Trolls in the Hamptons

by Celia Jerome

  “It’s not like that, Mom. He was just nice when he didn’t have to be.”

  “Of course he had to be. It’s your tax money paying his salary. Did he leave his card?”

  “Yes.”

  “That means he wants you to call, so there’s no hint of abuse of power or conflict of interest.”

  “What about fraternizing on the job?”

  “That’s for coworkers, isn’t it? Call him if he was that nice.”

  “He only wants to hear from me if I remember anything else about what I saw.”

  “So make something up! You’re a writer. Be creative.”

  That was the problem, not the solution.

  I checked in with my father, who was more concerned with his bad hip ruining his golf game and his tennis matches than with me. He swore my mother’s father had been a troll, big, ugly, and mean, but he made me promise not to tell her he said so.

  My Fafhrd wasn’t mean or ugly. Neither was the troll in the street, I decided. That is, if I was not crazy, if he existed. I went with that, instead of waiting for the guys with the straitjacket.

  He hadn’t hurt anyone, except for trying to push them out of his way. He’d been determined to get somewhere, it seemed, but I didn’t think he was looking for water. The hydrant was an accident, then a happy surprise. Then he left. Why’d he come? Why’d he go?

  I unlocked the desk drawer and looked at my sketches, then put the flash drive files back on my computer. I made some more notes, a list of questions, possible villains, a dramatic rescue. Fafhrd as Lassie? Maybe. He couldn’t fly like Superman, or climb like Spidey, being much too heavy. But what if he could wink out of sight at will, the way the street menace had?

  I worked on that until I had an outline I was pleased with. I just didn’t know if I should consider writing the story. It was definitely out of the box, and I couldn’t afford to spend months on a project that might never sell. So I called my boss, Don Carr. As editor and publisher and majority shareholder of the whole company, DCP, he was always busy, but he picked up the phone for me.

  “What have you got?” he yelled over the noise of his office. It was a big open loft, with artists and writers coming and going and tossing ideas and Frisbees and donuts back and forth. “That prima donna who writes the werewolf series is going to be two months behind schedule, one of my vampire bride writers decided to go on a honeymoon, and the ghost hunter guy joined his buddies in the afterlife. And I don’t think he’s going to be emailing any more books. So talk to me, Willy.”

  My next book wasn’t due for another five months, so he couldn’t mean that one. “Well, I have a new idea . . . ”

  “Great. I love it. How soon can I have it?”

  “I want to talk to you about it first, see if you think it’ll appeal to our readers.”

  “Come in Sunday morning. It’ll be quiet enough to think then.”

  I knew Don often came in on weekends to catch up, and to get out of going to his in-laws with his wife and kids. Since Susan wasn’t coming until dinnertime, and I had no date for Saturday night/Sunday breakfast, Sunday morning was perfect.

  It was one of those rare clear, clean spring mornings in the city, with not much traffic making smog, no heat yet to raise the garbage stench.

  DCP’s offices were way downtown, near the financial district, so the streets and sidewalks were almost empty on the weekends.

  The weekend guard didn’t know me, but he had my name on a list, so he let me up without calling first. Don must be desperate.

  He had a box of pastries from the bakery, and a plastic container of fruit salad from his wife. I brought trail mix bars. The coffeemaker was on, so we were set.

  Instead of trying to pitch the story out loud, I gave him my outline and sketches.

  “You eat while I read,” he said, pointing to a chair, but I was too nervous to sit. I picked a blueberry muffin from the box and a napkin and went to the windows that took up almost the whole front of the loft. The streets below were deserted, so I looked around and up. A building across the way was under construction, but no one was working on Sunday.

  From what I could see, they were adding upper floors, which would block some of Don’s light and view, but I wasn’t going to say anything. I looked at him. He was smiling. Maybe at the jelly donut that dripped on my sketches. I hoped not. I put a napkin in front of him, but he kept reading. That was a good sign, wasn’t it?

  I went back to the window. Some of the new floors were framed out with steel beams, and a crane was waiting next to a bunch more, so I guess they were going higher still. I couldn’t quite make out what the red stuff was on the existing roof of the building until it moved.

  Fafhrd! My troll was climbing up on the steel girders, swinging like a spider monkey from beam to beam. Then he noticed the crane. I gurgled something, but Don just said, “Coffee’s ready. Get some.”

  “But—”

  “Shh. This is good, Willy.”

  Oh, no, it wasn’t. Fafhrd—I didn’t know what else to call him—was investigating the boom of the crane, snapping the chains and locks that held it in place. There’ve been a lot of crane accidents lately, what with so much building always going on, so the safety precautions were on high.

  Not high enough for a ten-foot, rock-solid troll. Who, incidentally, was now wearing a black sash around his privates, the same as I had drawn on my sketches. I wouldn’t think about that.

  “Don, you better come see this.”

  Fafhrd had managed to loosen the crane and was climbing out on it, letting it swing away from the building, so he was dangling over the street. I couldn’t tell if the noise I heard was Don gasping, the crane straining, or Fafhrd laughing as he rode the boom like a kid on a playground whirler.

  “That’s going to break for sure,” Don shouted, reaching for his phone. While he dialed 911—not that there was anything anyone could do in time to save the crane, the girders it was striking, the other buildings it might hit on the way down—I beat on the window. “No. No, get down!”

  Don hit the floor.

  “Not you. Him.”

  “You see the guy tampering with the equipment?”

  “Don’t you?” I pointed, and Fafhrd waved back to me, just as the crane’s tower separated from the carriage platform and went crashing down toward the street. The troll jumped off, back to the roof.

  Don shook his head. “Poor bastard couldn’t live through that. Not that it doesn’t serve him right.”

  The poor bastard was looking down, shaking his head, too.

  Don and I got closer to the window to look down at the wreckage below. Pieces of steel, parts of other buildings, a ton of rubble had landed in the street. A couple of cars were buried. “I bet they’re going to evacuate the whole neighborhood.”

  Then: “Holy shit! That’s my car!” He went flying for the elevator. On his way out, he yelled, “I love the idea. Really original, new, fresh. Write it. We’ll talk money next week.”

  I could see people coming out of buildings, alarms going off. I could not see a troll.

  I sat on the floor and ate a jelly donut.

  CHAPTER 6

  THEY DIDN’T FIND A BODY, of course. When I went downstairs to the street, with my proposal back in its canvas tote, a policeman was interviewing Don, who thought he saw trouble. Or a troop of truants. Or maybe a train. A red train.

  “Yeah,” the tired cop told us. “We’re getting that from a couple of other witnesses. Makes no sense. We know it was trouble, but a bunch of school kids? A train on a building? Let me tell you, this is not what I want to hear on a quiet Sunday downtown.” He turned to me. “What did you see, miss?”

  “Something red. Definitely wearing red.” I wiped at my shirt, where the jelly had dripped. “I saw the crane swinging. Mr. Carr saw it, too.”

  Don was on his cell phone, calling his insurance company. Heaven knew what he was telling them. He was not saying that a troll had used a multimillion-dollar crane as a jungle gym. So I didn
’t say that, either.

  Two other possible witnesses nearby were muttering about a bunch of teenagers, or some nuts trying to sabotage the building because the renovation was to increase office space for an oil company. They all decided no one man could have wreaked such havoc by himself. Maybe the activists brought a red wrecking ball up to the roof, or something that looked like a train.

  The cop scratched his head. He looked at me again, hoping for a reasonable answer, I suppose. “Are you sure you didn’t see anything else, Miss, ah, Tate?”

  I pointed back to the window of the publisher’s loft. “I’m sorry, but I was too far away. And too stunned by what I was seeing, that crane swinging loose, to notice anything else.”

  I went home, a death grip on that canvas bag.

  Later, I walked over to Thirty-Ninth and Third to meet my cousin at the Hampton Jitney bus stop. I’d forced myself to shop for a healthy meal for Susan, vegetables to stir-fry, salad, and fruit for dessert tonight; organic cereal and exorbitantly priced berries for breakfast tomorrow. It turned out she couldn’t have breakfast in the morning before those fancy scans, and all she wanted for supper was a pastrami sandwich from the kosher deli on Third Avenue. She’d been looking forward to it all week, so that’s what we got, along with a couple of bags of chips and some cookies and more ice cream. And chocolate-covered raisins. Raisins made it healthy. She could eat the vegetables tomorrow.

  Back in the apartment, Susan took a good look at me, screwed up her face, and said, “You’ve really done it this time, haven’t you?”

  “How did you—? That is, I haven’t done anything wrong. And if you tell my mother, I’ll never let you stay here again.”

  She took another bite of her sandwich. “You’d never be that mean. Oh, can I stay until Wednesday?”

  “Sure, how come?”

  “I see the doctor then, and hear the results of tomorrow’s tests. I was going to go home and come back in with my mother and father, but Pop thinks he’s coming down with a flu or something and I shouldn’t be near him. It’s most likely Lyme disease—everyone’s got it this year—but I can’t take the chance. Lowered immunity, you know.”

  “No problem.” Of course it was. That meant I had to go with her and hear her future. Damn, we were talking life and death here. Tomorrow’s tests were to see if the chemo had worked, if the cancer was gone. I didn’t want to be there when they told her! I hated being at the hospital altogether, seeing all the suffering. I know they do wonderful things at Sloan, but it’s still sad. And scary. There but for the grace of God, etc.

  “I have a new project, but I can take time off for whatever you want to do.”

  “Shopping.” She took the baseball hat off her head. “My hair’s coming back and I want to talk to a stylist.”

  I doubted she meant the woman across the street who cut hair in her kitchen in return for my babysitting her daughter once in a while. But I could see what Susan meant. She had cute little brown curls on top of her head, but some straggly mousy strands on the sides.

  “I might have to buzz it all again, but I really want my hair back.”

  She sounded so wistful, I would give her mine, if I could. “It’s coming. We’ll find an expert for advice. I promise.”

  “You know, you don’t have to look so concerned. I’m going to be all right. Grandma read my tea leaves and said I’ll be fine.”

  Her grandmother was my grandmother, and I didn’t believe a thing the old witch said. I’d heard that a positive attitude was important to recovery, so I wouldn’t say anything to Susan, but I’d sure as hell have more confidence in what my doctor said than in some backyard herbalist. If Grandma was so good, how come she couldn’t cure the cancer in the first place?

  What I said was, “If Grandma said it, then it’s true. Besides, you’ve got the best specialists in the field.”

  “Right.” Susan left her sandwich to look over my DVD collection. “I’ll be happy to stay here and watch movies while you work. I still get tired, from the chemo and stuff.”

  I had another handful of potato chips. Sweet potato chips, which had to have more nutrients, didn’t they? I mumbled something about renting something she hadn’t seen, around a quiver in my throat. Hell, she was still my baby cousin.

  Instead of picking a movie, she asked, “So when are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

  Shit, she was still my pesky baby cousin. And far too knowing.

  “I split up with Arlen.”

  She blew dust off the DVD player. “I already heard that. Besides, you wouldn’t be half so twitchy over a dickhead like him.”

  So everyone knew he was a dickhead but me? I took a bite of the sour dill pickle, which was just how I felt. And made myself stop rocking my chair on its legs. “There’ve been a lot of strange incidents in the city.”

  “There are always strange happenings in the city. In the Harbor, too. You should hear about the rich guy who’s renting Rosehill this summer. A movie producer. He says he’s looking for a new kid star, untrained and natural. Every mother’s trotting her son past the estate, or wherever the big shot goes in town for coffee or dinner with his current starlet. We have a texting hot line for when they’re spotted.”

  I wasn’t really listening. “What’s going on here is scary, peculiar.”

  “Like the crazy trolley car no one can find?”

  “Yeah, and today a crane fell off a building roof.”

  “That’s not so unusual.”

  “It is when people think a train pushed it. Like a little red engine shouting, ‘I think I can.’”I looked out the window to see the sky darkening with nightfall, then asked, “Have you ever seen a troll?”

  “Yeah,” she said, so I turned back, to see her flipping through my portfolio, the empty tote bag in her lap.

  I grabbed it away. “Damn, you always were a snoop. Some things are off-limits, Susan.”

  “Sorry.” She didn’t look the least repentant, there with her cherub curls. “It looked like a fun story.”

  I didn’t feel like confiding in the brat. She might be twenty-six years old, and with a sickly pallor to her complexion, but she was still a brat. And she stared too hard at me, as if she could read my mind. Maybe she could. In my family, anything was possible. Luckily the door buzzer beeped.

  This time I wasn’t expecting anyone, and hoped it wasn’t Arlen, who could only make the situation more awkward. I pushed the intercom. “Who is it?”

  “Van Gregory, Miss Tate. Officer Gregory. May I come talk to you?”

  I’d wondered what his friends called him, Donovan being too long and, I don’t know, pretentious, for what seemed a nice guy. “Sure. Come on up.”

  I made certain I checked in the peephole this time. Yup, it was the handsome cop, in an NYPD sweatshirt this time, with the same tight jeans. I hoped he didn’t notice me staring, or notice that I’d forgotten to lock the door when we carried all the deli bags and Susan’s suitcase up.

  I made the introduction to my cousin, who looked embarrassed that she didn’t have her scraggly hair covered.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Van—that’s how I was thinking of him—told her. “My grandmother just went through chemo. Her hair’s coming back better than ever. You look great with short curls.”

  Susan smiled, and I gave Van a grateful look. A real hero, right in my doorway. “Come in, come in. We’re having dessert, and there’s plenty to go around.”

  “Thanks, I will. I’m on my way home, but I heard you were at the scene of another incident today.”

  Susan moved to the other side of the sofa to make room for him, but she glared at me. “You were there when the crane fell and you didn’t tell me?”

  “I was downtown at DCP. That’s my publisher,” I explained to the policeman. “Don Carr Publishing. I met my editor there to talk about a new project.”

  “That’s an amazing coincidence, don’t you think?” Van helped himself to a Mallomar. “I haven’t had one of these in ages.”


  “Do you know you can’t buy them in the summer?” I wanted to change the subject.

  Susan wasn’t going to let me. Her mouth was screwed up at one side, and not from the pickle. “That’s too weird.”

  I sighed, knowing she was like gum on your shoe when it came to curiosity, or nosiness. “I thought so, too. That’s why I didn’t say anything.”

  “And you saw nothing that could help identify the perps?”

  I dished out ice cream so I did not have to look anyone in the eye. “I did not see any train.”

  Van chose the rocky road, and crumbled an Oreo cookie on top, which showed the man had taste, besides looks. “We have no idea where that one came from, or the trolley. Do you know that one of the cars that got flattened downtown belonged to your friend Lou?”

  I almost spilled the chocolate syrup. “Lou from the building across the street?”

  Susan took the bottle from me and drowned her pralines and cream. “Isn’t he the old coot who stares at you?”

  I nodded, but demanded to know, “He was there?”

  “His car was. We don’t know where he is. That’s one of the reasons I’m in the neighborhood. You didn’t see him anywhere, did you?”

  “No. God, he wasn’t injured, was he?”

  “No bodies were found at the scene, and they’ve sifted through all the rubble. And checked nearby hospitals. No injuries that we know about. But he’s not at home either. You didn’t travel downtown with him, by any chance?”

  “I wouldn’t get in a car with him. Do you think he’s involved in the accidents?”

  He reached for the chocolate syrup. How the hell did he stay so slim? I ate my ice cream plain. Of course, I ate out of the container.

  Van licked about a million calories off his spoon. “It’s beginning to look like the two incidents were no accidents.”

  “I told you he was up to no good.”

  “The computer boys are looking deeper into his background now. But someone would have seen him tampering with the crane. You didn’t, did you?”

  “No. I wish I could say yes, but no. I only saw a troll.”