Ghosts of Bergen County

by Dana Cann

  “You don’t like cats.”

  She shrugged again.

  Daisy stretched a paw and shielded her eyes from the sun. He sat next to them.

  “What’s with the beard?” she said. “And the clothes.”

  “I had an appointment.”

  “With the homeless?”

  “I called in sick.”

  “Okay.” Mary Beth waited, prescient. Maybe Amanda, in her sleuthy omnipotence, had ratted him out.

  “Where’s our ghost?” he asked.

  Mary Beth flattened her mouth, raised her eyebrows and the tips of her shoulders for a full second before returning his gaze. Two girls on bicycles pedaled past on the sidewalk, followed by a mom, running with a dog, and a gust that rustled the leaves on the young trees. In two months they’d turn and drop. Daisy flicked her tail. Mary Beth awaited an explanation.

  “Heroin,” he said. “Dope. I’ve been using.”

  She narrowed her eyes, and he told her about Jen, about everything—the bike accident, buying dope, snorting dope, and the mall thing, complete with the mannequin act, the mall cop who stopped him and let him go. It was a story that defied logic, he realized now, that held no connective tissue between its juxtaposed events, comprised no causality. But he told it, and when he’d gotten through that first night he paused.

  “What are you saying?” she asked.

  “I got busted. This past Saturday. In the city. Real cops. I was charged with possession.”

  A breeze stirred her hair, the ringlets she favored now that it had grown longer, now that she cared how it looked.

  “What else are you saying?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Isn’t that enough?”

  “If that’s all there is.”

  He tried to gauge where this was going. A car trundled past, too slow, it seemed. Ferko wondered if the driver had braked to get a gander at the actual residents of the blue house with the white trim, outside in the actual sunshine. When he and Mary Beth had moved here, he’d assumed they’d know their neighbors. Then they never did.

  “I expected that you’d leave me,” she said. “First I prepared myself. Then I waited for it to happen.”

  Her clear eyes gazed into his.

  “Did you hear what I said?” he asked. “I got busted for possession of heroin.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Getting busted?”

  “Heroin.”

  He considered what to say.

  “You didn’t shoot it?”

  “I snorted it.”

  She waited. Then she said, “That’s good.”

  Daisy stood and stretched, then turned around once and lay on the concrete walk that met the porch stairs. She rolled on her side.

  “It’s a feeling like a flood,” he said. “Well, that’s not right.” Then he changed his mind: “Yes it is.”

  Mary Beth squinted.

  “It’s like a flood in that it’s got a current, a strong pull. It fills you and empties you at the same time. Puts in the good and takes out the bad.” He’d nailed it, he realized. He let his words sit like that. A commuter train rumbled from the direction of the Glen. A horn sounded. Then another word came to him, and he couldn’t help but say it: “Numb.”

  “Numb,” she said, though it could have been a question. She stared ahead, beyond their yard.

  “Numb doesn’t sound good.”

  “Numb sounds good.”

  “A good numb,” he said. He smelled roasted garlic from someone’s kitchen. The train engine growled.

  “Will you go to jail?”

  “You’re not real upset by this.”

  “I actually want to cry.”

  He waited for the punch line.

  “I wish I could.”

  “I won’t go to jail.”

  She nodded.

  “I need to appear in September. A first offense. I’ll probably just get counseling and no criminal charge.”

  “You have a lawyer?”

  “Bob.”

  “Bob? That’s a funny name for a lawyer,” she said.

  “It’s a good name for a mechanic.”

  “That’d be Bobby.”

  He put his arm around her, and she scooted her butt against his.

  “You’d think,” she said, “if one’s husband had a lawyer, his wife would know the lawyer’s name.”

  “Now you do.”

  “Did you know I haven’t cried in over a year?”

  “That’s good or not?”

  “Not,” she said. “I’ve got to get off these pills.”

  “Did you talk to your doctor?”

  “Did you talk to yours? Did he write you a prescription for smack? Did your insurance cover it?”

  “Smack?” he said.

  “Horse?”

  “Dope,” he said. “No one says smack or horse. Everyone says dope. And I’ve stopped.”

  “Kicked?” she asked.

  “Yeah, and so should you. Call your pusher.”

  “Dr. Levin?”

  “That’s him.”

  She put her head on his shoulder.

  “Do we know how to have fun?” Ferko asked.

  “Yeah. Popping pills and shooting up.”

  “Snorting lines!” he corrected her.

  The girls on bikes rode back down the sidewalk, in the opposite direction. They looked to be Amanda’s age, six, when she rode off into the woods. But these girls were real, alive, no one’s collective burden.

  “Does the bully know?”

  “No,” Ferko said.

  She meant Prauer. She’d met him once, on a Friday afternoon approaching Christmas. She’d brought Catherine into the city and stopped by the office. There was a Christmas party that night on the Upper West Side, a friend of Mary Beth’s from childhood. She met Ferko at the office and took the tour. Prauer was attentive, genuinely tender. He held the baby and walked her around the suite, then brought her to the big windows facing Sixth Avenue and pointed out the twinkling lights in the dusk. And Mary Beth had somehow observed in this bullying behavior. Ferko was never sure how. Prauer was, of course, a bully. He wasn’t big physically. Just personally, emotionally, financially.

  “Did you,” Mary Beth started, then paused, “consider leaving?”

  “I might not have a choice.”

  “What does that mean?” Her voice turned sharp.

  “I screwed up the other day, when I got busted. They might not want me back.”

  “I meant me.” Their bodies had separated, he noticed now. “Did you consider leaving me?”

  “We were talking about Prauer. I missed that segue.”

  “Keep up.”

  He remembered what she’d said—that she’d expected he’d leave her.

  “Well?” She waited.

  “No,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I wouldn’t. Because I love you.”

  She held his gaze. Her eyes glistened for a single moment, reflected the afternoon sun.

  “You really want to cry,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  It occurred to him that she was sorry for a lot of things. So was he. He thought about fate, about those things you could affect and those things that affected you, but it was a circular reference, a self-referential loop, the concept too complicated. Philosophers asked questions they didn’t have answers to.

  “I messed up,” she said.

  His first instinct was to deny it, but he couldn’t bring himself to do so.

  She gasped and buried her face on the sleeve of his T-shirt. She breathed. When she was done his shirtsleeve was dry. So were her eyes. Then she smiled in a way that made her look sad. “You’re crying,” she said.

  It was true, he realized, and the tears came at once, flooded his eyes and ran down his cheeks. He did that sometimes—cried—even before Catherine, before Mary Beth. She touched a finger to his cheek and sniffed a tear.

  “I’ve made a mess of it,” she said.
/>   “Look at us.” He held his hands out, pink palms toward the blue sky. “This isn’t a mess.” He supposed his face was red, tear-streaked. He supposed it really was a mess. But maybe that was the point. Because they were outside, on the front porch, with a cat named Daisy, instead of inside, hidden in the bedroom behind the drawn shades. It was a start, getting to know the neighbor’s cat, even if they didn’t know which neighbor the cat belonged to.

  “Yeah,” she said, “a couple of junkies.”

  “A couple of recovering junkies.”

  “A mess,” she said.

  “A good mess.”

  “Optimist.”

  “Optimist?” He lifted his shirt and wiped his face. “I’m the one crying.”

  “Can you take Friday off?”

  “Sure. Though I might not have a job to take off from.”

  She squinted at him.

  He blinked.

  “I can,” he said finally. “What’s Friday?”

  “We’re going to Princeton.”

  “Princeton?” he said. “What’s there?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  It was Wednesday, and he hadn’t been back to the Riverfront suite since Saturday. Not feeling well, went his e-mail to Lisa Becker on Monday morning. How’s Greg? How are the Groves? But Ferko knew from the e-mail traffic how the Groves were: Prauer’s binding term sheet committed a billion-one. The Groves were rich. Not distressed-retail-department-store rich. They were cash rich. They were out, too, could spend the rest of their lives on the Florida beach of their choice, nursing their millions. Each article on Grove Department Stores—and Ferko received them all through his e-mail alerts—touched on Roy’s murder, possible motives, possible suspects. Most focused on the youngest son, Kyle, who had arrests for possession of cocaine and ecstasy, and one incident, widely reported, in which he’d thrown Roy off his yacht into the Gulf of Mexico. In the end Roy had declined to press charges. The article yesterday—in the Journal, which reported the agreement in principle between Riverfront and Grove—rehashed the family dynamics, and then quantified, based on unspecified family sources, how much Kyle stood to gain from Roy’s murder. Twenty million dollars. Ferko figured the entire Grove clan was better off with Roy gone. Except Roy, of course.

  Ferko poked his head into Lisa’s office. “Hey!” he said.

  “Welcome back!”

  He continued to the kitchen for coffee and food.

  Greg’s office was dark. Weeks ago, when he arrived—first to visit, then to occupy (in a temporary, unofficial capacity, with office and laptop)—the alchemy at Riverfront shifted. Any sense of complacency that had previously existed was gone. Props were knocked down. Floors fell away. Ferko walked on joists, the footing treacherous, while George Cosler and Greg Fletcher formed a team. A basketball team. They went to the gym at lunch and played pickup, two on two, while Prauer went on vacation—to Alaska, some river a four-hour flight from Anchorage. The plane brought arriving campers and food and supplies once a week, and picked up departing campers and their refuse. There were cabins, a freestanding dining room and kitchen, outhouses. The camp was open four months a year. And yet there was a signal—maybe even a tower—and Prauer kept in touch the way he would on some diligence trip to Shanghai. His e-mails came at odd hours, even taking into account the time difference. It never got dark, of course, and Ferko imagined Prauer, his boundless energy, catching fish, eating fish, and never sleeping, fixated on Grove Department Stores from his remote and ever-sunny corner of America. The e-mails came to Ferko, Greg, and Lisa, in that order, and Cosler and Greg would come back from basketball, showered and shining, and log back in. Sometimes Greg proclaimed, “Whoa!” if Prauer attached photos, as he often did, of fish, hip-high, held by their gills by straining men in waders, behind whom stood strange trees and green hills, blue sky, water, preternatural colors, a landscape from another planet. Then Greg tapped his keys—the guy could type fast—and fired off a response to Prauer that wasn’t copied to Ferko or Lisa. By the second week, the e-mails were coming to Greg, Ferko, and Lisa, in that order. Ferko had been passed that quickly.

  He found Lisa in the breakout room, where she’d opened her laptop and stacked her Grove files. She’d put meetings on his calendar: ten o’clock with Greg, eleven o’clock with Greg and Prauer. Despite everything, they still expected Ferko to do things.

  She glanced at his food—a bagel with cream cheese and a hunk of Prauer’s salmon. Another filet—smoked and salted, garnished with capers and served with bagels and cream cheese—sat in the kitchen, largely ignored by the overindulged Riverfront staff. Since Prauer’s vacation, the salmon—his trophies—appeared a couple of mornings a week. At first their appearance was met with unreserved enthusiasm. Then the novelty wore off, and more fish meant less eaten. It would sit in the kitchen, slabs like human thighs with forkfuls missing, until someone tossed it by the end of the day. If Prauer paid attention, he’d have diverted the fish to a shelter or food bank. As unpredictable as he was with his investment decisions, he was equally unimaginative with his magnanimity.

  “You’re better?” Lisa asked Ferko.

  “In the pink,” he said, lifting the top of his bagel to reveal the fish beneath.

  She made a sour face.

  “Better,” he said. He capped the bagel and took a bite. This morning, in the mirror, he’d looked a bit gaunt. It was good to eat. He swallowed.

  “What’re we doing?” he asked.

  She raised her eyebrows and waited.

  “We have meetings,” he said.

  “You’re reporting on financing.”

  “What does Prauer expect?”

  “Seven fifty.”

  “No fucking way.”

  “At least,” she said. “You should’ve stuck around Saturday. Greg said it was possible.”

  Ferko imagined it now—Greg, in Ferko’s absence, swagging seven fifty, minimum, perhaps even suggesting it was Ferko’s number, raising Prauer’s expectations so that he’d accept the billion-plus price tag while still meeting his hurdle. The more debt Riverfront raised against the Grove assets, the better the return on investment. Worse, with a seven-fifty floor, Prauer would expect more debt—eight hundred or eight fifty. Each dollar of incremental debt was a dollar less he’d need to invest from Riverfront’s funds, boosting returns. Ferko was being set up to fail. He supposed he deserved it.

  “Fuck Greg,” Ferko said.

  “I suggest you tell him that directly”—she glanced at her watch—“in twenty minutes.”

  “No one’s going to lend Grove five hundred. Four hundred’s a stretch. The leveraged loan market is done. Prauer knows that. Even dickhead Greg knows that.”

  She tsked him, stared at him with her hard eyes until they softened.

  “Did I ever tell you,” she asked, “I wanted to be a schoolteacher?”

  He put his elbows on the table and folded his hands. “I don’t believe you have.”

  “All growing up. Until my junior year of college.”

  “What happened?”

  “Money happened.”

  Ferko pushed his chin forward and nodded. Money had happened to him, too. After college. The stock market was rising. The math wasn’t difficult. Twenty percent returns meant you could double your money every four or five years. It worked until it didn’t. Guys like Prauer succeeded through optimism and swagger and the uncanny ability to spot a bargain. When things got bad they put their heads down and kept buying. That was the value they added: determination and guts and the ability to convince rich people to trust them. The theory was dodgy—something bought at a given price today would be worth more tomorrow.

  “You know what’s nice?” she asked, but she didn’t give Ferko a chance to answer. “There are teachers everywhere. You can be in New York or Wisconsin. I always imagined myself someplace north, a town on a river that freezes every winter.” She paused as though allowing herself to imagine it. “Not a city, but a town,” she said. “Maybe even a village.
And the people who live there skate the river, from one town to the next. I think I read that in a book once.”

  “Or heard it in a Joni Mitchell song.” It was an obscure reference, but it didn’t faze her. He took another bite of his bagel and wiped his mouth with a napkin.

  “Village makes it sound like there’s no central heat,” he said. “Just a wood-burning stove. Or maybe you’d use coal. You could shovel coal into your potbelly stove.”

  “Coal’s dirty,” she said.

  He nodded his agreement. “And there’d be no school system, no salary. You’d teach the village elders’ children in exchange for beads and baskets and fish.” He removed the top of his bagel to reveal what was left of his salmon.

  “Okay, a town, not a village. Someplace with historic buildings. But not too historic.”

  “Sounds quaint.”

  “And a Starbucks,” she said.

  “The historic Starbucks?”

  “They love those properties.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  She paused to shrug. “Exit strategy?” It was more question than statement.

  “But I’m the one who’s about to get thrown out on his ear,” he said.

  Greg didn’t show for their ten o’clock. Lisa walked Ferko through the deal.

  “Financing contingency omitted,” she said.

  “Nice,” Ferko said, but it wasn’t a surprise. It was Prauer’s MO, to allow himself no outs. It gave him an edge, which he used, even in a case like Grove, where the competition for the assets was thin.

  After a time they had nothing left to say. Ferko stuck his head out into the hallway. Still no Greg. His office lights were out. They were equipped with motion sensors, which meant that no one had been there for a while.

  “Maybe he’s hanging out with Kyle Grove,” Lisa said.

  “The murderer?”

  “The Grove family bad boy.”

  She pulled up an image on her laptop. Kyle Grove’s blond hair fell past his collar. He wore a scruffy beard, black sunglasses. He looked like he belonged in Hollywood.

  “You’re obsessed with him, aren’t you?” Ferko asked.

  She shrugged. “Kyle and Greg are hanging together, growing their hair, getting tan on Daddy’s yacht.”

  “Dead Daddy’s yacht,” Ferko said.