The Stranger Behind You

by Carol Goodman

  “When the conductor called Spuyten Duyvil I told Rose to get ready because Marble Hill was next. I could see the platform coming up and the oily black water of the Spuyten Duyvil Creek. We waited until the last minute to get up and then hurried to the doors when they opened at Marble Hill. No one followed us out and the platform appeared to be empty. I thought about the story Frank had told about the Dutchman swimming across the creek and Henry Hudson anchoring his ship there. . . . Have you been there?”

  The sudden break in the narrative startles me. “Once, years ago,” I tell her. “When I came down to visit the Cloisters with my mother. I remember she held my hand tightly because the platform is so narrow.” The memory surprises me with its vividness. I remember realizing how wary of the world my mother was—an inheritance from her own anxious, overprotective mother.

  “Yes,” Lillian says. “A long narrow platform wedged between the rock face on one side and the Spuyten Duyvil Creek on the other, where Henry Hudson’s ship the Half Moon had anchored. Somehow it was as if that tied the place to the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island and that made me nervous. As if I would never escape that moment in the hotel. The way the light fell on the platform through the slats of the stairs made it look like we were back under the boardwalk. There was even that same shadow of a man in a trench coat and fedora—”

  “You mean it looked like the same shadow?”

  “No,” Lillian says, turning to me from the window. All the blood seems to have drained from her face. Her skin is the same watered gray as the fog pressing up against the window, as if coming for her, as if the waters of the Spuyten Duyvil have risen up bearing the ghost ship Half Moon to take her away.

  “No,” she repeats, “the shadow was real. I thought it must be the police officer Frank had sent to meet us, but then I saw the gun in his hand. It was pointed at me. I felt Rose pulling me backward, but to where? I wondered. We were already on the edge. And then I heard the gun go off and I was falling backward. Into the Spuyten Duyvil.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Melissa

  I SEE THAT Joan had looked up the trains leaving from a station called Marble Hill. According to Waze, the station is only a ten-minute drive from the 207th Street subway station. There’s a train leaving in thirty minutes that will take me to Stratford in forty-five minutes. I can talk to AJ today and hear her version of what happened at the Hi-Line before Joan gets to her. I know journalists; they like to think they’re objective, but they can shape the facts to tell the story they want to tell. Joan has a vested interest in representing Cass in the worst light. Whatever AJ tells her she’ll twist to fit her own version of the story and the truth will be lost.

  I’m ordering an Uber on my way up from the platform but I spy a Green Cab on Broadway and commandeer it instead. It creeps slowly through the rain on Broadway for several blocks and then comes to a complete halt. “Why are we stopping?” I demand. “My train leaves in fifteen minutes.”

  “The bridge is up,” the driver, an elderly Black man, says, pointing through the rain-spattered window. I lean in to look through the front windshield and see a looming iron structure at the end of Broadway. It looks like a prehistoric sea monster rising up out of the water.

  “Why?” I ask the driver. “Why is the bridge up?”

  “Ship in the canal,” he replies laconically, as if we were in the Outer Hebrides instead of New York City. When we used to go up to Maine to visit Cass’s cousins, the kids would find it exciting if we had to stop for the drawbridge. Cass would sigh and bitch but it was a quaint inconvenience, part of old-money island life. But who knew such a thing existed on the northern tip of Manhattan.

  “Isn’t there another way to get there?” I demand.

  “Not unless you want to swim,” he scoffs. “And I wouldn’t recommend it. You know what that creek is called? Spuyten Duyvil. The Devil’s Whirlpool ’cause of the riptides. Takes ships down to the bottom, especially in a storm like this.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” I say, “the storm is not so bad. The news just likes to make a big fuss to raise their ratings.”

  He cranes his neck to look back at me; his eyes are deeply lined and sorrowful. “I agree that the news media is not as dependable as it once was, but even a broken clock is right twice a day.”

  I hoot at the old-fashioned saying. “My grandmother used to say that.”

  “Your grandmother was a wise lady. Looks like the bridge is back down. Hold on.”

  He deftly swerves through traffic across the bridge and turns left just after it, climbing a steep hill. He makes a U-turn to put me right in front of the Metro-North station entrance. “You get on home before this storm gets any worse,” he tells me after I’ve paid and tipped him. Of course. He thinks I’m heading home to my Westchester house. If only I were. I picture the white colonial in Ardsley, a fire in the fireplace, the deep ruby and gold Persian rugs, the gleaming hardwood floors, and polished oak bookcases—a snug sanctuary in which to ride out a storm.

  Instead I’m heading down a wet and muddy metal staircase onto a cold, rain-swept platform wedged between cold black stone and even colder water. Devil’s Whirlpool, indeed, I think, looking over the edge of the narrow platform into the roiling water. It makes me shiver just to look at it. Gazing across the inlet I see the edge of Inwood Park and on the ridge above, partly shrouded in mist, the Refuge. It looks sinister from here, like something on one of those old Gothic Romance covers. All it needs is a fleeing girl in a white nightgown.

  It’s not entirely deserted here on the train platform. A woman with a rolling suitcase is sheltering on a bench under a plastic rain hat. Two teenagers huddle together behind the plexiglass map board, and a tall hulking figure at the end of the platform hunches into his hooded sweatshirt. Everyone is withdrawn into themselves against the rain that sweeps sideways onto the platform. I hadn’t realized how isolated the station was—or thought about having to come back this way. Hopefully I’ll have the girl with me—and if I don’t I’ll take an Uber back.

  When the train finally comes it’s an older model, the vinyl seats torn and patched with duct tape, smelling like stale chips and urine. While it creeps along the river, stopping at every obscure whistle stop—Ludlow, Glenwood, Greystone—I think about the best way to approach this girl AJ. She must be scared if she’s been hiding, but of what?

  I am the only one getting out in Stratford. There’s no station waiting room, no taxi stand, no town that I can see. There is, though, an old weathered sign on the other side of the tracks that reads CAMP ST. BERNADETTE-ON-THE HUDSON. I cross a rickety trestle bridge, the planks and iron frame groaning under my weight and swaying in the wind. Hanging on to the iron railing as I descend the slippery steps I can feel the structure shaking and it occurs to me that the whole thing could rip free of its moorings and fly into the sky like Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz. What’s the use of hanging on to something that’s rotten at its core?

  I walk up the hill and through an old wrought-iron gate that has the name of the camp spelled out in rusted letters. I pass a gatehouse and a stone chapel, the doors and windows of which are boarded up. Clearly Camp-St. Bernadette-on-the-Hudson has been closed for a long time; it’s as empty as a ghost town. Had Joan bothered to check that?

  Or—the thought intrudes as stealthily as the icy water creeping under my collar and down my back—what if Joan knew I was spying on her computer and she planted the suggestion that AJ was here? What if she’s lured me to this isolated spot in the middle of a hurricane? How easy it would be to kill me and dump me in the river. When I washed up in some New Jersey swamp, people would think I’d followed Cass into a watery grave because I couldn’t bear the shame of the scandal and my newly reduced circumstances. As if I were one of those rich, entitled women who couldn’t survive outside of a pampered lifestyle. I’d show them.

  My anger at my putative critics propels me up the hill toward a weathered clapboard house—the only building that has a light in the
window. It looks like it had been an old farmhouse once, then converted into a dorm, and then abandoned. A chipped and worn rowing oar hangs over the door with the faint crudely painted letters: St. Bernie’s Forever! ’78. The building doesn’t look like it’s been occupied since then. Clearly I’ve come here on a fool’s errand—

  Only a curtain twitches at the window to the side of the door, blown by a stray breeze perhaps, or—

  “AJ?” I call, knocking on the door. “Are you in there? I want to help you. I think you might be in danger.”

  The door remains solidly closed, barred to me as well as to the storm. And why not? Why should she trust me? I’m not really here to help her; I’m here to prove my dead husband’s innocence.

  “AJ, I’m Melissa Osgood. Caspar Osgood’s widow. I know I’m the last person you want to talk to, but think about it. If you’re scared because you saw something my husband did why should you still be scared? My husband is dead.”

  My words are greeted with nothing but the low moan of the wind and the lash of the rain. Perhaps the logic of my plea was too complicated for the girl. Even I can see its flaws—

  The door opens.

  A slim, dark-haired girl in jeans and a sweatshirt levels her large brown eyes at me. She looks frightened, but also defiant. I notice she’s holding something in her hand—an aerosol can, which I think might be pepper spray but then realize it’s just hair spray—the only weapon she has. The thought that she sees me as a threat makes me feel suddenly ill. What have I become that a girl like this—a girl who could be Emily—would be afraid of me? My heart breaks.

  “I’m not here to hurt you, honey. I-I want to help.”

  “And what if you don’t like what I have to tell you?” she demands. “What if I did see your husband do something bad?”

  It’s what I was afraid of. Part of me wants to turn away. I don’t want to hear what she has to say. But those eyes already have me pinned.

  “Then you’d better tell me about it.” It’s what I’d say to Whit or Emily when they woke up with a nightmare or came home from school with red eyes. I can’t tell this girl that everything will be all right. All I can tell her is the truth: “I’m here to listen.”

  THE BUILDING IS bitterly cold and damp, heated only by an electric heater that looks like a fire hazard. She has an electric kettle that she uses to make tea while I inspect her meager accommodations. A cot with a bare, stained mattress, a faded Dora the Explorer sleeping bag, a stack of paperback books—mostly those dystopian fantasies Emily read for a while—a bulging backpack, and a flip phone plugged into a power strip. No wonder she’s not posting on social media; she might as well be in a third world country. Watching her I notice what I hadn’t in her Facebook pictures; she’s Latina. Maybe I’ll trot out my Spanish later.

  She brings the tea to a rickety card table. “I don’t have milk or sugar,” she says, sitting down and blowing on her own tea. I notice a rose tattoo on her wrist when she raises the mug to her mouth.

  “It’s fine,” I say. And then, pointing to the tattoo, “That’s pretty.”

  “I got it when my mother died. Her name was Rosalita.”

  “I’m sorry about your mother. How . . . ?”

  “Ovarian cancer, which they caught too late because she was afraid if she went to the clinic she’d get deported.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say again. “My mother died of breast cancer when I was around your age. It’s hard losing your mother when you’re young. It makes you do . . . foolish things.”

  “Is that why you married Caspar Osgood?” she asks.

  Well, that didn’t take long. I take a sip of tea to give myself time. My best chance of gaining her trust might be if she thinks I’ve turned on Cass. “I never thought about it like that, but maybe that had something to do with it. I moved in with Cass after my mother died. I wanted to start my own family and Cass . . . well, he was very . . . determined. He knew what he wanted and that felt safe to me then.”

  “I can see that,” she surprises me by saying. “He was very persuasive.”

  I try not to wince at the innuendo in her voice. “Why don’t you tell me what happened? It was the night of that fundraiser at the Hi-Line, wasn’t it?”

  She hesitates, which I can understand; after all, she has no reason to trust me. But I see something else on her face, the look Emily would get when something bad had happened and she was afraid to tell me but she also wanted to get it out. I remember that the best thing to do at those times was just to be very quiet and still, like waiting for a shy woodland animal to eat out of your hand.

  “Yeah,” AJ says after a few moments. “This girl I knew from one of the bars I worked at asked if I’d fill in for her. It sounded like good money, so I said yes. I was helping out with the bills because my mother wasn’t able to work.”

  “What a good daughter,” I say. “Your mother must have been very proud of you.”

  “My mother would have told me to get out of there. It was, like, seventy percent men getting drunk on expensive scotch and smoking stinking cigars. My ass was black and blue from getting pinched after the first hour.”

  “The pigs,” I say, meaning it. “Was my husband . . . did Cass . . . ?”

  I’m almost hoping she says yes, that that’s all this is, a little harmless ass pinching, as gross as that is.

  “No,” she says, “at least, not to me. I noticed him because he seemed upset . . . and . . . well . . .” She smiles ruefully. “He gave me a hundred-dollar bill at the start of the evening and told me to make sure his glass was always full.”

  “Oh,” I say, “he didn’t usually drink like that. But I suppose . . . well, I’d kicked him out a few weeks before.”

  “I know,” she says. “I was taking a smoke break out on the terrace and he came outside with a girl. I hid behind a planter because you’re not allowed to smoke on the job. They didn’t see me, but I overheard what they were saying. He accused the girl of telling you about their affair, that she did it to force him to leave you.”

  “Did he?” I ask, surprised. “She didn’t. Maddy Wensley, one of the other mothers at Emily’s high school, saw Cass having an intimate lunch with Amanda downtown and took a picture of it. Here, I still have it on my phone.” I scroll through my photos and find the photograph that had changed my life. It shows Amanda leaning across a table, showing a lot of cleavage and laughing too hard at one of Cass’s jokes. Cass has his hand on her thigh. “Does that look like a woman who’s been taken advantage of?” I ask.

  AJ picks up her own phone and taps some keys. “Does this?”

  The picture is so small—I’d forgotten those old flip phones could even take pictures—that at first I’m not sure what I’m looking at, but then I make out Amanda’s blurry features. I look closer and see that she has a swollen cheek and a split lip. “You’re telling me that Cass did this?”

  “Yes. When he left I went to her to see if she was all right. I wanted to bring her down to the kitchen to get ice, but she said no, let it swell so everyone will see what a monster he is. She asked me to take a picture of her with my phone because her battery was dead and then she even asked me to make an audio recording of her saying what happened. She was so upset that I did it. I thought she was going to ask me next to go the police station and I was afraid if I did, it would be like a police record and I’d be deported.”

  “Oh!” I say. “Are you il—undocumented?”

  “Yeah,” she admits. “My mother brought me here from Mexico when I was three. I’m in the Deferred Action Program.”

  “You’re a Dreamer!” I say, excited to meet one.

  She makes a face. “Yeah, those dreams aren’t looking so bright lately. But three years ago I thought all I had to do was continue to stay out of trouble with the police. Anyway, it turned out Amanda didn’t want to go to the police. ‘I have other plans for this,’ she said when I sent her the picture and voice memo.’”

  I think of our vanishing bank account. “She wa
s planning on blackmailing him.”

  “Maybe,” AJ says. “I’m ashamed to say I was relieved she didn’t want to go to the police. I left the terrace right after she left, thinking I would just grab my stuff and go. I was heading into the service stairs when someone came up from behind and put his hand over my mouth to keep me from screaming. I was terrified and dropped my phone. The man was talking and I couldn’t even understand what he was saying I was so scared. Then I realized it was the man who had hit the girl—Caspar Osgood—your husband.” She looks at me defiantly as if I’m going to contradict her.

  “And then what?” I ask, trying hard not to look away. “Did he—”

  “He didn’t rape me,” she said, “he just . . . talked. He told me that if I went to the police with Amanda he’d make sure I was sorry. That’s what he kept saying over and over again. You’ll be sorry. I’ll make sure you’re sorry. All the time he had his hands around my throat like he was going to strangle me . . .”

  AJ’s breath catches and I move closer to her. “I’m so sorry,” I say. “I can’t even imagine. How awful. Cass . . . well, he was under a lot of stress, not that that’s any excuse, but as you say, he was drunk . . .”

  “You don’t believe me,” AJ says, her voice flat, not even angry, just resigned.

  “No—I mean, yes, I do, I believe he scared you, that he—my husband—behaved badly—”

  “You don’t believe he was threatening my life.”

  “Well,” I say, “you didn’t exactly say he was, just . . . I mean you’ll be sorry could mean a lot of things.”