by Andrew Gross
He shrugged. “A little over a hundred thousand dollars and climbing.”
“Oh my God!” I saw the whole thing now.
“At first I tried to re-fi this place, but that’s a three-month process. And I never thought the FEMA claims would drag on as long as they have. But it’s not just the money . . . It’s the collateral. It’s the security they demanded on the loan that’s become the real problem for me.”
“Collateral?”
He pushed himself back in his chair and said resignedly, “My job.”
“You mean they’d own you?” I saw what he was saying and the situation he was in. “You’d basically be working for the Russian mob.”
“Ukrainian,” he said with a rueful smile. “And they’d be delighted if they got to take it back that way. They’d get ten times the value. Their hooks in someone who goes between the NYPD and the mayor’s administration.
“Hilary, look, I don’t know what kind of crap my father got mixed up in. Whatever he found that these people seem to value so much. That’s worth killing for. All I know is that half a million dollars is a way out for me, as much as it was for you. I’m sorry. Maybe it’s not the story you were expecting to hear. But I can’t let the police get involved. I can’t let this pass by. I can’t.”
He looked at me, his cheeks blown out, an expression somewhere between guilt and disappointment.
“So what are you suggesting we do?”
He shrugged. “I’m suggesting we find a way to keep the money.”
I stared blankly at him. Going to the police and possibly facing charges and maybe even going to jail were exactly at the top of my top-ten list. “You know if we do that, Patrick, once you let this chance go by, you’ll never be able to turn yourself back in. If it ever comes out, you won’t even have a job to go back to.”
He nodded. “I’d rather risk it doing something to protect my family than put it at risk every day doing favors for people I took an oath to put away. You’re right, it is sounding like blackmail. And I want to find out what the hell my father got himself into. Before someone else does.”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry, Patrick, but I just can’t put my son at risk.”
“That’s task number one. First thing in the A.M. I can reach out for a favor to the local police up there and make sure that wherever he’s staying has a patrol car on watch for a while.”
“He’s safe for the time being. He’s with my housekeeper. No one would know about her. But thanks.” I nodded appreciatively. “So what’s task number two?”
“Task number two is that we find out just who the hell is behind this and exactly what it is they’re trying to protect that’s worth paying five hundred thousand dollars for.”
“I think I’m stepping a little out of my league,” I said, a beat of trepidation rising up.
“I thought you were the one who came to me and said you wanted to handle this privately . . .”
I smiled. But a smile with the same enthusiasm I’d have if I’d just swallowed a mouthful of calf’s brains. I sorted through my options. I could say no and still go to the police on my own. It might mean jail. It might even mean losing my son. At least for a while. Brandon’s life would be turned upside down, that was for sure. And there would still be those people out there. Behind this. I didn’t have a clue who they even were. Would they just let me off the hook for what I’d done? The commitment of the man who tried to get me at the boatyard didn’t convince me they would. And the stakes had been raised. By whatever he meant when he said that there was more. The diary. Patrick’s father was clearly blackmailing someone. Who? Not to mention, if I did turn this over to the authorities now, I’d clearly be hanging Patrick out to dry.
But there was also something new to factor in, which was making me feel a whole lot more secure.
I had him.
I said, “You realize how scary this is? Not just for me. But for Brandon.”
He nodded. “I guess I’ll take that as a yes?”
“It’s a yes.” I nodded, but slowly, halfheartedly. “At least, kind of.”
He reached across the table and put out his hand. “So I guess that makes us kind of partners. Just one more thing . . .”
“What’s that?”
“It’s almost two in the morning. This might be the best chance we’ll ever have . . .”
“The best chance for what?” I asked. His hand was still out.
“For getting that money,” he said.
“You mean tonight? Go back home?”
He nodded. “If you did to him what you said you did, then there might never be a better time.”
I felt my heart pick up with nerves. I looked at him appraisingly. “You’re not married or anything, are you?”
He shook his head. “I was. Not anymore. Why?”
“No reason.” I finally shook his hand. “My car’s a little beaten up. I think you’re driving.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Mirho’s phone rang. It was one in the morning. He didn’t have to look to see who it was. The boss didn’t like failure, and so far, all he’d gotten was a busted rib and a broken nose. He pulled the car over. He didn’t want to answer. He just cleared his throat.
“I’m here.”
“I was supposed to hear from you. Do we have it? You seemed to feel you had it in the bag earlier. I didn’t hear back.”
Mirho dabbed away some blood from a cut on his face. “Maybe I was a little premature.”
The pause on the other end was like a blade thrust in him. “I don’t have to remind you that we don’t have time. There are things happening, and I can’t have this out there like that. Not to mention it doesn’t exactly sit well with me that someone’s spreading around my money.”
“Nothing’s changed,” Mirho said. “I just have to find another way in.”
“What other way . . . ?”
“You don’t have to know the details. You just want your peace of mind back. Let me handle the rest. I haven’t let you down yet, have I?”
“You know, if I didn’t know better . . .” His boss chuckled. “It might seem as if this woman’s got the better of you. Maybe I should have gone out and hired her.”
“Trust me, she’s going to regret it,” Mirho said. He took in a breath and winced. Probably a fractured rib or two from the boat that fell on him. “So much for Mister Nice Guy. I know exactly how I’m going to handle it next.”
MRS. O’B
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Six weeks earlier.
Sheila O’Byrne sorted through what was left of her husband Tom’s belongings, the first time she’d been able to face it since the storm.
The navy suit he wore to Rich’s wedding; Rich was now a fireman down in Delaware. Tom’s favorite Hawaiian shirt that he always wore at the grill for his famous summer barbecues. The old Yankees cap with a Yogi Berra autograph on the bill that his father had given him. Everything she held brought back an important memory for her. Memories she struggled to have to relive right now. Their lives. He had been gone only two months. It was still too soon. Too raw. She ought to do this some other time, she began to feel. Or with her sister, when she came back from Ohio.
This was the second time that the person who meant the most in the world to her had been stolen.
The first, it took months just for her to be able to go out again or do her chores. But that was twenty years ago. She never thought she’d have to go through it all over again.
Go through it all again, she thought, and alone.
Two months out, the house was still mostly rotted roofing and drywall, and covered with debris. It was still laid open where the elm had gone right through their roof and the bay had rushed in, her only protection a weatherproof tarp and some temporary insulation to bar the cold. Everyone promised help; so far none had come. Other than Joe’s son, Patrick, who had come back to help his dad rebuild. Volunteers were everywhere; but volunteers could only help clear the mess and bring them food and blanke
ts. They couldn’t rebuild their homes. They couldn’t give her back her memories.
Sheila took out the white dress shirt with his initials monogrammed on the sleeve that Tom had worn to Rich’s graduation from the academy.
T. L. O’B
The tears rushed in again. Like the storm. She put her hand in front of her face and began to cry.
That was when she heard a knock coming from downstairs, and a voice from the front porch. “Hello. Anyone here?” The stairs were about all that was structurally left of their old place; everything else was still gutted and open to the world. And to the biting wind and the cold. And now the snow. For a few weeks Sheila had gone to her son’s place in Delaware, but they didn’t have much room. And then to a cousin’s in Ridgewood. Finally she just thought, Tom would want me back here. There were all their memories to protect. And a house to rebuild. Their house. That was all she had now.
Sheila went downstairs to see who it was. A young couple was at the front door, visible through the glass. They looked in their thirties maybe. Sheila opened the door. The woman was pretty in a quilted down jacket, carrying a shopping bag. The man was tall and thin, and wore glasses. He looked professional. They were probably from a church group with some food or a prayer to deliver.
Food helped these days.
“Mrs. O’Byrne?”
“Yes.” Sheila pointed to the mess. “Sorry not to invite you in. In or out, I guess it’s all the same now,” she said with a smile.
“That’s okay . . .” The woman smiled back. “We won’t stay. We just . . .” She glanced at her husband as if searching for the right words. “We think we have something that might belong to you.”
“To me . . . ?” Sheila looked back at her with surprise.
“Yes. We’re the Richmans,” the husband said, introducing them. “Alan and Nina. We have a beach house in Deal, on the Jersey shore. We were pretty battered too. But we were out on the beach the other day looking at the erosion there and we saw that this had washed up. There was a name inside it . . .” She opened the bag and took out the hand-painted lacquer box that was inside. “Deirdre Annemarie O’Byrne. It said Midland Beach. Is this yours . . . ?”
Sheila’s breath went out of her. She stared. At first it was like her heart just stopped, like someone pulled the plug in an instant. And then it kicked right up again, not in worry this time, but in giddiness, joy, something she hadn’t felt in a long time. She took the box in her hands, let her fingers wrap around it. Lovingly. “Oh good Lord . . .”
She felt as if her legs were about to give out.
“Are you all right?” the husband asked. “I hope we didn’t upset you. Maybe you ought to sit down.”
“Please.” Sheila nodded, a little wobbly. They helped her over to a chair in what used to be her living room.
The wife came over to her. “Can I get you some water?”
“No, I’m fine. I’m fine. It’s just that . . .” She looked up at them. “This was my daughter’s.”
She opened the box’s clasp and peered inside. The bound leather diary was still there, amazingly intact. And the little box containing Deirdre’s baby teeth, along with a cutting of her hair. “She’s not with us any longer. This is all we had left of her. I was sure it was gone. We lost it in the storm.”
“I’m so sorry,” the wife said. “It’s amazing, it doesn’t even seem so badly damaged. It must have been carried by the tide.”
“Yes. All the way down to Deal,” Sheila said, her eyes glistening. She took out a couple of the waterlogged pictures. And Deirdre’s journal. Miraculously, it seemed like most of the handwritten pages—pages she had written right up to the day she disappeared, the day, they found out later, she had died—still seemed legible. “She was headed to college. Up in Buffalo. She was killed. August 21, 1992. We never even found her body. For over ten years . . . until they dug up the ground in the area over by the Goethals Bridge to make some new apartment complex. We never knew what she was even doing over there. Or if that’s just where they dumped her . . . She had some boyfriend we never knew . . .”
“I’m so sorry,” the woman said. She looked at her husband. “I wish there was something we could do.”
“Oh, you have. You already have!” Sheila O’Byrne looked up at them. “The storm took everything from me. Everything. But this . . . This is almost like you gave me something back. Thank you,” she said, and stood up and hugged them both. “You can’t know how much it means.”
Later, in the kitchen, warmed by a blanket and a space heater, she ate the Chinese meal that Patrick had brought her and brewed herself a cup of tea. She knew she should have called Rich and told him what had turned up today. What she was holding in her hand.
But just for a few minutes, Sheila wanted this moment to herself.
She opened Deirdre’s journal. Many of the pages had the crisp, dried-out feel of antique parchment; on others the twenty-year-old ink had run. Over the years, she’d read through it so many times. Maybe a hundred since Deirdre had never come back that day. She knew the musicians her daughter had liked by heart: Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, Michael Jackson. The boys she had an eye on then. Her inner dreams and ambitions. She said she wanted to study veterinary medicine.
And this one boy . . .
She had never had much to say about him. She never even wrote his full name, only some nickname. He was a year younger and came from a different school. He was poor. How they met at a summer street fair.
What was the point? Sheila shut the book tight. All it brought back was pain that was twenty years old. And now, with Tom gone, the tide of it felt as strong and wounding as if it had all happened yesterday.
It had taken twelve years to even find her. And then it was just by matching up her DNA; what was left of her was too far gone. The first year or two she and Tom still held out hope that one day she’d come running back through the door. But in their hearts they knew. They always knew. Deirdre would call if she was going to be home an hour late from school.
They knew.
One of her girlfriends confirmed for them that she’d recently met this guy. He didn’t have much; Deirdre was always a rescuer. Some stray cat, a dog, a homeless person. She was there for any cause. No one knew his name or how to locate him. They tried, of course. Even just to see if he knew where she was that night. What time she might have left him. She was leaving for college in a week. The pain came back. She was just eighteen . . .
Why? Sheila sat there with the journal and asked herself. Why play this old record all over again and again . . . ?
She opened it once more. Like she had so many times. To the same, familiar spot. Near the end.
“It makes it all the more fun,” her daughter had written, “if we keep everything shrouded in mystery. As if we were at some kind of masked ball, like in The Count of Monte Cristo. There’s no hope of it lasting, of course. I’m leaving on the twenty-fourth for college and he’ll be going back to school. So we decided not to even call each other by our real names. He only calls me Cordelia. What a beautiful name. From King Lear. The most beautiful and the most loyal.
“And I call him by this name his family had given him . . .”
Sheila paged to the last entry: August 22.
They never knew if it was him or someone else. They could never locate him. But reading the name again brought everything back. As if it had all happened yesterday. As if it was happening all over again.
His name, like a knife piercing her heart, the name of the person who had cost her everything.
“Streak,” her daughter had written in that graceful, familiar script of hers.
That’s what she called him.
She wrote, “We’ll see how it goes. I’m going to meet Streak one last time.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Patrick and I rushed back to my house in Armonk at two thirty in the morning. It took only forty minutes; there was barely another car on the road. As we turned up my cul-de-sac, I kept my eyes peeled f
or any suspicious cars around.
I didn’t see any.
“Whoa!” Patrick ogled, his eyes widening as we drove into the driveway. The place did look impressive with its second-floor dormers, mullioned windows, the three-car garage, and the outside lights turned on.
“Make me an offer.” I grinned. “We can start with your share of the cash.”
“Sorry.” He pulled the car up in front of the garage. “Just a shade out of my league.”
“I hope you don’t mind if we dispense with the tour. I’ll be back in a minute.” I ran in through the garage and hurriedly threw together a change of clothes and a few toiletries as Patrick stayed in front and stood guard.
Then I went around the back.
It was a bit eerie going under the deck, my feet crunching on a crusty layer of snow, no light but the moon. I crawled over to the cooler and breathed a sigh of relief to find the ski bag where I’d left it. I was even more relieved when I opened it and saw the money still there. I zipped the case up and went back upstairs.
Barely five minutes had passed and I was back in the car.
“Let’s just get out of here,” I said.
“Mind if I take a peek?” Patrick asked, and zipped open the nylon case. His eyes grew wide. “Always wondered what half a million dollars looked like.”
“Four hundred and thirty-seven five,” I reminded him. “Now can we please get the hell out of here?”
It took even less time to make it back to his house in Bensonhurst. The late hour, along with the intensity of everything I’d been through tonight, began to take its toll. I even closed my eyes and dozed on the way back.
Back at his house, Patrick insisted I take the bedroom and threw a sheet and a quilt over the couch for himself. He threw the money in a storage nook in the basement. In about thirty seconds I was dead to the world. The next thing I knew I was opening my eyes and it was light. The smell of bacon was coming from the kitchen. I threw a T-shirt on over my jeans and stepped out.