by Dete Meserve
“Didn’t that guy Logan say that he had a connecting flight through Dallas?” I asked Scott as we sat in his office later that morning sifting through the tips viewers had sent in.
Scott looked at me. He was overdressed for the occasion, still wearing a gorgeous indigo-blue dress shirt, unbuttoned at the neck, from an earlier ANC hosts photoshoot. “How do you remember details like that?”
“That’s why he was giving away the gift cards. Remember? Because some stranger had helped him with his luggage on a connecting flight through Dallas. Here’s a viewer that wants to tell us about something that happened outside of Dallas.”
He leaned back in his chair, stretching his tall frame. “Okay. I’m trying to catch up here. But it seems like a big leap to think that an event fifteen hundred miles away is somehow connected to what’s happening here.”
I rubbed my forehead. “Yeah. I feel like I’m grasping at straws here,” I said, moving the note to the “no” pile.
But something was pulling me back to it. Reporter’s instinct, maybe. Or maybe it was simple desperation. “But then again . . .”
He smiled at me. “Then again?”
“That guy Kevin Raley, he said his son Joe’s flight had been rerouted through Dallas.”
“Coincidence, maybe. Could be we’re only seeing patterns in random information.”
“You’re saying we’re crazy?”
His eyes were dancing. “Obviously we are. But it doesn’t mean we’re wrong.”
I read the note again.
“Why do I feel like you’re going to call this guy?” he asked.
Emboldened by his admiring smile, I called the number and put the phone on speaker. “Because I am.”
“Gary Reyes,” a man answered, but the rumble of road noise overpowered his voice.
“Gary, this is Kate Bradley from ANC. I got your email.”
“Wow. For real, this is Kate Bradley? Let me pull over.”
While we waited, Scott shot me a quizzical look. Now that we had the guy on the phone, I had the feeling we’d just taken a dive down the rabbit hole.
“In your report, you mentioned that a US Army soldier might be behind all the good things sweeping through New York City,” Gary said, the noise around him quieting.
“Right. A woman at the flower mart reported seeing a soldier buying a truckload of purple flowers. But it turned out to be a dead end.”
“I saw him.”
“You saw a soldier on the back roads of Texas.”
“We had a terrible storm here a few weeks ago,” he said, his Texas drawl in full bloom. “Winds were ferocious. A bunch of tornado sightings. We got three inches of rain in just a couple of hours. I wouldn’t normally have been out on the road in a storm like that. But I’d left my house keys at the towing-company office and had to go back and get them. Lots of the highways were flooded, you know, so I took 4305. It’s narrow and pitch black along that route, but it was faster than taking the interstate. Have to say I was pretty angry at myself for having to drive that empty road late in the night like that. But I’m glad I did.”
I reined in my impatience and tried to get control over the interview. “What does this have to do with the soldier?”
“I’m getting to that. I saw a car, you know, alongside the road. It was raining like crazy, there are downed trees and brush along the road, and I see this car almost in the drainage ditch. A guy gets out, and he’s wearing an army uniform.”
Scott and I exchanged glances. This was a waste of time. I tried not to sound annoyed. “So you helped him?”
“I gave him a tire, yeah, but it took two of us to change it. Water swirling around us. Both of us were covered in mud, and I told him that whenever I’m in the middle of the toughest jobs, I always imagine myself on a warm beach in Hawaii sipping a piña colada. We laughed about that. When we finished, we were soaked to the bone with rain and mud, and he asked me for my business card—”
“What does this—”
“A week later I get an envelope addressed to me at the towing company. I don’t ever get mail there, so that was strange. Inside was a pair of airline tickets to Hawaii. Wrapped in a purple ribbon. Same stuff I’m seeing all over the photos in Manhattan. No name or anything on the envelope. But I knew. I knew they were from him.”
Scott and I looked at each other in surprise.
“Did you get his name?” I asked.
“I never did ask him. But I remember seeing his last name on his uniform.”
“What was it?”
“Raley.”
“No luck,” I told Scott on the phone as Gavin drove me back to my apartment later that evening. “I called Joe Raley’s dad, and he told me Joe is now stationed at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.”
“Will he put you in touch with him?”
“Definitely not. He doesn’t trust the media and asked me why I kept pursuing this, as he called it, ‘crazy idea.’ Then he told me not to come back. Said the whole idea that his son might be involved in some secret ‘operation’ was disturbing the family.”
“They’re probably overwhelmed, after the funeral and all.”
As I left the car and headed to the front door with Gavin a few feet behind me, Artie scurried down the steps, his hands in the pockets of his hoodie.
“Hey,” I said, but he kept going, ignoring me.
“There’s only one way to find out. Let’s track down Joe Raley at White Sands,” I said, unlocking the front door.
“It won’t be easy getting through the army red tape.”
As I stepped into the hallway, Gavin suddenly pushed in front of me. “Call 911!” he shouted.
That’s when I noticed the door to my apartment was slightly ajar. I remembered pulling hard on the handle in the morning, straining to lock it.
“I have to hang up,” I said. “Someone’s broken into my apartment.”
“I’ll be right there.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I’d been robbed.
I felt like I was going to cry, but there was no time for that. My hand was trembling so hard that it took a huge effort to connect with the phone in my purse and dial 911.
Shards of broken glass and dishes littered the mini-kitchen, as if a monster had barreled into the room in a rage, hurling every glass, jar, and bottle to the floor. Even my mother’s favorite cobalt-blue Depression-era glass bowl, the one reminder of her that I’d brought to Manhattan, had been thrown to the floor, broken into awkward, ugly pieces. My laptop was gone.
The next thing I noticed was tufts of cotton scattered throughout the apartment—the stuffing from the couch cushions they’d torn apart. Any sense of safety or trust I thought I’d had was torn up and scattered on the erratic path the shadowy figure had taken through my apartment.
Detective Steve McGregor, a hefty guy in his forties, showed up fifteen minutes later but seemed bored by the whole situation, lethargically surveying and photographing the scene and asking me questions in a dreary monotone. Even when he was examining the smashed glass in the kitchen window, his only words were, “That’s gonna be expensive.”
But when I showed him the postcard and told him about the video shot from across the street, he started flinging rapid-fire questions at me: Did ANC have any suspects? Did I have a security system? Cameras? What was on the laptop? Who knew it was here?
I crouched down and picked up two halves of a broken plate. Was this payback for continuing to report about Marie? If that was the case, wouldn’t they have made that clear by leaving a message for me? Or did they assume I would just know?
While the detective photographed the wreckage, I tried to steady my nerves. I opened the blinds and gazed at the woman in the window across the street. Tonight, she was working with a shimmery fabric that rose like silver, puffy clouds from her sewing machine and glittered in the light. I envied her, so engrossed in her voluminous, frilly fabrics that the chaotic world around her disappeared.
Raymond and Cora had seen
the detective arrive and stopped in to see what was going on. In a blurry haze, I told them what little I knew. Saying it aloud was strange, like I was delivering a news report, not something that had actually happened to me. Raymond promised to call the landlord and offered to install a padlock so I could lock the front door that night.
Had they seen anything? I’d asked. Cora thought she had seen a car driving slowly down the street earlier. But she didn’t remember the description. Raymond saw Artie rushing into the apartment building earlier in the afternoon, angry about something.
Artie.
Why had he been leaving the apartment building in such a hurry? And just who was he?
I asked Cora and Raymond about him, but neither of them knew anything.
“Would you look into him as a possible suspect?” I asked the detective. “He lives in 2B.”
Toward the end of the meeting with the detective, the tears fell. I had tried to hold them back, but when I looked around the room and realized that everything here—everything—had been ransacked or ruined, exhaustion kicked in, and the tears slipped out seemingly of their own free will.
It wasn’t just the brokenness of it all that got to me; it was the time I’d have to spend repairing or replacing all that was lost. I tried to rally some optimism by convincing myself that it wasn’t so bad. How hard could it be to replace an entire kitchen of dishes and glassware? A laptop. Probably not too difficult, but add to that getting the couch re-covered and coordinating the window repair, and the minutes started adding up to hours and days. All just to put back the apartment to the wretched way it was when I left it this morning.
“Kate?” I heard Scott ask as he knocked gently on the open front door. “Everything okay?”
He did a quick sweep of the room with his eyes, then put his arms around me. “I’m so sorry.”
I might have stayed there forever. It felt so good to rest my head against his chest, feeling calm for just a moment. My hand clasped his jacket as if absorbing every bit of warmth and comfort it offered. We both lingered in the hug too long, but he covered it well by talking casually, as if it were absolutely normal for us to be standing there with our arms around each other.
“I would have gotten here sooner, but the Uber driver got lost,” he said. “The guy had glow-in-the-dark stickers on his ceiling.”
“You’re kidding.”
“He was also wearing a cowboy hat and singing along to ‘Happy Trails’ and ‘Tumbling Tumbleweeds.’”
I relaxed into a smile. “How come I never get Uber drivers like that?”
“You doing okay?” His forehead was creased with worry.
“Are you Mr. Bradley?” the detective asked, making me realize how long we had been holding each other.
Scott let go of me and extended his hand. “Actually, no. Scott Jameson.”
“I thought you looked familiar. Well, I’m finished up here,” the detective announced, hiking up his pants a little. “I’ll be in touch when I’m further along in the investigation. I’m going to be talking to your neighbors.” He handed me a business card. “In the meantime, I’d suggest you stay somewhere else until this place can be secured.”
After he left, Scott and I surveyed the living room again. “You okay?” he asked.
“Honestly? No,” I said, then realized, with my puffy eyes and smeared mascara, I must have looked like someone straight out of a telenovela.
“What’s his theory? Does he think it’s related to the postcards you’ve been getting? Or just some random guy?”
“He didn’t know.” I looked around, shaking my head. “Ironic, isn’t it? Here I am chasing a story about all the good happening around the city, even arguing with Mark that people are not inherently selfish and evil. But seeing this, experiencing what people are capable of . . . maybe I’ve been naive.”
“Don’t change, Kate,” he said. “You’re not naive. You’re . . . hopeful. We could all use a little more of that.”
My eyes met his, and I thought I was going to cry again. It was the nicest thing anyone had ever said about me. And hearing it now, when I had succumbed to fear and sadness, made it even more meaningful.
I tried to laugh it off. “You only think that because of the story we’re working on together. But it’s easy to be hopeful in the face of so much good like that.” I lifted a lamp from the floor, revealing my most treasured copy of Harriet the Spy, its cover newly torn. I sighed. “Not so easy when you’re faced with a reality like this. This has been my favorite since third grade.”
He took the book from me and dusted off some tiny shards of glass. “Yeah, this definitely sucks. But you haven’t been naive. Bad stuff like this happens, but it doesn’t take anything away from all the good things that are going on too.”
“Now who’s the one sounding like an optimist.”
He smiled. “We’re a rare breed in this city.”
Something about the way he said we made me feel warm.
I drew a deep breath and glanced at my watch. Ten thirty. “This ‘rare breed’ needs to get a hotel reservation and get some sleep. We’ve got to hit the ground running tomorrow morning.”
He turned to face me. “Why don’t you stay at my place? I’ve got an extra bedroom, and if we get an Uber driver who isn’t a singing cowboy lost on the range, we can get there in ten minutes.”
Everything about his invitation seemed right. But also totally wrong. What would people think if they found out I’d stayed the night at Scott Jameson’s apartment?
“Thank you, but a hotel probably makes more sense. You know what Mark would say if he heard we—”
“Mark’s got a big enough ego. Let’s not make it bigger by allowing him to make decisions for us. Besides, I’ve got one advantage over the nearest hotel.”
“What’s that?”
“Waffles. I have a state-of-the-art waffle iron and a killer recipe that would make Gordon Ramsay cry. And maple syrup straight from Mont Rigaud in Quebec.”
He made me smile. “What is your obsession with waffles?”
“It’s the cure for all bad things. Especially robberies and vandalism.”
I laughed. “A robberies and vandalism cure? As much as I want one, I don’t want to inconvenience you and Paige.”
“She’s not . . . we don’t live together.”
“I just don’t want to make this . . . awkward.”
“Look, it’s late. Why don’t you grab a few things and get some shut-eye at my place? No weirdness, promise. It’ll be like you’re sleeping in an ashram.”
“An ashram?”
“You know, peaceful. Quiet. But with waffles.”
Scott’s guest bedroom was comfortable and well appointed, with a mattress that came straight from heaven, so I fell asleep easily. But an hour later, I woke up, my heart pounding, a thick, pulsing knot roiling in the pit of my stomach.
My thoughts bounced between two fears. This was a random robbery and further proof that where I was living in Manhattan was not safe. Or: whoever had been sending the menacing letters and videos demanding that I stop looking for Marie was escalating the threat.
That thought sent a chill through my body. How far would they go to stop me from looking for Marie?
My throat and lips were parched, so I left my bed and padded toward the kitchen to get a glass of water. I kept the lights off so I wouldn’t disturb Scott, but I didn’t need them because the lights of the city floated through sheer curtains in the living room, casting a liquid blue-white glow throughout the room.
The apartment had been tastefully decorated, the walls covered with framed wildlife photographs. An inspiring shot of a hawk floating over powdery snow with the stately Grand Tetons in the distance hung over the fireplace. Across the room, a stunning photo captured a tiger by the side of a calm stream and under a canopy of dense foliage. The dreamy expression on the tiger’s face in the dappled light made my pulse slow.
“You can’t sleep either?” I heard Scott say.
I
turned around as he stepped out of his bedroom. He was wearing a pair of navy-blue knit lounge pants and was shirtless for a brief moment before he pulled a slim white T-shirt over his head.
“Yeah. I hope I didn’t wake you. I was just admiring this one.” I nodded to the tiger photo.
“Still my favorite. We were filming in India at the Bandhavgarh National Park, and we were actually looking for a four-horned antelope when I just stumbled upon him. The scene just kind of begs you to linger.”
“He almost looks like he’s meditating.”
“Or dreaming. Like we both should be.”
As we stood together gazing at the photograph, I felt an undeniable pull between us. I pushed the feeling away, chalking it up to the magical lighting and a heavy dose of exhaustion.
“I’m starving. You hungry?” he asked.
“Are you suggesting waffles at midnight?”
“As much as I hate to admit it, it’s actually too early for waffles. But I bet you didn’t eat dinner, either, and I know a great place to get a late-night something. You up for a quick walk in the city?”
“Where do you have in mind?”
“You’ll see.”
A few minutes later, we were headed down the hushed streets of Manhattan in search of a street vendor Scott assured me would “change my mind about eating street food after midnight.”
“What I need is something to change my mind about the city,” I said. “I feel like this robbery is a sign that I shouldn’t be here.”
“You know what? I felt the same when I moved back here.”
“But you grew up here.”
“I’d been working in Chicago for a couple of years, and the day I moved back, I got on the A train, and a deranged guy got on behind me and shoved me. Then he started getting into people’s faces—nannies, businessmen, everyone—and shouting. I told him to stop. He pulled a knife and was waving it around like he was going to stab all of us. Right then, I thought, ‘I’m done with this place.’ We’re all crammed onto this island, and our complicated lives end up colliding with each other. The trick is finding your place and knowing that it gets better. You’re in the trial phase. The city is testing you.”