The Schuyler House

by Cade Haddock Strong

  Once that’s done, I pull out my Chinese take-out box and scarf down every last bite of food inside while sipping on one of the beers. Apparently, this running from the law stuff is causing me to have an amazing appetite. After I gorge myself on Chinese food, I pop open another beer and pick up my new cell phone. It’s charged up somewhat, so I type in Ellen’s phone number and hold my breath as it rings.

  “Damn, Ellen, where are you?” I mutter when it goes to voice mail again. I stab the phone to end the call and sit back down at the small desk. I open the pack of pens and the notebook that I bought at Duane Reade and doodle on a piece of paper as I start to weigh my options.

  I write Option # 1: Stay in New York City. I could stay in New York, but for a reason that I cannot pinpoint, I don’t want to, so then I jot down Option 2: Go back to Vermont. I know I want to get back to Vermont eventually, but I know it’s way too soon to even seriously contemplate that as an option. Not to mention the fact that I don’t currently have a car at my disposal. That leads me to write Option 3: Fly somewhere far away, ideally foreign. But I quickly admit that Option 3 is totally stupid. I’m certainly not going to fly somewhere using my license as ID, and it would be way too risky to try to fly anywhere using Sarah’s driver’s license. I don’t happen to have a passport on me so sneaking off to some foreign destination is also completely unrealistic at this point.

  At this point I’m stumped, and I start to doodle some more until another option pops into my head. I write Option 4: Washington, DC. I can easily get there on the train or bus—check. I know and love the city since I lived there for many years after college—double check! DC is likely to be a tad warmer than New York—Option 4 seems like the clear winner, and after a little more doodling, I decide to head to DC sometime the next day before turning my attention to formulating my game plan for the next forty-eight hours.

  First thing tomorrow morning, I’ll go to the bank where we have the safe deposit box. From there, I will head to the Apple Store and get myself a laptop and new iPhone. Finally, I’ll shop for a change of clothes and a couple of other supplies before I take off for DC… Now I just have to figure out the best way to get to DC. Amtrak is the first thing that comes to my mind, but I figure taking the Chinatown bus is probably a better idea. The Chinatown bus is dirt-cheap and seems like a good way to stay below the radar.

  Once I’ve established my near-term game plan, I turn to a fresh page in the notebook so I can write a note to Ellen to leave in the Hatshepsut safe deposit box the next morning. I’m seriously counting on the fact that she made it out of Schuyler House uninjured and undetected. The limited news I’ve seen on the Schuyler House burglary makes no mention of her, so I have to assume she’s on the run like me.

  I start my note to her by writing the date at the top of the page, and this is enough to cause the tears to start. Pretty soon, I’m sobbing uncontrollably and have to go to the bathroom to get a Kleenex so that I can blow my nose. Eventually, my tears subside enough that I can start to write…

  Dear Ellen,

  I am completely and utterly beside myself with grief about what happened at Schuyler House. I am sure you know by now that Sarah and Kat are dead. God, I still cannot believe it. How the hell could something like that have happened? It’s still all a blur and it all happened so fast. One second I was out on the deck next to Sarah and Kat and the next second I was in a giant snowbank on the side of the river. I tried so hard to get back up to the house but the snow was too deep and the riverbank was too steep.

  I want to see you and talk to you so badly. I hope you find this note soon. I tried to call you but got voice mail. I will keep trying you but please call me at the number below the second you read this.

  I am in NYC now but I plan to go to DC tomorrow. I pray that you are all right.

  Love,

  Mattie

  I glance over at the “Ellen phone number” that I jotted down from the second SIM card and scribble it at the bottom of my note and then tuck the note into my ski coat.

  I decide to try Ellen one more time before going to bed. Much to my disappointment, I get voice mail just like all the other times, but this time I decide to leave her a cryptic message. I pretend to be someone asking her to donate money to the biannual NPR fund drive and leave the “Ellen phone number” as the call back number. If she gets the message, I’m pretty sure she will figure out it’s me—we both listen to NPR religiously, and we used to moan about their biannual fund drive during which they constantly interrupt the morning broadcast to plead for donations, promising that callers will be entered in a drawing for twenty free iPads.

  I hang up and set the cell phone on the desk. I pull SIM card #1 out of the phone and stuff it inside my Chinese take-out container and toss it in the garbage. I’ve probably read too many James Patterson books; I am totally paranoid that if the police have Ellen’s cell phone they will eventually trace it to the SIM card.

  Before climbing into bed, I pull the second “clean” SIM card (the card with the “Ellen number”) out of my ski coat and pop it into the Motorola phone. However, now that I have inserted the “clean” SIM card into the phone, I have absolutely no intention of using the Motorola phone again. I will just keep it charged and cross my fingers that Ellen either listens to my phony NPR voice mail or gets the note I plan to leave for her in the safe deposit box and eventually calls me.

  I slip under the covers and turn out the light. I am completely exhausted but I cannot fall asleep. My mind just churns. It’s like there’s a little Indy race going on in my brain. I keep going over and over the events of the last twenty-four hours. Goddammit, we were so stupid, I say to myself. So, so stupid. The money and the thrill clouded our judgment. Who am I kidding, we let it completely shroud our judgment. And now Kat and Sarah are dead. I put my pillow over my face and scream into it. Then I fling the pillow onto the bed and punch it a few times.

  I lay back down and stare at the ceiling. I vow I will never ever steal so much as a ketchup packet for the rest of my life. I’m going to become more law abiding than a nun.

  Chapter Ten

  After securing some breakfast, I check out of the hotel around eleven o’clock and cut through Morningside Park before turning toward Central Park. The bank where we have our safe deposit box is a Bank of America on the corner of Lexington and 43rd, so I cut through Central Park to get to the Eastside and then take the Five Train down to Grand Central Station. It’s still really chilly, and the wind is blowing a lot more today than it was yesterday.

  I get to the bank just as all the workers are starting to pour out of their offices for lunch and the bank is bustling with activity. Sarah and I are the ones who originally opened the safe deposit box for Hatshepsut Consulting, and I’ve visited the bank a few times since we opened the box so I know that I need to head to the desk in the back of the bank labeled Special Services. There are a few people in line at the desk ahead of me, so I try to patiently wait my turn but I’m super nervous, which makes me fidgety. My palms are all sweaty.

  When I reach the desk, I indicate that I am here to access my safe deposit box, and the woman behind the desk picks up her phone to call someone. She looks up at me after she hangs up the phone. “Michael will be right out to greet you. Please have a seat,” she says in a very high-pitched voice and points to a small seating area next to the desk.

  Michael appears before I even have a chance to sit down and walks me into a small room off to the side of the main bank. He asks to see my ID and I hand him Sarah’s license. He then directs me to sign a logbook before he escorts me into the area where the safe deposit boxes are located. Thankfully, I am still wearing my ski hat, and he doesn’t seem to notice that I don’t have curly red hair like the photo on the license.

  Unlike the old days, a key is not required to open our box. Instead, we had to pick an eight-digit PIN, and in order to make ours easy to remember (and look up if necessary), we picked 1507-1457, the year in which Hatshepsut was born and the year i
n which she died (minus one in both cases to make the PIN a little less obvious). I enter our PIN, Michael enters the master PIN for the bank and this releases the safe deposit box from its hold.

  He shows me to a small private room, and once the metal door locks behind me, I sit down and open the box. It has about $500,000 in cash plus four credit cards and four debit cards. All the credit and debit cards are in the name of the LLC that we set up—Hatshepsut Consulting. There should also be another $500,000 or so in the Hatshepsut Consulting’s checking account. I take $100,000 in cash, one credit card and one debit card and leave the note I wrote for Ellen. The cash is mostly in hundred-dollar bills, but there are a few packs of twenty-dollar bills and it’s pretty bulky. I spread as much cash as I can into the various internal and external pockets of my ski coat and jam the rest into Sarah’s yellow fanny pack before summoning Michael so I can return the safe deposit box to the vault.

  After I’m done at the bank, I walk up Lexington until I reach 57th Street and then cut over to Fifth Avenue. I pass throngs of tourists and well-clad shoppers and figure, based on my less than fashionable attire none of them would ever guess that I have a hundred grand in cash stuffed in my coat pockets. I stroll down Fifth Avenue until I get to the Apple Store on the northeast corner of Central Park. I go in, and less than thirty minutes later, walk out with a new MacBook Air and a new iPhone. From there I head to Patagonia, an outdoor clothing store known for their quality clothing, but also often referred to as “PataGucci” for the sometimes-exorbitant prices, and buy a small daypack with a bunch of external pockets plus a few pairs of warm socks.

  My last stop is Macy’s where I buy two pair of 7 For All Mankind jeans, a black leather belt, two new bras (since I only have a jog bra with me), two long sleeve T-shirts, and a black V-neck sweater. After the saleswoman at Macy’s rings me up, I ask her if I can go back into the changing room and change into my new clothes. She smiles. “Of course, dear,” she says and leads me back to the changing rooms. Once inside the changing room, I quickly peel off my layers of long underwear, exchange my fleece pants for a pair of jeans, swap out my jog bra for one of my new bras and slip into one of the T-shirts and my new sweater. I stuff my fleece pants, long-underwear tops, and jog bra along with the rest of my new clothes into my new daypack alongside my new laptop and head out of the store.

  I walk a few blocks and duck into the first Starbucks I see so I can fire up my new computer and use the free Wi-Fi. Once I am online, I set up a new Gmail account, buy my ticket for the Chinatown bus to DC and start to poke around the Airbnb website for a place to stay in DC. Eventually, I settle on a small Airbnb apartment in the Logan Circle neighborhood and I send the host a request for a one-week stay beginning the next day.

  Once that’s done, I pack up my stuff and head back outside. I’ve still got some time to kill before my bus leaves. It is probably a good three or four miles from where I am to Chinatown but I decide to walk anyway. I’ve got nothing else to do and I could use some exercise.

  It is just past eight o’clock when I reach Fifth Avenue and the street is a complete and utter zoo, packed with holiday tourists. I follow the hoards and wander by Rockefeller Center to see the Christmas tree and the ice skaters before continuing toward Chinatown.

  The walk to Chinatown takes me about two hours including a little pit stop for a beer and some fish tacos. I arrive at the designated bus stop about fifteen minutes early. I’m surprised to see there’s already a small queue of people lined up for the bus, and I take my place at the end of the line. I go to pull out my phone to scroll some news headlines, but the bus pulls up before I have a chance. The driver scans my e-ticket and I board and take a window seat about halfway back. The bus has Wi-Fi so, once I am seated, I pull out my laptop to see if I’ve heard from Bettie, the Airbnb host, and I’m relieved to see that she’s confirmed my dates and can meet me the next day at three.

  As the bus pulls away from the curb, I’m happy no one has taken the seat next to me. I take advantage of the extra room and curl up against the window to try and get some sleep during the trip, mindful that I have a hundred thousand dollars stuffed into my ski coat and fanny pack.

  Chapter Eleven

  It’s still pitch black when we arrive in DC just before five o’clock, and the sun is showing no sign of rising any time soon. The bus drops us on the eastern side of Chinatown in DC, and the streets are totally deserted except for an occasional taxicab.

  Once I get off the bus, I contemplate heading for Union Station but instead decide to walk toward Metro Center so I can take the train to Ronald Reagan National Airport, which is located just outside the city. The airport should already be hopping at this time of the morning and it seems like a good place to kill some time—the airport has free Wi-Fi, lots of options for food and clean restrooms—before I am scheduled to meet my Airbnb host later that afternoon.

  When I get to Metro Center I go to one of the ticket kiosk machines and buy a SmartTrip card so I won’t have to deal with paper tickets every time I want to ride the Metro. Once I have my SmartTrip card, I head down the escalator to the train platform, and an Orange Line train headed in the direction of National Airport pulls up a few minutes later. The train ride is only about twenty minutes and the train is virtually empty since it’s still so early in the morning and I’m doing a reverse commute—heading out of the city when most commuters are headed in.

  As soon as I get to the airport, I make a beeline to the ladies’ room—I was scared to use the toilet on the bus and I’m about to burst plus I am dying to brush my teeth—and then I go in search of something for breakfast. I buy a bacon, egg, and cheese bagel sandwich and sit in a vacant row of chairs in front of big windows that offer a nice view of the tarmac. I perch myself on one of the chairs and stare out at the planes on the tarmac while I slowly nibble on my breakfast sandwich. I eventually drag my laptop out of my backpack and connect to the airport Wi-Fi.

  I trawl through a bunch of news websites to see if there is anything more on Schuyler House. The CNN site is dominated by breaking news about a mega blizzard about to hit the Rockies and the Midwest. I poke around some more but don’t see anything on the CNN site about Schuyler House so I navigate to the Albany Times-Union website.

  “Holy fucking shit!” I mutter a bit too loudly. The police have already connected the dots and linked Ellen and me to the attempted break-in at the Schuyler House. I am a bit taken aback they made the connection so quickly. We were all really careful and never exchanged emails or text messages about the heists we planned. Guess we weren’t as stealthy as we thought… They must have uncovered something at Sarah’s house linking the four of us. We always used Sarah’s house as our home base, and obviously we got sloppy somewhere.

  I skim the Times-Union article, and it refers to Ellen and me as “people of interest” and has a photo of each of us, but mine is from at least five years ago when I had much shorter hair and Ellen’s photo isn’t all that current either. I note with some relief that the article mentions Schuyler House but makes no mention of any of our previous burglaries so I can only hope the police never put together all the pieces of the puzzle.

  I suddenly feel extremely exposed, like everyone in the airport is looking at me. In reality though, I currently look nothing like the picture, I’m five hundred miles away from Schuyler House and everyone at the airport is laser-focused on getting where they need to go. Plus, as of now, the story is only in the local paper. It’s possible that CNN and the other big national media outlets will eventually pick it up, but hopefully it will be completely overshadowed by news of the imminent mega blizzard.

  I shut my laptop and think about my sister Abby for the first time since the deck collapsed at Schuyler House. I wonder what she will think if and when she hears that I was part of an attempted art burglary. Abby is almost fifteen years older than me, and I haven’t spoken to her more than once or twice since my mom died three years ago. She and I were never close growing up. The age difference
had a lot to do with it, but Abby has resented me since the day I was born and has always tried her best to pretend that I don’t exist. My mom was in her mid-forties when I was born and my father was well into his fifties—I was, without question, a surprise to all of them. Abby’s resentment was likely magnified by the fact that my parents seemed to have more time for me than they did for her when she was young. My father spent her early childhood building his business and, once it was successful, he found time to go to my soccer games and swim meets when he’d rarely made it to hers. Anyway, Abby went to Georgia for college, married the son of a Baptist preacher and pretty much cut off all ties with me when I came out in high school. I was angry with her for so many years, but now our nonexistent relationship just makes me sad. I’ve always hoped that someday we would reconcile, but I guess that day is going to have to wait.

  I’m jolted out of my daze when a large man in a tweed suit plunks down in the seat next to me, causing the entire row of chairs to wobble. I rub my eyes and check my watch and am surprised to see that it’s already almost noon. I decide it’s probably time for me to make my way back into the city. I take the Orange line from the airport to Farragut North which is right in the center of the business district and only a few blocks from the White House.

  I walk north on Connecticut Avenue up through DuPont Circle and then, for no real reason, wander over toward Adams Morgan. It calms me to walk through the old neighborhoods I used to know so well. Halfway up Eighteenth Street in Adams Morgan, I cut over to Columbia Avenue and walk a few blocks until I come upon the running store where I used to buy all my running gear when I lived in DC. I wonder if I walked here subconsciously. On impulse, I open the door and go inside.