Gone by Morning

by Michele Weinstat Miller

  Kathleen’s phone shivered in the back pocket of her jeans, interrupting her housecleaning: Emily had posted on Facebook. Kathleen had meant to terminate the Sophie social media accounts once Emily moved into the building, but she hadn’t brought herself to do it. Even though she didn’t need to use a fake account to have contact with Emily anymore, she couldn’t exactly open a Facebook account with a real profile photo and stay tuned in to Emily’s life. Lauren might see it. Kathleen had taken a similar risk of running into Lauren, though, when she rented an apartment to Emily. But Kathleen had easily avoided Lauren the day she helped Emily move in, and Emily mostly gravitated toward the family home downtown when she wasn’t working.

  Emily’s post was a video of Rusty. She was telling her friends that he’d woken her up from a nightmare yesterday. She wasn’t sharing on Facebook what had caused her to have a nightmare. Wise girl. She didn’t need to broadcast that she might be a witness in a future murder prosecution, especially not when the killer was still out there.

  Kathleen’s phone buzzed again, this time a phone call from a number that wasn’t in her contacts. She answered, expecting a robocall.

  “Ms. Harris?”

  “Yes, who is this?”

  “Dunbar, at Sharon Williams’s building.”

  “Oh, hello.” He was the last person she’d expected to hear from.

  “Sorry to bother you, but you’re listed as an emergency contact for Sharon here at the building. I guess you did tell the truth about your relationship to her.”

  “I did,” Kathleen said, although she was a bit surprised by this news.

  “You know she only rented the apartment? From the condo owner. He wants to start cleaning out the place so he can rent it again.”

  “He’s not wasting any time.”

  “I guess he needs the rent money.” Dunbar lowered his voice. “He’s not my favorite.”

  “I’ll come over and start packing her things. Did the police do a lot of damage in there?”

  “Not really. I stayed with them. It’s building policy that we stay whenever we let anyone into the apartment, even the cops. They took her laptop, looked through some papers. I don’t think they really put on their Sherlock Holmes caps.”

  “I can imagine. I’ll be over later. Will you be on duty?”

  “Until four.”

  Kathleen wasn’t looking forward to emptying out Sharon’s apartment. She thought she’d store the furniture until she could make sure no one was entitled to it. She could look for a will in the apartment, and maybe she’d find contact information for friends, business cards or event invitations. She could poke around and see if Sharon had left anything else around indicating that she planned to meet someone, perhaps after seeing Kathleen, on the night she died.

  She doubted she’d find something like that, especially after the police had been at the apartment, but she hoped she’d at least find a lead on Angel. If she found a full name, she could look for her on social media. Sharon had no social media accounts, at least not under any name Kathleen knew, so Kathleen couldn’t even peruse a list of Facebook friends. It was a pity no one kept real-life phone books and calendars anymore.

  CHAPTER

  16

  SHARON’S APARTMENT WAS as clean as Kathleen’s. It was a one-bedroom with a view of a high-rise building across the street and the huge multifloor SONY movie theater. An apartment like this in a prime doorman building was by no means cheap. Sharon had plenty of cash for rent but no on-the-books job to qualify her for a mortgage. That would be why she’d sublet rather than bought.

  Dunbar stayed close, watchful, while Kathleen looked around. The living room flowed into a small dining area and a compact kitchen that was separated from the rest of the room by a granite breakfast bar. Kathleen went to the kitchen first. Coffeemaker. Microwave. Shiny toaster. Nothing out of place. The counters were so clear of personal effects that the place could have been a vacation villa. Kathleen opened the refrigerator, looking for any sign of Sharon’s life. She pulled out a box of garbage bags from her oversize shoulder bag. She could throw away the milk and cheese, which were already old.

  “If I were you, I’d leave that for the owner to clean out,” Dunbar said, his full lips pursed tight, dark eyes pained. “You don’t owe him.”

  Kathleen shut the refrigerator. “You’re right.”

  She opened drawers under the counters, hoping for a junk drawer full of clues about Sharon’s life—whom she shared her life with, and who she would willingly accompany in the maroon car just when she was about to reach Kathleen’s home. But there was nothing personal. Silverware, utensils, lighters, a couple of pens, but not a single notepad or discarded item. Even Kathleen’s inner neat freak allowed for personal items, just stored away in an organized manner. Sharon had apparently taken out the garbage with her when she left her home for the last time. The garbage pail under the sink was empty.

  The living room looked like a high-end doctor’s waiting room. Leather Holiday Inn furniture. Neutral colors. There were even a few magazines on the end tables.

  Kathleen turned back to Dunbar, who stood by awkwardly. “Did she bring tricks here?”

  Dunbar looked scared. He wiped his palm over his close-cropped hair. “No, no. They don’t allow that kind of thing here.”

  Okay, Kathleen thought, she definitely brought tricks here, and Dunbar covered for her. Maybe he got a cut. Kathleen would have told Sharon not to do that. One needed personal, untainted space. She didn’t hold the lying against Dunbar. Sharon was dead, and he was alive and needed his job. End of story.

  Kathleen looked at Dunbar, who appeared distraught. “You were pretty close to her, huh?”

  He nodded, his large shoulders rounded. “I’m all messed up about it.”

  “Could you tell me about the last time you saw her?”

  “It was the day of the subway attack. We talked about the attack for a couple of minutes.”

  “Did she seem upset or worried about anything else?”

  “She was upset, just like everyone. She didn’t mention anything else. We were standing out in the driveway, watching the crowds walking uptown, before she went out for her morning run in the Park. The sidewalks were packed with people going back home from work, since the subways were down. A lot of them were hiking ten miles and more, could probably have gotten home faster if they’d waited for the subway to come back on. She said a terrorist attack does that to you, makes you want to keep moving. She said she remembered that from Nine-Eleven.”

  “You’re right. I walked up Central Park West from Forty-Second Street. I passed two blocks from here. It didn’t even occur to me to stop here instead of walking home.” The thought hit Kathleen now, a kick in the gut. “I might have seen you and her standing there if I’d walked on Broadway.”

  Kathleen’s regret deepened. If she’d stopped here, she would have been with Sharon that day. Sharon might not have come to see her that night. Sharon might be alive now. The smallest change in a minute of Kathleen’s day might have meant forty more years of life for her friend.

  Kathleen inhaled, trying to clear her head of the sadness and frustration. She reminded herself that there was no way Sharon’s death had resulted from random bad luck. She hadn’t just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The killer had likely known her and, as Emily had said, was probably someone who planned things out, including the cover-up.

  Kathleen looked around the sterile room. There must have been more to Sharon’s life than she was seeing. There had to be some answers here. “Did you know her friend—Angel, or Angela?”

  “Yeah, Angela. But I haven’t seen her for a while. I think Sharon used to stay at Angela’s a lot. Angela would come pick her up in an old Toyota. But I haven’t seen her for at least six months. Maybe they broke up.”

  They must not have been in regular contact if Angela hadn’t come here to try to find Sharon as Kathleen had. “I’ll start in the bedroom now,” she said, mulling it over.


  CHAPTER

  17

  THE BLINDS WERE at half-mast in Sharon’s bedroom, and the room lay in shadow. Kathleen turned on the light and homed in on the books piled on the night table next to the bed. She felt a surprising sense of relief. It was the first real sign that Sharon had lived here, or lived at all.

  Kathleen picked up the top book: an Al-Anon meditation book with inspiring thoughts for each day of the year. Below it was an Al-Anon step book. Sharon had been attending Al-Anon, the twelve-step program for people who had relatives or friends who were alcoholics or addicts. Kathleen didn’t think Sharon’s parents were alcoholics, so maybe it was Angela who’d motivated Sharon to go. Long ago, Kathleen had tried Al-Anon herself. For a few weeks. She’d attended meetings at a building on Saint Marks Place where AA, NA, and Al-Anon meetings ran twenty-four hours a day. It had been a few blocks from the home she shared with her husband and then-twelve-year-old Lauren.

  A speaker at one of the meetings, a graying elementary schoolteacher, had said, “Have you tried everything to stop him? Have you tried being extra nice to him, thinking—or maybe he told you—that if you only treated him better, he wouldn’t drink or use drugs? Have you tried being a royal bitch? Have you tried drinking or drugging with him, thinking that maybe, if you drank with him, he wouldn’t think of you as the square who’s always nagging? And maybe if you got high with him, you could convince him to drink or drug less?”

  For a fleeting moment a few months later, Kathleen remembered that woman’s words when Michael came home with cocaine to smoke for the first time. Lauren was at a friend’s house for a birthday sleepover. Michael was already high, rocking from foot to foot, hyped up. “Kat, come on, let’s try something new … together.”

  He’d given her that irresistibly broad smile, teeth still white back then. The same smile that had coaxed her into her first consensual sex at seventeen. Kathleen had smiled back at him, nervously. “Okay, pass it here.”

  Until that day, Kathleen had been the stable one, a wife and mother who stuck with her troubled husband through thick and thin, unable to bear the thought of abandoning him or depriving Lauren of the father she loved. Maybe if Kathleen had gotten more Al-Anon under her belt, maybe if she’d really listened to the message of the graying schoolteacher—that it didn’t help anything when you got high with them—she would have known better than to try crack even once.

  After that day, they talked about it many times, passing a pipe back and forth to each other during long days and nights in their smoky bedroom as they discussed how they’d gotten hooked on crack the very first time. Neither Kathleen nor Michael had thought the drug would tilt their life off its already fragile axis after only one hit of a pipe. Sometimes Michael would weep, saying, “I know I got you into this, baby. I’m sorry.”

  But she’d ended up worse than Michael. Within just a few days of first smoking, Kathleen started to hear a secret transistor radio broadcasting in her head and saw terrifying images. She learned later that she had cocaine-induced psychosis. Each day, her belly and chest clenched with craving. The addiction was a drill sergeant that demanded she get high, but she’d had no idea that the drill sergeant was making her insane too.

  It would be a long time before she knew the voices in her head weren’t real and stopped doing drugs long enough for them to disappear. She’d been lucky in that regard. Some people lived with drug-induced mental illness for the rest of their lives, needing psychotropic medications to dull it even after they got clean. For her, she’d only needed prison and a counselor there, who helped her see that drugs were the cause of her problems. She’d stopped using completely in prison and the hallucinations had stopped too. Unfortunately, by then she’d already lost everything that meant anything to her.

  And Lauren had lost infinitely more. Her childhood ended the day Kathleen began smoking crack. The guilt walked with Kathleen every day of her life.

  Inside the pages of the Al-Anon book, Kathleen looked to see if Sharon had underlined anything. She yearned to feel some sign of her friend here, the old warmth of their relationship. As if in answer to her wish, the book opened to a photo that Sharon must have used as a bookmark: Sharon and a woman. The tawny-complexioned woman—African American or maybe Latina—had a buzz-cut mullet, hiking boots, and a thick belly and breasts. She and Sharon were holding a parrot between them, a turquoise body of water in the background. It was one of those overpriced photos you could buy when you visited an eco-park in Mexico. They were both smiling, happy. Kathleen kept her tears inside.

  She turned to Dunbar. “Is this Angela?”

  He leaned in. “Yes. That’s her.”

  Kathleen placed the photo back in the pages of the book and put the book into her shoulder bag. She found a few earrings and a gold necklace in the night table and took them too.

  “Dunbar, can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did anyone ever visit Sharon who drove a maroon car, a husky guy? He might have looked like a bouncer, or military?”

  He paused, thinking. “I don’t remember that. People usually don’t drive their cars into the front driveway unless they’re picking up or dropping off. He doesn’t sound like anyone I’ve seen. I’m sorry.”

  CHAPTER

  18

  A WEEK AFTER THE subway attack, Emily entered the glittering basement of a landmark Tribeca restaurant for a fund-raising breakfast. Round tables for ten draped in white tablecloths were set with crystal and china. Carved tin ceilings. Romanesque columns at the room’s edges. The restaurant was in a building that had once been a wharf warehouse, back when merchant sailing ships used to dock on the Lower West Side of Manhattan. A podium and microphone stood front and center, up a step from the rest of the room.

  “Get some breakfast and we’ll sit down at a table in the back,” Emily told Thea, who wore a pink cotton dress and bright lipstick for the occasion. “You’re not here to work. You can introduce yourself to the other people who end up sitting at your table. They’ll be grateful for the icebreaker.”

  When City Hall staff did campaign work for the mayor, it was strictly on their own time. If interns came to campaign events, it was for the learning experience, and Emily was there in case something official needed doing. But aside from the flood of emails on her phone that needed monitoring, weekday fund raisers were usually a break for Emily too. And the food was always good.

  Emily guided Thea toward the back of the room, where plates of pastries and fruit as well as coffee and tea urns covered a white-tableclothed buffet. Behind the long table, chefs in tall hats cooked omelets. Emily filled a plate with fruit and ordered a veggie omelet. While they waited for their eggs, Thea talked about a prostitution diversion program in Oakland she’d learned about. Max rolled up on them, wearing a suit and tie. He stared a bit too long at Emily’s fitted sky-blue dress. There was a long beat before his eyes left her breasts.

  “See the guy over there?” Max said to Thea as they carried their plates toward an empty table at the back of the room, farthest from the podium. He chucked his chin toward the side of the room at a short guy with curly hair that formed an awkward crown around his otherwise bald head.

  Emily could tell what was coming next: Big Staff Member gonna lay some knowledge on the intern.

  “He’s the City’s number-one lobbyist—or that’s what he tells anyone who’ll listen,” Max said. “He’s a bundler too. He puts together political donations from all his clients, who put together donations from all their friends and families. He hands politicians checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even though politicians aren’t allowed to accept individual donations above a few thousand dollars, they can accept unlimited bundles of them.” Max smirked. “So the guys with money and connections still have the power, screw campaign finance laws.”

  Emily wondered why Max sounded so gleeful about that. Probably because his father was a politician. Personally, it always made her uncomfortable that the mayor was basically indebted
to the donors. The biggest bundlers had the mayor’s personal cell phone number.

  Emily read her emails on her phone as she ate, while Max talked to Thea nonstop and she displayed appropriate fascination. Someone else joined the table and began chatting with Thea.

  Max leaned toward Emily.

  “So, we’ve never talked about it, but who do you know?”

  Emily looked up from her phone. “What do you mean?”

  “You know, who got you the job? Who’s your rabbi? I’ve never been able to figure that out. We can assume our intern is the daughter of a fund raiser, from Iowa, no less. But you, I don’t know.” He threw his tie over his shoulder and picked up a fork, sawing into a plate of huevos rancheros. “You’re as white and middle class as they come, so you’re not here because some wise person decided City Hall needed diversity.”

  Emily scoffed, covering her rising anger. “Look me up on LinkedIn, Max. I got my job based on merit. Through a posting.”

  “Ha. Good joke.”

  Emily whispered, her face going hot, “You’re so used to privilege, you think nobody who gets what you have could possibly have earned it.”

  Max put down his fork. “Whoa, a little harsh, Emily.”

  The lobbyist with the curly crown blew into a microphone at the podium at the front of the room. “Good morning. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for coming. We are going to have a stimulating discussion about city and national policy with the greatest-ever mayor of the City of New York, Derick Sullivan! The next president of the United States!”

  The attendees, who now filled almost all the tables, applauded and smiled as the mayor halfway stood and took a small bow from his seat at one of the front tables, his hands in a humble namaste pose. One middle-aged man in a corner pumped his fists awkwardly, calling out, “Woohoo.”

  The curly-crowned lobbyist gave the woohoo guy a humorous royal wave. “Without further ado, to introduce the most important politician in America today is a man far more eloquent than me, who has known the mayor longer than any of us: Roger Merritt.”