The Stranger Behind You

by Carol Goodman

  I give him a puzzled look. “What door—” But then I see, behind the shelves, the clear outline of a door. “What the hell!” I say. “I didn’t know there was a door there.”

  Enda gives me a strange look. “Didn’t the real-estate agent show it to you? It’s described in the co-op agreement. You’re not supposed to block it. The last tenant got around that by saying the shelves were removable.”

  “Where does it lead?” I ask, horrified that there’s been this back entrance to my sanctuary all along. “And who has the key to it?”

  “You do, for starters,” he says. “It should have been on the ring of keys you got at the closing.”

  I remember now the one old-fashioned skeleton key. I’d thought it was to the basement storage area, which I had no intention of using.

  “And of course Hector and I have one.” He holds up a key identical to the one I thought was to the basement storage area. “It’s all in the handbook. We keep a key in case you want a delivery when you’re out. It’s nothing to worry about,” he adds as I glare at him. “I never let the key out of my sight.”

  As he says it his eyes shift up and to the left, as I’d seen him do on my first day here. Only then I’d thought he was looking up into the camera.

  Now it’s clear that he’s lying.

  Chapter Ten

  Melissa

  COMPLIANT, THAT’S WHAT that little bitch called me. There on the top folder on her big, pretentious, look-at-me-I’ve-got-an-enormous-book-deal desk. Girls all compliant like Melissa Osgood. Trying to find a younger version of what he’d lost? Who the hell did she think she was, playing armchair psychiatrist with Cass and me when she didn’t know the first thing about us or our marriage? Clearly from her bachelorette digs—take-out containers and empty wine bottles lying around everywhere!—she’s never even lived with anyone. What did she know about what made a marriage work? What did she know about the compromises, the sacrifices?

  I’d show her compliant.

  I was so mad that after I copied the files from her hard drive—conveniently labeled on her laptop, which, to my good fortune, had not gone to sleep—I erased Amanda’s file; Joan deserved to be erased. Then I copied her whole hard drive and got out of there, just as I heard her stirring in her bedroom. I went right back through that sad little linen closet of hers and locked the door behind me and was back on the fourth-floor landing before Enda even got back. I was afraid maybe he’d come up, found that I was in Joan’s apartment, and gone to the police, but then he came pounding up the stairs, all hot and bothered.

  “Look,” he said, “I’ve had a complaint from a tenant that they heard someone at their door. You didn’t . . .”

  I just widened my eyes and looked up at him blankly. He shook the thought away. I could see him thinking that a nice, compliant wife like me wouldn’t have the nerve to break into anyone’s apartment.

  What girls like Joan Lurie don’t realize is that sometimes instead of striding around shouting loud demands, looking like you’re compliant gets a lot more done. So when Enda told me I had to go down to the basement and out the side door so the nervous tenant didn’t see me on the lobby camera, I didn’t bat an eyelash.

  “Of course,” I told him, “I don’t want to get you in any trouble. This will be our little secret.” Meaning he wasn’t going to tell anyone about me being here because it would get him in trouble.

  Sometimes compliance breeds compliance in others.

  And I didn’t even mind sneaking out through the basement. Yes, it was creepy. I had to go down a long dark corridor past closed doors, which must be where the storage units are, and into a big cavern with rock walls and enormous iron vats that smelled like soap and mildew, but I was glad to learn how to leave the building unobserved by the cameras. I bet Joan Lurie doesn’t know about that. Which meant I could move in, live right below Joan, and if I was careful she wouldn’t even know I was there. At first I didn’t care if she saw me, but now that I have secret access to her back door I might just keep my presence hidden until I can find out what she’s planning to write in her book, and I can debunk her lies even before she publishes them.

  I might have been compliant when I needed to be, but no one is telling me what to do now.

  IN THE NEXT two weeks plenty of people try to tell me what to do. When I told Wally Shanahan where I was moving, she laughed in my face. “Don’t be ridiculous, Mel, you can’t live in Inwood. There’s not even a Zabar’s or Whole Foods. Let me call that shark of a realtor Sylvia recommended and we’ll get you out of that hasty decision and into a nice co-op in Greenwich.”

  “No thank you,” I told Wally. “I’m going to love my new place. It’s got a great view and a charming Irish pub down the hill and I can just order from FreshDirect and GrubHub. Come visit. We’ll go to the Cloisters.”

  My accountant told me I’d be broke in five years if I lived off my principal.

  My lawyer told me I should be putting money aside for future lawsuits.

  Sylvia was nicer about my choice. I’ve heard it’s an up-and-coming neighborhood, she said, and even expressed an interest in visiting, but I could tell by her strained voice that she was mortified for me.

  I thanked them all for their concern and said I knew what I was doing.

  And I do. As soon as I got home I downloaded all of Joan’s files onto my laptop. I have the names and addresses of all her sources. The transcripts of their interviews. All I have to do is go through them and find the holes. I have Cass’s calendars, credit-card receipts, and, once I hack into his email account, correspondence. I am sure there will be discrepancies between the lies these women spun and my husband’s records. And when I find them I will write my own story and then I will sue the living daylights out of Joan Lurie and Simon Wallace. I will drive Manahatta into the ground—or maybe I’ll buy it with the money I get in the lawsuit and from my book deal. I’ve always wanted to run a little magazine. I’ll let Sylvia stay on, but I’ll wait until Sally Jessell needs a job and then laugh frothily in her face.

  THE NEXT TWO weeks fly by. Whit and Emily come home to sort through their stuff before going back to college. I tell them they either have to get rid of it or keep it in their dorm rooms. Emily cries and tells me I’m hard-hearted. She has gone from being furious at her father to believing he was a saint and everything that has happened is somehow my fault. I let her rage at me. I wish Whit would do the same but he has withdrawn into an incommunicative sulk that worries me more. He’ll do better when he’s back at Brown with his friends, I tell myself, and they’ll both be better when I’ve cleared their father’s name. In the meantime, I give in and rent a storage unit but limit them each to five hundred square feet. They both forgive me long enough to be helpful: Emily by holing up in my closet to take pictures of all my shoes and handbags that she’ll then list on eBay, and Whit by helping me hack into Cass’s Gmail account so, I tell him, I can protect myself against any possible lawsuits.

  We try passwords with combinations of birth and anniversary dates and celebrity names.

  “Who were dad’s favorite authors?” Whit asks.

  I stare at him. “Whitman and Emily Dickinson,” I say after a short moment. “How did you think you got your names?”

  Whit shrugs. “I never knew.”

  How had we not told him? When I met Cass in English 101 at Brown and he said his favorite writers were Whitman and Dickinson I imagined right then and there that someday we would marry and have children named Emily and Whitman. I imagined we’d have the kind of bookish family that went every weekend to the Museum of Natural History and the New York Public Library at Bryant Park and spent their summers in Maine and had their own private jokes and made-up language. Like one of those families in a Salinger story, only with a little less neurosis. What had happened to that dream?

  Work had happened. The Globe and Cass’s ambition to make something of himself that wasn’t predicated on the family name. To prove he wasn’t his father. To fill a hole I hadn�
��t even known was there.

  “Try Globe1030,” I tell Whit.

  He does and we’re in. “That’s not anyone’s birthday,” he says, frowning.

  “No,” I tell him, “it’s the day your father bought the Globe.”

  “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised,” Whit says. “Work was always the most important thing to him.”

  My heart contracts in pain for him. “Your father loved you very much. Remember—” I search my memory for proof of Cass’s paternal love but all I find is the image of Cass sitting by Whit’s hospital bedside after Whit’s suicide attempt. “Remember how fast he got to the hospital when you . . .” I falter, hating to bring up the moment.

  “When I tried to off myself?” Whit asks. “Yeah, he got there quick enough for that.” He gets up, his face clearly troubled. How could I have been so stupid as to bring up his own suicide attempt when his father has just killed himself?

  “Whit,” I say, “if you want to talk—”

  “I’ve got a therapist for that, Mom. I’d better go finish packing.”

  As I watch him go I’m torn between chasing after him and opening the laptop. What can I say to him? Better I face whatever bombshells are lying in wait for me on Cass’s laptop so I can at least protect him and his sister from any more shocks.

  I take Cass’s laptop outside. The weather has finally broken and it feels like the worst of the summer heat is behind us. I gaze out at the empty pool. The realtor had suggested I keep it filled for showing optics, but I knew every time I looked at it I’d see Cass’s bloated body.

  The empty pool is a depressing sight, though, like the end of that John Cheever story we read in 101 about the cheating husband who swims across a suburban neighborhood of pools to reach his home. I remember how much Simon had loved the story, with its setting of suburban hedges and sparkling swimming pools. One of the other kids—a snooty bitch from Westport—had made a condescending comment about how bourgeois Cheever was, and Cass had come to Simon’s rescue.

  “That’s the point,” Cass had said in his silky, confident upper-class voice, “Cheever unmasks the façade of bourgeois desire.”

  Ms. Westport had turned pink and Simon had given Cass a look of such gratitude that I’d been embarrassed for him, but I was proud of Cass for defending Simon. After the Times incident, though, when Simon turned on Cass, Cass had said, “Simon’s just like the man in that Cheever story who swims through everybody else’s pools. A trespasser. He wants what we have—or at least for us not to have it.”

  By “we” Cass really meant him and his blue-blooded, old-money family, not me and my nouveau-riche Scarsdale parents, but he had turned out to be right.

  I wonder if Cass thought about the story when he decided to take one last swim—

  I shiver. I should go inside; it’s actually colder out here than I thought, already more like autumn than summer. But I don’t want Whit or Emily looking over my shoulder while I read Cass’s email. I’m afraid of what I’ll find there—porn? Salacious messages from his lovers?

  I take a deep breath and open the laptop. And what I find is almost worse: dozens of debt-relief and bankruptcy lawyer solicitations. How depressing it must have been for Cass to wade through these every time he opened his email. It gives me a pang to realize he didn’t feel like he could share these troubles with me, but when I try to imagine what that conversation would have sounded like, I hear myself demanding to know how he had gotten us into this predicament. No doubt that was exactly why he hadn’t come to me with these problems.

  The solicitations have just kept coming after his death, as if he might still be able to solve his problems beyond the grave by consolidating his credit-card debt or taking out a low-interest loan. I scroll past them all to the days before his death, assuming there will be more emails of a personal nature, but there isn’t much. No colleagues or friends writing to say they believed in him or just writing to see how he was doing. His only regular correspondent was Greg Firestein. I open these emails and find cryptic missives.

  About what we talked about on the 12th—I still think it’s inadvisable.

  Pursuant to question you asked yesterday—our sources say no.

  Re: Tuesday: Unlikely.

  Cass might as well have been consulting a Magic 8-Ball. For that advice Cass had been shelling out over ten thousand a week. Greg had called the day after Cass’s funeral to say he was wiping out the balance due on Cass’s account, as if he were doing me an enormous favor. I should be suing him for sexual assault for what he did that last night, putting his grubby hands on me and talking to me like it was somehow my fault Cass had affairs. Talk about blaming the victim! I would write a chapter about him in my book. In fact, I should save all these emails as proof of how useless he had been.

  I save them to a folder, which I copy onto my flash drive. It occurs to me that if any of the women ever do sue us they might try to confiscate Cass’s laptop. Could they do that? No one’s asked about it so far, but then there were no legal charges made against Cass and his death was declared a suicide by the medical examiner of Westchester County, so there was no criminal investigation.

  I scan back through the emails until I get to the day of the gala. Here, at last, is a normal day in Cass’s life—emails from friends saying they’re looking forward to seeing him later, colleagues checking in on stories in the paper, an old college friend asking if Cass could help his daughter get an internship at the Globe (I bet he felt stupid about that later) and one from me reminding him not to be late that makes me cringe at my wheedling tone. Just a friendly reminder to be there at 7, hon. I’d even added a smiley face and cocktail glass emoji, as if I’d had to cajole my own husband into coming to my gala. Compliant, I hear that Lurie woman saying as I scroll to the next email, which came in at 4:03. This one’s from Simon Wallace.

  I open it and see that it’s part of a longer thread that began the day before, when Simon sent Cass a draft of Joan Lurie’s story. Which means that when Cass went to work that morning, while I reminded him to bring his tux, and babbled on about who was coming, and complained about who wasn’t, and fretted that maybe aperol spritzes were passé, he knew about the story. He knew there was this ticking time bomb about to destroy our lives. I am so angry that I scream out loud, “You bastard!”

  My shout echoes in the hollow basin of the pool and is answered by the dry scrape of leaves against its cement belly—a sound like the cackling of the dead, who are beyond our anger. How could Cass have blithely gone to work that day without warning me?

  The answer is right in front of me in Cass’s reply to Simon’s first email: If you run this I will sue you and destroy your rag of a magazine. Cass thought that he could stop it. He thought he could make the problem go away as he had made so many problems go away—as he had when I asked him if Amanda was going to be a problem after he left her to come back to me—

  What had he said?

  I sit, trying to remember his exact words, as if I will hear them if I’m still enough. All I hear are the dry leaves and the wind in the privet hedge at the end of our lawn—the lawn; it doesn’t belong to us anymore even if there were still an us.

  And then I hear Cass’s voice, as clearly as if he were sitting in the chaise longue right next to me.

  Don’t worry about Amanda. I’ve taken care of her.

  I hadn’t asked him what he meant. I was too relieved to have him back and too angry at her to care what Cass might have had to do to buy her silence. Now I wonder if he had paid her off—or threatened her as he’d threatened Simon. Of course he’d gone off to work that day optimistic that he’d kill the Manahatta story before the party. He’d dismissed it from his mind as he banished anything that threatened his peace.

  There was a phrase in that Cheever story that Cass had underlined in his copy of the book—how did it go?—something about a gift for concealing painful facts. That’s what Cass had had—a gift for concealing painful facts from himself and others. That’s what enabled hi
m to go off to work that day, concealing from me that our world was about to implode, because he thought that he could fix it.

  Why hadn’t he? Why had he failed?

  I scroll down to Simon’s response to Cass’s threat.

  We both know that there was more that could have been in that story—the incident at the Hi-Line, for example. If you sue I’ll publish that.

  A chilly breeze stirs the leaves in the bottom of the pool, sounding like sandpaper on raw skin. I feel flayed by it. What had Cass been so afraid of Simon revealing?

  That story, he called the assassination piece he’d done, as if they were back in college arguing about literature instead of real life, calling whatever happened: “The Incident at the Hi-Line Club,” which sounded like the title of a Sherlock Holmes adventure, for God’s sake—

  What could have happened at the Hi-Line Club? I type “Hi-Line” into the email’s search bar and get a slew of emails from the club about events and outstanding dues. I remember how excited Cass had been when he was accepted to the club. It had seemed a little silly to me, but Cass had explained that it was the most exclusive club in New York and would give him an opportunity to rub shoulders with the most powerful movers and shakers in the city. A lot of good that had done him. Where were all the movers and shakers when our lives were going down the toilet?

  I glance back at the list of emails and notice there’s one dated September 8, 2015, from the membership committee requesting a letter of recommendation. When I open it I see that the letter was for Simon Wallace. That was odd. Why would Cass write a letter for Simon when they hadn’t been friends for years? But then I see. Cass had written back saying “I cannot in good faith support this candidate. An accusation of plagiarism that was made against him some years back establishes that he is simply not the right sort for the Hi-Line.”

  Ouch. It seems a bit petty, but then that couldn’t be what Simon had referred to as “The Hi-Line Incident.” For one thing, Cass’s letter would certainly have been confidential—and there’s no other email, or file on the computer, referring to the Hi-Line.