The Good Stranger (A Kate Bradley Mystery)

by Dete Meserve

  “She gives away millions but lives in a place like this?” Scott asked.

  “Doesn’t seem right,” Chris said, peering at his GPS app. “But this is the right address.”

  My stomach roiled. I had a sudden sinking feeling we were wasting our time. That we were on the edge of failure. I’d worked on plenty of stories that hadn’t panned out before. But I’d never floundered on a story this big. Maybe the top brass was right: I was failing.

  I thought about bailing. Had the feeling the others were thinking the same. Instead, I sucked in a deep breath and forced myself to keep it together.

  “Let’s see what’s going on here,” I said, swinging open the van door.

  As the three of us strode up the front walk, a tabby cat watched us through a set of bent metal mini-blinds in the window. We couldn’t find a doorbell, so I knocked.

  Long moments later, a woman in her early sixties opened the door. She wore a blue tunic with white slacks and a black orthopedic boot on her left foot. I studied her reddish-brown hair and sharp blue eyes, but without the distinctive glasses or scarf, she didn’t look like a definitive match.

  “Hi, I’m Kate from ANC. And this is Scott. Are you Marie Rivera?”

  She nodded, then glanced at Chris’s camera, puzzled.

  “We’re here because we believe you’re the Marie Rivera that’s behind all the good stuff happening in Manhattan,” Scott said, his natural charisma on high beam.

  She placed a hand on her chest. “I’ve been hearing about her on the news.” She talked slowly, her breath labored. “But while I have the same name, I’m not her.”

  Scott and I exchanged glances. If she was Marie, we knew she wouldn’t confess. But she sounded pretty convincing that this was a case of mistaken identity.

  “Do you have a nephew named Jordan?” I pressed.

  She eyed me warily. “Yes. But how do you know that?”

  Scott answered. “The Marie we’re looking for has a nephew named Jordan. Also, someone matching your description was spotted renting a car in Dallas during a big storm.”

  “My description? That’s impossible. I’ve never been to Dallas.”

  “Where were you during the blackout?”

  “Right here,” she said, nodding to her boot. “Not getting far with this.”

  “You weren’t at city hall?” Scott pressed.

  She shook her head. “I haven’t been to city hall in ages. And certainly not like this. Why would I go?”

  I could feel this hurtling to yet another dead end, but I still had one last volley.

  “Maybe we do have the wrong Marie,” I said carefully. “How long have you lived in this home?” I remembered Linda from Compass saying that Marie had moved recently because the Crown Heights apartment building in the address on her driver’s license had been demolished.

  “Almost five years.” She looked at me and then Scott. “I’m a retired teacher living on a pension. Do you really think I could be behind this, or are you just hoping it’s true because I have a similar name?”

  My spirits sank. Andrew was right. It was time to move on. We were never going to find Marie.

  “Welcome back to the real world,” Mark was saying the next morning. I’d spent another restless night in the upstairs apartment, and my nerves were frayed. The whole commute into work, I’d been dreading this moment with Mark. Figured he’d use this opportunity to put me in my place. I wasn’t wrong.

  “Now that you’ve come to your senses, you might try covering important stories,” he continued, his tone laced with arrogance. “Things viewers actually need to know. Growing terrorism. Old diseases outwitting our antibiotics. Did you see the researcher we had on this morning who said the next global pandemic is a matter of when, not if?”

  My assignment was not that, of course. Instead, he had me cover a billionaire political donor who had just been charged in a Florida prostitution sting. Scandal. To say I was miserable was an understatement. I’d failed to find Marie. Now I was back to being the senator’s daughter covering politics. And a giant failure on my first big story at ANC.

  I trudged back to my cubicle and noticed that someone had left a vintage copy of Harriet the Spy on my desk. The book was expertly wrapped in red ribbon, and the cover showed Harriet roaming her Manhattan neighborhood clutching a spy notebook under her arm.

  No note or card.

  “That was my favorite when I was a kid,” Stephanie said, dumping a tote bag on her desk. “Is it your birthday?”

  “No.”

  “Part of the kindness thing? Or from someone else?” Her knowing smile made me think she had a hunch about who was behind it.

  “No idea.” I faked a puzzled look, but my stomach was doing a nervous flip. It had to be from Scott. He was the only one who knew that my own copy had been torn in the break-in. He’d thought about me, hunted down this rare treasure, and bought it for me. All of that was making my head spin.

  I threw myself into reporting on the political-donor scandal, but after a long day of the endless repeat of the story, I realized that hearing about this billionaire who was hiring prostitutes wouldn’t really make a difference in viewers’ lives. The millions of people who watched my report about him weren’t going to be better off because they knew every detail of what he’d done. Instead, the story was just another example of the bad things people did.

  Yet what Marie was doing was changing us. All around the city, we could actually see it happening. People paid for coffee for those in line behind them. A group of strangers formed a human chain to rescue a boy who fell in the lake in Central Park. A high school cross-country team took a dozen shelter dogs on their morning run. The list of “good” stories was rising from dozens to hundreds by the day.

  As Gavin drove me back to the apartment building that night, I felt regret creeping in. I’d given up on Marie too easily. There had to be a way to convince Andrew to put me back on the story. A way to find her.

  As I stepped out of the car, I noticed something scrawled on the sidewalk in white chalk:

  STOP LOOKING FOR MARIE.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The police found the guy who broke into my apartment. Twenty-five-year-old Roy Jackson was inside a Chinatown apartment when the tenant arrived home to find him ransacking her place. When the police searched Jackson’s apartment, they found my laptop, wiped clean, along with a slew of other electronics he’d stolen.

  My palms were sweating as Detective McGregor told me the news on the steps of my apartment building the next morning before I headed into work.

  Jackson was in jail. My upstairs neighbor Artie had had nothing to do with it.

  I was relieved. Grateful that they’d found him. Yet still angry. The robbery had thrown me down a bizarre wormhole, saddling me with a crushing to-do list to put my life back together, most of which I’d still been avoiding, and making me believe everyone around me couldn’t be trusted. I’d even suspected Artie, simply because his late-night hours and his lack of social skills seemed unusual.

  But as glum as I still was, what I suddenly realized was that the robbery had also given me another perspective. So many people had rushed in to help me—Scott, the detective, my neighbors, the landlord. Even complete strangers like the Andersons.

  The good guys outnumbered the bad guys by at least ten to one.

  “Is this new?” the detective asked, bringing me back to the moment. He pointed to the chalk writing on the sidewalk.

  I nodded. “Do you think Jackson’s been doing this? Is he the one sending the notes?”

  He snapped a photo. “He’s a crash-and-grab kind of thief. Not much thought behind the stuff he does. I don’t think he wrote this.”

  “Maybe you could do a handwriting analysis?”

  He frowned. Clearly, he didn’t like me making suggestions for how to do his job. “I’ll work on it. You got any idea why this person wants you to stop looking for Marie?”

  “Lots of possibilities. Maybe she’s in troub
le or in hiding. Perhaps she does business with criminals. For all we know, she could be in the Witness Protection Program.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Be careful. Those are big reasons for not wanting to be found. And someone who does stuff like this, he’s more cunning than petty thieves like Jackson. He’s putting calculated thought into what he’s doing. And that’s far more dangerous.”

  Mark was obsessed with my report about the Florida prostitution sting that had ensnared a major political donor and several other high-profile individuals. He found the story so compelling that he went on and on about it that morning, walking me through the excruciating details of what he wanted in a follow-up report. In his mind, any story about scandal, people behaving badly, celebrities, sex, or violence was highly newsworthy, even if it didn’t represent most of what was happening in the world.

  While he was talking, my phone chimed, and another text from my father flashed up. This was his third text this morning, and I’d lost count of how many he’d sent since I walked out on him. I promised myself I’d call him, but first I needed to find out more about Julia.

  After Mark headed off to another meeting, I scoured the transcripts of the ex-governor’s court documents I’d ordered. I’d been mulling a couple of theories: Maybe Julia was in financial trouble and needed my father to bail her out. Maybe she wanted a higher profile for her foundation, and being a senator’s wife would do that. Perhaps she wanted to burnish her reputation after being married to the governor embroiled in scandal.

  I hoped the transcripts would point me in the right direction. But despite scanning hundreds of pages of her husband’s court proceedings, I found nothing connecting her to any of it.

  I went back to the LexisNexis database. In the place of any proof of financial trouble, I found articles about the work she was doing to encourage women entrepreneurs in Vermont and in far-flung rural areas of India. Instead of evidence of her being a social climber, I found photos of her sitting on a schoolroom floor in El Salvador, her hair tied back in a ponytail, listening to young girls playing the violin.

  I closed my laptop. Even without any indication of an agenda, her marriage to my father still troubled me. Maybe my instincts, honed by years uncovering manipulation and deceit, were right.

  Or maybe I was uneasy for another reason: I didn’t want things to change.

  My dad answered my call on the first ring.

  “I was beginning to worry about you,” he said. He didn’t sound angry, but my dad was better at hiding his negative emotions than I was.

  “Sorry it’s taken me a while to get back to you,” I said sheepishly. “And sorry for walking out on you.”

  “I don’t understand. Why are you so upset that I’m marrying Julia?”

  I’d placed the call while standing outside the ANC building, a mistake because the stale odor of cigarettes lingered there. The low groans of the buses lumbering by grated on my nerves too.

  “I’m not upset,” I said. Upset seemed like a term for frail women who couldn’t control their emotions. “I’m concerned. It’s all happening really fast, and it doesn’t make sense. It’s not like you to be impulsive.”

  “This isn’t impulsive. I know this is what I want to do.”

  I leaned my head against the concrete wall. After all the years of it just being the two of us, I knew my dad. He was deliberate and systematic in his thinking. Before he reached a decision on any issue, he’d have sifted through all the facts and research, evaluated what experts were saying, and outlined the strategies to fix the problem. Then, when he talked about his decision, his voice was measured, deliberate. But that wasn’t the case here. When he talked about Julia, his decision to marry, the cadence of his voice was one I didn’t recognize: breezy, unrestrained.

  “Is she pressuring you to get married?”

  “Kate, this is something we both want.”

  “Then what’s the hurry?” I asked, my voice unsure. “Remember when you were looking for an electric car a few years ago? You researched all the models for nine months before you decided on one. You spent more time on that decision than you have about a person you’re about to marry.”

  “The two are not the same, and you know it,” he said sharply, then softened his tone. “When you meet the right person, you know it. Sometimes you take a leap like this because you can’t imagine your life without them.”

  I swallowed the knot that had formed in my throat. “It seems like you’re rushing into this, Dad. Like you haven’t thought this through. Maybe you should give yourself more time. Call off the wedding for now.”

  “Call off the wedding?” He blew out a breath. “Kate, you’re being unreasonable. It’s a little embarrassing, to tell the truth. I’m not sure how to explain to Julia why you’re acting this way.”

  Unreasonable. Embarrassing. My sadness, my fear, transformed into straight-up anger. I bit out the words, letting him feel my frustration. “You’re ruining our family.”

  He was silent for a long moment. Then he had the audacity to ignore what I said. “I’ve got to run. Julia and I are late for a fundraiser.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The text rolled in at 6:55 in the morning, just as I was finishing my run. A number I didn’t recognize:

  Kate, you are invited to participate in a concert at Floyd Bennett Field at 50 Aviation Road tonight only at 8:00 pm. Free. There is more that connects us than divides us. Marie. This invitation is non-transferable.

  I looked up Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn and learned that in its heyday it was the site of flights by Amelia Earhart and the start and finish point for Howard Hughes’s record-breaking flight around the globe. But the airfield had been abandoned since the early seventies, and the photos I found were of buildings in serious disrepair, with rusted beams, peeling paint, and sprawling vines taking over spaces that once housed stately airplanes. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to host a concert in such a depressing venue.

  Plus, I wasn’t sure this was an actual invitation from Marie.

  In the newsroom later that morning, I checked around to see if anyone else had received a text, but no one had. I figured it was a fake. But after a quick check on social media, I realized I wasn’t the only one to receive an invite. Thousands of people were posting about the unusual invitation, and the hive mind had as many conspiracy theories as there were questions.

  Most were worried that the concert was a sham like the Fyre Festival in the Bahamas, which turned out to be nothing like the advertised hype. But since no promises were being made about the concert except that invitees could “participate” in it, that theory faded quickly. Others thought this was a scheme to make money off Marie’s name. Midmorning, Scott texted me that he had received the same invitation, and we made a plan to share a cab to Floyd Bennett Field later in the afternoon.

  I don’t know what I expected when I got into the taxi with him. But I didn’t imagine that I’d actually feel nervous sitting with him in the back of a shabby cab. Everything about him was distracting—broad shoulders beneath a flawless creamy dress shirt, blue eyes—and the pull was so strong that I had to look out the window every few minutes.

  I needed to distract myself, so I asked him about Harriet the Spy. “I have a very important question to ask you.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “It sounds serious.”

  “It is.” My heart was racing. “And you have to promise to answer honestly.”

  “Well, you’re either about to propose to me or—”

  I laughed. “Propose to you?”

  “Or you’re about to ask me a deeply personal question. I know that look, Kate. It makes people you interview want to tell you everything you want to know. Or it can look like you’re about to ask someone to marry you, vote for you, or lend you money.”

  “The same look can mean all those things?”

  “Yes. And it’s very effective,” he said with a mischievous smile. “Now what kind of question are you going to ask me?”

&n
bsp; His eyes were dancing. So distracting that I stared at the back of the head of the taxi driver for a moment before looking back at him.

  “I want to know if you were the one who left the vintage copy of Harriet the Spy on my desk.”

  He stared at me blankly. “What happened?”

  “I asked around the newsroom, and no one knew anything about it. You’re the only one who knew my copy had been destroyed.”

  “True.” His eyes met mine in an unwavering gaze. “And even if I did it, I wouldn’t tell you.”

  “Why?”

  “I like the idea that wondering where the gift came from brings you a little happiness.”

  “Wait, you’re not going to tell me. Because . . . you want me to be happy?”

  “Exactly.”

  I wanted to hug him. Kiss him. Both. My emotions were spinning out of control.

  I sobered. It was too soon after my breakup with Eric to feel this way. If nothing else, my feelings were completely unprofessional.

  I tried to get things back on track. Remember why I was there. “FNN is saying this whole thing is a sham,” I said as we neared Floyd Bennett Field. “That it’s just someone capitalizing on Marie’s name recognition.”

  “They’re just saying that because no one in their entire network was invited. Same for ABC.”

  “None of the other networks were invited? That’s odd. Makes me wonder if this is the real deal or if we are a bunch of gullible suckers, so eager to find her that we’ll head an hour outside of Manhattan on the off chance we might see her.”

  “Depending on the hour of the day, I’ve been leaning toward: we’re all a bunch of gullible suckers.”

  “My only hope is in the last sentence in the text, where it says: ‘There is more that connects us than divides us.’ Not the kind of wording scammers use. Plus, it’s spelled right. And with good grammar.”