The Good Stranger (A Kate Bradley Mystery)

by Dete Meserve

  “No.” She fixed her gaze on me. “But I would like to see the others again.”

  To my complete surprise, Mark gave me the set of ANC Tonight to do an interview with the Secret Four. This was the studio that anchor Jason Berman would occupy in a few more hours, and it was stunning—a total 360-degree set with high-resolution images of the New York City skyline and a white staircase that led to a balcony emblazoned with the ANC logo and bathed in pools of soft lights that cast beautiful shadows on the back walls.

  Even Logan, Joe, and Alexia couldn’t resist the studio’s charms—their eyes widened in astonishment as they filed in. The studio was lit for broadcast, but no one was running the cameras because the group had demanded that we not record the interview.

  That didn’t mean the studio was empty. At least fifty staff had gathered in the back, and so many others wanted to watch the interview that security was instructed to send everyone else back to work. A violent protest had erupted in Tehran, sending the news team scrambling to arrange coverage, but even that wasn’t enough to keep staff from trying to catch a glimpse of the Secret Four.

  Still, I was troubled. The interview met none of the requirements of network TV news: no sound bites, no names or identities, no visuals, and no video. That would set off alarms with the top brass. They wouldn’t care that I’d achieved something I cared about if it didn’t translate somehow to viewers and ad revenues. I worried that Mark might even leverage my lack of on-air assets to edge me out.

  I was restless as we waited for Marie to show, pacing around the studio and trying to burn off the nervous tension in my arms and legs. After what seemed like a long time, Marie stepped into the studio. Dressed in a sapphire-blue blazer, her red hair pulled back in a sleek low bun, she was escorted by a security guard who guided her past the throng of journalists and producers like she was a celebrity or a movie star.

  “I’m glad you came,” I said, crossing the studio with Scott.

  “We’ve been looking for you for a long time,” he added.

  As I shook her hand, I noticed the red scarf tucked into her blouse.

  “Beautiful scarf,” I said.

  Her blue eyes lit up. “A gift from my mother long ago. She’d be happy about how I’ve put it to use.” Then her eyes fell on Logan, Joe, and Alexia, and her lips curved into a smile. “This is a clever way to get me to come out of hiding.” She drew them into a long embrace, as though they’d been separated for years, not just a few weeks. “I’m so happy to see you three again.”

  She sat in the chair next to me and started talking before I had a chance to ask any questions. “My guess is that you’re hoping for some story where I tell you how someone did something kind or lifesaving for me, and this whole thing is just me returning the favor,” Marie said. “But that’s not what this is about.”

  “Okay. Then what is it about?”

  “If I’m honest, it started out as bargaining. Thinking I could bribe my way into good health. I’d gotten a tough health diagnosis. Colon cancer. I was willing to do anything to buy more time. I thought if I did some good things, I could change the outcome.” She cleared her throat. “And then I realized how wrong that was.”

  “Wrong?”

  “Kindness is not some kind of exchange: I’ll help you, but then you have to help someone else. And maybe I’ll be rewarded for my kindness. That’s not how it works.”

  I leaned forward. “How what works?”

  “Connecting with others,” she said, softly. “It’s not transactional. It starts with understanding that everybody is struggling, even people who don’t appear to be suffering on the outside. Loss. Grief. Brokenness. Hurt. Worry. Everyone around you, the people you share the grocery line with, sit next to at work, meet on social media, and see across the kitchen table. They’re all wrestling with something. And we all have the power to help.”

  Scott shook his head. “Most of us don’t think we can change things like that.”

  “But you can. We all can. I did a small thing. Invited these people into the car with me. And look what happened. It grew into something . . . far bigger than any of us ever imagined.”

  I glanced over at some of the staff watching the interview and saw that they were, like me, transfixed by her. In an industry where everyone’s gaze was always locked to their phones during waking hours, no one was looking at anything except what was unfurling in front of us.

  “Some, like the New York Times, are calling you a miracle worker,” I said.

  “I don’t believe in miracles.” Her tone was sharp. “Not the things we hope will happen magically. But we can create miracles for each other, person to person.”

  “Then you are a person who spreads miracles,” I said.

  “Perhaps. But I’m not special. When my flight was canceled in that storm, I was bitter. Resentful. Angry. Just like everybody else. I looked around at the crowd of people who wanted to rent cars and get away from the storm. I thought, Well, everyone here has it better than me. Everyone got dealt a better hand. That girl over there is young, healthy, and very beautiful. She probably doesn’t have a care in the world. That turned out to be Alexia, who’d almost died before she got a last-minute kidney transplant a few months before. And then I saw this big guy, Joe, in army fatigues, listening to music on his headphones, and thought, Look how strong his body is. Decades of good health ahead of him. From the looks of him, I couldn’t have known that he was grieving the loss of his sister. And when I met Logan, I kind of assumed he was just a handsome con artist. Young, carefree, charming. But it turned out he was running from a lot of mistakes and was trying to find his way back. Everyone’s struggling with something.”

  “But getting in a car with strangers,” I said. “I can tell you a lot of stories of how something like that can go terribly wrong.”

  “I think I’ve heard all of them,” she said, with a small laugh. “But these strangers changed me. When I told them my story, they didn’t see a frail, angry woman battling a terrible disease. They saw me as . . .” Her voice drifted off, and she was silent for a long moment. “They saw me as something more. So I became more.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Mark had entered the back of the studio. Although he had slowly warmed to the story over time, I knew he continued to have his doubts about the people behind it. The fact that they had refused to allow us to record or broadcast the interview had both frustrated and intrigued him. It was proof they weren’t in it for the attention, but it also meant we had nothing to show for all the work we’d done.

  I leaned forward. “What made you decide to work together this way?”

  She took a long swig of water from the bottle the security guard had given her. “After we’d told our stories in that car late into the night, I realized that I’d made a connection with each of them, even though we had seemingly nothing in common. It made me wonder if maybe we’re all just fooling ourselves with the idea that we’re strangers. Maybe we’re all connected by some kind of thread that’s invisible to us.”

  “But what you decided to do. That’s a huge undertaking.”

  She inhaled a shaky breath. “Everything good that has happened to me in my life was a direct result of helping someone else. Everything. I knew this is what I wanted to do. What I was meant to do.”

  “The whole thing was only supposed to be for twenty-four hours,” Joe said, leaning forward, elbows on knees.

  “Then we got inspired to do more,” she said. “You have to understand that all of it became quite addicting. The high, the joy—it’s not like anything I’ve ever experienced. The more we did it, the more beautiful the world became.”

  “The happier we all became,” Alexia chimed in, “the more we wanted to do.”

  I let my gaze fall on each of them, realizing their story had cast a spell on me. And I was terrified about asking the next question. Afraid that after all this searching, I’d never know.

  “What is the leap?”

  Marie took a long mome
nt to answer. So long I expected her to answer vaguely, like the others had done.

  Instead, her face lit up. “A leap is something you do without knowing what the outcome will be. It’s just as likely that something good will come out of it as something bad. But you do it anyway. That’s what I asked these three to do. To go from being strangers to doing these big things together. To take a leap into a larger life.”

  Joe smiled. “It sounded crazy at first. A leap to a larger life? Then she started talking about balloons, gift cards, flowers. I thought: This lady is completely off her rocker. There’s no way we could do all of that.”

  “And no reason we should,” Alexia said, pulling her hair back. “We all had things to do. A wedding. Graduation. Funeral. How could anyone expect us to do anything like what she was imagining?”

  “I figured we’d get caught,” Logan added. “Maybe the police would think we were up to no good. Or we’d meet up with some people who wanted to make trouble for us. My grandpa always said, ‘No good deed goes unpunished,’ and in this case, I thought he would be proved right.”

  “And then I started doing the math and realized we were going to need a lot of money,” Alexia said, straightening the collar on her light-blue blouse. “None of us had any. And this woman didn’t look rich or anything. I mean, she told us she was a retired schoolteacher. So I was out.”

  “Me too,” Logan said, cracking his knuckles. “I just didn’t think we could do it. It’s not like any of us had any special skills.”

  “Except we actually did,” Joe said with an infectious laugh. “I grew up here and knew where to go. Where to find things. Alexia had all the creative ideas. Logan, no offense, but you knew how to sneak around, avoid cameras and nosy people, so no one would see us.”

  “I’ve had a lot of practice,” he said sheepishly.

  Alexia leaned back in her chair. “Still, we all thought it was a crazy idea.”

  “Impossible,” Joe added. “But she was right. We did take a leap into a larger life.”

  Marie’s expression softened. “But the leap did have one rule. And we’ve broken it.” She glanced at the three others. I waited for her to continue. “We agreed we would never tell anyone—not even the people closest to us—what we were doing.”

  “We didn’t even know each other’s last names,” Logan chimed in.

  “Why was it a secret?” I pressed.

  She twisted the bracelet on her wrist. “By staying a secret, there’s no chance for us to be admired or for people to think they had to repay or reward us for what we did.”

  “We wanted people to focus on what we were doing, not on who we were,” Logan said. “Because it was never supposed to be about us.”

  I glanced over at Scott, wondering what he was thinking. His expression said everything: a mixture of curiosity and wonder, because, like me, he’d never experienced a story like this. Then I looked at Marie, and a figurative light bulb went off, brighter than any of the studio lights, which suddenly felt hot on my face. I realized then why it had been so important to find these people, even though they’d worked hard to stay hidden.

  They were proof that a small group of ordinary people could change the world.

  “Where did you get the money to do it all?” Scott asked Marie, bringing me back to the moment.

  Her face crinkled, registering her discomfort with the question. “I’m not rich, but I’ve been saving—investing—since I started working,” Marie answered. “By some people’s standards, I hadn’t amassed a fortune, but I never once doubted what we did was exactly what I wanted to spend it on.”

  “Even when she told us about the money she had, we weren’t sure,” Alexia said.

  “We had a lot of doubts. But Marie wasn’t having any of that. She told us to put aside everything,” Joe said, “and take a leap with her. Trust that it would all work out.”

  Logan shook his head. “Which was ridiculous, when you think about it. I mean, four strangers surviving a near apocalypse of a storm, then hatching up a plan to connect strangers in Manhattan.”

  “And keeping it a secret . . .”

  “But how?” I asked. “How did you figure out how to do it? In the beginning, it seemed like you were giving to some of the people featured in my news stories here on ANC.”

  She nodded. “At first I thought that was the easiest way to find people to help. I mean, where do you start? But then I realized that most people won’t ever make it on the news unless something really terrible has happened to them. Many people come forward to help in situations like that. But I wanted to help those with everyday troubles. Those that are struggling silently. So instead, I stood in grocery store lines, coffee shops, pharmacies, doctors’ offices. And I listened.”

  “Eavesdropping?”

  She laughed. “I guess you could say that. I heard what they were worried about, what was weighing on them. And that’s when I figured out what to do.”

  I drew a deep breath. Leveled my voice so I wouldn’t sound anxious. But their answer to my next question was crucial. “Everyone is going to want to know who you are. What can we tell them?”

  Marie looked at Logan; then her eyes drifted to Joe and Alexia. “Let them think it could be anyone. It could be the stranger they pass by every night on their way into work. Or the woman behind the counter at their favorite store. Or the taxi driver who’s driving them home. Don’t tell them it’s us.”

  I leaned forward, meeting her gaze. “Don’t you think it would be better if they knew?”

  Her voice was soft. “They’re not looking for us, Kate. They’re looking for each other.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Scott and I recorded our stand-ups on busy Fifth Avenue during rush hour. Which drove Chris crazy, because commuters kept jostling him and his camera, and a couple of takes were interrupted by taxi horns and people shouting in the streets.

  As excited as I was to finally crack the story, I was on the verge of tears. I was so proud of what we’d done to find the Secret Four but also struck by the realization that it was all coming to an end. The search for Marie. Working with Scott. In two weeks, he’d begin a twenty-seven-mile hike at ten thousand feet in Peru for the season’s first episode of Wonders of the World.

  My voice shook as I started the report. “Four strangers survived a near apocalypse of a storm thousands of miles away and turned that nightmare into an extraordinary gift that transformed New York City. After their harrowing trip through a deadly storm, they dreamed up a plan and took a leap, transforming themselves from strangers into friends.”

  “And changing us too,” Scott continued. “For weeks now, these four strangers have been hiding a secret. What started as small acts—purple balloons, gift cards, bouquets of fresh flowers—bloomed into something far bigger.”

  “Anyone who’s been in Manhattan for the last few weeks can see that there’s a different feel when you walk down the streets,” I said. “And that feeling has spread around the country, inspired by what people are seeing happen here. We promised the Secret Four that we’d keep their identities anonymous. So we won’t tell you their names or where they come from. But we will say that they are the richest people in the world. Not because they have unimaginable wealth or are heirs to fortunes. Not because they are executives in Fortune 500 companies or lottery winners. They aren’t. They are the richest people in the world because every day they reap the benefit of knowing that the world is a better place because of what they’ve done.”

  A hipster with a man bun had been watching us record the report and approached us afterward. “They’re not even going to tell us who they are? Or collect the reward? That makes no sense. Why?”

  “They really want to be anonymous,” I told him. “And they don’t want anything for doing it.”

  He raised his eyebrows in astonishment. “Not even followers?”

  Our report aired throughout the day on ANC. The story even rocketed to the top of newscasts on every network, and the next day, Andr
ew summoned me to his office.

  When I arrived, he was sitting on his couch, flipping through the channels on his monitor. He seemed on edge, his fingers rubbing repetitively along the handle of his coffee mug. My stomach clenched. Was this going to be more than a lecture about delivering a story without video assets, names, or sound bites? Was he letting me go?

  “Have a seat,” he said, motioning to the couch.

  The room suddenly felt hot. Prickly heat rushed up my neck as I settled next to him. I smoothed the fabric of my skirt and looked down at the floor, waiting for him to speak.

  “Ken and I have been talking . . . ,” he said, his eyes still on the monitor. Ken was the president of ANC. The top boss. “And we aren’t happy that what was a huge story culminated without us being able to reveal their identity or show any images.”

  “I know. But we couldn’t—”

  He turned to look at me. “Until the emails and messages started coming in. Viewers thanking us for not identifying the group. A lot of them writing things like, ‘Thanks for leaving them alone.’ And lots of people saying they’re glad we ‘let them be.’ So our thinking has evolved. We don’t need to know who they are. Your story of how they came together, why they did this, was powerful enough.”

  My mouth fell open. I had been expecting a warning. A reassignment. My anxiety inched down a notch, but I was still so on edge that the only words I could say were: “Thank you.”

  “I also shared with him what you said to me the other day. How our focus on negative news makes viewers think that’s primarily what’s happening in the world. And that led us to another decision. We want to give you your own show.”

  That’s what I thought he said, but he couldn’t have. My voice broke. “A show about?”

  “We’d like to call it Good Things,” he continued. “You’ll be doing stories that highlight the best of what’s happening around the world. Weekends for now.”

  My entire body was abuzz. Surprise. Disbelief. His offer felt like it had fallen out of the sky. From nowhere. But it hadn’t really. Marie and the Secret Four had stopped us all in our tracks. Reoriented our thinking about what was important.