The Stranger Behind You

by Carol Goodman

  “Aren’t there doors in the hallways to this stairwell?” I ask.

  “No,” he says, “only onto the backs of the apartments. It was used by the nuns when this was a laundry. They kept those girls locked up tight.”

  “Oh yes, a man in the bar was telling me the place’s history. It’s a bit . . . creepy.”

  “What was creepy is what the Church did to those girls, locking them up because they’d had a little fun or ran into a bit of trouble. Back in Ireland I had a great-aunt who’d been in one of the laundries. She said a girl could wind up there because she was, as she put it, too free with the boys or talked back to the priests. I don’t know what these girls did to get put here, but from all the locks on the doors I know no one wanted them to get out.”

  We’ve climbed four floors and come to the door of “my” apartment. He uses an old-fashioned skeleton key to open it. The hallway inside is even darker than the stairwell. He turns on his phone flashlight and lights the way. I hadn’t noticed before that there were no windows in the long hallway. I imagine nuns patrolling these halls, making sure the girls didn’t get away, the girls weeping in their narrow cots—

  I shake myself. This place is making me sentimental. I direct Enda to the windowsill where I left my phone. “There it is,” I say, picking it up and hitting the Home button. “Oh dear, three missed calls from my daughter. Do you mind if I call her back?”

  “I’d prefer you made your calls downstairs, Mrs. Osgood. We’re really not supposed to be here and I’m not supposed to leave my post.”

  I pout. “Don’t you want to help me ‘break in’ my new place?” I say, leaning back on the windowsill and extending my legs out so he can get a good look at them.

  “Some other time, Mrs. Osgood, when it is your new place.”

  “Oh, okay.” I get up and let him lead me back down the hall and into the stairwell. After he’s locked the door and put the keys in his pocket I make a little noise—like that fainting noise the woman on Masterpiece Mystery does—and then fall in his direction. He catches me. His arms are very strong. I allow myself to droop against his broad, muscular chest and dip my hand into his pocket as he lowers me carefully to the floor.

  “Oh, my,” I say, “I just got so light-headed for a moment. I think I must be dehydrated.”

  “That must be the problem,” he says, detangling himself from me and leaning me against the wall. “Take it easy for a moment. Is there anyone I can call?”

  “No,” I say with a little sniff. “No one. Only . . . I think I really am dehydrated. Do you think you could get me some water?” He looks toward the apartment door. “Bottled water,” I add. “I have a very sensitive stomach.”

  He sighs and stands up. “I’ve got some at my desk—”

  I nod and close my eyes. “If it’s not too much trouble.”

  “Not at all,” he says grudgingly. As he starts down the stairs I hear him muttering, “What is it with falling women today?”

  I listen until his steps grow fainter and then I get up and uncurl my fist to look at the key in my hand. Then I head up the stairs.

  Chapter Nine

  Joan

  BACK IN MY apartment I engage all my locks even though, knowing there could be spare keys out there, they no longer make me feel safe. I’ll get the locks changed tomorrow, I tell myself. In the meantime, it’s just frail old Lillian Day who has a key, and even to my hyper-paranoid brain she does not seem like a credible threat. I could go to her apartment and demand she give me my key back. At least it would prove to Enda that I hadn’t imagined her having my key.

  That would be mean, though, to upset an old lady who’s probably asleep by now. Plus, even the thought of going into the hallway is unbearable. So I open a bottle of wine and begin pulling files out of a box. I am secluding myself to work on this book—not because I’ve become an alcoholic agoraphobe, I tell myself. It’s all about the process.

  I line the files up on the satiny oak surface of my Stickley desk. The names of the women swim across my field of vision like fish. Here’s Amanda, Caspar Osgood’s assistant who broke down in tears and told me that she’d been sleeping with her boss and she was afraid he’d fire her if she tried to end it. When I interviewed her a few weeks after we’d both been fired from the Globe, Amanda gave me a list of interns who had worked there and I went to each of them. I was careful. I never directly asked if Caspar Osgood had assaulted them. I said I was doing a story on the value of internships. There were plenty who just complained of having to bring their bosses coffee or how competitive the other interns were, as well as those who said it was great, but they were working in PR now, journalism wasn’t really a viable career option anymore. But then there were the ones who would fidget and look nervous and then their stories would come spilling out—

  Stephanie, Gwyneth, Pamela—

  I touch their names on each file. Nice college girls who shyly reported the furtive gropings, fingerings, rubbings, and maulings as if they were somehow at fault. If Caspar Osgood had a type, it was the kind of polite, well-behaved college girl that he had married. They all could have been Melissa Osgood thirty years ago.

  Girls all compliant like Melissa Osgood, I scrawl across one of the folders, trying to find a younger version of what he’d lost?

  When I started talking to older reporters, I found that he’d been doing it for at least the last twenty years—

  Sandra, Amy, Roslyn—

  These women, I recall, as I handle each of their files, reported the abuse more matter-of-factly. Everyone’s got a Caspar Osgood in their résumé, the guy whose groping you endure and then move on, Roslyn, a senior editor at a Phoenix paper informed me. Some of these women wouldn’t let me use their names. It would hurt their career, they said. People would accuse them of sleeping their way to the top.

  Of course, Roslyn told me over drinks at the Arizona Biltmore (Simon, who knew her, said to take her someplace fancy), people say that anyway whether you do or not. It’s what people are saying about you and Simon Wallace, you know. She’d given me a sideways look. Are you, by the way?

  I had laughed it off, but now I wonder if people are saying that. I resist an urge to ask Bot to search social media for references to me and Simon. I have to start working on the book. Etinosa had specifically asked that I keep an eye out for material that I hadn’t explored fully in the article. As I’d told Andrea Robbins that night at the Manahatta party, there were plenty of tips I hadn’t been able to pursue, the most incendiary of which was the accusation that Cass had assaulted an underage server at a fancy private club. But who had told me that?

  When I try to remember, all the women I’ve interviewed over the last three years blur together, all of their voices echoing inside my brain. What is wrong with me? I start to ask Bot to look up whether imagined voices are a symptom of concussion when it hits me: Amanda had told me that a server had seen Cass hit her at a club and that Cass had been taken down to the police station. But that had proved to be a dead end. I’d checked through all the police databases and there was no record of any charges against Caspar Osgood. If there’s no police record you can’t report it, Simon had said. Amanda was probably mistaken or making it up. Stay with the workplace harassment angle. God knows you’ve got enough there.

  Still, I think now, if I could follow that lead, it would make for great new material for the book. I open the hard copy of Amanda’s file but as I begin to read I notice that the pages are out of order and some seem to be missing. Had I really left them like this? When I try to put them in order the words of the typescript blur together. It would probably be easier to just print out the digital file, but when I open my laptop my screen is a blur. I can’t even read the print I’ve magnified to 220 percent or make out the lights across the river. The whole world has smeared into an indistinguishable blur. Maybe I’ve had more wine than I thought. Or maybe whatever was jarred loose in the attack has finally detached, leaving me blind and brain damaged—

  But the
n I realize it’s just a fog that’s risen from the river, blotting out the view—that and the bottle of wine I’ve polished off, leaving me drunk and maudlin. Through that blur suddenly comes the name of the club where Osgood had supposedly been arrested: the Hi-Line Club—the same club that, according to Sylvia, Simon had tried to join but he’d been denied membership, supposedly because Cass blackballed him. I scrawl the name down on top of Amanda’s folder and then stumble into my bedroom, collapse into bed without undressing, and fall asleep thinking about those women whose files are on my desk. Amanda, Stephanie, Gwyneth, Pamela, Sandra, Amy, Roslyn. But in my dreams the women and I are all in the Refuge when it was still a Magdalen laundry, put there for loose morals and being too free with the boys.

  “Look at what getting drunk and gallivanting about on the streets got you,” a tall, imposing nun scolds me.

  She leads me to a row of boiling vats, thick yellow steam rising from them. The smell makes my eyes and nose sting. The heat is unbearable, but when I try to step away I see my wrist is chained to the iron vat.

  “You might as well get to work,” the girl to my right says. She’s wearing the same muslin uniform as me . . . she looks familiar . . . but when I try to get a better look at her through the steam someone strikes me on the back of the head and I stumble against the vat, nearly falling in, boiling water scalding my hands. Gray water churns in the vat, white clots of cloth writhe like snakes, viscous bubbles rising—one of those bubbles bobs to the surface and looks up at me with Caspar Osgood’s dead eyes.

  I wake up screaming, fighting with my own bedsheets, that smell of bleach and soap clawing up my throat—

  And then I hear a step in the hallway.

  Is someone in my apartment?

  I rise out of bed as weightless as those soap bubbles and stand listening. The door to the hall is closed—had I closed it? I don’t remember doing it. I hear a creak that could be a floorboard settling and then the unmistakable click of a door opening and then closing.

  Someone is definitely in my apartment.

  I quickly scan my nightstand for my phone, but it’s not there. The last I remember having it was when I put it in my bag to go out—the bag that I dropped on my desk when I came in. It also has the can of mace my mother gave me. I am defenseless, cowering in my bedroom. Maybe it’s just Lillian, confused and wandering again. Or Enda checking on me. In which case I will give him a piece of my mind.

  Anger suddenly replaces fear. I grab the brass lamp from my nightstand, ripping the plug out of the wall. The hallway stretches out in front of me like a tunnel with only a dim glow at the end. The door to the linen closet is partly ajar. The intruder could be in there. I walk down the hall and fling open the door. A pile of sheets falls out, the smell of laundry soap stirring up that awful dream.

  Maybe I had been dreaming when I heard that footstep.

  But the door opening—I’d been awake for that.

  I stalk down the hallway, holding the lamp in both hands like a baseball bat, into the living room, which is lit by a full moon riding a bank of clouds above the river. The fog has vanished. The moonlight is so dazzling that the dark room seems alive with presences. Those women chained to the laundry vats, those nuns in long black habits patrolling their wards.

  I blink and the image fades into patterns of light and shadow cast by moonlight and clouds. The room is empty. The door is closed. I check the locks and the security camera. The outside hallway and lobby are also empty, and so is the sidewalk outside the front door—

  Where is Enda? Taking a break? Somewhere the camera doesn’t reach? I swipe between the lobby and the sidewalk, fighting the urge to buzz him and demand to know where he is, and then something flickers as I swipe back from the sidewalk to the lobby: a dark shape lurking on the edge of the trees bordering the door. I switch to the sidewalk just in time to catch a glimpse of that shape stealing in through the door. When I look back at the lobby it’s empty. But the intruder could be hiding behind one of the tall wingback chairs, free to roam at will while Enda is God-knows-where.

  I hit the buzzer, my eyes glued to the image of the lobby, and wait. Nothing moves, but staring at the black-and-white picture on the screen makes my head ache and vision blur. I blink—and something moves on the screen—Enda, hurrying from the service stairs to the front desk, shrugging his jacket back on.

  “Yes?” His voice crackling from the monitor startles me. “What can I do for you, Miss Lurie?”

  What indeed? What services was he performing that had him out of his jacket after midnight?

  “I . . . uh . . . I heard someone at my door before,” I say. It’s not entirely a lie. I did hear someone at the door before—ten hours before when Lillian showed up. “And when I looked at the camera I thought I saw someone in the lobby.”

  He doesn’t say anything right away. I can see his back. The collar of his jacket is tucked under, the nape of his neck shiny with sweat, hair mussed. “So,” he says, his voice thick with condescension, “you heard someone at your door and so you looked at the lobby? Is there anyone at your door or in your apartment now?”

  “No, of course not,” I say. “I checked the lobby after I made sure the intruder was gone. But he may still be in the building. Do you think you could stop being an ass long enough to look behind the chairs?”

  A tremor passes through his back that might be repressed laughter or anger. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll have a look behind the chairs. Should I be checking under them? How big was this intruder of yours?”

  “I can see you,” I say tightly, “not looking anywhere.”

  He turns around and looks up into the camera, grinning. Then he makes a show of looking behind and under the chairs and sofa. He moves them to show me there’s nothing behind them and even tilts them up to show me there’s nothing underneath either. When he lifts up a corner of the carpet I explode.

  “He must have gotten out. But there was someone there and, as I told you before, my neighbor had my key. What were you doing away from your post? I was promised twenty-four-hour doormen. I’m going to complain to the co-op board.” I regret the tone of my voice immediately but I’m too far down the road of outraged entitlement to stop. “And you were supposed to text me the number of a locksmith. I want my locks changed.”

  “Now?” he asks, making a show of looking at his watch. “You want your locks changed at twelve thirty in the morning?”

  “How am I supposed to sleep tonight knowing there are copies of my key out there?”

  He looks up at the camera. “Weeelll,” he says, drawing out the word, “would you like me to come up and have a look around?”

  Is there a suggestive lilt in his voice? Is this some kind of code for offering special services?

  “No,” I say, “that won’t be necessary—”

  He cuts me off. “Actually, I think I’d better have a look. I can’t take the chance that there’s an intruder in the building. I’ll be right up.”

  I try to object, but he’s already turned off the intercom and crossed the lobby to the service stairs. Why isn’t he taking the elevator? I wonder. Then I look down at myself and notice that I’m still in my sundress, which is a wrinkled mess. I hurry back to my room and change into a T-shirt and sweatpants, and brush my hair. Then I go back to the front door and check the camera, but Enda’s not here yet.

  Then I see the elevator needle moving from 4 to 5. But why would Enda be in the elevator when he took the stairs? Four is the floor where Marla showed an apartment earlier. What if someone she showed it to somehow got the key? What if she is on her way up now? My heart is pounding so hard as the elevator doors open that my vision blurs—no, it’s not that—the camera has short-circuited. The screen is a fuzzy gray, as opaque as the fog that had risen off the river before—

  And with the same soap and bleach smell.

  I can hear footsteps in the hallway approaching my door—or maybe it’s the sound of my heart jackhammering against my rib cage. I feel as if I’ve
stood here before, waiting inside the fog, not knowing if the one approaching is coming to save me or kill me—

  A sharp rap on the door makes me jump, and the camera screen flicks back to life. There’s Enda, looking sweaty and flustered. As I fumble with the locks I have the thought: How do I know he’s not the one who’s been sent to kill me? It doesn’t feel as if it’s my thought. And it’s too late anyway; I’ve already opened the door.

  Enda gives me one look and grins. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Are you going to let me in to check under the carpets?”

  “I didn’t ask you to come up,” I point out, but stand aside to let him in. “However, if you want to check I won’t stop you.” The truth is I’ll feel better having him check. “There aren’t any carpets, though.”

  “Hmph,” he grunts, heading down the hallway toward my bedroom. “That may be a problem now that 4B’s been sold. Your co-op agreement requires that seventy-five percent of your floors be covered.”

  He goes into my bedroom and makes a show of looking under the bed. I stand in the doorway, arms folded across my chest. “Did that woman who came in with Marla buy the place?”

  He looks up. “How do you know Marla was showing it today? And how did you know she was showing it to a woman?”

  “I saw them in the elevator,” I say. It’s not entirely a lie. But to cover I ask him, “Were you helping her move in?”

  He blushes so red I know I’ve hit a nerve. So he was up to something. He gets to his feet and squeezes past me into the hallway and stalks to the linen closet.

  “I’ve already checked in there—” I begin, but he opens the door anyway. A bundle of towels falls out.

  “There’s your intruder,” he says, lifting a tilting shelf from the closet. “This shelf came loose. You must have heard it fall.”

  “It just fell by itself?” I ask skeptically.

  “Weeell,” he drawls, holding up the warped plywood, “it’s a bit flimsy. You should have it fixed—or personally, I’d recommend storing your linens elsewhere and clearing this doorway.”