The Good Stranger (A Kate Bradley Mystery)

by Dete Meserve

  “If this is a test, I’m definitely failing.”

  “Maybe this will change your mind.”

  We turned the corner and a gyros food cart was right in front of us, its brightly lit orange-and-red umbrella standing out on the dark street. And like everything in NYC, even in the wee hours of the morning, there was a line: A guy in camo pants and a yellow sweatshirt. A ponytailed woman in black yoga pants. A man lugging an oversize stuffed penguin.

  “After midnight. I’m pretty sure my stomach knows this is not a good idea.”

  As we stood in line, my eye drifted down the street to an old man shuffling down the sidewalk. Wearing a black beret and brown sport coat that was too large for his thin frame, he seemed out of place in the grit and graffiti. I wondered where he was going at this time of night, but in the city that never sleeps, people walked around at all hours.

  Then a woman walking two pugs came from the opposite direction and stopped in front of him, blocking his way. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I was instantly on edge. My nerves still raw from the break-in, I didn’t have the energy to cope with more conflict. But as much as I wanted to turn away, I knew I couldn’t. Shouldn’t.

  Whatever the woman was saying to him seemed to confuse him, because he kept shaking his head. He tried to get around her, but she stepped in front of him, blocking him again, holding up a paper shopping bag.

  Then she pulled something out of the bag—a bakery box—and presented it to him, lifting its flaps so he could see what was inside.

  His eyes lit up, and then he reached out, slowly, gingerly, and squeezed her hand. My heart swelled at this simple moment. I had no idea if she knew the man or what exactly had taken place, but I could feel the kindness transfer between them.

  Under ordinary circumstances, I might not have noticed something like this. Yet somehow in my grief about my apartment, in my heartache for all the ways my life had gone off the rails, I was suddenly struck with wonder. In all the chaos, anger, and upheaval, was kindness all around, just waiting for us to notice it?

  I ran after her. Any exhaustion I felt earlier was gone as I chased her down the street.

  “Wait up!” I shouted.

  She kept walking.

  I caught up with her. “Excuse me, but what did you just give that man?”

  She eyed me suspiciously and withdrew the earphones from her ears. “What’s it to you?”

  “I’m Kate Bradley. From ANC. Covering the secret good sweeping through the city.”

  She broke into a big smile, exposing a gap between her two front teeth. “I like those stories.”

  “Did you give him something?”

  “I gave him a cake I made. Strawberry shortcake.”

  “You know him then?”

  “Not really. I see him out here every night around this time when I’m walking these guys,” she said, nodding toward the pugs. “He always seems so lonely. And kind of sad. So when I saw all the nice things people in the city are doing for each other, I thought, what the heck, I can do something too.”

  “For a complete stranger. In the middle of the night.”

  “I guess it sounds kind of strange. But it didn’t feel that way. It felt good, you know?”

  “Are you one of the people who started this whole thing?”

  She laughed. “Wish I could say that I was that creative. But, no.”

  I thanked her for talking with me, and when I returned to the gyro truck, I filled Scott in on the exchange.

  “I think you sprinted that entire block in under fifteen seconds,” he said with admiration in his voice.

  “It’s a skill set. You track tigers in India. I track people in the city. But seeing what that woman did made me wonder if maybe good things are happening all the time, but we focus most of our attention on what’s broken.”

  “You’re right. ANC did a story a few weeks ago about a couple of homeless guys who got into a fight with a lone NYPD officer at the Twenty-Eighth Street subway station. That story was everywhere. Even my aunts were talking about it. But that same day, a blind man tumbled on the tracks at Columbus Circle, and five bystanders rushed to get him to safety seconds before the train pulled into the station. You can guess which one got more attention.”

  “Why are we obsessed with hearing about a fight, but when people do good things, we act like it’s something trivial?”

  The gyros guy slid our order through the window. “Kept ’em warm for you.”

  “This will make you love Manhattan,” Scott said, handing one to me. I didn’t think I could stomach a gyro loaded with chicken, onions, french fries, and rich tzatziki sauce on thick naan-like pita in the middle of the night, but after the first bite, I was sold.

  “I’d say the city is growing on you,” Scott said as I went in for a second bite.

  “You’ve been trying to convince me through my stomach. But this place has got to have more than good food to help me forget that my apartment is in a state of mayhem.”

  “Sounds like you’re throwing down a New York City challenge.”

  “Is there actually such a thing?”

  “Not really, no. But we New Yorkers are notoriously smug about our city.”

  “For what reason, I still don’t know.”

  He faked a look of annoyance. “Challenge accepted. What time is it?” he said, looking at his phone. “Only twelve fifteen. How fast can you run?”

  I smiled. “Is that a trick question?”

  He squeezed my hand. “Then let’s go. They close at one.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Wherever he was taking me was in Central Park. As we ran in the warm pools of light beneath its old-fashioned streetlamps, I tried to guess. “Belvedere Castle? Conservatory Water?”

  “Nope. But we’re almost there.”

  The roar of traffic had died down to a whir in the distance, and except for the two of us, this section of the park seemed empty. Even though the wind had picked up a little, I was surprisingly warm. Being with him had that effect on me. Our relationship was easy—the kind of relaxed friendship that had been so natural to make in college but was becoming more complex as I entered my thirties. Yet I felt something growing between us—something more than a friendship—and I wondered if I was imagining it. Maybe I was so desperate for connection in this city that I was mistaking his friendliness for something more.

  Then suddenly we left the part of Central Park I knew, the one I’d seen in movies and TV, and we slowed to walk down a stone path that wound through gardens crowded with flowers whose sweet and pungent scents whispered in the air.

  “What’s your favorite Shakespeare play?” he said.

  “You’re asking me that because . . .”

  “Because we’re in the Shakespeare Garden.”

  Then it all made sense: the rustic fences, the wooden benches, the hedges and shrubs that looked as though they had been lifted from another time.

  We stopped in front of a long, curved stone bench with an eagle’s wing carved into the end. “I know it doesn’t look like much. Tourists pass it thousands of times a day and don’t realize its magic. Why don’t you sit here . . . ?”

  I sat, thinking he would join me, but instead, he walked to the other end of the forty-foot bench. To my complete surprise, he pulled out his phone and began scrolling.

  “They call this the whispering bench. It’s the one place in the city you can whisper and the other person can actually hear you,” he said, but his voice seemed to be coming from the stone bench itself. “Full disclosure, I’m using a Shakespeare app. So no, I’m not quoting from memory.”

  “You’re actually going to read Shakespeare to me?”

  “What else would you do on a whispering bench in a Shakespeare garden after midnight?

  I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

  Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,

  Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,

  With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:


  There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,

  Lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight.”

  I’d always imagined that if a man read Shakespeare to me, it would feel corny or contrived. But as in any Shakespeare play, a lot of what happened had to do with the characters’ intentions. This wasn’t a grand romantic gesture to woo or impress me. Scott was working to help me forget about the city that had crumpled me and instead make me fall for the place he’d grown to love.

  “What’d you think?” he asked.

  “I think I want one more.”

  It took him a minute before he began reading again:

  “It is not night when I do see your face,

  Therefore I think I am not in the night.

  Nor doth this wood lack worlds of company,

  For you in my respect are all the world.

  Then how can it be said I am alone

  When all the world is here to look on me?”

  Beneath a canopy of trees and surrounded by a thicket of flowers, listening to him read words written hundreds of years ago, I felt the tension easing in my chest. My breath slowing.

  There was an intimacy in the way he read the verses, but even though I knew they were only said to cheer me up, I couldn’t help but wonder what it might feel like otherwise. That feeling, the yearning for something more, took me by surprise.

  He walked over to me, his hands in his pockets. I thought he might declare that he’d won the challenge. But instead, he surprised me. “I know it’s going to take more than gyros and a whispering bench in Central Park to make up for what that maniac did to your apartment, but I hope this is a start.”

  His words swirled around me, as if infused with magic. “It’s working. Except for the french fries in the gyros.”

  He gripped his chest in mock pain. “You didn’t like the fries? That’s the best part.”

  “Maybe I should try them before midnight next time.”

  Then big fat raindrops danced along the sidewalk in a quirky rhythm. And stopped.

  Seconds later, it began to pour. Not like the sprays of rain I’d experienced in Southern California, which were mostly wind and a little drizzle. This was dense rain that fell in sheets and shrouded the streetlamps, transforming their drowsy light into something mystical and otherworldly.

  “So this is rain,” I said.

  I leaned my head back and let it hit my face, an action that seemed childish but then wonderful as I reveled in the soft, cool feeling on my skin. The smell of it. Every drop erasing the tension, rinsing it away.

  When I lifted my head back up, his eyes drifted across my face. I felt like he had something he wanted to say, but instead he was quiet for a long moment.

  “Let’s get out of these wet clothes,” he said finally. While the statement was practical, his tone sounded almost seductive. “You ready?”

  The rain suddenly grew more insistent, pounding us as though a cloud had opened up above us. He took my hand and we began to run.

  There are moments when things turn. When time seems to slow, and we suddenly realize we are experiencing something we’re probably going to remember forever. Maybe it’s goose bumps or a lump in our throat that first signals it.

  For me, it was the way my hand felt in his. Buzzing. Alive.

  The rain didn’t stop, but we did. About two minutes into our attempt to escape Central Park and find a taxi, Scott paused and scanned the landscape.

  “Are we lost?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No, but I know a shortcut. Do you mind getting a little muddy if it means we’ll shave a few minutes off our run?”

  “Is this going to be another jumping-puddles-and-running-down-alleys adventure?”

  He smiled. “Probably.”

  Then he took my hand again and led me through a stand of elm trees, then onto a dirt path that meandered between shrubs and rock outcroppings, beneath tall trees and down a gentle hill, with the earthy smell of the rain-soaked leaves rising up around us.

  We rounded a huge sycamore and nearly ran straight into . . . a Christmas tree. Or at least it looked like one, a fir tree decked out with laminated photo ornaments tied to the tree with ribbons and bows.

  “I thought this was just a rumor,” Scott said, approaching it slowly. “An urban legend.”

  He lifted an ornament, a laminated portrait of a tabby cat with the word “Rockstar” written beneath it. There were dozens more like it with photos of pets and short tributes.

  “I know people who’ve walked this park for years, and they all say this doesn’t exist. But here it is,” he said. “The Secret Holiday Memorial Tree to Pets.”

  I didn’t quite grasp the significance of this secret tree devoted to the memory of strangers’ pets. Instead, I was pulled in by his excitement for it. I might’ve expected someone with his background to be cynical, certainly reserved, about a discovery like this, but he was so comfortable in his own skin that he approached it, like seemingly everything, with a sense of wonder. Somewhere along the way, I’d lost that ability to immerse myself in a simple moment. But with the rain falling thick and hard, I felt a shift inside me.

  “Take a look at this one,” he said, picking up a laminated photo of a collie that had fallen to the ground. He was standing so close to me that I could smell the woodsy scent on his skin, and it threw me off balance.

  “Squirrel hell and dog heaven are the same place,” I read.

  He grinned. “Now that we’ve found it, we have to make a vow of secrecy about its location,” he whispered.

  “A vow of secrecy may be a difficult promise for two journalists to keep.”

  He turned to look at me, and the charge was there again, stronger than before. He reached up to move a wet lock of my hair from my face and lingered there for a moment. Then he leaned in, as though to kiss me, his eyes locked with mine in an unwavering gaze. Emotion squeezed my chest. I felt his jacket brush up against me. Then his lips hovered over mine briefly before they settled into a gentle kiss.

  Suddenly he pulled away, taking away his warmth.

  “I hope I didn’t—” he said.

  “No, it’s . . . okay—”

  His lips curved into a smile. “Let’s see if I can remember the way out.”

  Waffles. Fluffy, warm perfection. Crowned with a dark-amber maple syrup straight from the gods.

  “Now I get why you’re obsessed with these,” I said in Scott’s kitchen the next morning, polishing off the first one out of the waffle iron.

  Standing in the sun-drenched kitchen wearing Levi’s and a gray T-shirt, he looked more relaxed than I’d seen him before. And somehow more handsome.

  I had never been attracted to famous men—I’d grown up around well-known men orbiting my father, and I never found any of them any more alluring because of it. But here I was, falling for a man who was a familiar face to millions.

  After our almost-a-kiss the night before, I could see he was as nervous as I was, his hands busily whisking and combining ingredients, his eyes focused intently on what he was doing, then lifting and taking me in as though he were seeing me for the first time. “Needs a little more amaretto liqueur,” he said absently, but the way he was looking at me made me feel light headed.

  When he stood next to me demonstrating his secret waffle iron technique, I could feel the exact distance between our bodies, down to the millimeter, and a shiver of excitement raced through me. I felt powerless to ignore the new feelings, even though I knew all the reasons I shouldn’t have them.

  “This will help you regain your strength.” He placed a second waffle on my plate. I smiled at him, finding him irresistible. “Doctor’s orders.”

  “I’m having serious doubts about your prescription, Dr. Jameson.”

  “You don’t approve of my remedy? Ouch.” His eyes lit up as he baptized the waffle with syrup. “You’ll be singing a different tune later.”

  “You mean when I’m comatose on the couch?”

  He smiled at m
e. “If you lapse into a coma, I promise I’ll bring you back to life,” he said, but I was pretty sure we were no longer talking about waffles.

  My phone vibrated on the counter. The caller ID on the screen read: “Office of the Mayor.”

  I laughed. “Telemarketers are really getting sneaky. Pretending to be the mayor.”

  “Maybe it is the mayor?”

  I didn’t think that was possible because I didn’t know the mayor of New York City, Fred Trester, and he didn’t have my cell phone number. Scott’s expression was urging me to answer it anyway. I put the call on speaker. “Kate Bradley.”

  “Kate, Fred Trester. I hope I’m not calling too early.”

  “Not at all,” I said, heat rushing to my face.

  Scott and I exchanged surprised looks. As far as I knew, the mayor of New York didn’t call journalists on their cell phones. Especially ones he’d never met.

  “I ran into your father at an event last night, and he shared your number with me. I don’t know if you saw the USA Today front page yesterday, but they’re now calling Manhattan the ‘Good City.’ I was telling your dad that my office is planning to give a civic award to the people who started this movement. We’re announcing the award—and the ten-thousand-dollar reward—at a press conference later today. Your dad told me you’re covering the story for ANC and suggested I call you about it.”

  “My dad convinced you to call me personally?”

  He laughed. “As I’m sure you already know, he’s very persuasive.”

  “He is. But aren’t you worried that many people are going to say they’re behind it so they can claim the reward? How will you ever know who’s the real deal?”

  “Our cameras recorded four people leaving balloons around city hall the night of the power outage. Before the emergency lights kicked on.”

  “How did they—”

  “City hall cameras operate on battery backups. You can’t make out much, even with cameras that can see in the dark. But two images are pretty clear.”

  My breath hitched in my throat. “What did they see?”

  “We’re not sharing this with the press or the general public. But your father says I can trust you. And that you might be able to help us find them.”