Simon blinks and frowns—the frown I’ve seen him aim at reporters in editorial board meetings when they’ve said something stupid. “I should have emailed you sooner to check up on you, so I was glad to get your email, but a little surprised that you wanted to talk to me about the”—he looks behind him again and the baseball-cap guy shifts a fraction as if aware that Simon is looking at him—“the Hi-Line thing,” he whispers. “I thought we’d gone over that and decided it was something Amanda had made up. I hope you haven’t been basing your book on that.”
He gives me a concerned smile and I feel my stomach curdle. Did I imagine Simon’s email? Am I going crazy? “Wait,” I say, reaching for my phone and opening my email app. “I’ll show you.” I scroll through my inbox as the singer croons about his dark Rosaleen. Do not sigh! Do not weep! I find the email from Simon and breathe a sigh of relief. “Look,” I say, too loud, too eager. “Here it is! You even used the subject line ‘Hi-Line Club.’”
Simon’s eyes widen and he holds his hands up, patting the air to quiet me. Then he takes my phone from me and looks down. As he reads I listen to the plaintive song.
Woe and pain, pain and woe,
Are my lot, night and noon,
To see your bright face clouded so,
Like to the mournful moon—
Simon looks up, his face as clouded as the one described in the song. “This isn’t from me,” he says. “Look, there’s an extra ‘1’ in the address.” He holds the phone up to me, but my eyes have gone blurry.
“But you got my answer!” I wail, rivaling the singer for woe and pain.
“I got an email from you asking me to meet you here.” He takes out his phone, but I shake my head. There’s no point in him showing it to me; my vision is so blurry I can barely make out his face.
“How?” I begin.
“Someone hacked into your email,” he says. “They’ve set this up. My guess is they wanted to get you out of your apartment.”
“To do what?” I ask, thinking of the crazy diagram on my living-room wall.
“My guess is that they want to see what you’re working on. We should go back there and check.”
“But if someone’s there—”
“I’ll be with you,” he says, grabbing my elbow and steering me away from the bar.
“Shouldn’t we call the police?” I ask as he propels me out the door.
“And tell them what?” Simon asks. “That we can’t remember who emailed whom?”
I’m thinking that’s not exactly what happened, but I’m too breathless to answer as we racewalk up the steep hill. The park has grown quieter—and darker. I peer ahead into the gloom, looking for the lights of the Refuge, but I can barely make them out.
“Is it always this murky up here?” Simon asks.
“It’s the river,” I gasp. “Simon, wait up. Tell me what happened at the Hi-Line. Why would anyone be so worried about what I know to trick me out of my apartment? Why does it matter? Cass is dead—”
At Cass’s name Simon reels around, his face looming angrily out of the fog. “Do you think that when a man like Cass goes down he goes down alone? Or that he cares who he takes down with him? Did he think about his wife and children when he killed himself? He’d drag his grandmother into hell if he thought he could sell her soul to the devil to ease his own discomfort. He’d—”
Simon’s voice stops abruptly. He’s looking behind me, down the hill. I start to turn around to see what he’s looking at, but he grabs my arm and pulls me toward him. “I think we’re being followed,” he says in a low, urgent voice. Then an explosion goes off in my ear and Simon pushes me to the ground. His weight on me awakens that moment in my apartment when my assailant tackled me to the floor. I thrash against him, struggling to breathe, but then I realize what the sound was—a gunshot. Someone has shot at us and might be coming for us right now. Simon must realize the same thing. He pulls me to my feet and drags me into a blind run.
To where? I wonder, gulping mouthfuls of dank, wet fog. It smells like bleach and soap, like the closet Lillian hid in with Rose. Then we’re out of the fog and at the door of the Refuge. I’m so grateful to see it that I push past Simon and into the lobby . . . which is empty. Where’s Hector? Did he hear that shot and run out to investigate?
“We need to call the police!” I yell.
“Let’s go to your apartment first,” Simon says, punching the elevator button. I’m going to suggest we take the stairs, but the elevator opens and Simon pushes me in. He presses the button for the fifth floor and I slump against the back wall. For a moment I wonder how he knew what floor I live on, but then I’m pretty sure I must have bragged about living in “the penthouse.”
“Holy shit,” I say, my voice shaking, my stomach plummeting, and my knees giving out as we rise upward. “What was that?”
“Someone just shot at us,” Simon replies, his breath ragged.
“What the hell! But why?”
He doesn’t answer. When the door opens he checks the hall first as if he suspects someone is going to burst out of one of the doors. Poor Lillian, I think, did she hear that shot? With her history it would have frightened her. I think of checking in on her but first I need to get Simon into my apartment and call the police. I open my door and Simon walks past me, toward the desk as if drawn by the lamp . . . Did I leave that on?
“This is why,” he says, looking at my wall. “This is why someone just tried to kill you. To keep you from finding out what happened at the Hi-Line.”
Chapter Eighteen
Melissa
WHEN I GET back to my apartment Hector is already putting on his jacket and heading out the door.
“I’m sorry, senora,” he says hurriedly. “I thought I heard a gunshot. I have to go—”
“A gunshot!” I cry, staring at his jacket and wondering how I’m going to get the keys into it. “Oh my God! I thought this was a safe neighborhood.”
“Don’t worry,” he says, “no one will get inside this building to hurt you.”
“Thank God you’re here,” I say, bursting into tears and collapsing against his chest.
He pats my back awkwardly as I slip the keys in his pocket, and then he steps back from me, his face red. Poor man. I’ve embarrassed him and myself but it couldn’t be helped. I hope it doesn’t give him any ideas, but as he hastily excuses himself and leaves I realize he’s too much of a gentleman to take advantage of a distraught woman.
As soon as he’s gone I pull the kitchen chair back in front of the camera so I can watch for Simon’s exit. I check the elevator door and see it’s paused on 5. Then I hear footsteps above me and a door opening. If only I had the apartment across from Joan’s then I could watch them on the camera—maybe if that old lady dies I could switch apartments—to see if there’s a good-night kiss.
But then I hear one set of heavy footsteps moving from the door to the window and another lighter set following. They are both standing at the window—admiring the river view? Or did they hear a gunshot too? Or is Simon staring at that crazy wall of Post-its? Of course he is. That’s why they’re standing there so long. Simon is probably telling her she needs to get help. She certainly looked like a madwoman on the lobby camera. But wait, how the hell did Simon show up at the fake date I had set up? Had Joan realized that the email was phony and called him? Maybe they are examining Joan’s computer right now to find out how the email was sent.
If that’s what they’re doing, I might as well get what I can from Joan’s computer before they disable the spyware. I sit down at my desk, conscious that I am sitting right below them, like a troll lurking beneath a bridge, spying on them. Being a spy suddenly doesn’t feel so romantic, but at least this way I’ll know if they stay in the living room and I’ll know when Simon leaves.
IT SEEMS SIMON will be staying all night. Eventually I hear footsteps leaving the living room and going down the hall, but I refuse to let myself follow them into my own bedroom to listen, even if it means staying u
p all night at my desk. Fortunately, it does not seem as if they have uncovered my spyware, and Joan’s cloned computer proves an ample distraction through the small hours of the night. I learn how pathetic her finances were before the book deal—it’s a crime what a pittance Simon was paying her at Manahatta!—and exactly what she got for her advance and how much she paid for the apartment. If she’s not careful she’s going to run out of money even before I do.
From Facebook I find out she’s got a couple of friends from college who are growing annoyed that she never makes time for them and a string of shaggy, underemployed ex-boyfriends that she’s well rid of. She’s got terrible taste in men. One guy she dated sent her an invoice for half their Airbnb bill in the Catskills and, I find through her checking account statements, she paid it! Another broke up with her by email saying he didn’t think she respected his qi. No wonder the poor girl hated men. But still, it’s no excuse for her to have taken it out on my Cass.
The only thing I find to be remotely jealous of is her correspondence with her mother. There’s a whole folder full of it, dating back to when Joan was in college (a second-rate state school). They’re clearly close. Joan wrote her long emails about her classes, the books she was reading, the boys she liked. Although I dutifully text Whit and Emily every day, they hardly ever answer with anything more than the most perfunctory responses. Forget about taking my calls or emailing! Emily says no one talks on the phone or emails anymore. And Whit—Whit seems to be actively avoiding me.
The emails from her mother are a little boring, I’ll admit. She’s a teacher in a small town upstate and she writes about her students, complains about the principal and what the focus on standardized testing has done to the curriculum. She also reports on Joan’s grandmother’s deteriorating mental state.
“She still tells all the old stories she raised me on—you know the ones: growing up in the Depression, the bread lines, eating crusts for dinner, and then the glamorous war years, dating soldiers, dancing in nightclubs, marrying your grandfather just before he shipped out and then finding out the boat he was on had sunk—I bet you know them all as well as I do. But now she mixes up the details and comes up with these totally new stories as if she’s reinventing her life. Which wouldn’t be so bad except that she keeps getting stuck in the bad parts and getting scared. She’s becoming increasingly paranoid. She thinks that bad men are after her and she gets up in the middle of the night and tries to climb out the windows. I’m afraid if she gets any worse I’ll have to put her in a home.”
Do you think, Mrs. Lurie? The old woman clearly has dementia.
I notice, too, that Joan is impatient with her mother. Her emails in the last year have grown terser.
That’s so sad grandma can’t remember her own name.
I really can’t bear to see her like this.
Why don’t you come down here if you want to see me so badly?
So maybe I’m not so jealous of Joan’s special mother-daughter bond.
I move on to her research for “the story,” as she refers to it, as if it’s some goddamned biblical epic. Most of the background I’ve read already—and I’ve read more of it than she has. I see in her hard drive search field that she’s been looking for the Amanda file I erased. I feel a pang of guilt for the frustration I must have caused her and I quickly squelch it. Look at all the pain she’s caused me!
At least she quickly turned her efforts to looking for AJ—and found her Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts. AJ herself is clearly MIA. She hasn’t checked in to any of her social media accounts since June, when she used to post something at least once a day, although rarely a selfie, I notice. In fact, the only pictures of her are cryptic, partial shots—profiles with her sunglasses on and hair down as if she didn’t want anyone to see her face. Nor does she give her last name. She’s just A. Jay on Facebook, @arosegrowsinharlem on Twitter, and ARoseByAnyOtherName on Instagram. Many of her posts involve roses, but she hasn’t posted so much as a petal since June 21—the day of the gala. The day my world fell apart.
What happened to her on that day?
She’s around Emily’s age; surely she must have a mother who knows where she is—or is probably very worried about her.
I look back through AJ’s Facebook. She’s more active on Twitter and Instagram but Facebook is where her mother’s more likely to post. I look through the comments and likes and find someone named Barbara. No one under fifty is named Barbara, so it has to be her mother or at least an aunt.
I switch to my own laptop and find Barbara’s Facebook page. She’s a retired nurse living in St. Petersburg, Florida. Before sending her a friend request I check the time. It’s six A.M., a little early to send a request, but maybe not to an older person who probably gets up at the crack of dawn. First, though, I change my background picture on my Facebook page to a picture of a teacup and a hokey quote about tea being the elixir of the soul. Then I follow the tearoom where AJ worked and post an old picture of Emily and me having tea at Harrods. I’m hoping Barbara will think I know her daughter from the tea shop or that our daughters worked together (although I’d die if all Emily did with her college degree was waitress).
While I’m waiting to hear from Barbara, I look through more of Joan’s search history. Oddly, after finding the tearoom, Joan started searching for information about some Depression-era criminal named Abe Reles and a racket called Murder Inc. What could that possibly have to do with AJ—or Cass, for that matter? Is she writing an article on 1940s crime figures? Shouldn’t she be working on her book?
But when I look through her Word documents all I can find are some notes on her past research. There’s no other recent document at all. Unless she’s writing the book by hand (and no one Joan’s age would even write a letter by hand), she hasn’t written anything. And according to her contract, the book is due in less than four months.
Now, that’s interesting.
Maybe I don’t have to worry about Joan Lurie publishing any more scurrilous lies about Cass. Maybe she’s realized she doesn’t have enough material for a book—
But then why is she looking for this missing AJ person? The only connection is that she may have worked as a waitress at that party Cass went to at the Hi-Line Club. If her disappearance had to do with something that happened at the Hi-Line, wouldn’t she have gone into hiding three years ago? But no, she went missing when Joan’s story came out, so something in the story must have frightened her. Maybe she was afraid that Joan was going to try to get her to come forward to accuse Cass. Maybe her version of events that night didn’t fit the picture of Cass that Joan’s story portrayed and someone paid her to stay quiet.
I look again at the date of the party and remember that Cass had written a check that night to Pat Shanahan. . . .
And then it hits me. Cass wrote a check to Shanahan on May 15, 2015. But I’d always thought that Cass began donating to Shanahan after Whit’s suicide attempt because of how kind Wally was to me on that day. But Whit tried to kill himself on May 21—a date forever seared into my memory. Why was Cass writing a check to Pat Shanahan six days before?
It’s nothing, I tell myself. Cass went to a fundraiser and wrote a check out, because that’s what Cass did, play the big man. Which is what he did a week later, too, when he told me he was donating to Shanahan as a thank-you for Wally’s help. I remember I had even teased him about donating to a conservative when he’d been such a liberal in college and he had quoted me that old chestnut about how if you aren’t a liberal when you’re young, you have no heart, but if you aren’t a conservative when you’re middle-aged, you have no head. Now it appears that conversion occurred the night of the Hi-Line party.
It’s nothing, that little voice whispers again, only with a bit less conviction. It’s not even for that big an amount—
Then I remember that I still haven’t looked at his LLC files. Cass sometimes wrote checks on that account for business expenses. The folder is sitting on my desk where I left it earlier. I
open it and find all the statements neatly arranged chronologically. I flip through them until I find the one for May 2015. There’s a check to an accountant, one to a car service, and then one to Pat Shanahan, written the night of May 15, 2015, for $50,000.
Well. That was a lot. But then Cass sometimes got carried away with his enthusiasm and it was the night of the fundraiser. So it wasn’t that unusual.
I flip through the next few statements and find, three months later, another $50,000 check made out to Pat’s campaign. And another three months after that . . . and another . . .
I recalled Cass telling me once that LLCs could donate unlimited amounts to political campaigns.
That’s why I get invited to so many fundraisers, he said.
He liked to feel like an important man, his fingers on the pulse of power. I knew he’d contributed to Shanahan’s campaign, but I’d never imagined—
I go through all the statements for the last three years, highlighting the donations to Shanahan. They add up to over a million dollars.
WTF, as Emily would say. While he was second mortgaging our house and borrowing on his life insurance he was donating a million dollars to a political campaign. This wasn’t a political cause; it was extortion. Pat Shanahan had something over him. Something that had happened the night of the Hi-Line party. Something this girl AJ knew about. And apparently this girl AJ had gone missing the night of my gala. Could, I wonder, feeling suddenly very cold, Cass have had anything to do with her disappearance?
As I’m pondering that dreadful possibility my laptop pings. Barbara has accepted my friend request and sent me a message: Do you know where my daughter is?
I feel a sickening pang of guilt. How would I feel if Emily or Whit were missing? And what if Cass had something to do with it? But no, Cass wouldn’t have been capable of hurting someone, especially a girl Emily’s age, and besides, Emily wouldn’t have been running around the outer boroughs sporting tattoos and working as a waitress and Whit—
The Stranger Behind You Page 21
