  “That’s quite an allegation,” Lauren said skeptically. “She came all the way to Rikers to tell you that story?”

  Kathleen was sure Lauren was being intentionally obnoxious.

  “I imagine the man he saw could have been military or an ex-cop, too,” Kathleen went on. “And it’s only one of the strange things that’s happened. Did you see what the newspaper said about Wayne today? The paper said he killed himself because his life was falling apart due to a divorce. That is ridiculous. Not the Wayne I knew. Take my word for it, that would be like Donald Trump killing himself over a divorce.”

  Emily laughed, a skittish sound, more nervous than amused.

  Kathleen could tell Lauren was paying attention, even though she looked straight ahead as she drove. The set of Lauren’s face reminded Kathleen of her vigilance as a child, when she’d seen shady characters coming to their apartment to buy drugs from Michael or to smoke, some staying for days to get high. More than anything, Kathleen yearned to hold and comfort her child, who was right in front of her but still a million miles away.

  She forced her mind back to the present issues. She owed Emily and Lauren information. They had a right to weigh their risk for themselves.

  “There’s one thing Wayne
and Sharon and I have in common,” she said. “I didn’t talk about it before, and Emily, I didn’t tell you about knowing Wayne because of it. But I’ll tell you this much: we all signed nondisclosure agreements with one of my clients. I think Sharon may have had the client’s baby. He was married.”

  Lauren still focused her eyes on the road ahead of her. “How long ago was that?”

  “Around twenty years.”

  Lauren asked, “Do you think Sharon or the lawyer was threatening to reveal it?”

  Emily loosened her seat belt shoulder strap with her hand and leaned forward from the back seat. “Killing Sharon after two decades is like dropping a nuclear bomb to put out a forest fire.”

  “The solution would be way riskier than the original problem,” Lauren agreed.

  The car was silent for a moment.

  “But still, all three of you have an NDA in common,” Lauren continued slowly. “Two of you are dead. And you almost died in a fire that someone set on purpose.”

  “What are the odds of all that happening coincidentally to the three of you within two weeks?” Emily asked.

  CHAPTER

  51

  THE MAN HUNG up the phone after a short talk with a member of his team. He swiveled around in his desk chair in the library of his Upper East Side triple-width townhouse, a mansion in disguise. The library was lined with bookshelves with built-in rolling ladders to reach its thousands of volumes, although he read on his iPad or phone like most people. He bounded to his feet, pacing on a hundred-thousand-dollar Persian rug, handwoven in shades of gold and brown.

  Kathleen Harris had been bailed out. Emily Silverman had gotten her mother to do it, that much was clear. Emily had visited the home of a hacker. The hacker’s electronic devices were impenetrable, which irked the man to no end. But today they’d found a photo on Emily’s phone that some incompetent idiot hadn’t noticed before. It was of Sharon Williams and her girl-toy.

  He itched to add Emily to his project. It would be a fantastic doubleheader with Kathleen Harris. He imagined Emily tethered, him ripping her apart, stripping her to the bone before killing her. The way he liked to do it when he went on “safari.”

  The alpha men in his family all had the same craving. The trifecta: catch, torture, and kill. He could walk through the family estates in Charleston, South Carolina, or Rhinebeck, New York, and admire the portraits of his ancestors lining the entry halls. Some of their crimes had been passed down via whispered oral history, the older generations grooming the young ones with the stories. Other deeds he could only imagine, enjoyed imagining. Of course, no matter how heinous the actions, they weren’t crimes, since no one was ever caught. In some cases, their feats were perfectly legal.

  The family looked at this craving among its men as evolutionary. Like his predecessors, the man had started with the killing of wayward pets in childhood. One couldn’t keep a pet alive on their estates if there was a boy heir growing up there. That had been a problem for centuries—if you cared enough about pets to call it a problem. Then came adolescence and young adulthood, when the family made donations to schools and police benevolent associations to bail the boys out as they trampled on rules and laws. Eventually, each young man learned to live within the social constraints of his times. The ability to do that came with maturity, and that was what the family gave its gifted boys: time for them to flourish and be free until their maturity caught up to their violent propensities.

  They were a tight-knit and closemouthed dynasty, having protected their own for nine hundred years. Everyone recognized the bottom line: the males who possessed the riskiest traits were also the income producers, the ones with the outstanding minds for money and power. It was a package deal. But now, after Jackson’s antics, the family was in unprecedented jeopardy. The earth had shifted beneath their feet.

  The man felt an overwhelming need to punish and obliterate those who would help Jackson destroy the family. If there was one thing the man hated, it was people who posed a threat. Which brought him back to Emily Silverman. He was angrier each moment he thought of her. It would take every bit of his self-restraint to adhere to the family rule: when in the United States, do-it-yourself projects were strictly off-limits. The family made light of his concern, assuring him that Emily was nowhere near learning anything that could damage them. But even if she was only shadowboxing, it was the thought that counted, the principle of the thing, the lack of control. It made him hate, a hate beyond his ability to withstand. Once obsessive hate flowed inside him, it required expression. His self-control was already running on empty. How dare Emily Silverman oppose him?

  He studied the photo of Sharon and her girlfriend, as he was sure Emily Silverman had done. He conjured the image of Sharon dying in the plastic-lined trunk of a car. He tried to calm himself with a fantasy of Sharon’s dying moments. Had Sharon tried to call out her girlfriend’s name after her larynx was severed and she was drowning in her own blood? He laughed at the thought of it.

  He shuddered and stood straight, coming back to himself, smiling like a snake that had shed old, uncomfortable skin. First things first. Kathleen Harris. She had to go first, particularly now that she was out of jail. He had planning to do. He could circle back to the Emily Silverman issue afterward.

  * * *

  Kathleen savored her first sip of coffee while Emily showered and dressed. Skye was sitting on the floor near the table, leaning against Rusty after reluctantly eating breakfast in her chair rather than on the floor with him. Rusty seemed perfectly content with his new juvenile appendage. Skye had spent every waking moment with him since Friday night, when they’d stopped off after Rikers to pick her up from Hector’s mother.

  Kathleen only hoped that there was no risk for Emily and Skye in staying with her.

  Emily didn’t want to uproot Skye again after all the upheaval. Emily conceded that she’d been nervous. But she’d concluded that whatever was happening couldn’t possibly include a conspiracy of roving arsonists following Kathleen from building to building.

  Kathleen agreed. But she also knew that the mind had a way of finding equilibrium, minimizing any reality that fell too far outside its norm. Especially unpleasant reality. For Kathleen, the cuff on her ankle and the threat of a life in prison kept her acutely aware that nothing was normal.

  And Kathleen had heard Emily speaking in harsh whispers by telephone with Hector. He was starting to worry about the risk. Kathleen couldn’t blame him. Despite Kathleen’s bliss at having her granddaughter and great-granddaughter under her roof, she planned to look into renting them a separate apartment. Nearby. She would never forgive herself if anything happened to Emily and Skye.

  Kathleen sat at an angle to the round kitchen table. A wire ran from her ankle to an outlet in the wall.

  Skye pointed. “What’s that?”

  Kathleen answered matter-of-factly, “I have a cuff on my ankle. It has to be charged every day.”

  Emily appeared in the doorway and looked at her with a disconcerted frown. “Yeesh.”

  “If it runs out of juice,” Kathleen said to Emily, “the GPS stops and the nice people at the warrant squad come. I have to wear it twenty-four hours a day. It’s waterproof.”

  “So stupid.” Emily shook her head in disgust. “How long does it take to charge?”

  “About a half hour.” Kathleen lifted her I ♥ New York coffee mug, undoubtedly left by a previous Airbnb customer. “I come prepared with my coffee and iPad. And Skye has kept me company. I just need a positive attitude. Hopefully, the criminal case will be cleared up soon. I have an appointment with a new lawyer tomorrow.”

  Kathleen slipped her fingers between the cuff and the raw skin of her ankle, rubbing a chafed area. She didn’t know whether to put lotion or powder on it. Unfortunately, she didn’t think she’d get an answer by Googling, although she thought she’d give it a try while charging up.

  “You’re allowed to go there?” Emily asked. “The ankle bracelet won’t go off if you leave t
he house?”

  “My lawyer’s office will be an approved destination. I can also walk around the neighborhood, go to the store, that sort of thing.”

  Emily poured a cup of coffee from the half-full pot.

  “Skye, where’s Rusty’s ball? Can you take Rusty to look for it in the living room?”

  “Rusty, come,” Skye commanded happily, and scampered off with the dog.

  Emily leaned against the counter. “I never expected this level of attachment.”

  Kathleen nodded. “How long until you get a new dog?”

  “Just a few weeks. But that’s the thing. Skye loves this dog. We’ll get a new puppy, but I think I made a big mistake.”

  “Losing your home didn’t help. You couldn’t foresee that. You can’t blame yourself.”

  “Rusty is getting new brother,” Skye said matter-of-factly, coming into the room, obviously hearing part of the conversation. “Evie is having new brother too.”

  “That’s right,” Emily said, then spoke to Kathleen. “Evie is Skye’s friend from day care.”

  Kathleen knew Emily hadn’t figured out how to tell Skye that, unlike her little friend, the new dog would replace the old dog. Kathleen wished she had something wise to say to Emily, but she was coming up blank on grandmotherly wisdom.

  CHAPTER

  52

  AFTER EMILY AND Skye left for the day on Monday, Kathleen made her way to the State Office Building on 125th Street. She sat in a waiting room with bolted-down plastic chairs, like the waiting room on Rikers. A counter topped with bulletproof glass separated the probation officers from their charges, who waited for their designated appointment times. After twenty minutes, a receptionist called Kathleen’s name, and Probation Officer Daniels appeared at a nicked metal door. She was middle aged, easily six feet tall, and wearing a man-tailored shirt. Rosacea patches bloomed on her cheeks.

  Kathleen followed her down a cubicle aisle, and PO Daniels took a seat across the desk from her. “I’ve got to know all your regular destinations so I can preapprove you without the GPS reporting you AWOL.”