Before He Finds Her

by Michael Kardos

  He had stopped in front of a double door with a TAPING IN PROGRESS sign attached to it. “They’re doing promo spots right now,” he said. “Otherwise, I’d give you the full tour. Come on, let’s go to my office.”

  At the end of the hallway, he opened the door and waved her in. His office looked about the size of Melanie’s home on Notress Pass. One corner was nothing but floor-to-ceiling windows, overlooking a large portion of Manhattan. Magruder strolled over and scanned the skyline as if it had been erected this morning just for him.

  “I do well,” he said. “But nothing was ever handed to me.”

  When he was done looking out his window, he turned around, smiled at Melanie, and told her to take a seat. The sofa was leather, soft, and probably cost more than all of her family’s furniture put together. Above the sofa were photographs of Magruder shaking hands with President Bush, and another with him shaking hands with President Clinton. Both settings looked like the Oval Office. That seemed to be the recurring theme—Magruder with incredibly famous people, most of whom even Melanie recognized: Madonna, Tom Cruise, Michael Jordan. Angelina Jolie. Hillary Clinton. Magruder flashed the same smile in all of them: friendly, slightly crooked, with his teeth showing a little. A smile divorced from an actual expression.

  He sat down on a leather chair at the head of the coffee table, which looked like a slab of petrified wood. He crossed his legs. The crease in his pants was sharp enough to cut steak.

  “We produce a show a week, which airs on Wednesday night. Thursday we’re off, and then on Friday morning we start all over again.”

  “That sounds really intense,” Melanie said.

  “Maybe. Though I have to tell you, Alice, after years of daily TV and having to chase every unfolding story and be everywhere at once, it feels like a walk in the park. I can plan my shows ahead of time, get the interviews I want.”

  Now that Melanie had a better look, she noticed that Magruder’s face had the same orange cast as some of the girls at college who hit the tanning salon too often. Not sure what to say next, she took Arthur’s advice and paid a compliment. “Your office is amazing,” she said.

  “Thank you. This whole floor is mine,” he said. “The network wanted me to rent space in their building, but I said fuck no. Pardon the bravado, but it’s the truth. I refused to have them looking over my shoulder.” He shrugged. “What’re they gonna do, Alice? Last week, I got a twelve-share with those marines, guy and a gal who got nailed by an IED and fell in love in rehab. We broadcast part of the wedding, their first dance... did you happen to catch it?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I missed it.”

  “Well, you’d have been weeping. Trust me, it was very beautiful.” He smiled again, but the smile quickly vanished into an expression of genuine concern. “I have no manners.”

  “Sir?”

  “Would you like coffee? Tea?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “I’d offer something stronger, but I probably shouldn’t, ha ha. But if you want it, it’s here. But we probably shouldn’t.”

  “If you have any water.”

  “Sure, we can rustle that up.” He picked up the receiver of the phone on the coffee table and dialed an extension. “Please bring Ms. Adams a glass of water. No, nothing for me.” He hung up. “You’re southern.”

  “North Carolina,” Melanie said.

  He nodded. “It’s a sexy accent, and it suits you—you’re quite lovely—but you’ll want to lose it or you’ll be relegated to the small markets. This isn’t a come-on, by the way, just some free advice. Back when I was doing weather, I used to sound like a real hick. Point is, I lost the accent. Point is, I beat out 60 Minutes last week. Ratings talk. Everything else walks.” He slapped his lap twice, as if encouraging a small, obedient dog to jump up and be petted. “So—your class. Tell me about it.”

  “It’s called Introduction to Mass Media,” she said.

  “What school?”

  Last night she’d gone online to prepare for this question. “Gaston College.”

  “Never heard of it.” Exactly why she’d chosen it. “Go on.”

  “Well, one of our assignments is to interview someone in TV or radio. I thought I’d have to find someone back home, but when I found myself in New Jersey for a cousin’s wedding and realized I’d be this close to New York... anyway, I’m like your biggest fan.”

  Arthur Goodale had insisted she say that.

  “So instead of interviewing some local yokel, you came to me. That’s ambitious. I like that. And I always try to make time for the next generation of media moguls.” His smile was reassuring. “So what do you want to know?”

  She unzipped her backpack, removed her notebook and pen, and scanned the list of handwritten questions. She decided to begin with a question about past shows he worked on, but almost at once he stopped her. “You can learn all that on Wikipedia. Lesson number one: Don’t waste your interview’s time. What is it you really want to know?”

  She looked at the list again. He’d just invalidated eleven of her fifteen questions. If only she were subtle and clever and able to improvise, able to chat. All she could do was skip to question twelve on the list. “You’re single with no children, isn’t that right?”

  “It is,” he said, a little uncomfortably. “But again, that’s something—”

  “Why do you still live in Silver Bay?”

  He frowned. “I don’t talk about my home life.” He must have realized that sounded curt, because he added, “I’m sure you understand why a public figure might want to keep his private life private.”

  This was a serious blow—her plan, such as there was one, was to get him talking about Silver Bay and then, acting naïve, bring up the crime. How do you develop a rapport?

  “My school assignment,” she said, “is to get to know my subject. His life as well as his work. That’s why I asked about Silver Bay.”

  “Trust me,” he said, “my work is a lot more interesting than my life.” He shifted in his seat.

  Five, maybe seven seconds of silence. Her armpits felt sweaty. Feeling out of options, she shut the notebook and braced herself. “When you lived in the Sandy Oaks neighborhood,” she said, “how well did you know Allison and Ramsey Miller?”

  “I beg your pardon?” He leaned back in his seat and got a good look at her. “Were you not just listening to me?”

  “In nineteen ninety-one—”

  “What the hell kind of a question is that? I’m not discussing that.”

  “I only wondered if you knew them. Because you lived in—”

  “I know where I lived, sweetheart.” No smile now. “I don’t talk about that. You don’t ask about that. Do we have an understanding?”

  Her heart pounded. “Yes, sir.”

  “I didn’t know either of them. Not even a little. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she said. He was lying, though. Why would he lie?

  “Damn right, okay.”

  Just then, a young woman barged in carrying a tray. “Here you go,” she sing-songed. On the tray sat a single glass of ice water. Melanie and Magruder watched as she set the glass in front of Melanie, on a ceramic coaster. She smiled. “Anything else?”

  “No,” Magruder said.

  “I didn’t know if you wanted lemon or not,” she said, “so—”

  “We’re fine,” Magruder said.

  “All right,” the woman said, her smile faltering and then reaffirming itself. Then she left.

  “I’m really sorry,” Melanie said when the woman was gone, doing her best to sound apologetic and reasonable. She meant it, too. She didn’t want to be burning this bridge already, when there was no other in sight. “I promise, I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “You? You can’t upset me.” She looked down at the table, accepting his condescension. He took a breath, laid his hands down on his lap atop those perfect creases. “Why don’t you try telling me the truth. Why are you really here? Who are you?” When she didn’t i
mmediately answer, he asked, “What college did you say you’re going to?”

  “Gaston College.”

  “We’ll see about that. Because this...” He motioned to her clothes. “The college students I know would’ve dressed up for an interview.” At Arthur’s advice, she had dressed like a “typical student”: simple blouse, worn blue jeans. Sneakers. Hair in a ponytail held together with a black elastic. Subtle lipstick and a touch of eyeliner—an amount that Phillip always mistook for no makeup at all. “If I find out you’re with the Enquirer or some other—”

  “I promise, I’m a college student,” she said.

  “You promise.” He laughed. “No, you’re a liar. I can spot a liar every time.” He glanced around his office at all those photographs, as if refueling. Then he massaged his temples. When he spoke again, his voice was softer. “All right, Alice. I’ll tell you what I know.” He leaned in closer. “I know two things: I know you’re going to leave through the door you came in. And I know it’s going to happen right now.”

  “Sir?”

  “You heard me.”

  Her vision began to get swimmy, and she fought to control herself. “Mr. Magruder—”

  He reclined in his seat and folded his arms. “I’m waiting for my two things to come true, dear.”

  “I can ask other questions.” She looked down at her notebook, the useless list. “What is it like to inform so many millions—”

  “Let me make it plainer.” His voice had hardened. “Get the fuck out of my office.”

  She stood up, placed her notebook back into her backpack. She felt Magruder’s stare as she walked to the door. She felt it all the way down the hall to the elevator—which took an eternity to arrive.

  “Don’t keep pressing the button,” the receptionist said. “It doesn’t make it come any faster.”

  After hurrying past the security guard and leaving the lobby, she walked a full two blocks before realizing she was going in the wrong direction, then backtracked the twenty blocks to Penn Station. Her feet throbbed, and she felt lightheaded and nauseous from not eating—she’d been too nervous to eat for most of the day—and all she wanted was to lose herself in the train terminal at rush hour, where thousands of people would cocoon her in anonymity.

  When she got there, she saw from the list of departures that the next Coast Line wasn’t for 30 minutes, and braving the coffee smell, she stood in line to buy three donuts and a bottle of orange juice. She moved away from the counter so that she would no longer smell the coffee, sat against the terminal wall, and bit into the first donut. It was the most incredible thing she’d ever tasted. All around her, throngs weaved past one another. If everybody who lived in Fredonia was put inside this railroad station, it probably wouldn’t be this crowded, but at the moment she felt reassured by all those people, to be just one among them, an anonymous grain of sand on the beach.

  She filled her stomach and was ignored by everyone. She’d botched the interview badly, probably left West Virginia for nothing—but at least she was in Penn Station, this subterranean place of human voices and music and track announcements. It was wonderful and safe. A paradise. A womb. She could stay here forever.

  She drank some juice, wiped her lips with a napkin. As she was deciding which donut to eat next, a tall man in a yellowed tank top and camouflage pants ran past. He was middle age at least, his hair ratty and gray, but he had ropy arms. He’d barely passed her when a heavy uniformed policeman caught up and tackled him to the hard floor. Then an even more massive officer jumped on top of the man, who was already down, and his face mashed into the ground. This second officer lay across him, covering him with his body, while the first officer yanked the man’s arms behind him and snapped handcuffs around his wrists. By this time the man was howling wordlessly, like an animal badly hurt, and the first officer was telling him to shut up, shut up right now, as people nearby stopped what they were doing and edged closer, and a few started taking pictures with their cell phones, and one man in a business suit said to another man in a business suit, “Fucking New York,” and when Melanie saw the small pool of blood on the ground near the man’s head, the donut she’d just eaten felt like a stone in her gut.

  Afraid to stand because her legs might not support her, she squeezed her eyes shut, covered her ears, and started reciting the names of Nancy Drew characters as if it were a litany: Carson, Nancy’s father. Eloise, Nancy’s aunt. George, the tomboy; Bess, George’s plump cousin; Ned Nickerson, Nancy’s boyfriend; Hannah, the housekeeper.…

  Part 2

  10

  1965

  His was a love story, though the love came later. First came all the climbing.

  As a young boy, on nights when his father and mother put too much beer or vodka into themselves and got to screaming and hurling picture frames containing happier times, Ramsey would scurry up the black oak behind the apartment building, perch in a nook, and sway with the highest branches. Eighty feet up, his breathing eased. He’d sit up there for two or three hours before becoming so drowsy that he feared falling in his sleep or so butt-sore that he had no choice but to climb down again and face the loud and unkind earth.

  Yet the earth wasn’t always unkind. Saturday afternoons, his mother sometimes took him ice-skating. He kept to the perimeter, hand on rail, but enjoyed the friction of his blades on the ice. He liked watching his mother, an expert skater. A single warm-up loop and she was drifting toward the center, where she might slide backward, spin, even leap into the air. While the strange truck smoothed the ice, Ramsey and his mother would put quarters into a vending machine near the skate-rental counter, and a paper cup would drop down and begin to fill. They passed the salty chicken broth back and forth. It gave them the warmth they needed for another hour on the ice.

  And sometimes he went with his father to the Shark Fin boatyard, where Ramsey would watch his old man climb inside churning engine rooms as large as bedrooms. His father might explain a thing or two about whatever he was working on. Sometimes he took advantage of Ramsey’s smaller size and asked him to squeeze into a space. More often, he let Ramsey explore the docks and climb aboard the dry-docked yachts. The other men in the boatyard trusted Ramsey not to drown or fall or break anything. They always took the time to shake his hand, not because they cared about him but because they respected his father. Ramsey liked these men’s faces, red and deeply lined from the wind and sun, and he liked their generous laughs and the black coffee they drank out of Styrofoam cups, and how their clothes were always stained with grease from a hard day’s work. He liked knowing that his father was one of these men.

  When the workday was over, the two of them would share a Dr Pepper at the end of the dock overlooking the bay. Standing there, the sun warming the backs of their necks, his father would look out at the charter boats returning with their day’s catch, a cloud of seagulls hovering over the decks.

  I got my mind set on a thirty-eight-foot Sea Ray, he’d say. Or: I got my mind set on a forty-six-foot Viking. Or maybe that day his mind would be set on some other yacht, as if he had all the money in the world to spend and all the time in the world to contemplate his purchase.

  It would be years before Ramsey started to sort out just how much of his parents’ troubles came from life’s usual slop of suffering—money troubles, boredom, graceless aging—and how much was due to the particularly poor alchemy of two people with hard tempers and short fuses. More and more, anything could set their ferocity into motion: something quoted from a newspaper, someone’s car in the wrong parking space, a comment, a glance, or nothing at all. Ramsey would sit rigidly on the sofa or on his bedroom floor and wait for it to start. He could always sense it in the atmosphere, the way animals know a storm is coming. And when one parent’s remark begat a louder response, and when the profanity started, and certainly by the time the first coaster or mug or TV remote got slammed down onto a coffee table or hurled against a wall, Ramsey would be long gone, already halfway up his tree. His parents never stopped hi
m or called his name. When he came home again, they never asked him where he’d been. Then again, the flecks of dirt and crumbles of tree bark on his clothes and in his hair surely gave him away.

  One fall night a week before his ninth birthday, Ramsey was hiding in his tree and imagining, as he often did, how it might be to live alone in a log cabin in the mountains, maybe by some lake, where at night all you heard were crickets and coyotes, and where there were a zillion stars overhead. He’d been learning constellations at school and was naming them to himself when a patrol car pulled silently up to the apartment building, its flashing lights blotting out the stars and brightening the branches around him like a multicolored strobe. He felt cold, sitting up there without moving, but seeing the patrol car made him start to sweat. One of his parents, he figured, had finally gone and killed the other. Neither had resorted to physical violence before, unless you counted the sliver of glass lodged in the meaty part of his mother’s hand, just below the thumb, from when she’d slammed down and shattered a mug. But their rage had grown worse in recent months, and now anything seemed possible.

  But no: His parents were still shouting at each other. The wind that night came from the west, carrying their voices all the way up the tree.

  The officer knocked. The shouting halted.

  A short while later, the officer emerged from the apartment, shook his head once as if clearing it of muck, walked to his car, and sat in it for several minutes with the headlights off. Like the officer, Ramsey sat and waited for the fighting to resume. When the officer finally drove away, Ramsey counted to five hundred before climbing down again.

  “You probably saw what happened here tonight,” his father said to him, sitting at the foot of Ramsey’s bed an hour later. It was a school night. Ramsey already dreaded having to wake up in a few hours. He watched the fish decals stuck to the walls. During the day they looked happy, but at night, lit by the dim lamp on his dresser, they were shadowy and sinister. But because they’d always been there, he never thought of asking that they be taken down.