The Stranger Behind You

by Carol Goodman

  Whit had worked as an intern for Pat Shanahan. It makes me ill to think of him involved in any of this. I’ll call him tomorrow and make sure he takes my call. We’ll have a long talk and I’ll call Emily after. I’ll make clear to both kids that they must check in regularly. In the meantime, I need to find AJ to make sure she’s okay and find out what really happened the night of the Hi-Line party.

  I click Reply and type: Oh no, is AJ missing? I noticed she wasn’t at the tea shop when I got back from my summer place in the Hamptons—

  I backspace over Hamptons and type country instead. I don’t want Barbara to think I’m a snob.

  And I wondered what had happened to her. She’s such a lovely girl!

  Barbara doesn’t answer right away. I imagine her preening at the praise of her daughter as I do whenever anyone says something nice about Whit or Emily. Maybe she’s wiping away a tear as I find myself doing right now, thinking about Whit and Emily and wondering how they’re doing at Brown and Bard. Parents’ weekend is coming up at Bard, and I asked Emily if she wanted me to come but she said it was “kind of lame.” But now I wonder if she won’t feel lonely with all the other parents there—

  A long message bubble pops up on my screen.

  That’s so sweet of you to say. The fact is that I haven’t heard from her since the last week of June. She said she was going to upstate New York to work at a resort in the Catskills and that I shouldn’t be concerned if I didn’t hear from her because there was no cell phone service or wifi, but I thought she’d at least call once in a while and she hasn’t. To tell you the truth I’m sick with worry.

  Of course she is. What twentysomething voluntarily goes without Wi-Fi and their phone? It sounds like she’s joined a cult. I think what to say next. How can I get her to give me information?

  Has she ever done anything like this before?

  Again there’s a long pause and I worry that I’ve offended her. When Whit OD’d people asked the same question and I could always tell they were thinking that I must have done something wrong to have my son end up with so many problems. Not that Cass had done anything wrong. Everyone always blames the mother. I’m about to type that I didn’t mean to suggest it was her fault when another bubble appears.

  Actually, yes. She ran away when she was 16 and she dropped out of college last year. She’s always been a bit rebellious which is why I think the police aren’t taking it seriously. But I think this is different. She was worried about something earlier in the summer. She said some reporter was bugging her.

  Ah, I think, relieved that it was Joan who had chased the poor girl out of the city, not my husband.

  That’s terrible, I type, I know how unscrupulous they can be.

  She replies right away. I even came up here to New York to look for her myself but none of her friends will talk to me. They all act like I’m being hysterical and that I’m violating AJ’s privacy rights by wanting to know where she is!

  I know exactly what she means. Emily’s and Whit’s friends act exactly the same way. This poor woman.

  Then I have an idea.

  You said you’re in New York now?

  Yes, she types, I’m staying at a Catholic hostel in Chelsea. It was all I could afford. I’m going out of my mind here with no one to talk to. And I’ve been here for two weeks now and have had no luck finding my daughter!

  I shudder, imagining how dreary that place must be. The woman deserves a good lunch.

  Would you like to meet? I think I have an idea of how to find her.

  She answers with a heart emoji and one of an angel. Oh God, I hope she isn’t some born-again fanatic. But if she is it will be all the more newsworthy when I reunite her with her daughter. As I make a date to meet at Buvette, a darling little French café in the West Village that Sylvia told me about last year, a flicker of motion draws my attention to the camera screen. Simon is getting out of the elevator and walking across the lobby, sweater knotted over his shoulders. He exchanges a smirk with Enda. I can practically smell the testosterone from here. He won’t look so smug when I expose the lies he published about Cass and how his reporter hounded that poor girl out of the city. The girl I’m going to find and reunite with her mother. I can’t think of a better way to rehabilitate my own image.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Joan

  “IS THAT WHY you told me not to follow up Amanda’s story about what happened at the Hi-Line party?” I ask. “Because you thought it was too dangerous?”

  He sighs and sinks down in the wingback chair, the springs groaning as if protesting that anyone heavier than Lillian sit on it. “I suppose that doesn’t sound very professional,” he says. “And I wasn’t completely honest. You see, I was at that party—”

  “At a fundraiser for Pat Shanahan? But he’s a Republican!”

  Simon laughs, then assembles his face into a stern expression. “A newspaperman can’t be biased. We have to cover both sides objectively—”

  “So you were covering the party?” I ask, interrupting a lecture I’ve heard a million times before.

  He frowns. “Not exactly. But Sylvia told me about the party and she got me in as her plus one.” He laughs again. “She actually wanted me to join the club and I went along with the idea because I wanted to see who had turned out for Pat Shanahan. I was surprised to see Cass there. He’d been a liberal in college, even fancied himself a Socialist . . .” Simon smiles. “Easy posing as a Socialist when you’ve got a big trust fund waiting for you.”

  There’s a note of bitterness in Simon’s voice I haven’t heard before that makes me think about the rumors that he was envious of Caspar Osgood. Could it be true that he okayed my story because he wanted revenge on his college nemesis? I try to focus back on the main point. “So you saw Osgood at the party? Did you see him with Amanda? Did you see him mistreat any of the servers?”

  “Of course not,” he says, looking out the window where there’s nothing to see but fog. “If I’d seen anything like that, I’d have said something.”

  “So why didn’t you let me follow this up?” I cry.

  “Because I thought it was too dangerous,” Simon says, turning back to me. “I know, that’s not a good reason for an editor, but I’m afraid I wasn’t being completely . . . objective. I was worried about you. Shanahan has a reputation for playing . . . rough. I thought if he was involved in a cover-up and you got too close, well . . .” He holds up his hands. “Look what happened tonight. Someone tried to kill us because they think you’re getting too close.”

  “We have to call the police,” I say again.

  “And tell them what? We have no proof that what happened tonight had anything to do with Shanahan.”

  “We can’t just do nothing! This girl—AJ—she’s been missing since June.” I sit down at my desk chair and show him AJ’s Facebook page. “One of the servers where she worked says they haven’t seen her in almost four months.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Simon says. “If she ran because of something she saw that night at the Hi-Line why did she wait three years?”

  I’ve been puzzling that out myself. “It must have been something in my story,” I say. “It looks like she went AWOL right around the time the article came out. Maybe when she read my story she realized that the man who assaulted Amanda was Cass Osgood.”

  “But wouldn’t that have made her less scared that he’d been exposed already? No one would have had any reason to keep her quiet then. And then with him being dead, what would she be afraid of?”

  “She might have been afraid of Shanahan. If you’re right that Shanahan left the party to help Osgood—”

  “I didn’t say that—” Simon begins.

  “But it’s what you thought. That’s the reason you didn’t want me following the Hi-Line lead. Because you thought Shanahan was involved. What if Shanahan—or his people—threatened AJ?”

  Simon shakes his head. “But why would he wait until the story came out?”

  “I don’t
know,” I admit. “Maybe something in the story worried them and they went looking for AJ and she got scared. We have to find her—”

  “That’s exactly what you can’t do, Joan.” He pulls my chair closer to him. His face is lit by the glow of my computer screen, his eyes are dark pits, the lines around his mouth deep grooves as if carved into stone. “You can’t keep looking for her. It’s too dangerous.”

  “I can’t just ignore that she might be in danger,” I say.

  “She’s gone to ground,” he says. “And that’s what you have to do. Just stay here and keep laying low. You’ll be safe here. I’ll find out if Shanahan is really involved in this. I-I’d never forgive myself if anything happened to you.”

  His voice hoarsens and trembles. I’m alarmed to see that he’s on the verge of tears. I move closer to him—to comfort him—and his arms are suddenly wrapped around me. I freeze, paralyzed. I can feel his hot breath on my neck, the rough tweed of his jacket against my face, suffocating. I can’t breathe. He must feel my muscles stiffen, because he pulls away.

  “I’m sorry—” he begins. “I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s okay,” I say, getting up, not entirely sure what just happened. Was he making an advance? Had I given him a reason to think that’s what I wanted? Did I want that? I’ve always wanted Simon’s admiration, the validation of him thinking I was a good reporter. I knew that some people thought we were having an affair.

  It’s what people are saying about you and Simon Wallace, Roslyn had said.

  Had I given Simon the wrong idea? Did he think I’d just been waiting for the story to be over?

  Only, the story isn’t over. The lamp light has fallen on the picture of the Black Rose pinned to my wall. Just as Lillian was still stuck in that moment at the Half Moon I am still reliving the attack in my East Village apartment. The story isn’t over; it’s still happening right now, right here.

  Simon must see the fear in my face. “I don’t want to leave you,” he says. “Maybe I should sleep on the couch tonight.”

  I nod, too numb to even thank him, then I go down the hall to my room and lock the door behind me.

  EARLY THE NEXT morning I hear Simon moving around the living room, but I pretend to be asleep, too embarrassed at last night’s awkwardness to face him. All night I tossed and turned, reliving the attack in my apartment—only now it had merged with the memory of Simon knocking me to the ground even though Simon had only been trying to protect me from whoever the hell was shooting at me. Was I never going to be able to trust any man again?

  I wait until I hear the front door close, then I hurry to get up and lock the door behind him. Then I go to my desk. My expensive view has been obliterated by fog and rain. I am cut off from the rest of the world, just as Lillian was. She went into hiding here right after she witnessed Abe Reles fall from the Half Moon Hotel—just as I have. Gone to ground, that’s what Simon said. I see that he’s left a note on a Post-it on my laptop. “Don’t go out again until you hear from me. I’ve got a friend down in city hall I can talk to confidentially. I’ll handle everything. You focus on taking care of yourself and staying safe.—S”

  It almost makes me laugh. I don’t need Simon’s warning to keep me here; my own fear and trauma are prison guards enough.

  I go to the kitchen to make coffee, moving as if through a fog trying to make out shapes in the mist. When I get back to my desk and check on my laptop I see that neither AJ nor Stacy has answered my messages. It’s clear that they don’t want to be found, so why should I risk my life looking for them? I can’t think of anything else to do to find them. I look up at my wall and think about Lillian’s story. Were she and Frank able to find Rose? Was the mystery of Abe Reles’s death ever solved? I ask Bot to read me the contemporary coverage of Abe Reles’s death.

  While the official story was that Reles had fallen while trying to escape, there were suspicions that the police had been bribed to look the other way while Reles was thrown from the window, but no one was ever indicted. I ask Bot to find out what had become of Frank Maloney, the assistant DA whom Lillian was so fond of, but she’s unable to find any reference to his future career. Maybe he decided he’d had enough of crime and politics after he lost his star witness for his big case.

  I ask Bot to tell me about the DA in charge of the investigation, William O’Dwyer. He apparently had gone on to become mayor of New York City, but things didn’t end up so well in the long run for him. In 1949 Mayor O’Dwyer was accused of associating with organized crime figures and was forced to resign from office. Was it such a stretch, then, to assume he’d had contacts with organized crime figures in 1941? That he was the one who arranged to let Eddie Silver and his thugs into the Half Moon Hotel to kill off his star witness? Maybe he was the man that Rose saw in the stairwell that scared her so much. I’m just about to ask Bot if there are any theories about O’Dwyer’s role in Abe Reles’s death when I hear a tapping at the door. I’m wondering who could be visiting so early, but then I look at the time and see that it’s past noon. I’ve somehow spent the whole morning listening to articles about Abe Reles and Murder Inc. and Mayor O’Dwyer. I go to the door, embarrassed to still be in my bathrobe, and find Lillian.

  “Oh, did I wake you?” she asks.

  “Not at all,” I say. “I just lost track of time. I was down a rabbit hole of research.” I gesture at my desk, realizing Lillian probably isn’t familiar with losing time on the Internet. She takes my gesture as an invitation to walk toward my desk.

  “Your story got me interested in Murder Inc.—” I begin to explain, embarrassed for her to see all those references to her own past tacked to my wall like specimens, but she interrupts me by tapping her finger on a picture of AJ.

  “Who’s this?” she asks.

  “A girl who’s gone missing,” I say.

  “Like Rose,” she says with a sigh, sitting down in the wingback chair. “She vanished after we split up beneath the boardwalk. Frank looked for her for weeks.”

  “You must have been worried about her,” I say. Lillian points her toes to touch the floor.

  “I was,” she says. “Every time Frank visited I was afraid he was there to tell me they’d found her body in the river.”

  “Frank visited?” I ask, noting the wistfulness in her eyes when she says his name. What had become of him, I wonder. Maybe he died in the war. Maybe his picture is in the locket she gave me, which I haven’t opened because it would feel like prying.

  “Oh yes. Of course, it was part of his job. I was one of his star witnesses, after all. I could place Eddie Silver at the Half Moon on the night Abe Reles died. Frank said they were building a case against him, but his boss wanted to know who Rose saw coming up the stairs with Eddie that night before they could proceed. He kept asking me about that: What had I seen? Had Rose told me anything about what she had seen? Had she mentioned any names? I felt like I was disappointing him every time he came . . .” She pauses at the sound of a train whistle and looks out the window, as if hoping that Frank is on that train coming back to her.

  “You couldn’t help what you hadn’t seen.” I think about the man who attacked me whose face I never saw but who seems to be always with me. And I consider the invisible figure in the fog last night who shot at me and Simon. It all feels like a dream—or a nightmare. “But it must have been frustrating . . . a blank spot you could never fill in.”

  Lillian turns from the window to look at me, her eyes brimming, as if the river fog has filled them with watery light. “Yes, that’s it exactly. There’s always been this”—she splays her age-marked hand over her heart—“this hole. I tried as hard as I could to remember everything about that night but all I could remember was that man lunging for me, the weight of his body on mine, the smell of the couch cushions, not being able to breathe . . .”

  I put my hand on Lillian’s arm; she’s trembling. “You were sexually assaulted,” I say. “That’s a traumatic event. When I was researching the story on Cass Osgood I
read about the science of what happens in the brain during a traumatic event. The chemicals released during trauma increase the storage of central details and make peripheral details fade. So the details of that policeman’s face—the smell of the couch cushions, the song playing on the radio, the view out the window—”

  I see myself on the landing of my old apartment looking for my keys. I hear a step behind me . . . A hand covers my mouth . . . A sickly sweet smell fills my head . . . My heart is pounding . . . I can’t see anything . . . he’s put something over my head . . . he knocks me to the floor and I struggle wildly . . . then my head hits the floor . . . he drives my head into the floor . . . and everything goes black. I have less to remember in my attack than Lillian but that moment is as indelibly burned into my memory as hers is.

  “Those details are seared into your brain forever while the flight from the hotel, what Rose said about some guy on the stairs—”

  Fragments from the night of the publication party swirl in my head—Sylvia and Simon arguing on the patio, Andrea Robbins telling me I was part of a new vanguard, a server handing me another glass of Champagne, Simon and Sylvia on the terrace . . . those memories feel faded.

  “It’s natural that you don’t remember them as well.”

  Lillian nods. “Yes, that’s it exactly. I remember that stupid freckled cop but not what Rose said to me under the boardwalk. She might have been telling me where she was going to hide, but I couldn’t remember. I told Frank, though, that Rose had an aunt upstate in a town on the river—Barrytown it was called. Frank wanted to go up there but he was afraid she’d run if she heard a cop was looking for her. He thought that if we went together on the train maybe I’d be able to find her. To tell you the truth, I didn’t think so. I thought that if Rose had gone to ground she’d not come out even for me, and especially not if she saw me with Frank. But I liked the idea of an excursion up the river with Frank . . .” She blushes. “I suppose you’ll think it was vain of me. Here my friend was running for her life and I was dreaming of picnics in the country.”