The Stranger Behind You

by Carol Goodman

  “He said that if I revealed that I was there at the police station and covered up for him it would go worse for me than it would for him. ‘Men like me always land on their feet,’ he said, ‘while men like you end up on the garbage heap.’ That’s when I slipped the sedative in his drink and waited until he passed out. Suffice it to say he didn’t ‘land on his feet’ when I dumped him in the pool, nor, I imagine will you . . .”

  He bends me over the rim of the ladder and tightens his grip on my head. My vision blurs and stars, sunbursts raying off the glass shards on his shoulder . . . and landing on the woman standing behind him. Lillian, tiny and determined, holding up a splintery piece of wood as if she were Joan of Arc—her favorite saint—wielding a sword. She’s not tall enough to reach Simon’s shoulders, but Simon will kill her after me if he sees her.

  “No!” I try to cry, although it comes out like a grunt. “Run!”

  Simon whirls around, giving me enough space to step out of his grip and try to help Lillian, but then he stumbles back against the ladder, his face a mask of fear and confusion as Lillian rushes him. His arms windmill in the empty air for a moment, his eyes searching—

  For me, I wonder, or for something else? He looks like a man who’s suddenly remembered a forgotten appointment.

  —and then he falls backward.

  I crouch at the edge to look down. Simon’s body is splayed on the rocks below, red seeping over them in the orange-gold glow of the setting sun. That glow is spreading over everything. I look up and see Lillian through the red-gold mist, which matches her red sneakers. She is looking east, back toward the skylight as if she is watching someone coming through it. I look but there’s no one there. Is she reliving that moment when she saw her Frank come up through the skylight and she realized he had betrayed her? She flinches, as if at a loud sound, and her face is stricken, but then the pain dissolves into something else, a radiance. She turns, her eyes briefly grazing me.

  “It wasn’t him,” she says, a light dawning on her face. Then she tilts her face up to the setting sun and sighs as if she hasn’t felt the sun on her face for decades. Her face is suffused with love, like something—or someone—has been restored for her. She looks . . . free.

  As I reach for her the red glow expands, filling my brain, wiping everything else out. I feel, for an instant, Lillian’s fingertips brushing mine, and then I feel nothing but the empty space left behind after a sun explodes. And then I don’t even feel that.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Melissa

  IT WAS CLEAR right away that he must have died instantly, spine broken on the rocks, limbs splayed, their looseness an uncanny reminder of the pose he’d struck in the library that day to imitate Cass. Now Simon had followed Cass into death. On his face was the same surprised expression he often wore in college when someone was unexpectedly cruel—or unexpectedly kind. It made me wish I’d been kinder to him more often.

  I climbed back up the rocks to check—

  On what? I knew he must be dead. But I had to make sure he wasn’t suffering.

  As I turned to go something bright caught my eye, a glitter of gold in a crack between two rocks. I knelt and reached down, thinking it might be something that had fallen from Simon’s pockets. As my fingers touched cold metal I saw something else, hidden deeper in a crevasse, that made me freeze. I quickly withdrew my hand, pocketed the piece of gold, and clambered back down toward AJ.

  “We have to find out if Joan’s all right . . . if Wally got to her . . .” I stammered, still unnerved by what I’d seen in the rocks but determined to put it aside for now. I expected AJ to argue about going back but she didn’t. She led the way, helping me over the rocks and climbing up the steep hill. By the time we got to the front of the Refuge there were police cars and ambulances outside. I saw a stretcher being carried out of the lobby. It was Hector, an oxygen mask over his face, which was drained of color. At least he was still alive. I’d find out what hospital he was going to, but first I turned to AJ.

  “If you want to go now I understand.”

  She shook her head. “You need me to say what happened, and I’m tired of running. If they deport me . . .”

  I squeezed her shoulder and promised I would do all I could to help prevent that from happening. I started walking toward the plainclothes detective who looked like she was in charge (partly because she looked just like Mariska Hargitay on Law & Order), but I stopped when I saw a second gurney coming out of the lobby. Joan was on it, unconscious, her face dead white beneath a plastic oxygen mask. She looked worse than Hector had. Enda was walking beside the gurney, his face grim.

  “What happened?” I asked Enda. “Was she shot?”

  Enda shook his head and pointed to a woman being led out of the lobby by a police officer. It took me a second to recognize Wally. Her carefully highlighted hair stood up in spikes, her face streaked with grime. Here was my “friend” who had plied me with Veuve Clicquot and told me to stand by my man. I wanted to ask her why she had been willing to risk so much to save her man. Was it love—or was it because her own sense of self was so wrapped up in his that she no longer knew who she was without him? But then I realized that I couldn’t ask her those questions until I answered them for myself. Instead I turned to the officer. “I saw that woman shoot Hector Ramirez,” I say, pointing at Wally.

  “I heard the shot,” Enda said, “and chased the woman up the stairs, disarmed her, and secured her to the banister while I ran up to the roof. I got there just as the man fell off . . .” He looked over to the detective. “He was trying to push Joan off and lost his balance.” Enda paused, looking puzzled, then shook his head as if clearing his ears of water, and looked down at Joan. The EMTs were barking numbers at each other: blood pressure, heart rate . . . something about internal bleeding. “She just collapsed.”

  “She was hit on the head four months ago,” I yelled at the EMTs. “She didn’t go to the hospital. It could be an aneurysm.” The EMTs looked at each other grimly. I was guessing that wasn’t a good sign. “What about Hector?”

  The detective shook her head. “Too soon to tell. They’ve taken him to Columbia Presbyterian—that’s where they’ll take Ms. Lurie too. I need you to come to the station to give a statement.”

  “I’m going to the hospital,” I told her. “And so is she.” I grabbed AJ by the arm and pulled her close.

  A POLICEMAN DROVE AJ and me to the hospital, less out of politeness, I guessed, than to keep an eye on us. When we got to the ER I took one look at AJ and grabbed a nurse. “This poor girl’s been out in the cold and rain for hours. I think she has hypothermia and shock.”

  I made enough of a fuss to get her into a bed, hooked up to an IV for fluids, and covered with heating blankets. I asked the nurse to keep us informed on Joan Lurie’s and Hector Ramirez’s conditions. When she asked if I was family I told her Joan was my sister and Hector was my domestic partner.

  “And this one?” she asked skeptically, pointing at AJ.

  “Mi sobrina,” I told her.

  “Aunt Melissa,” AJ called me when the nurse left to get more blankets. “Who’s my uncle?”

  “Hector,” I told her, adjusting the pillows. Now get some rest while Tia Melissa makes a few calls.”

  I went out to a waiting room and called the immigration lawyer Cass had hired to help Marta get her green card and asked him to come help AJ. Then I went to find out how my sister Joan was doing. The nurse told me that she had, indeed, suffered an aneurysm and was in surgery.

  “Why didn’t you make your sister go to the hospital after she was attacked?” she asked me.

  “Because I’m a bad sister,” I told her. “But I’m going to try to be a better one.”

  “You’d better,” she snapped. “In the meantime, your boyfriend’s daughters are over there.”

  She pointed to three women holding hands in the waiting room. I introduced myself as a friend of their father’s and apologized for telling the hospital he was my boyfriend.


  “You’re not?” the youngest of the sisters asked. “We were hoping Papa finally found a lady friend.” The oldest of the sisters added something in Spanish that was too fast for me to follow.

  “How’s he doing?” I asked.

  They told me that the bullet had missed his heart but that he’d lost a lot of blood. “He’s a strong man,” the eldest—Thea—told me. “He came here on a boat from Cuba when he was only thirteen and raised his two baby sisters and sent them both to college—us too. Family makes us strong, he always tells us.”

  As he had said to me while I used him to spy on my neighbor, I think with a heavy sigh. I left them praying for their father and went to sit outside for a moment. I needed air. I needed a moment—

  I needed to find a way not to hate myself. I could blame Cass. He had set this all in motion with his lies, his cheating, and his entitlement. But I was the one who had turned a blind eye and enabled him. It had been so important for me to hold on to the idea of who we were—college sweethearts, golden couple—that I’d refused to see what was in front of my face. If I had seen, maybe I could have done something to stop all of it.

  I take out my phone and open the MataHari app. Joan has a list of contacts on her computer. I call the one under “Mom.” A woman answers on the third ring, her voice a tangle of hope and dread.

  “Joannie?”

  JOAN’S MOTHER, ANNE, arrives after midnight. She’s a faded blonde with a few extra pounds on her and a beautiful peaches-and-cream complexion. I tell her that Joan is out of surgery and in stable condition. I help her find the on-call doctor and leave her to go see Joan alone. She comes out tearful. “They say they stopped the bleeding in her brain but that they won’t know how bad the damage is until she wakes up.”

  I commandeer a sleeping chair, which I know about from when Whit was in the hospital and I wanted to sleep in his room, and bring Anne water, coffee, blankets—anything I can think of to make the waiting more bearable. I shuttle between her and Hector’s daughters until I’m sure both Joan and Hector are stable.

  At the end of the next day I suggest to Anne that she come back to the Refuge and use her daughter’s apartment to get some rest. I arrange things with Enda, and when he opens Joan’s apartment for Anne I’m there with a bag of “essentials” I picked up. She walks straight over to the desk and stares at the wall of Post-its. I could kick myself for not coming in earlier to get rid of them. I know how it must look to Anne, like the work of a madwoman.

  “Is this what Joannie was working on?” she asks.

  “She did a good job,” I say, pointing to the card with AJ’s name on it. “She found the witness before anyone could hurt her, and she’ll tell her story just as she told these women’s stories.” I point to the six women who were Cass’s accusers, forcing myself not to look away.

  Anne nods and then points to one of the articles about Murder Inc. “What’s all this stuff from the ’40s?”

  “That I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe she was inspired by the history of this building? The story about Rose O’Grady is kind of a local legend. Maybe Joan saw in it a parallel to the story she was telling about young women who are victims of sexual assault today.”

  It’s a lame explanation but Anne seems to accept it. “She’d have gotten some of it from her grandmother,” she says. “My mother was always telling these kinds of stories from her youth. ‘Eat your vegetables; we didn’t get any in the Depression.’ Or ‘If you go with the wrong boys you’ll end up like the Kiss of Death girl.’ I grew up hearing so many of them that I was scared silly of doing anything, but Joan’s reaction was to ignore them and get out.” She turns to me, tears brimming in her eyes. “Maybe she would have been more careful if she wasn’t so busy rebelling against all those scary stories.”

  I shake my head. “You raised a brave girl who risked her own safety to help other women. You should be proud of her.”

  “Oh, I am,” she tells me, the tears spilling down her face. “I just hope I get to tell her so.”

  AFTER MAKING SURE Anne has everything she needs, I go down to my apartment. I sit at my desk and think about Joan sitting at hers, one floor above, trying to find a way to tell the stories of the women Cass hurt while struggling with her own damage and pain. Was it really all that strange that she had to find a side door in through another story?

  I open my laptop. I’d meant to delete the MataHari app after using it to get Anne’s phone number, but I haven’t.

  I open it up and, in spite of my resolution not to, look through Joan’s files one last time. According to the timestamps, the last folder she’d opened is called “Lillian.” I open it up and see that it’s the story of a woman who grew up in the ’30s in Brooklyn and came to the Refuge in the ’40s. It’s what Joan was researching, and it’s written as if the woman herself was telling it, from her Depression-era childhood of bread lines and Catholic school, through the tragic loss of her mother and subsequent disintegration of her family, to her brothers ending up in orphanages and falling into lives of crime. It’s like a ’40s movie: young Irish girl struggling to keep brother out of jail joins forces with a handsome young assistant DA to put the bad guys away, but is ensnared in the crime world herself. When I get to the part about how Lillian was assaulted by a policeman at the Half Moon Hotel I see why Joan saw this story as a companion to the stories of her informants. I can hear all the women who were assaulted by powerful men and then silenced. Most of all, I see AJ, bullied and threatened by Cass and Simon and Wally and Pat Shanahan, driven into hiding just as Lillian was—

  By another DA.

  I read the last bit about Lillian and Rose running from the train, jumping into the Spuyten Duyvil to evade the gunman, fleeing to the Refuge, hearing the gunshots and then escaping to the roof—

  Just as we did.

  The story breaks off with Lillian on the roof, turning to see her unknown assailant. Was it Frank, the handsome assistant DA? Had he been the one working with Eddie Silver? Did he send the killers to Abe Reles’s room? Was he the man on the stairs at the Half Moon Hotel who Rose saw?

  Poor Lillian! What a horror to find out the man you trusted, the man you thought was going to save you, was your destruction. Hopefully that’s not actually what happened. But if not, then what did happen? Did Rose and Lillian escape? Did they ever get off that roof?

  I search through the files for anything that gives away the ending, tears trickling down my face, as if the ending to some ’40s pulp heroine’s story could tell me the ending to mine. But there’s nothing there. Lillian’s story is unfinished. For all I know, Joan made her up and her resolution is trapped inside Joan’s potentially damaged brain.

  The last thing I do before I fall asleep is to call Whit. It takes three calls and several text messages to him and Drew to get him to pick up. When I ask him about what happened at the Hi-Line three years ago he breaks down in tears.

  “Dad told me that he was trying to help that girl, but when I talked to her afterward she was so angry—and scared,” he tells me. “I knew something was wrong. Then when Dad came to the hospital he told me it was all a big misunderstanding and if I told anyone it would hurt you, Mom, and that I’d already disappointed you enough by what I’d done.”

  I’m so floored by this tactic of Cass’s—that he would use his own son’s love and shame to hide his secrets—that I can’t speak at first, but I swallow hard and make myself.

  “You could never, ever, disappoint me, Whit. Never be afraid to tell me the truth—and I promise I’ll always do the same for you.”

  We talk for another half hour and I make him promise to come down next weekend. It’s too late to call Emily, but I text her with plans for a family weekend.

  As soon as it’s light I walk to the hospital, taking the path through the park. I stop at the rocks where I’d found Simon’s body. I had told the police what I saw in the rocks below where Simon’s body lay, but I didn’t give them the bit of gold I’d found first. I look at it
now—and then put it away. As I turn toward the river I can almost see Lillian and Rose climbing the hill from the banks of the Spuyten Duyvil on their way to the Refuge.

  When I get to Joan’s room I see that she’s awake, sitting up in her bed, looking out the window to the same view of the Spuyten Duyvil as if she, too, is watching the progress of the two fleeing girls.

  What happened to them? I want to demand. Instead I clear my throat.

  “Melissa!” she calls. “Just the person I wanted to see. I have so many questions.”

  “Me too,” I say, relieved at the sharpness of her gaze. Whatever damage was caused by the aneurysm it hasn’t quenched her sharp, inquisitive nature. As I sit down, though, I feel a tremor of dread at the thought of that sharp intelligence aimed at me. What if she asks how I found AJ or why I moved to the Refuge? But that’s not what she says.

  “No one will tell me what happened to Lillian.”

  “Lillian?” I repeat with a sickening drop in my stomach. “You mean the woman whose story you were writing?”

  “Well . . .” She looks confused. “She was telling me her story. She was in my apartment when you and AJ arrived and then she came up to the roof with me. Don’t you remember?” She lowers her voice. “She was the one who pushed Simon off. But then I blacked out and I didn’t see what happened to her.”

  I swallow hard and take her hand. “Joan, there was no one else in your apartment when we arrived and no one else with you when you came up onto the roof and no one else who fell to the rocks.” I squeeze her hand. “I’m afraid you must have imagined Lillian.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Joan

  THE NEUROSURGEON, A pompous but frighteningly competent superstar from Columbia–Presbyterian, has an explanation for “Lillian.” “The bleed in your brain produced hallucinations. Not uncommon. You’re lucky you didn’t die. You would have if your friend hadn’t called me. You’re welcome.”