The Stranger Behind You

by Carol Goodman

  “Frank?”

  “Frank Maloney, the assistant DA. He always asked for me when he needed to depose a witness because he said that even the most hardened criminal was so disarmed by my beauty that he’d sing like an angel.” Lillian sits up taller, preening.

  “Frank sounds like a charmer,” I say.

  “Oh, he was,” Lillian says brightly, but then her shoulders slump and the brightness goes out of her eyes. “He helped out when Tommy got in trouble. One night I was just getting ready for bed when Tommy shows up at my room . . . by then I’d moved out of my aunts’ place and lived in a boardinghouse . . . he was in a state and covered in blood. I thought he’d been shot! Instead it turned out he had been fooling with that gun to impress his girlfriend, Arlene, and the gun had gone off and hit the poor girl! Instead of taking her straight to the hospital he’d run to get me. He was babbling, not making any sense, pulling me down to the boardwalk . . .” Lillian’s voice falters. “She was lying in the cold, wet sand under the boardwalk. At first I thought she must have drowned, her skin was cold and wet from the fog rolling in off the ocean. Tommy was going on about how it had been an accident and he was sorry and he would do whatever I told him to do. As if I knew what to do! But then I remembered that I had Frank’s phone number. I ran down to a candy store on Mermaid Avenue and called Frank. When I told him my brother was in trouble, he told me to wait under the boardwalk and he’d be right there. I went back and sat with Tommy, holding his hand, listening to the foghorns . . .”

  She looks at me, her eyes startling against the gray fog that has risen from the river now and is pressing against the glass. “When the fog comes up like this I think I’m back there with Tommy, sitting beside Arlene in the blood-soaked sand, waiting . . .”

  I reach for her hand and am alarmed to find it cold and damp. While we’ve been sitting here the fog has crept in under the windows and settled over us like a shroud. I pull the afghan off the chair and wrap it around her shoulders, chafing her hands to warm them up. “And did Frank come?” I ask. “Was he able to help?”

  “Oh yes,” Lillian says, squeezing my hand. “He came. He took care of everything. He told Tommy he’d vouch for him and make sure the judge went easy on him. He was a minor, after all, and it was an accident. Frank was true to his word. Tommy got three years on a charge of manslaughter when he could have gotten life.”

  Lillian’s face, glazed by tears, shines in the eerie fog light like a pebble washed ashore by the sea. “I knew it was better than if he had run, but I couldn’t help feeling that I was the one who had put him in that prison.”

  “Oh no!” I say. “It wasn’t your fault. You did the best you could for him.”

  “Maybe,” she concedes, “but sometimes I’ve wondered if what Sister Dolores said was right about me having a stain on my soul that won’t wash out and if that means I’ll never see my mother again.” She sighs, her shoulders drooping. Gone is the sharp young woman who strode into the police station to rescue her errant brothers. “But I’ve bent your ear too long with my old stories. You must be wanting to get back to your story.”

  The truth is I’m more interested in Lillian’s story right now, but she is clearly worn out from revisiting so many painful moments. If she were a source I might push her, but she’s not a source. She’s just a sweet old lady and she’s right; I should get back to my real work. “I suppose I should,” I say, “but you’ll come back, won’t you, and tell me more?”

  “I’d like that. You’re a good listener.” A bit of the sharpness has returned to her eyes. “I can see why you’d be good at your job.”

  I help her to the door, where she again waves off my offer to escort her to her apartment. This woman faced down Coney Island cops and gangsters, I tell myself, she can navigate the hallway. Still, I watch her on the camera until she vanishes off-screen. Then I go back to my desk—back to my more important story. But isn’t it all the same story? These girls—I arrange their files in a fan like the plumed bustle of a chorus girl—were nice girls who thought they’d be okay as long as they stayed on the right side of the tracks. Until someone like Caspar Osgood came along and shoved them off the tracks, changing their lives forever.

  Roslyn, Amy, Sandra, Pamela, Gwyneth, Stephanie, Amanda—

  Then I notice something. Amanda is the most recent case of these seven. Of course, when I started three years ago she was the current case, but although I found other, older cases, and more have come forward since my story came out, all of the cases happened before Amanda. No one has come forward claiming that Caspar Osgood has assaulted her in the last three years. Had his more recent victims stayed quiet? Or had he stopped assaulting women three years ago? If so, why? Had his conscience caught up with him? Somehow I don’t think so.

  So what, I wonder, happened three years ago?

  Chapter Twelve

  Melissa

  THE ESTATE SALE is such a success—Wally was right about the vultures wanting a piece of our tragedy—and Whit is so good at selling my clothes and accessories on eBay that I have the house cleared by the third week in September. So when I get an offer for my asking price I decide to move right away, even though it will take weeks to close on the house. Why should I wait? I think, walking through the empty rooms of my beautiful, empty house. There’s nothing here for me anymore. Whatever future I have left is waiting for me at the Refuge.

  I have the few pieces I kept delivered in a small van and order some sad furniture from Pottery Barn, the kind that says right up front that it’s basic, which Emily says is her friends’ most brutal takedown, as in She’s so basic she goes to Olive Garden for first dates. I am coming to like the idea of basic, though. Basic means stripped-down, back to essentials, like a soldier in a field camp. That’s what this place is to me, I think when I arrive on a chilly day in the last week of September with three Louis Vuitton suitcases, only one of the eiderdowns, and two boxes of Cass’s files, a field camp from which to launch my attack from beneath enemy lines.

  I put my desk right where hers is, under the bay window. I like to think of her sitting at her desk, spinning her tissue of lies, not knowing that I am lurking right below her, spinning her destruction.

  A spider crouched in its web.

  A spy.

  Before he went back to college, I asked Whit if it was easy to install spyware on someone’s laptop. He gave me a worried look and I told him I just wanted to make sure that Daddy’s laptop wasn’t bugged. “And don’t look at me like I’m crazy,” I told him. “You know your father had enemies.”

  He looked troubled by that thought, and once again I could have kicked myself for saying the wrong thing. “Did you find anything . . . new when you looked through his laptop?” he asked.

  “Do you mean more women accusing him?” He had looked away, as if embarrassed for me. “No,” I said firmly. “I really think that your father stopped all of that three years ago after . . . after he saw how much we all needed him.”

  Whit nodded. “He said things would be different.”

  “He did?” I asked. “You mean when—”

  “In the hospital. I mean, after he said that thing about suicide being for cowards. He told me things would be different.”

  “You see,” I said, wiping my eyes, “that’s how much your father loved you. That’s why we need to still protect him.”

  He nodded and showed me how to check for spyware. There wasn’t any that we could detect. Then he showed me a few websites selling the stuff. “It’s totally legal,” he told me. “They get away with it by saying it’s for”—he crooked his fingers into air quotes—“‘monitoring your children or employees.’ Ugh. Can you imagine the skeevy parent or boss who would do that?”

  I shook my head in my full agreement—wishing I’d thought of doing it before Whit’s suicide attempt—and took mental note of the site he showed me. When I went to the site on my own, though, it made me nervous. Warning! It said in red letters at the bottom of the screen. Installing compute
r monitoring tools on computers you do not own or do not have permission to monitor may violate local, state, or federal law.

  No duh.

  What made me nervous was the thought that someone might be watching me. What if someone knew I ordered the spyware online? Wouldn’t that put me on some kind of list? I mean, whenever I looked at evening dresses on Neiman Marcus’s website I got pop-ups for the next month showing me more evening dresses. So what cyber bells would go off if I ordered TotalSpy from PrivateEye.com?

  I decided to wait until I could read through what I had already gotten from Joan’s computer and what I had in Cass’s files and emails. It only takes me a few hours to settle in. I put the Frette sheets on my new bed (I may be roughing it but I’m not going to sleep on sandpaper), open up the paleo salad I’d ordered from GrubHub, and pour myself a glass of sparkling water (no more Veuve Clicquot; I need a clear head). Then I arrange Cass’s laptop and files on the lovely French marquetry writing desk Cass gave me for our tenth anniversary, open up Cass’s laptop, and download the files I took from Joan Lurie’s computer. I decide to read Amanda’s file first, the one I deleted from Joan’s computer. Let’s see what that little slut who tried to break up my marriage had to say.

  The file includes the transcripts of all the interviews Amanda gave. I read the first one, cringing at Joan’s description of how Amanda broke down in tears and reluctantly confided that she was sleeping with her boss, but only because she was afraid she’d be fired if she stopped.

  What a load of crap.

  Then I notice the date when Joan supposedly saw Amanda crying in the bathroom; it’s May 15, which is the day after I found out that Cass was sleeping with his secretary and threw him out. Interesting that he’d had some kind of fight with her the very next day. Maybe she had expected him to move in with her and was disappointed when he refused. I go to Cass’s online bank account and look for his Amex and Mastercard statements that covered that time period. I find a charge at the Peninsula, Cass’s favorite Manhattan hotel (I prefer the Carlyle). Of course, that doesn’t prove he wasn’t inviting Amanda over. If I could look at the hotel bills—

  I go to his email and search for the hotel’s name and up pop a dozen emails with bills attached. There are bills for weeks when I know Cass was spending his nights with me in Ardsley. Apparently he was spending his afternoons with someone else. I ignore the rising nausea at this additional evidence of infidelity—that’s not what I’m after here—and open the bill for May. But the room-service charges are for breakfasts for one, a few lonely dinners, and lots of movie rentals. Not what I was expecting. I almost feel sorry for Cass.

  Almost. His bill for two weeks at the Peninsula is more than my monthly maintenance fee for this Spartan apartment. He clearly didn’t care how much he was spending, which makes me wonder when he began draining our finances.

  I look back at our bank statements for May 2015. There are our mortgage payments for the Ardsley and Hampton houses, a tuition bill for Whit’s college and one for Brearley, a $5,000 donation to the Cancer Foundation (we donated every month in honor of my mother), and a $10,000 check to Pat Shanahan’s reelection campaign fund, which he’d written after Wally was so supportive, driving me up to Providence. Nothing out of the ordinary.

  I go back to Amanda’s file. Joan interviewed her a month after the incident in the Globe ladies’ room, after which both Amanda and Joan had been fired from the Globe. After Amanda spewed out a ridiculous story of intimidation and assault, Joan asked for dates and places for each occurrence. I note these down on my iPad to check against Cass’s diary later.

  “Thanks, Joan,” I say out loud, “these will come in handy.”

  She also asks if anyone witnessed the assaults. “No,” Amanda told her, “he was always careful to make sure we were alone.” Convenient, I think. Undeterred, intrepid girl reporter Joan Lurie asked if she told anyone about the assaults at the time.

  “You mean like right after?” Amanda asks. Not the brightest bulb in the pack. How was Cass able to stand her?

  “Yes,” Joan says, “like, did anyone see you after and notice that you were upset?”

  “Oh, I see . . . well, yes. In May there was this party downtown . . . some kind of fundraiser thing at this fancy private club and Cass asked me to go to be, like, his ‘eyes and ears,’ which is what he’d say when really he just wanted me there . . . you know . . . for sex.”

  “And you would still go?”

  Good question, Joan.

  “Well, yeah, it was expected. So I go and there are all these bigwigs—political types and newspeople, even a couple from your magazine—and some real celebrities, too, like that actress in that reality show . . . anyway, I was kind of bored so I wandered out onto the terrace to have a cigarette and I was just checking my phone for messages and Cass came out. I could tell he’d been drinking a lot and he started asking me if I’d been talking to his wife, which was crazy, why would I talk to his wife? I mean, I got her on the phone sometimes and she always seemed . . . nice. I felt kind of sorry for her, to tell you the truth—”

  How dare she feel sorry for me, I think, getting up to refresh my drink and wishing I’d ordered some wine or, better yet, vodka, when she was the interloper, the woman sleeping with another woman’s husband. I stop at the camera monitor and watch Hector reading a newspaper at his desk for a few minutes to calm myself down (it’s like having a twenty-four-hour meditation channel watching these guys at work). Then I go back to Amanda’s fairy tale.

  “But I never would have told her about the things her husband did.”

  “Why not?” Joan asks. “Wouldn’t that have stopped it?”

  “Maybe,” Amanda conceded, “but I knew how angry it would make him. For all his . . . fooling around I got the impression he really cared about her. I know that sounds weird, like if he cared about her why couldn’t he keep his dick in his pants, but it was like he kept her in this other box that nothing else should touch. She was his beautiful college sweetheart in the big white house in Westchester, and as long as he still had her he was still that boy he was when he was young—the crusading boy reporter.”

  “Interesting,” Joan had said. “So at this party Cass accused you of talking to his wife. Was he loud? Could someone else have heard him?”

  “Well, that’s the thing. I think someone did. Because after . . . I was crying . . . and this girl, one of the servers, came out from behind one of the planters on the terrace—I guess she’d been sneaking a cigarette too—and asked if I was okay and did I want to call someone. I think she meant, like, the police, which really startled me because up until then I hadn’t thought of what Cass did as . . . well . . . illegal.”

  “What did he do that night, Amanda? When he was asking you if you’d called his wife.”

  “Oh, he . . . um . . . he made me go down on him. One minute he was yelling at me and the next he was unzipping his fly and pushing my head into his lap and when I tried to say no—I mean anyone could have come out on the terrace and seen us—he slapped me. It was like yelling had gotten him hard. He told me once that anger was the most powerful aphrodisiac.”

  I flinch and pull back from the screen as if I have been slapped. The words Amanda used reared up out of her hysterical account with the force of reality because Cass had said those words to me, years ago, when we were in college. I’d thought it was an affectation, like reading Sartre and wearing black turtlenecks. But it was true that we always had great makeup sex—

  I get up and pace, pausing to watch Hector leading a workman in coveralls to the service door until I am calm enough to return to the desk. Yes, he slept with Amanda, which is why he said that intimate thing to her. Maybe that was why he had strayed. He needed sex fueled by anger and I didn’t give that to him anymore. But that didn’t mean he had forced her. And as for that so-called witness, Amanda couldn’t recall her name. Amanda looked nervous when I asked her a second time, Joan had noted, and changed the subject. Shouldn’t that have told Joan
that Amanda was lying? But instead she’d just made a note to get a list of servers from the caterer, Bread & Roses. Joan had dutifully noted that she’d been unable to locate the server who had witnessed Cass and Amanda’s tête-à-tête. Because she didn’t exist. I read through the rest of Amanda’s file. Yes, there are some so-called corroborating accounts: Amanda’s roommate, who recounted that Amanda was “very stressed” during this period and one night broke down and told her that she was afraid she’d get fired if she told anyone about what Cass was “doing to her.” And there was an accountant at the Globe who said she saw Amanda crying in the bathroom and Amanda told her she was afraid of her boss. But all that proved was that Amanda was hysterical and lied to other people. There were no real witnesses.

  And it’s the same with the others. At first it’s hard reading all these women’s stories, the things they said my husband did to them, but I make myself look for the facts, like Cass always said a good reporter should.

  You have to go cold inside, he’d say, don’t let yourself be swayed by emotions, look for the facts, what can be proved, where are the witnesses, the paper trail, the bodies. Without them, all you have are fairy tales and ghost stories.

  Joan Lurie had tried to find that evidence, I have to concede. She interviewed friends of these women who swore they told them what was happening at the time, but all that proves is that their friends were lying too. There’s no hard evidence here, just stories. Cass would have known that. Why didn’t he fight back?

  We both know that there was more that could have been in that story, Simon had said in his email to Cass, the incident at the Hi-Line, for example. If you sue I’ll publish that.

  Exasperated, I stride down the long hallway as I go over it in my head. There was some detail about what happened the night of the Hi-Line party that Simon made Joan leave out of the story she published. What? And where was it? There’s nothing more in her computer files about it except for the interview with Amanda, and apparently she stopped following that lead when she couldn’t find the server. But maybe Simon wrote her a memo—something he wrote down because he didn’t want a digital trail—that she’s kept in the physical copy of Amanda’s file. I should have taken the hard copy of Amanda’s file from Joan’s desk. Let her worry that she was losing it—from the number of empty bottles in her apartment she couldn’t be thinking very clearly—