The Good Stranger (A Kate Bradley Mystery)

by Dete Meserve

He shook his head. “She’s gone back to Dallas.”

  “Can you give me her number?”

  “She wouldn’t like that.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket. “Let’s call her together.”

  Alexia hung up on me. Twice.

  “What’s going on?” Brad said, frowning. “This isn’t like her. She’s probably one of the nicest people I know.”

  I could see my plan was faltering, but I pleaded with him to try once more. “If she hangs up again, I’ll leave her alone.”

  On the third try, the phone rang and rang until she finally answered. “I don’t want to talk with you. Please stop calling.”

  “Wait,” I said. “I’ve talked with Logan.”

  She was silent for a moment. “About what?”

  I was grasping at straws. “About why the four of you were in the Dallas airport.”

  She sighed. “I’m hanging up now.”

  Sweat broke out on the back of my neck. In order to crack this story, I needed to keep her talking. “Wait, would you tell me about your kidney? Your donor.”

  “Did Logan tell you about that too?”

  “Actually, Brad did.”

  She sighed. “I wish you hadn’t, Brad.”

  I softened my tone. “I’d like to hear about it. Not for air.”

  She blew out a breath. “Okay. This isn’t for you to share or anything, but I had kidney disease and spent a few months on the transplant list. Then, four months ago, the hospital called to say that some anonymous person was donating one to me. I couldn’t believe it. They wouldn’t tell me his name. But I managed to find out he’s a principal at a high school somewhere in Idaho. The hospital says he doesn’t want to meet me.”

  “Do you want to meet him?”

  “Sometimes it’s all I can think about,” she said, her voice pitching higher. “Wondering why he did it. Why he doesn’t want to meet the person whose life he saved. If I’m being honest, the balloons gave me a way to celebrate what he did for me.” She was quiet for a moment. “I’ve said more than I should. I’m ending this call now.”

  “Wait,” I said, desperately. “Before you go. Can you tell me where I can find Marie?”

  “She could be anyone,” she said, then hung up.

  Maybe I’d never find her. Perhaps she was like so many things we sought but could never grasp. Like chasing rainbows. We’d captured moments, instances, snapshots of her: descriptions of those who’d encountered her, stories from people who’d worked beside her.

  But not her.

  Finding Marie was a wild-goose chase. She was always ten steps ahead of me, and each time I caught up a step or two, she slipped through my fingers.

  I wondered if I should continue to chase her or if Andrew was right about this story damaging my prospects at ANC. Making me look like a failure. Time had marched on, and the stories I’d missed out on were big, newsworthy, important. Why pursue something so elusive?

  Maybe I should let Jason Berman take over the story.

  The story. It started out being about that. About proving that I had what it took to deliver ratings. First and exclusive. That I deserved to be here at ANC. But the goal had morphed into something I was still trying to grasp.

  I’d tracked down murderers, rapists, and white-collar criminals. To bring them to justice. To help the victims get closure. To drive ratings. But this—finding Marie—was about something else: I wanted to understand why she did it.

  I wanted to be like her.

  Back in my apartment building that night, the Andersons were playing ABBA’s greatest hits at high volumes, and someone, I thought it might be Raymond, was cooking a dish that smelled like dog food. Oddly, it didn’t bother me all that much. In a way, it felt comforting and familiar, yet another reminder of the tapestry of the city around me. My new friends.

  Cora wasn’t back from Ukraine yet, so I used the key she’d left me to feed a pair of red-eared slider turtles she kept in a small tank in her living room.

  Outside my apartment door, I discovered that Artie had left a glass container of one of his food creations with a note:

  This is Chicken Bog. Let me know what you think.

  In the days since the neighbors surprised me in the apartment upstairs, Artie had slowly warmed up to me, lifting his head and saying hello when we passed on the doorsteps but not much more than that. I felt like cooking was his way of communicating, reaching out. Some people expressed themselves in words or music. Others, like Artie, through food.

  As I stood by the window enjoying the creamy dish, my eyes fell on the lamp in the window across the street. For weeks the woman had been a nightly fixture, her nimble fingers fashioning beautiful things out of sumptuous fabrics. But for the past several days, the lamp had languished there alone, its yellow beam constant through morning and night, with no sign of her or any movement in the apartment. Maybe she’d finished her masterpieces and taken a holiday. Or she’d won the lottery and moved to someplace exotic.

  There were a hundred good reasons to tear my eyes from the window and get back to my work. Maybe a thousand.

  But I was worried about her.

  Before I could consider all the reasons it was a bad idea, I made my way across the street to her apartment building and up a set of faded red steps to an ornate steel door. Although the wind had picked up and the temperature had dropped, a room air conditioner was humming in her window. I was trying to figure out whether I should press the button for apartment 1A or 1B when a man wearing gray sweatpants and a tank top buzzed out of the door, carrying a French bulldog.

  I stepped inside and knocked on her door. I could see light beaming through the peephole, but then it suddenly shut off. The apartment was silent.

  I knocked again.

  Finally, shuffling noises, and then the woman answered. She was younger than I expected, maybe fifty, slightly sleepy eyed, with smooth porcelain skin.

  That’s when I realized I’d made a mistake knocking on a stranger’s door. “I’m Kate Bradley. I live across the street and—”

  “What is it you want?”

  “I’m just here to introduce myself,” I said, trying to find a way out.

  “I’ve seen you in the window too. Across the street.” She fixed a pair of pale-blue eyes on me. “What really brings you here?”

  “To be honest, I was worried about you.”

  “Why? We don’t even know each other.”

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  She waved a hand at me. “Looks like you work all hours into the night. What do you do?”

  “I’m a reporter. For ANC.”

  She must have been expecting a different answer, because she looked at me, puzzled. “Come in already. It’s hot out here.”

  She ushered me inside and led me to the living room, where she turned on a lamp by the couch. I glanced at the familiar sewing table by the window, the lamp off, the fabrics gone. Up close it somehow seemed smaller, ordinary.

  “You want a glass of wine? Something stronger?”

  “Nothing. I’m fine.”

  I took in the old cracked walls, a hall closet overstuffed with heavy coats, a coffee table covered with medicine bottles.

  “I need to throw all this away,” she said, noticing my gaze. “What made you worry about me?”

  “I noticed you weren’t sewing for the last several days . . .”

  “And you came all the way over here to check on that?” she said, heading into the kitchen.

  “I hope that doesn’t seem strange.”

  She returned with a can of ginger ale and a plate of store-bought cookies. “It does, actually.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

  She thrust the can in my hand. “I don’t like strangers. But since you’re here, why don’t you tell me what you want.”

  “I already told you.”

  She motioned for me to sit on the couch. “Are you a friend of Karen’s?”

  “No,” I said, settling beside her. “I don’t know any
one by that name.”

  She crossed her arms on her chest. “Then why are you here? You watched too much Rear Window or something?”

  “I’ve been working on the story about all the good things happening around the city. And trying to find who’s behind it. And then I noticed you weren’t in the window.” I stopped for a moment when I realized I was rambling. “I worried about you. Well, I guess I’m a little lost.”

  “If it’s any consolation, we all are. Lost.”

  “Maybe, but I—”

  “Maybe you’ve been going about it the wrong way. Maybe we both have.”

  I smiled, trying not to look surprised that a complete stranger was giving me reporting advice. “How so?”

  She shrugged. “I’m just saying that if you want some kind of proof of who they are, you might never find it.”

  “That’s not exactly encouraging.”

  Her voice broke. “Maybe it’s okay not to know.”

  I wasn’t sure what she was getting at. “I think a lot of people would like to know who they are and what inspired them to do this.”

  “Maybe we have to be okay with not understanding. To let go of our need to find answers for every question. Maybe some questions don’t have answers.”

  I wondered if we were talking about the same thing. She looked away, a faraway expression on her face.

  “I’ve taken enough of your time,” I said. “It’s great to meet you. I’m glad you’re okay.”

  I started to stand.

  “You were right to be worried about me,” she said quietly.

  I turned. “I was?”

  She drummed her bony fingers on the armrest, silent for a moment. “My husband died a few weeks ago,” she said, and for the first time, her voice was gentle. She waved her hand toward the medicine bottles. “Those were his. But I can’t bring myself to throw them away. I haven’t known what to do since then. I go to my bookkeeping job during the day, then throw myself into making dresses until I’m so exhausted I fall asleep. Every day the same.”

  I sat beside her. A light rain streaked the windows. “What are the dresses for?”

  She sighed. “I don’t know yet. But sewing, working with fabric, has always been something I’ve loved to do. Only the dresses aren’t enough to distract me anymore.”

  I felt her pain moving and breathing between us. “I’m so sorry.”

  A softness settled in her eyes. “My friends, they ask me what they can do for me. I can’t make a list of what I need because I don’t know what that is.”

  In the long silence, I felt my own heart crack open. Tears welled in my eyes. Suddenly our separateness, our aloneness, faded away, and I felt connected to her, fused with her in a way that at once seemed strange and undeniable.

  She spoke finally, her voice trembling. “You coming over like this . . . you listening to me . . . even though we didn’t know each other . . . this is good.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  I didn’t wait for Andrew and Mark to take me off the story. Instead, the next morning I rushed straight past Andrew’s assistant and through his open door, where I found him sitting at his desk talking on the phone.

  He looked at me with surprise but then waved me in. As he continued his call, I felt my heart pounding. I’d never used the “Senator Bradley’s daughter” card on a story before, but that was my plan. But even as I rehearsed in my mind what I was going to say, I began to have second thoughts.

  Andrew finished his call and hung up. “Did we have a meeting on the books?”

  “I heard that you and Mark are going to take me off the secret-good story and—”

  Anger flashed in his eyes. “Take that up with Mark. I don’t interfere with his assignments.”

  “But you can stop him from giving it to Jason Berman.”

  He frowned, then motioned for me to sit in the chair opposite his desk. “I see the ANC rumor mill is hard at work.” He clasped his hands together. “I’ve said this before, but this time you need to listen. Let this one go. I have bigger things in mind for you.”

  I was about to remind him of his friendship with my father. Talk about the reasons I’d agreed to come to ANC. Instead, I told him about meeting a stranger I’d only seen in the window. As he listened, I watched his shoulders relax. Andrew had been a journalist for decades before ascending to the executive suite, and I could see he understood where this was heading.

  “After she told me her husband had died, I spent another hour with her, listening to her story. A complete stranger. And that’s when I realized what these people are doing. They’re connecting us. Everything that’s happened, all of it is changing the city. But it’s also changing me. I mean, I knocked on a neighbor’s door, a stranger, because . . . I was worried about her.”

  He blew out a breath, and his expression made me think I’d convinced him. I was surprised when he said, “Jason feels the same way. These people paid off his mother’s medical debts, bills that she’d been hiding from him because she didn’t want him to worry. This is personal for him too.”

  I shrugged. “Okay then. Let him have the story . . .”

  “Good, I appreciate—”

  “I’m kidding, Andrew. There’s no way I’m giving up that easily.”

  He leveled a hard gaze at me. “You’re not expecting me to tell Jason—”

  “No, I’m saying let him cover it. But keep Scott and me on this story too.”

  He scratched his head. “Having all three of you on this story is like driving a Porsche forty miles an hour . . . I can’t remember a time when a soft story like this had so much star power.”

  “Is that such a bad thing?”

  He fiddled with a pen on his desk, thinking. “Look, if I’m being honest, it inspired me to help too. There’s a woman in accounting who just took on two foster sons. They came to her without shoes, extra clothes, school supplies. Anything. I knew she wouldn’t accept any help from me, so I secretly left a gift card on her desk loaded with enough money to get them everything they need.”

  “It’s changing you too . . .”

  He leaned forward. “Don’t let that get around the newsroom. I don’t want anyone thinking I’m growing a heart or anything.”

  “I’ll keep your ‘heartless’ reputation intact. You want me to tell Mark that I’m staying on the story?”

  He stood. “You better let me handle Mark. And don’t think I’m going soft on you. I want answers—closure—fast.”

  The Kindness Busters finally caught someone on tape. Not a rat with pizza or a guy walking his white rabbit, like I’d seen in previous clips they’d sent.

  Instead, they captured a man in a tan jacket and white hat staggering through the crosswalk at a busy Eighty-Eighth Street intersection. The time stamp was 7:32 p.m.

  I wondered why Kindness Busters founder Peter Venkman sent it to me, but then, in a recording shot from the vantage point of a GoPro strapped to a street sign, the man had only made it to the middle of the street when the light changed. As cars streamed past him, his body trembled, and he lurched sideways. He was about to fall when a teen girl in a bright-blue puffer vest appeared. Her presence surprised him, and he flailed his arms, almost careening into a passing car. Then a woman with a ponytail raced into the street to stop traffic and prop him up. Seconds later, two burly men with their backs to the camera, one in a blue T-shirt and another in flannel, ran up to guide him across the busy street as the teen in the vest made a call, perhaps to 911. When they reached the sidewalk, a guy in a Red Sox sweatshirt and black sandals helped the group lift the man over the curb.

  It was a beautiful sight. Five strangers working together to help a man they didn’t know who was probably drunk or strung out on drugs.

  The guy was recovering from a stroke, Peter texted. Good example of how this city is changing. Thought it might help your story.

  I watched the recording continue, and the man in the blue T-shirt turned toward the camera and flagged down a police car. The light from
a passing truck blinded the camera for a moment, but then I could see his face.

  Joe Raley. Or at least it looked like him.

  When did you record this? I texted Peter.

  Last night.

  Are you sure?

  100%

  I rewound the recording to the point where the man looked toward the camera. Even without the army fatigues, I recognized his face from the city hall footage: deep-set brown eyes beneath thick eyebrows. I snapped a screenshot.

  Joe Raley was not in White Sands. He was in New York.

  I waited. Focused on the door to the Raleys’ apartment building. Without the cocoon of a car to sit in, I did what everyone else did in Manhattan: I put in my earbuds and scrolled through my phone, pretending to listen to some awesome music while waiting for someone.

  My pulse was pounding as though I were doing something wrong. A guy eating from a cardboard tray of nachos passed by me and glanced at me briefly, but otherwise, everyone else ignored me. This was one time that feeling anonymous in Manhattan was working for me.

  I didn’t like to think I was doing ambush reporting, a technique employed by paparazzi or investigative reporters looking for dirt. This was a form of it, but I didn’t see any alternative.

  Either Joe’s parents thought he was stationed at White Sands Missile Range or they were lying on his behalf, and the only way I was going to get to talk to them was to confront them with the photo.

  As rush hour came and went and the number of people on the street dwindled to just a few, I weighed and reweighed the pros and cons of simply ringing their doorbell. Kevin had already told me, “Do not come back,” so I was sure that once they saw me in the peephole, they wouldn’t answer.

  Then twilight shifted into evening, and no one had entered or left the Raley apartment. Just as the streetlights flickered on, I saw him.

  Joe Raley. Dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, he rushed up the street carrying a large box, but he made it look easy. My mouth went dry, and suddenly I wondered if I could go through with this.

  From here, he looked to be over six feet tall. And strong. With military training. And in the dark, he might have thought I was trying to attack him and react accordingly. My stomach twisted in a knot.