The Stranger Behind You

by Carol Goodman

  “Here.” AJ picks up her phone and presses some buttons until sounds come out of it. I can’t make out what they are: a cry, then some whooshing that sounds like it’s coming from the bottom of the ocean, and then out of that subaqueous roar comes a voice from the dead. The voice of my husband.

  “This is what’s going to happen,” he says. “You’re going to leave here and forget you were ever here tonight. If you don’t you’ll be sorry. I promise you that you . . . will . . . be . . . very . . . very . . . sorry.”

  Each pause between words is punctuated by a rasp that sounds like sandpaper dragged over barbed wire. It makes my throat ache just hearing it. It’s the sound of someone choking. I look up at AJ and see that her hand is on her throat. I open my mouth to say something but nothing comes out, as if it’s my throat that Cass’s hands are around. A sharp crack, like a gunshot, ends the recording.

  “He stepped on the phone and then left me there. It was only when I checked to see if it still worked that I saw it had been recording, and that was only because when he grabbed me, the recorder was still on from earlier when I’d recorded what Amanda had said.”

  “You had proof,” I croak, my throat still tight. “No one could listen to that and not realize . . .” That Cass thought nothing of forcing himself on young women—on a young girl no older than his teenage daughter! And it wasn’t just about sex. I’d told myself for years that Cass was just oversexed, a man of appetites, virile, but the man I heard on that recording was a man drunk on his own power. A bully. How had I lived with him and not seen it?

  Because I had closed my eyes. I had gone through my life—my beautiful life with two perfect children and my handsome, successful husband and immaculate center-hall Colonial in Ardsley—willfully not seeing what Cass had become and what it had done to all of us—because I wanted to keep that life.

  “I’m so sorry,” I finally say to AJ. “He was a monster.”

  “That’s what I thought,” she says quietly. “I was still afraid of going to the police, but then one of the other guests saw me crying and took me aside and said he had seen what happened and that I should call the police, that he’d back up my story.”

  “Oh,” I say, “that was . . . nice.”

  “Yeah, I thought so too. But after I called the police I saw him talking to one of Mr. Shanahan’s interns. The intern—he was around my age—seemed worried and it looked like he was texting someone on his phone. That made me uneasy and I felt like I just wanted to leave, but then the police arrived and asked for me. Then Mr. Osgood came downstairs with Mr. Shanahan and the man who told me to call the police. They wanted me to go to the station to make a statement. So I did, but the whole time I was talking I felt like the cop wasn’t really listening. It didn’t seem like any of the men had any intentions of believing me or taking me seriously. When I finished he left me alone in this creepy room without windows for a long time. I thought I was going to go out of my mind. I thought they had called ICE and I was going to get deported. Finally, the door opens and it’s not the policeman, it’s Mr. Shanahan and the guy from the club who said he would back me up. Mr. Shanahan introduced himself as the district attorney and he said he took the kind of charges I’d made very seriously. Very, very seriously, he kept repeating, did I understand the gravity of the situation? I just kept nodding and saying yes, sir and of course, sir like an idiot, until I was shaking all over. Then he said that Mr. Osgood had denied he had any interaction with me or the other young lady that night. So I turned to the other guy and said, ‘But you said you saw what happened,’ but he just shook his head and said, ‘You must be mistaken, miss, I was with Mr. Osgood all night and I never witnessed anything like what you described.’”

  “The bastard!” I exclaim. “Why did he tell you he would back you up and then back out?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. I only know that it made me look like an idiot.”

  “What about the recording?’ I asked. “And your neck . . . you must have had marks on your neck.”

  She passed me her phone again and pulled up a picture, a close-up of her neck with a ring of black-and-blue marks. “Yeah, I showed them. Mr. Shanahan said, ‘We don’t know who did that to you, and we have no way of ascertaining that that is Mr. Osgood on the tape, Miss Herrera.’ Then he added, ‘Another problem is that you don’t appear to be on the list of employees contracted to work at this event. I’d hate to think you were impersonating another employee, as that would constitute a serious misdemeanor that would violate the terms of your work permit.’”

  “He was threatening you.” I’m appalled at the thuggish behavior of the man whom Cass had supported—

  Had given a million dollars to since that night.

  “Yeah,” AJ says. “How could I have known that covering for someone could be called impersonating? It seemed pretty crazy, but here was this big man—the DA—saying it, so what was I supposed to do about it? I got out of there as soon as I could. When I left I ran into the intern I’d seen texting earlier. I asked him if he’d been texting his boss to tell him what was happening and he admitted he had, but only because he thought Mr. Shanahan could help. So I said, ‘Look, man, I don’t know who you think you’re working for, but all these guys are assholes.’ That seemed to really upset him. He tried to ask me more questions but by then I just wanted to get out of there, so I left.”

  “I don’t blame you,” I say. “I’m sorry you were treated that way by my husband and Pat Shanahan.”

  The man Cass had supported and given over a million dollars to. The man whose wife had been watching our every move. I see it now, so clearly. Wally had been keeping an eye on me because her husband had done this big favor for Cass and Cass was in his debt. When the Manahatta story was published they must have worried that it would come out that Pat had gotten those charges dropped against Cass. And then she recommended Greg Firestein so he could watch Cass to make sure he didn’t tell anyone about the role Pat had played in getting him off the hook—

  I recalled Cass yelling into the phone: You’d better goddamn help unless you want me to go public with your part in this!

  He had threatened Pat Shanahan and then Greg and Wally came over and got me drunk on Veuve Clicquot (The Widow’s Wine), and the next morning Cass was dead.

  “Hey, are you okay? You’re shaking.”

  I look at this slight, big-eyed girl. How easy would it be to get rid of her? If Shanahan hadn’t balked at getting rid of Cass—

  “The intern who was with Shanahan,” I ask, “did you get his name?”

  “No,” she says, “but I saw him again at another party I worked. I’d recognize him anywhere.”

  “I think it must be Greg Firestein, a PR flak of Shanahan’s.” I open my phone. “I think I have a picture of him.” AJ leans over to look as I scroll through my photos. She stops me at one from the gala and expands it.

  “Him,” she says. “He was the intern who was at the station.”

  I look down and see Whit, handsome in his tux and orange bow tie. “That’s my son,” I say.

  “Oh,” AJ says, looking embarrassed. “No wonder he looked so miserable. It couldn’t have been easy finding out your father was an asshole. He looked . . .” AJ screws up her face, thinking. “He looked like he’d just lost something precious.”

  He’d lost his father, his idol. A few days later he tried to kill himself. I remembered his face in the hospital bed looking up at his father as if he were drowning. I’d thought Cass had rushed to his bed out of love—but I bet what he’d really wanted to do was make sure that Whit didn’t tell me anything about what happened at the Hi-Line. How much did Whit know? Was losing his belief in his father what drove him to try to kill himself? My God. I had to talk to him.

  I shiver. “We need to get out of here,” I tell her. “It’s not safe.”

  “No one knows I’m here. Unless . . .” She glares at me. “Unless you told them.”

  “I didn’t mean to,” I say, looking away
from those accusing eyes. I’m thinking of my laptop with its clever MataHari app on it. All someone would have to do is break into my apartment and look to see what I saw: the location of Camp Bernadette. They could be on their way here now.

  I force myself to look back at AJ, but she’s no longer looking at me. She’s crawled over to the window to look out. “It’s too late,” she says. “Someone’s coming.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Joan

  “YOU FELL IN the Spuyten Duyvil?”

  “Not fell,” Lillian said. “Rose pulled me in to save me from being shot. The water was freezing and the current was so fierce, it might have killed us anyway. I remembered what Frank had said about the ghost ship Half Moon and I thought we were being pulled under the water by the arms of drowned sailors. The current was taking us out to the Hudson and I knew that if we got swept out to the river before reaching the shore we’d be lost. But then I remembered that Dutchman who had swum across the creek “to spite the devil” and I thought if he could do it, so could we—to spite Eddie Silver and all the men like him. I grabbed Rose, who was flailing beside me, and started pulling her toward the opposite shore.”

  She looks out the window, speaking as if to herself. “Sometimes I feel as if I never did get out. That Rose and I are still drifting along the river—two girls who didn’t matter, swept away with the trash out to sea.”

  She shivers and I reach over to pull the afghan around her shoulders. Her skin is so cold she might be a drowning woman I need to pull out from the river. “But you didn’t drown that night. You fought the current. You wouldn’t let yourself be a victim to those men.”

  She grabs my hand and squeezes with a surprisingly strong grip. “Yes, that’s exactly what I felt. I think I got across that creek on sheer spite. Sometimes anger is the only thing keeping us going. I hooked my arm around Rose’s neck like I’d seen the lifeguards do at Coney Island and I swam us to the other shore. We were nearly at the mouth of the river by the time we dragged ourselves out of the creek, on the spit of land just below the Refuge. When I caught my breath I turned to Rose. I couldn’t see her in the dark, but I could hear her ragged breath. She was sobbing.

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “We’re alive. We just have to walk up this hill and we’ll be at the Refuge. The nuns will help us.”

  She made a choking sound that turned into a wheezing laugh. She seemed much worse from the swim than I was. I called her name but she only moaned. So I shook her—and felt warm, sticky blood on her. In trying to get me out of the way she had been shot. I couldn’t tell where she’d been hit, just that there was blood on her arm and chest and that she was very weak. I had to get her help—and the closest place—the only place—was the Refuge. Some of the nuns had trained as nurses in the war and there was a full infirmary on the top floor . . . right here.”

  I remember Lillian saying that the infirmary was here, but it’s still startling to have the story brought around to the present and to think of Rose and Lillian struggling up the hill, trying to get to this very room.

  “You must have been scared,” I say, “all alone in the park with your wounded friend.”

  “Yes,” she says, her eyes brightening at the acknowledgment. “I got Rose to her feet but she could barely walk. It was a steep climb uphill through the dark and over uneven rocky ground. We were both shaking from the cold. I lost track of how many times we fell, each time Rose moaning more pitifully. I never thought we’d make it, but when we came up on the ridge I spotted the lights from the windows shining through the dark. I’ve never been happier to see anything. For the first time this place felt like a real refuge: a port in a storm. I was mostly carrying Rose by then and I felt as if I were a shipwrecked sailor carrying her dead crewmate to a lighthouse on a rocky shoal.”

  Her lip quirks and I see the spark of humor in her eyes, still there despite all she’s been through. “Perhaps I was a bit delirious by then. I banged on the door, shouting for us to be let in. One of the younger nuns opened the door. When she saw me holding Rose up she sniffed and said, ‘We don’t take drunks here.’ I explained that we weren’t drunk, that Rose had been shot.

  “She still looked disapproving, as if being shot was the inevitable consequence of living the kind of life Rose and I presumably had led, but she called for help and we carried Rose up here to the infirmary. Sister Agnes had served in the Great War and tended to gunshot wounds before. She told me straight off that the bullet had passed through Rose’s shoulder and that it wasn’t a serious wound in itself, but that she’d lost a lot of blood and might not survive if we couldn’t get her to a hospital for more blood.

  “‘I’ll have to call the police,’ she told me, ‘if I take you to the hospital. So you’d better think what you’ll say about how this happened.’

  “I saw she thought we’d gotten ourselves into some kind of trouble that we didn’t want the police to know about and I began to tell her it was all right, that we were helping the police, but then I recalled what Rose had said about Eddie having his own men in the police. I told her to please not call the police right away, but to wait. The assistant DA had been with us on the train. He must be chasing the man who shot us, but then he’d come here. She agreed and said she would give Rose what blood they had in the dispensary (they kept some on hand for miscarriages and hemorrhages after childbirth) to stabilize her for a few hours, but then we’d need to get her to the hospital.

  “She left me with Rose and told me I should wash and get into clean, dry clothes. ‘You’ll want to look your best when you tell your story.’ I did look a wreck and smelled like the river. I washed in a basin as best I could and put on the plain muslin dress that was the uniform of the Magdalens. It made me feel like a ‘soiled dove,’ as they called the girls here, but I knew it would only be for a short time. Frank would come after they caught the gunman. He would take Rose’s statement and she would identify the man who had been on the stairs and they would arrest him and Eddie Silver and Rose would go back upstate to marry her fellow and I . . .” Lillian turned from the window and smiled at me. “Well, I had my own dream. I did hope Frank and I would marry someday, but I didn’t mind if it took a while. I wanted never to feel as helpless as I’d felt in the water that night—or when my mother fell in the kitchen or when that cop pinned me to the couch at the Half Moon. I wanted to make my own way, to work and tell stories of girls like me who no one listened to . . . Oh, I don’t know how I meant to do it. One moment I pictured myself a newspaper reporter like Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday and the next I was over in Europe writing about the war or sitting in a room like this”—she sweeps her arm around my living room—“writing stories to sell to magazines. I suppose it sounds silly to a young woman like yourself who’s done those things, but I had never really thought about myself as someone who could make a difference. But swimming across the Spuyten Duyvil that night and carrying Rose up that hill had given me the feeling that I could do whatever I wanted to do.”

  “I don’t think it sounds silly at all,” I tell her. “I’m sure you did make a difference.”

  She shakes her head. “Sometimes, sitting here, looking out at the fog, the rest of my life seems like a dream. Everything that came after that night is less real than the life I dreamed for myself as I sat by Rose’s bedside. I was right here, looking out this very same window. I drifted off to sleep at some point and dreamed I was back on that train platform facing that man with the gun. He was stepping out of the shadows into the light and I was just about to see his face when the gun went off and I woke up. I awoke with a jerk, my heart pounding, but I told myself that the gunshot was in my dream. Then I heard another one. It had come from below and it was followed by a scream and more shots and men shouting and women screaming. At first I couldn’t move. I still thought I must be dreaming. How could danger find me here? This was the one place that was supposed to be safe, but then I realized that no place was ever really safe and I knew that Eddie’s men must have come
for us.”

  “You must have been terrified. What did you do?”

  “I listened.” She puts a finger to her mouth and whispers. “Listen now. What do you hear?”

  I’ve fallen so far under the spell of her story that I do what she says. We both listen. At first all I hear is the rain beating a staccato rhythm against the glass and the high keen of the wind . . . but then, far below us, I do hear something—a murmur of voices and then the hydraulic churn of the elevator.

  Just someone coming home.

  “There were stairs where the elevator is now,” Lillian says. “The gunshots and voices were coming from the stairs so I roused Rose and told her she had to get up, we had to go.” Lillian gets up as if to show me what she had done. She’s so shaky on her feet that I get up, too, and put my arm out to steady her. She grabs hold of me as if I were the shaky one and begins shuffling us toward the hallway.

  “We had to take the back stairs,” she says, guiding me down the hallway. “But first I had to find the key. Rose told me where the nuns kept a spare. Do you have the key?”

  I’m confused for a moment but then I realize she’s asking if I have the key for the locks now. How far, I wonder, will she want to take this reenactment? But if this is what she needs to do, who am I to deny an old woman some closure? I’ve left the back-door key on my night table, so I steer Lillian into my bedroom to get it. Then we continue on our way down the hall to the back door.

  “I listened here,” she says with her hand on the door, “to make sure there wasn’t anyone coming up the back stairs . . . then I opened the door . . .” She gestures for me to open the door and I do. Cold, dank air hits my face as the door opens. The stairwell is dark. The bulb on this landing appears to be out. Watery, rain-shadowed light filters down from above. There’s some kind of skylight up there. Lillian is looking down into the stairwell. “When we got here I heard footsteps coming up the back stairs and I knew Eddie’s men were covering both ways out. There was only one other way.” She points toward the roof. The dappled light falls on her face like a veil and for a moment I see a much younger, and very frightened, woman.