The Good Stranger (A Kate Bradley Mystery)

by Dete Meserve

“Of course.”

  “Maybe you can call your dad and ask him what it’s going to take to get the sixty votes they need.” He drew a big X through whatever he had been reading on his iPad. “Welcome to ANC.”

  “Sixteen people shot in under seven hours yesterday,” Stephanie said as I laid my bag on my desk, in a surprisingly spacious cubicle not far from the Hornet’s Nest. “All over the city: Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn. Insanity.” She rose from her chair. “Stephanie Nakamura.”

  “Kate Bradley.” I extended my hand.

  Stephanie was a classic network-news beauty: chin-length dark hair, high cheekbones, and flawless skin. This morning she was dressed for off-camera work: skinny jeans, a long-sleeved white cotton top, and black boots, Prada maybe.

  “I’m on deadline for a piece on the uptick in violence in New York and other major cities. Guessing they put you on the political hamster wheel?”

  “Apparently. Even though that’s not what Andrew promised me.”

  “I wouldn’t bank on whatever promises he made,” she said, frowning. “The news always comes first in Andrew’s world. What we reporters want is . . . well, let’s just say it’s further down the list of priorities.”

  “I didn’t cover politics when I was in LA, and I don’t plan to be covering it here . . .”

  She flashed me a wry smile. “You think that, with the ten to fifteen White House and congressional story lines happening every day, they’re going to assign Senator Bradley’s daughter something else besides political stories?”

  I felt the heat rise to my face. “Most of my experience has been in breaking news. I broke the Good Sam story a while back. And then the Robin Hood story—”

  “That’s why you made it this far. But you know who had that desk of yours? Bryan Griggs. He covered major stories like the Las Vegas shooting, Weinstein, OJ’s release from prison. One of the best. Pressured Andrew and Mark for more freedom on the stories he covered, and now . . .” She lowered her voice. “He’s not working here anymore.”

  I swallowed hard. “I can handle anything these guys throw my way. I had a tough assignment editor and hard-ass news bosses in LA.”

  In the blue-white light of the newsroom, Stephanie’s face had an almost ghostly glow. “Not like this, you haven’t.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Sirens blared as I walked back from the ANC studios that day, plodding three blocks on packed sidewalks to the subway. The ambulances’ earsplitting wails were only part of the aural assault—backhoes digging up a foundation on a new apartment building, a deafening rat-a-tat of jackhammers at another building site a block away, and a rhythmic banging, metal on metal, that ricocheted off the brick and echoed in the streets.

  After a face-melting, hair-frizzing ride on the cramped subway, I stepped out into the fading sunlight and headed into the crosswalk. A taxi driver honked and screamed at me in a language I didn’t understand. But its meaning was clear: Hurry up. Move. Idiot.

  Impatience rode on air thick with car fumes. A red-faced man with a thick beard barreled out of an electronics store shouting into his cell phone. Maybe a business deal that had gone sour. A bad breakup. Hard to tell. I stepped out of his way and nearly fell against a bus waiting at the stoplight. It wheezed loudly, spewing warm exhaust in my face.

  When I finally reached the apartment, sweaty and tired, I sighed. But not with relief. Instead of taking the corporate suite ANC had offered me, I’d agreed to sublet this apartment for two months as a favor to my best friend from college, Janet, so she could move to Denver with her boyfriend. Our arrangement would save them $3,000 a month in unused rent and give me a chance to figure out where in NYC I wanted to live. Besides, Janet had assured me, it was near an all-night newsstand, a block away from the most heavenly tapas, and down the street from the “best cheese and beer shop in America.”

  No good deed goes unpunished.

  The 645-square-foot apartment in the heart of Chelsea was newly renovated but hardly deluxe. Perhaps the landlords hoped the floors looked like hardwood, but anyone with eyesight could see they were cheap vinyl. And the cabinets and shelves were made of flimsy pressboard, the kind that should’ve had a two-month expiration date. The apartment’s only redeeming feature was two big windows that let in a lot of natural light, even if the view wasn’t great—a close-up of the apartment building across the street.

  Raymond, my friend from the night before, had plopped his hulking frame in the center of the concrete front steps and was wearing an orange T-shirt that read, “Safety First.”

  “Tell him to stop leaving the gate open, damn it!” he yelled into his phone.

  He nodded at me but didn’t move. “And he better not take the brand-new Black & Deckers off-site either!”

  I squeezed past him, then unlocked the building’s front door and was immediately overpowered by a strong odor in the hallway. A rotten-egg stench I recognized as steamed broccoli, but intense, like someone was cooking an entire field of it.

  I turned the key in the lock to my apartment, but the wooden door, swollen by the humidity, wouldn’t open. I slammed a shoulder on the door a couple of times until it finally budged. At this rate, by the time I moved out of this apartment in two months, my shoulders would be strong enough to earn me a place on the New York Jets.

  I slumped into the couch. Instead of the familiar trio of palm trees that swayed outside my window in LA, my new view consisted of a brown brick apartment building. One particular window—framed in sagging yet colorful Christmas lights, even though it was August—caught my eye. A woman sat by the window, eating noodles in a hazy pool of light from a small lamp. Alone.

  My cell chimed. I smiled when I saw Eric’s photo flash up on the screen.

  “Hey,” I murmured. “I miss you.”

  His voice was warm, thick with emotion. “Me too. It feels like forever since you left. I don’t sleep well without you.”

  “Same.” I heard engines idling in the background. Voices shouting. “Where are you?”

  “I’m up at the Warner fire.”

  “The one near Sacramento?” Anxiety crept into my veins. That massive fire was so destructive it had been all over the national news today.

  “Yeah. They called in our search-rescue team yesterday for what we thought would be a couple of days, but this fire is deadly. It’s like a war zone here.”

  I padded across the room to turn on the AC unit. It whined, then groaned to life. “ANC reported that the fire has already destroyed three thousand homes. You okay?”

  “I’m surviving on beef jerky and one-hour naps.”

  “But you’re safe?”

  I could feel his smile through the phone. “I’m safe.” His voice cracked. “But it looks like we’re gonna be here awhile. Ten days. Maybe longer.”

  I didn’t hide my disappointment. “Ten days. How did your talk with FDNY go yesterday?”

  “Not good. The fire chief put in a good word for me high up in the chain of command, but it’s still gonna take years to get trained and certified in search-rescue there. And the work they had hoped to give me training their fire teams in swift-water rescue hasn’t been approved. The chief says it’s stuck in a bunch of red tape and could be a year or more before it gets authorized.”

  “A year,” I said softly. “But could you start some kind of work at FDNY before that? Once you get here?”

  “Doesn’t look like it.”

  I heard something steal into his voice. Something I’d been hearing ever since he’d promised to join me in New York: sadness.

  “All I’ve ever wanted, everything I dreamed about, only matters if you’re with me,” he had said when I’d told him about the ANC offer. Then, on a starlit night, he agreed to come with me to Manhattan. “This is me starting an adventure. With you.”

  But the words we say don’t always mirror what we end up doing. Even if we are certain we mean them. The world shifts in ways we can’t predict. Dreams collide and break us apart.

  Love is not always
enough.

  The impending government shutdown was keeping my dad so busy that all my calls to his cell went to voice mail. Even the call I placed at close to midnight a few nights ago went unanswered until the next morning. Eventually, he responded by texting me that he’d call me later in the day. Then he didn’t.

  At least I didn’t have to worry that something had happened to him. I saw his image flash up periodically on the monitors in the ANC newsroom as he issued an occasional sound bite as the Senate majority leader or, earlier in the week, in a meeting with the president.

  I didn’t keep tabs on my dad’s whereabouts otherwise, but apparently Stephanie did.

  “Looks like you missed the dinner for the British prime minister at the White House last night?” she asked when I arrived at my desk the next morning.

  I laughed. “Yep. Instead, I was here in Manhattan, being blasted by a playlist of Dean Martin’s greatest hits from the world’s largest speakers.”

  “Loud neighbors, huh?” She turned her laptop around and pointed at the screen. “Is that your sister?”

  I didn’t have a sister. And the woman standing next to my father didn’t look anything like me. But she was at least a decade younger than my sixty-two-year-old dad, with breezy golden hair that fell in tousled layers just below her shoulders. “Not sure who she is,” I said flatly, masking my curiosity.

  In the decades my father had spent as a US senator from California, I’d never seen him take a date to a formal government event. My mother died nearly twenty-five years ago, and while I knew he had gone out with several women since then, none of them ever had staying power beyond a few dates.

  “Rumor is that the defense secretary just resigned,” Mark interrupted, suddenly appearing at my side. “Kate, you got contacts with White House officials who could give us confirmation or detail?”

  “I didn’t come here to cover—”

  He raised his hands, signaling a time-out. “Anyone you can call?”

  I frowned. Mark knew I’d covered breaking news in Los Angeles, which would hardly prepare me to have contacts at the White House. Maybe he thought I’d have them because of my dad’s political position. More likely, he was trying to make me look bad. “Not off the top of my head.”

  He stared at me, and although no more words came out of his mouth, his eyes said it all.

  What good are you then?

  I tried to turn Manhattan into an adventure. I memorized the subway lines. Made lists of all the iconic places I would visit and Broadway shows I’d see when I wasn’t working or speed-reading the news or figuring out where to buy groceries or trying to troubleshoot my snail-like Wi-Fi. I’d even tried my hand at a game of chess in Union Square—and lost to a nine-year-old.

  Still, being here didn’t feel like the adventure I’d imagined.

  Thousands of people intersected and intertwined on the streets of Manhattan, yet it felt as though we lived our lives in parallel. On the subway, no one made eye contact. Instead, their glowing faces were consumed with unrequited love for their phones. And when they did look at me, watch out. A woman’s bag had its own seat during the packed rush hour, and when I asked if she would move it, she lifted baleful eyes from her phone and said, “Yeah, no.”

  “Here we go,” the guy behind her muttered.

  Everywhere I went I was pressured to buy things. Leon the Vietnam Vet—or so his signature T-shirt proclaimed—hawked his “mojo” hot dogs a block from my apartment, shouting at me, “The secret’s in the char.” A teen wearing long red basketball shorts and a white T-shirt blocked my passage at the top of the subway stairs, imploring me to buy designer sunglasses. But it was a frail Latina with mournful eyes who managed to sell me a snow cone from a pushcart the size of a mini-fridge, even though I didn’t like sweets.

  On the subway ride home from work, I made the mistake of scrolling through Instagram. Teri had posted photos from our friend Mayi’s thirtieth birthday, a party on Dockweiler Beach. As I scanned the photos of a half dozen of my closest friends, their smiling faces lit by the glow of the bonfire with a fierce orange sun setting over the Pacific Ocean behind them, I felt the ache of loneliness.

  I messaged Teri: Miss all of you.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” Eric was saying on the phone that night.

  My stomach lurched. Something in the way he said those words, a tone that was probably undetectable to anyone else, made me think that whatever he was going to say next would be painful to hear.

  Anxiety sped through my veins. I wanted to ask him point-blank: Are you coming to New York? But I was afraid of the answer. And as long as I didn’t ask the question, I could keep pretending. Hoping.

  I heard a raspy edge in his voice, as if the words he was saying were causing him physical pain. “People are counting on me here. As much as I might want to, I can’t leave.”

  Might want to. The tiny word had slipped into that sentence, changing everything. But maybe I’d misunderstood. “Maybe in a few weeks then? A month?”

  He was silent for a long moment. “This isn’t something I wanted to say on the phone. But I think . . . I think it’s better to be honest rather than waiting for the right time for us to be together to talk about it. I can’t come to New York.”

  His words sounded final.

  “That’s not what I was hoping you’d say,” I said, mournful, defeated.

  I wanted him to fight for me. To tell me all the reasons we had to be together. To propose the sacrifices we’d both make. But even as I wanted that from him, I knew this wasn’t his fault. It was mine. I was the one who’d left LA to take a job on the other side of the country. “I’ll come back to LA.”

  His breath was heavy. “Would you really move back?”

  And then it was my turn to be honest, and I didn’t know how to answer. As frustrating and difficult as Manhattan was, I couldn’t see running back to LA after less than a week here. Even though words were the tools of my trade, I suddenly didn’t know what to say. Maybe because I was discovering a hidden truth. A realization that loving someone didn’t always mean you could build a life with them.

  “No, I can’t,” I said tentatively, then felt tears sting my eyes.

  “I get it.” His voice broke. “People spend their whole lives searching, hoping to find work they’ll love. You’ve found it.”

  I swallowed my tears. I knew where this was headed. “Let’s not make any decisions right now.”

  “We can’t keep pretending that things are as they used to be, when we both know they aren’t.”

  The silence on the phone was deafening, and my stomach gripped as it continued. Three seconds. Then four. I sat down on the couch, shaking. The room closed in on me.

  “It sounds like you’ve already made up your mind,” I said.

  “I’m only saying . . .”

  I should’ve accepted the uncertainty of his words. I should have been patient. Instead, I rushed in. “Are you breaking up with me?”

  He didn’t speak for a long while. And when he did, his voice shook. “I’m sorry . . .”

  I let his words hang there. Then I felt my heart crumble, remembering all that I’d loved about him.

  My lips suddenly felt thick, too heavy to form words. I imagined the future, and all I could see was black. “How did it come to this?” I asked, wiping tears from my eyes.

  His voice sounded far away. “Kate, I’m so sorry . . .”

  My whole body was numb.

  Although the last place I wanted to be was the newsroom, the next day I threw myself into covering the last-ditch negotiations to avert a government shutdown. For a few moments throughout the day, the story offered a distraction from the breakup. But most of the time, I felt like all the oxygen had been sucked out of the room. A memory of us together would float up, and then my head was spinning. Stringing words together into a story seemed like a hopeless effort.

  My reports throughout the day focused on a couple of senato
rs who had stepped into a cloakroom on the Senate floor, frantically trying to map out a strategy on the phone with the White House chief of staff and the vice president.

  The “national crime and justice” beat Andrew promised me was thrown on the back burner in favor of a story that could have been on House of Cards: quotes from anonymous insiders, dour assessments of odds, the drama and spectacle of procedural bickering, and the play-by-play of the rituals of political negotiation. If aliens had watched the last hour of ANC, they might have assumed that the entire human race was a shouting, arguing circus of anger and hate.

  As I trudged back home in the stifling, muggy heat, the city amplified my agitated mood. A block from my apartment, a guy was sitting on a milk crate throwing crumbs at pigeons while a barrel-chested man in a wrinkled white T-shirt yelled at him, something about a taxi. The pigeon feeder kept rambling on about baseball. Meanwhile, everyone around them just kept walking, ignoring them.

  At least Leon the Vietnam Vet was in a good mood. “Our mustard’s homemade,” he tried with a wide grin.

  “No thanks. Dumplings tonight.”

  I held up the still-warm bag from Bao Dumpling House, the place Stephanie swore was New York’s most hallowed haven for dumplings and dim sum.

  “Good choice.”

  When I got to my apartment, Raymond had taken over the steps again, this time smoking a cigar. If the sound of a crying baby could be converted to a scent, that was what his stogie smelled like. “No, you’re wrong about that,” he shouted into the phone. “Louis is gonna take care of it. Tomorrow.”

  I shuffled around him, only to be stopped by my neighbor from across the hall.

  “You have drinking problem?” she said in a thick eastern European accent.

  She was barely five feet tall—either forty or seventy, I couldn’t tell—with wispy brown hair and thick, doughlike skin and bright-red lips. “What did you say?”

  From a bag by her door, she withdrew two empty wine bottles. “I found these in your trash.”