by Dete Meserve
“Yes, to both. Can someone in your office send me the photos? Not for broadcast, of course. So we’ll know who we’re looking for.”
“Will do. Two of the people are impossible to make out in the images we have. The third one is clearly a soldier. He’s wearing army fatigues.”
“I’ve been trying to find someone with a similar description. What about the fourth person?”
He sighed. “We can’t see her face. She’s wearing a scarf around her neck. We think she’s a little older.”
Marie.
When Scott and I walked to ANC that morning, it felt like we had stepped into an alternate universe.
It started with a text we received from the newsroom—cell phone video showing State Representative Randall Feldman riding a bus through Lower Manhattan. In the video, he was sitting next to a woman who appeared to be doing a job interview over the phone.
“Can I put in a good word for you?” the state representative asked.
When she handed him the phone, he proceeded to give a personal recommendation about her work ethic while the woman looked on with shock and delight.
Then, farther down the avenue, we spotted a sign in the door of a high-end wedding shop reading: FREE WEDDING DRESSES FOR VETERANS. In front of one of the buildings a block from the ANC studios, someone had left out a large cooler with a note saying:
Delivery People: Water and Gatorade inside. Enjoy your day.
At every turn of the eye, good things were happening.
Even the newsroom. “Has everyone in New York gone soft?” Mark was saying to some of the news team. As he pointed to something on his iPad, he looked like someone who’d seen a ghost. “A few minutes ago, a man slipped off the platform and got his leg stuck in the gap between the train and the platform at Fulton Street. You know how busy that station is. But get this, at least fifty passengers stepped off the train—they all got off—and pushed on the train car so the guy could free his leg.” He shook his head. “Doesn’t sound like the Manhattan I know.”
“This won’t either,” Isabelle said, joining us. “Forty NYPD officers and their K-9 dogs just paid a visit to a seven-year-old girl in Queens with a brain tumor. Since when do police do something like that?”
“I got something to top all of that,” Stephanie added. “Some viewer just sent us cell phone video of a man in first class on a Delta flight leaving LaGuardia. Bet you’re thinking it’s some kind of fight, right? I know I did. But instead, some passengers recorded him giving up his first-class seat to a mom and her baby who were heading to Children’s Hospital in Philly.”
“What the hell is going on here?” Mark’s voice was almost a whisper. “Is this what those balloons-and-flowers people started?”
“The New York Times just did a piece calling them ‘miracle workers,’” Scott said, looking at his phone.
“And we just got a big break in the story,” I added. “The mayor called me this morning. He’s announcing a civic award and a reward to—”
“The mayor. Fred Trester. Called you. Himself,” Mark said in disbelief.
My face was flushed with excitement, but at least my voice was calm. “He said they have recordings from city hall cameras the night of the power outage where they can see the people putting up the balloons. He shared them with me confidentially.”
“The mayor shared—”
I showed him the grainy black-and-white photos taken with night vision cameras. The first one was zoomed in on a guy with tightly cropped hair. Dark eyes on a broad face. Army fatigues. “I think this one is the soldier I’ve been searching for—Joe Raley.”
Then I flipped to another photo of a woman wearing a head scarf. The image was blurry because she was in motion, but it was clear enough to tell that she had a tall, slender build like the woman on the Purple Payday Loans footage. “This is Marie. The key to all this is finding her.”
“Something tells me a reward isn’t going to be enough to make her come forward,” Mark said.
He was probably right. But Scott and I were determined to get viewers to help us find her. We put together a report cramming in as many of the good things happening as we could in three minutes and replayed the footage of Marie from Purple Payday Loans.
“We’re looking for this woman,” I said in the report.
“Her name is Marie,” Scott added. “If you have any information on who she might be, call ANC.”
My phone rang ten minutes later.
The woman’s voice was soft, insistent. “I met your Marie. I recognize those glasses. That scarf.”
“How do you know her?” I said, flipping open my notebook.
“It started with a wrong number. She was calling someone else—a nephew of hers named Jordan. But it turns out that’s my name too. She left a message saying something like, ‘Jordan, I’m just calling to say I love you and I’m thinking about you. I hope you’re having a good day.’”
She stopped talking, and I heard a soft tremble in her throat. Was she crying?
“Then she said, ‘I know you’re going through some tough times, but I want you to know you mean a lot to me. I made that recipe for your favorite cookies, and I want to bring them to you. Love you.’ I know that call wasn’t meant for me, but I played that voice mail over and over.”
“Can I ask why?”
She cleared her throat, but her voice still shook. “My life was a mess. My husband had left me. I’d lost my job. I was having a hard time keeping it together. But her call came at just the right time. It made me feel special.”
“But the call wasn’t for you. It was for someone else.”
“I know. But you have to understand, her call was kind of a . . . buoy for me in the worst of times. I finally got the nerve to call her back and tell her that she’d left a message on the wrong number. I don’t know how I had the guts to do it, but I ended up confessing that her words meant so much to me. And you know what?” She started to cry. “She came over to my apartment with those cookies. And she told me . . . she said to always remember that what I was going through wasn’t going to be forever. That I would be okay.”
“But she didn’t know you.”
Her voice shook. “It didn’t matter that she was a complete stranger. I just loved her from the moment I met her. I know it’s hard to believe that I could feel that way about someone I barely knew. She had so much joy and love in her.”
“Did she tell you her last name?”
“I never asked.”
“And you’re sure she was the woman in the photo we aired?”
“Positive. She even had those same glasses.”
“Lots of people could have those glasses. How can you be sure it’s her?”
She drew in a deep breath. “I just know. You never forget someone like that.”
“Do you have the number she called you from?”
“After I saw your story, I tried calling her. But the number’s been disconnected.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
You got time for coffee today?
The text was from my dad. Who didn’t text. And didn’t drink coffee.
Sure. But aren’t you in DC?
NYC. Meet you at 3:15 at Eleven Madison Park.
Eleven Madison Park wasn’t a coffee place. It was a gastronomic destination—and it wasn’t even open until 5:30 p.m.
The Coffee Bean down the street is easier to get to, I texted, trying to smoke out why he wanted to go to Eleven Madison Park.
This is better.
As I took a cab to the restaurant’s upscale location on Madison Avenue, I tried to figure out why my dad was in New York when so much was going on in Congress, and why he wanted to meet here. He had never been one for grandiose restaurants with celebrity chefs. He loved an occasional fine steak but never seemed all that interested in restaurants bedazzled with tasting flights and sixteen-course meals, all of which had won this restaurant international acclaim. This seemed like Julia’s doing.
The restaurant seemed empty. The
n I spotted my dad in a booth in the corner, talking on the phone. I sank into a lush walnut-and-mohair chair and gazed at the breathtaking room with its floor-to-ceiling windows and knockout views of the park.
“My daughter just arrived,” he said, beaming. “I’ll call you later.”
I scanned the restaurant. “What’s all this about?”
“Julia and the owner, Danny Seitz, have been friends since they were at Columbia together. I had lunch here earlier, and Danny suggested I stay and make my calls here, instead of running back to my hotel.”
“Why are you here?”
He sighed. “Why am I anywhere? Fundraising, of course. Elections aren’t far around the corner.” He brightened. “And I’m here to see you, of course.”
“This is the nicest place we’ve ever been together,” I said. “Something on your mind?”
He met my gaze. “You don’t miss a thing.”
His hand shook slightly, and suddenly I was worried. Was he ill or just nervous?
“I’ve asked Julia to marry me.”
I stared at him. Blinked. In my entire life, I had never imagined him saying those words.
He broke into a smile. “She said yes.”
“Of course she did. But isn’t this kind of sudden?”
“Not really.”
I leaned forward. “Dad, you’ve known her for what, six months?”
“A little more than six months.”
“Doesn’t it bother you that she’s the governor’s ex? I mean, their divorce wasn’t even final until a year ago.”
His face darkened. “What are you getting at?”
“I don’t know. Is it possible she’s just social climbing?” I said and immediately regretted it. It sounded like I thought the only reason Julia might love my father was because of his position. “I didn’t mean—”
“Any man,” my dad started, then stopped. “Any man who’s in his sixties and is seeing a much younger woman has to ask himself those questions. But Julia isn’t like that.”
“Then what does she want?”
He looked at me in surprise. “I’d hoped that once you’d met her, you’d be happy about this.”
I sat there, trying to catch my breath. I knew my own breakup with Eric was coloring every emotion, making me bitter.
With a sour taste in my mouth, I moved the flawless porcelain coffee cup and saucer in front of me, squaring it with the plate. “She’s too young. Newly divorced from a governor who’s under criminal investigation for money laundering. You’ve been together for a few hundred days. And she’s changing you—making you go to the opera and having you hang out in glorified manors like this one. It doesn’t seem to me like you’re making good choices.”
“You’re making a lot of assumptions, Kate.”
Suddenly I missed the mom I never really knew. I wished she could speak to him and tell him what a mistake he was making. She had died before I could make many memories of her, but what I knew from the photos I’d seen and the stories reverently whispered by aunts and uncles was that my parents had the kind of love that lasted. They had taken their time to be sure. Word was, they had dated for three years before my dad got the nerve to propose. Love had a clear path—you didn’t plunge into it recklessly. It happened slowly, on a reasoned, measured timeline.
Why wasn’t all of this so obvious to him? Couldn’t he see what was happening?
“I hope you’ll grow to love her as much as I do,” he said. “We’re getting married next month.”
I couldn’t talk. My brain was telling my mouth to speak, but no words came out. Then I did something I’d never done before. I walked out on my dad.
I had a bad habit of walking out—sometimes storming out—when I didn’t like the way things were going. I’d done it a few times at Channel Eleven—once when a big investigation I’d been covering got taken away and assigned to a junior reporter for reasons that made no sense. My boss, David Dyal, said I was “too rigid,” expecting decisions to always follow a logical progression, when the reality was that the process was often more “fluid” than that.
“Fluid decision-making” sounded like an excuse for making bad ones.
My dad was doing the same thing. He was being impulsive, mercurial, as though he had succumbed to some kind of fever. Who married someone after knowing them for only six months?
By the time I reached the sidewalk, I was embarrassed about running out on him. I heard my heartbeat in my head. Thumping, urging me to go back. To apologize.
I didn’t.
I knew my instincts were right about Julia. I just needed a little time to cool down my nervous system and investigate.
In the cab on the way back to the studio, I accessed the LexisNexis database and looked up Julia Pearson. The first images that came up were of her with the governor on the campaign trail, at a film festival or two and several fundraisers, and during his swearing-in ceremony with the New York State seal in the background. In every photo, she was always camera perfect, dressed head to toe in understated but luxe designer outfits.
I learned that after college she worked in Africa and Latin America to help aspiring women entrepreneurs build their own businesses through the microcredit-enterprise model. After she earned her MBA from Stanford, she started a foundation to support women entrepreneurs. She met then-governor Drew Abbott on a blind date set up by a mutual friend in New York.
It all looked so good.
Until the stories became all about the investigation into her husband’s money laundering. I dug through a dozen or so articles, looking to see if she was implicated, but it seemed to be isolated to the governor’s dealings with a fugitive Malaysian financier. Julia didn’t seem involved. Still, I did a deep dive on court records and requested a few transcripts.
After the mayor announced the civic award and cash reward that afternoon, hundreds of people came forward claiming they were responsible for the balloons at city hall. None of them matched the people in the grainy photos.
Social media lit up. It seemed like anyone who didn’t claim they were at city hall that night thought they’d seen Marie.
One woman in Colorado swore she went to church with Marie but then admitted she hadn’t been to church for two years. Another man offered unconvincing photographic proof that Marie had been on the teacups ride in Disneyland last week. The strangest tip came from a man who said that the woman in our photograph looked exactly like his grandmother, only she had died twenty years ago.
Our spirits wilted. As Scott and I, with help from Isabelle, sifted through the calls and emails, we discovered many of them were bizarre Marie sightings—Vegas card dealer, truck driver in Iowa, swimsuit model at Mardi Gras. The tips were more likely to lead us to Elvis than Marie.
Except one. “Linda. Compass Car Rental,” Scott said. “Says Marie rented a car from her.”
“Where?” I asked.
“Dallas.”
Was it a coincidence?
Scott called the number and put the phone on speaker.
“Compass Car Rental,” a woman answered in a practiced customer-service voice. “Linda speaking.”
“Linda, this is Scott Jameson and Kate Bradley from ANC. We got your email. You think you rented a car to Marie?”
“I know I did. The night of the big storm. August seventh. All the planes out of Dallas were grounded, and we had a mad rush to get rental cars. People were shouting and shoving. Everyone was crying or mad. And this young man. He had been one of the first to get to the counter. He was very charming . . . good looking. My rep thought his driver’s license looked fake, so he called me over. I think the guy was trying to flirt with me, which was kind of ridiculous, since I’ve got kids his age. So that made me suspicious, you know. He was talking me up, explaining how he needed to get to Manhattan in time for a graduation. And that’s when Marie came up to the counter.”
“What’d she look like?” I asked.
“She had on the same scarf. Like in your report.”
&nb
sp; “Did she rent the car?” Scott asked.
“First she spoke to the guy—I couldn’t hear what they said—then he hugged her. Like a really big hug. She said she lived in Manhattan, then rented the car and offered to drive him. She had elite status, so she was one of the lucky ones to get a car that night.”
“And you’re sure her name was Marie? What was her last name?” Scott asked.
“Positive. But I’m . . . not allowed to give you her last name. Customer privacy.”
“And the man? What did he look like?”
“Dark hair. Blue eyes. One of those charming types. Don’t remember much else except he had a fake driver’s license from Kentucky.”
Scott and I locked eyes. Could this be Logan?
“Linda,” I said, carefully, “as you know, the mayor of New York is giving a civic award and reward to the people behind this movement. We think the Marie you met is part of it. Can you tell us her last name?”
“Sorry, but I can’t.”
“Would you ask the manager?” I pressed.
“I am the manager. And my boss will say no too.”
“Maybe they’ll make an exception? Everyone wants to know who she is.”
“I know,” she said with a laugh. “Even here in Dallas. It’s all over the TV.”
“Please ask your boss if they’ll let us have her last name,” Scott said. “We don’t need an address. Just a last name.”
“We’ll call you tomorrow to check in,” I added.
As we were about to hang up, Linda added, “One more thing. I guess I should’ve told you up front. Marie wasn’t alone. She came up to the counter with two other people. One was a young woman. Blonde. The other was a man in uniform. Army, I think.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Standing on Thirty-Fourth Street in front of a guy handing out flowers to military wives and widows, Scott and I delivered our report for ANC. “Thousands of New Yorkers have found themselves the recipients of acts of kindness by a secretive group no one has been able to identify. Their rent or hospital bills have been paid. Or they received a free meal or flowers on their doorsteps. These stunning acts have taken the city by storm, but it may be an actual storm thousands of miles away that brought the people behind it together.”