The Stranger Behind You

by Carol Goodman

  “Someone just walked over my grave,” I say with a nod. “My grandmother used to say that.”

  Lillian shakes her head. “He passed over us twice—the second time going in the opposite direction back to the hotel—and then we ran all the way to the Stillwell Avenue subway station near Nathan’s. Rose took me by both arms and whispered, her face close to mine but invisible in the dark. ‘We gotta split up, Lil. They’ll be looking for two girls. When you hear the train come in you run up and take it into Manhattan. I’ll take the next one. Meet me in Grand Central under the big clock. We’ll take a train upstate to my aunt’s.’

  “‘What will we do upstate?’ I asked.

  “‘We’ll stay alive,’ Rose said, giving me a hard shake. ‘Which is more than we’ll do here if Eddie’s guys get ahold of us.’ She moved her head back, into a slice of light, and I saw that her face was wet. I hadn’t seen Rose cry since my mother died. ‘Rose,’ I said, ‘did you see the other man’s face? The one Eddie sent to kill us?’

  “She said something to me I didn’t entirely understand and then she slipped a small, cold object into my hand. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘you’d better go.’ She gave me a fierce hug and then pushed me away. I stumbled in the sand out onto the sidewalk, and then up the steps to the subway platform—right into the arms of two uniformed policemen. They hustled me back down and into a squad car and took me straight to the DA’s office, where Frank was waiting. When I saw him it was all I could do not to burst into tears and throw myself in his arms. I told him about Eddie sending me and Rose upstairs to ‘entertain’ the cops and how I thought Eddie had guessed I was a snitch, but when I got to the part up in the suite—well, I couldn’t tell Frank about what happened on the couch. I don’t know why. I somehow felt . . . stupid that I’d gotten myself into that position.”

  “It’s not uncommon among survivors of sexual assault,” I tell Lillian, “to feel ashamed as if it were their fault. It’s what keeps so many victims silent.”

  It’s a little speech I’ve given a dozen times but Lillian looks at me as if I’ve delivered the secret of the universe. “Yes,” she says, squeezing my hand. “I never told anyone what happened . . . until now.”

  Now it’s my turn to tear up. I’ve been the first recipient of a number of sexual assault stories, but never one that’s lain seventy-seven years in the dark.

  “I told Frank that before anything happened I saw Reles fall from the window. I even made a joke about my virtue being saved by the fall, and then I told him how we ran to the stairs and heard Eddie coming up the stairs with another man. When I told him what Eddie had said, Frank turned pale.

  “‘Are you sure he said your boys?’” Frank asked.

  “I nodded. ‘That sounds like whoever he was talking to was a cop. That must be how Eddie figured out you were an informer, and since Rose was your friend he figured she was too. He must have planned to use you and Rose to distract the cops who were guarding Reles and then get rid of both of you. Did you see the other man on the stairs?’

  “I told Frank no, but Rose had. He asked me if Rose knew who it was and I said no and then he asked me if Rose had described him and I started to cry and said I couldn’t remember. And really I couldn’t. The whole flight from the Half Moon—hiding under the boardwalk, stumbling through the sand, that shadow stretching over the planks—all of that was beginning to feel like a nightmare I’d barely woken up from. The pieces were beginning to break apart, the way a dream evaporates on waking. When I closed my eyes, though, I was back on that couch, choking on the smell of mildew, watching a man fall past a window.”

  I could explain to Lillian the brain chemistry of why that moment when she feared for her life was seared into her brain, but instead I hand her a tissue and pour her another cup of tea.

  “When I finished crying Frank told me that I couldn’t go back to my room. Eddie Silver’s men would be looking for me. I wouldn’t be safe until Eddie was put away. I told Frank I’d testify against him and he said that was good but they needed Rose’s testimony, too, and they needed her to identify the other man on the stairs. If they arrested Eddie without the other man he would have Rose and me both killed.

  “‘But I didn’t see him,’ I wailed. ‘Only Rose did.’

  “‘He won’t know that. But don’t worry,’ Frank said. ‘We’ll find Rose. In the meantime, I’m going to keep you safe. I have just the place for you.’

  “So that’s how I ended up here at the Refuge. Frank said he had to put me someplace safe until they could find Rose and she could ID the other man. He pretended I was being put away for ‘solicitation’ because, he said, no one would think I was an informer then and no one would look for me way up here practically in the Bronx. It felt like a world away from Coney Island. He thought I would be safe here . . .”

  She wipes her eyes. She seems to deflate, suddenly, as if she’d used up all her resources on that headlong dash from the Half Moon Hotel only to collapse when she reached safety—this place of refuge.

  “What happened to Rose?” I ask as gently as I can. “Did Frank find her?”

  “Not at first. And then . . .” She begins to cry.

  I’m afraid that telling this story has been too much for her. “Maybe we should leave the rest of the story for another day,” I say, a line that Simon would say no reporter should ever utter.

  “Yes . . . I think that’s a good idea . . . I’m going to go lie down.” She gets unsteadily to her feet and I help her to the door. Before she walks out, she opens her wicker purse. I think she’s looking for her keys, but instead she reaches inside and brings out a balled-up tissue.

  “I want you to have this,” she says, “to keep you safe.” She sees me staring at the tissue and laughs. She digs in the folds and pours something cool and metallic into my palm—a bronze circle engraved with a floral design.

  “This is what I had given Rose when she was at the Refuge, to keep her safe. She gave it back to me under the boardwalk. I think you need it more,” she said with a sly smile. “After all, who’s going to bother with an old lady like me?”

  “Are you sure . . .” I begin, but she clasps my hand closed over the locket.

  “It gave me courage,” she says. “It will for you too.”

  I thank her and open the door. I don’t watch her on-camera, though; instead I rush back to my desk and I open my laptop to google Abe Reles and the Half Moon Hotel. I read until my eyesight blurs and then I ask Bot to continue reading as I write down notes on index cards and Post-its. The story corresponds to much of what Lillian told me, except that there’s no record of two Irish girls entertaining policemen in a fifth-floor suite. But of course there wouldn’t be. There is an Eddie Silver—a captain in Albert Anastasia’s crime ring whom Reles was scheduled to testify against the day after he fell to his death. And there are numerous references to the event in newspapers and books. The canary could sing but couldn’t fly, the journalists of the day quipped. I find myself wondering how much of Lillian’s story is true. It’s not that I doubt the story of what happened in the Half Moon Hotel with the policeman; the memory of that assault has been branded on her brain. Seared into memory. But the rest . . . the escape under the boardwalk, being placed under witness protection at a refuge for fallen women . . . even by her own admission, those details were hazy. I can’t help but wonder how much she has invented over the years to give the story of how she came to the Refuge a little more legitimacy than just poor girl becomes prostitute and ends up in a home run by nuns. Like all of us on Instagram, framing our lives in misty filters and curated shots of foamy lattes.

  Thinking of Instagram, I pick up my phone and start scrolling through AJ’s Instagram again, looking for a clue to where she’s gone—a favorite aunt upstate like Rose had, maybe? Instead I notice the same girl appearing over and over again in her selfies, another dark-haired girl.

  Two sisters from another mister, one photo is captioned. They’re on a beach, their dark hair intermingling in the oc
ean breeze, grinning up into the camera. The picture makes me think of Rose and Lillian under the boardwalk.

  I hover over the photo of the other girl and find she’s tagged as Stacy Fernandez. I go back through AJ’s twitter and Facebook feeds and find that Stacy has liked or retweeted every photo. She must be her best friend. Wouldn’t she know where AJ was? I click on Stacy’s Facebook page and send her a friend request. Then I send her a tweet and an Instagram message.

  I’m looking for AJ, I say. Do you know where she is?

  I pull up my email and find a message from Simon’s Gmail account. The subject line reads: Hi-Line Club. I open it with a little shiver of anticipation. Why is he writing me from his private email?

  Its brief contents hardly enlighten me: There’s something I need to talk to you about in private. About the Hi-Line incident. Meet me tomorrow night at the Black Rose at nine. Simon.

  I stare at the message until it swells, blurs, and floats off into my peripheral vision like a crow flapping into the sky. The words echo in my head as if they’d been spoken aloud by some tough PI in a ’40s noir—Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, perhaps. That’s what I seem to be living in right now. Lillian’s tale of gangsters, hit men, nightclubs, and secret identities has crept into my life. Even the name of the proposed meeting place—the Black Rose—is straight out of Lillian’s story. Why not? I think. Better Lillian’s story than the one you’ve been living—defeated shut-in who can’t write a book.

  “Bot,” I say aloud, “reply to email from Simon. Say, ‘Yes, I’ll be there.’”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Melissa

  JOAN REPLIES BACK in half an hour to say she’ll be there.

  Good for you, Joan, I think. Maybe this is what she needs to get out of the house. I’m really doing her a favor.

  Tomorrow is Wednesday—Irish folksong night. It will be crowded enough that Joan won’t be sure right away that Simon’s not there. Maybe she’ll make some friends while she’s waiting. And Hector is on duty Wednesday. I just have to figure out a way to get him to leave his desk for a long enough time for me to get those keys.

  I have only one day to figure it out. Cass always said he did his best thinking on a deadline. I do mine while my hands are busy, so I go down to the hardware store the next morning and buy a hammer, rubber gloves, a paint scraper, and industrial-strength cleaner.

  “Doing some home repairs, Mrs. Osgood?” Hector remarks when he runs into me in the basement. “Anything I can help you with?”

  “Just hanging some pictures,” I say. “I don’t want to get too dependent on you, Hector.”

  Which gives me an idea.

  I spend the day going up and down between my storage unit in the basement and my apartment, taking the stairs quickly to build up my endurance—who needs a fancy gym or personal trainer! I bring up a box with family pictures in it—the ones with Cass in them that I thought I wouldn’t want to look at anymore. I need them now, though. When I’m unpacking it I find a folder with Cass’s LLC files and remember that I hadn’t gone through those accounts when I went through the others. I put it on my desk to look through later.

  Toward the end of the day I go all the way up to the spiral stairs below the skylight and clean it off. If I’m going to use the landing as a hiding place, at least it should be clean and well ventilated. I pull the nails out that keep it shut. There are only three nails but they are long and heavy—more like spikes than nails. Someone really wanted to keep someone out—or in. It takes all my strength, bracing my back against the stairs and my feet against the wall, to pull the first one out. It feels like extracting a tooth from living flesh and it looks like it’s dripping blood when it finally comes loose. Rust, I tell myself, tackling the second one, mixed with rainwater seeping down from the roof.

  When I’ve gotten all three bloody nails out I push on the glass and it opens, showering me with dried pigeon droppings and feathers but also with a gust of fresh air that smells like the river. I wriggle out the hatch, glad I’d done all that exercise; I’m slim enough to fit through the narrow opening and my arms are strong enough to pull me up onto the roof. I feel like a climber who’s scaled Mount Everest. The sun is setting over the Palisades, turning them a brilliant red and the Hudson molten gold. To the south, beyond the glowing tower of the Cloisters, a million lights are just coming to life, pricking out the skyline as if it had just come into being. It’s the way the city looked to me when I was just starting out: as if New York and all its possibilities had invented itself just for me and Cass.

  I wipe my face and find it’s wet. I don’t know why. It’s not like I’ve never seen a view before. Cass took me to Windows on the World for my twenty-first birthday, and for my birthday last year we went to Top of the Hub in Boston. Cass liked places with wide, sweeping views. They make me feel like the future is limitless.

  But that’s not how I feel looking at the skyline and the river. I feel only a terrible loneliness, as if I’m marooned on a desert island with no way off . . .

  And there isn’t. Aside from the narrow escape hatch I came out of there’s only one other door and it’s bolted shut. On the edge of the roof there’s a skeletal black ladder outlined against the setting sun like the ribs of a prehistoric mastodon. I pick my way across the sticky tar surface to the edge of the roof, lay my hand on the warm, corroded iron, and look over.

  The narrow, spindly ladder plunges straight down the side of the building to the rocks below on the border of the West Side Highway. An escape route of sorts, but only for someone who’s decided death may be the only way out.

  WHEN I COME downstairs I check my email to make sure Joan hasn’t backed out, but there’s nothing from her. That’s my girl, I think, conceding a grudging admiration for her as if she were a newbie intern I am teaching to be more outgoing.

  I shower, scrubbing disgusting pigeon droppings and city soot off my skin while making my plan. I dress in a casual but nice lounge outfit—yoga pants and a cashmere hoodie—and get the hammer and picture hangers. Then I make enough of a racket hammering that Hector has to call up to let me know that the mother in 3B is complaining that I’m keeping her baby up.

  “I was just going to take a break for dinner,” I tell Hector.

  And I do. I pop a Daily Harvest soup in the microwave, pour myself a large glass of wine, and park myself in front of the surveillance monitor. I told Joan to meet me (Simon) at nine. I start watching the camera at eight. By 8:46 I’m beginning to worry that Joan has chickened out. Perhaps she really has become an agoraphobe. Am I going to have to slip her brochures for local therapists? But then at 8:52 she appears on the lobby camera, stepping out of the elevator in wool trousers, black turtleneck, and trench coat, like she’s Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca for heaven’s sake.

  “Whatever it takes, Joannie,” I say to the camera. “You can do it.”

  She crosses the lobby, stops to talk to Hector, cranes her neck to peek out the front door like she’s checking for rain—or falling meteors. But it’s a crisp fall night, ideal for an assignation with a source. She touches something at her throat, squares her shoulders, and marches out the door. I switch to the outside camera and watch her pause under the awning and peer mistrustfully into the park. Maybe I should have made the appointment for daytime. But then her hand goes back to the thing at her throat—has she gone all born-again on me?—and strides off-camera.

  “Good girl!” I shout, spilling my wine. Then I pick up the hammer on the floor beside me, raise it, and bring it down on my thumb.

  “Shit!” I scream, loud enough to be heard across the river in Fort Lee. I push the intercom and cry into it, not having to fake the tears in my voice, “Hector! I’ve hurt myself! Please come!”

  Since I’m watching on the camera I can see the look of genuine concern on his face. What a sweetheart! I hope I can do this without getting him in trouble.

  “Do you want me to call 911?” he asks.

  “No . . .” I sob. “Just . . . please . .
. come.”

  I see him looking around the empty lobby considering, and then he looks down at the keys on his desk, scoops them up, and stuffs them in his jacket pocket. Does he suspect that someone lifted them the last time? It’s all right, though, I have a plan for this.

  By the time he arrives at my door, which I’ve left open, I am sitting on my couch with a towel wrapped around my throbbing thumb, tears streaming down my face.

  “Pobre chica,” he croons, coming to sit beside me. “I told you I would help.”

  “I . . . know . . . I just wanted to prove I-I could do something on my own. I’m tired of feeling so helpless. And I wanted my family with me.” I wave to the wall behind me where I’ve hung three pictures of baby Whit and Emily crookedly on the wall. Other pictures—of Whit’s graduation from Choate and Emily’s from Brearley, of the four of us in front of the Colosseum in Rome, of Cass and me on our wedding day—are strewn across the floor.