The Stranger Behind You

by Carol Goodman

  “. . . won’t open the door. I think the others are there. Do you want me to meet you on the back stairs?”

  He’s probably talking to Shanahan’s wife, planning their strategy. I can’t let them reach Melissa and AJ.

  “Simon?” I say through the intercom. “Who’s that you’re talking to?”

  “Joan!” he cries, boyish worry on his face. “Thank God! Are you okay? I’m afraid you’re in danger. I’ve found out something horrible about the way Cass died.”

  “Really?” I say, trying to keep my voice calm. “Tell me.”

  A flicker of annoyance passes over his face turning the boyish look into something else: pique at being questioned. “Why don’t you let me in and I will.”

  “I think I feel better talking like this,” I say. “Like you always said: a good reporter should always maintain a professional distance.”

  He purses his lips, the annoyance curdling into anger. I feel a stir of air beside me and nearly jump out of my skin thinking it’s Shanahan’s wife who’s somehow gotten into my apartment. But it’s only Lillian, come silently to stand beside me. She’d been so quiet sleeping in her chair that I’d forgotten she was here. She stands on tiptoes to look at the camera screen.

  “He looks angry,” she says.

  “Joan,” Simon says in his deepest I’m-your-boss voice, “I’m worried about you. All that junk on your wall, all that talk of conspiracies. I think you’ve lost the plot, as the Brits would say.” He’s trying for a more jocular tone, but I can see the tension in his shoulders, his right fist clenched as he reaches into his pocket.

  “He has the keys,” Lillian says. “We have to go.” She’s right. He’s pulling a set of keys out of his coat pocket. He must have taken my extra set when he was here last night.

  I turn away from the door and follow Lillian, who’s moving surprisingly fast for someone her age. When she reaches the back staircase she holds a finger to her lips, listening. There are footsteps on the stairs coming up fast. Shanahan’s wife.

  “Mrs. Osgood? Melissa?” It’s Enda shouting on the stairs from a lower flight. The steps coming up halt and wait for another set of footsteps. Enda thinks the woman on the stairs is Melissa—just as anyone who sees the camera footage will think it was Melissa who shot Hector and then shot me in revenge for exposing her husband and ruining her life. And now Shanahan’s wife is waiting for Enda to reach her—

  “Enda!” I shout down the stairwell. “That woman is not Melissa! She has a gun!”

  Pounding footsteps follow, then a crash and a gunshot.

  Lillian grabs my hands and pulls me toward the spiral stairs. “We have to go through the skylight,” she tells me.

  When I push on the skylight I remember that Melissa was going to block it to keep Sylvia out—but it opens. I shimmy through, scraping my hips on the splintery wooden frame, then turn to help Lillian through. She’s so light I could practically carry her—and I might have to. How else is a ninetysomething old woman going to get off this roof?

  She’s thinking faster than me, though. As soon as she’s through she looks around for something to block the skylight. “Here,” she says, handing me a pole, the remains of some long-ago laundry rack. “Wedge it in the handle there. It won’t hold long but at least it will slow him down.

  It’s as if she has done this before.

  I thread the pole through the handles on the skylight, then stand and look around. The rain has stopped. Clouds are clearing in the west, letting through an orangey light, making the wet black tar paper glow like oil. Melissa and AJ are on the west side of the roof looking over the edge. I put my arm around Lillian and help her across the roof, worried that she’ll slip on the slick tarpaper.

  Melissa looks up as we approach. She looks puzzled, and I realize she must be surprised to see Lillian tucked under my arm, but all she says is: “We called the police. I told them an intruder had chased us onto the roof. I figured that was simpler than explaining the whole thing.”

  She’s probably right, but it occurs to me that if the police think that it was Melissa who shot Hector they might also believe it was Melissa who chased me and AJ out onto the roof.

  “What happened?” AJ asks. “We heard another shot.”

  “I’m not sure. Enda chased Wally Shanahan up the stairs. She may have shot him—” My throat tightens at the thought of another innocent victim.

  A crash from behind makes us all turn toward the skylight. Someone is trying to push it open. Sirens sound in the distance. The police aren’t here yet. By the time they arrive we could all be dead.

  “There’s a ladder,” Melissa says, “but it’s old and rusted.”

  “I used to go out on the fire escape in my old building,” AJ says. “These things are stronger than they look, but you don’t want more than one person on it at a time.”

  “You go,” both Melissa and I say at the same time to AJ.

  “Wait for us when you get down so we can go to the police together,” Melissa says.

  AJ looks at us and nods. “Okay, but you follow as soon as I’m down.”

  “Of course,” we both say in unison again, in the same false tone.

  “I mean it,” AJ says. “No heroics. I don’t want to face the cops alone.”

  “We won’t let you,” Melissa says firmly. “Here, take my gloves.” She hands her a pair of leather gloves. “Hold on tight.” She watches anxiously as AJ climbs down. I turn to Lillian, who’s become a heavier weight on my arm. I lead her to a dry spot by a chimney and help her sit down.

  “Rest here for a moment,” I tell her.

  Until what? I think. Lillian can’t climb down the ladder. Would Simon and Wally hurt her if we leave her behind? My mind balks at the idea of Simon hurting a frail old lady, but then my mind is still struggling with the notion that he followed me into my apartment . . .

  That he was my attacker. That he has been the dark, invisible presence I’ve been wrestling with all these months—the suffocating cloth over my face, filling my head with chloroform—

  Which Simon had in his office from the story Ariel had done on the chloroform rapist. She had ordered it from a medical-supply company using a phony ID to demonstrate how easy it was to get and then Simon had locked it up in his office “for safekeeping.”

  So you reporters don’t get any ideas about knocking me out and taking over the magazine, he had joked.

  Lillian is looking up at me, her face wet with tears. “I didn’t want to think it was Frank either.”

  “Frank?” I ask, horrified that the terror of this flight has brought back her own trauma.

  “When Rose and I got back up here, it was Frank who came through the skylight. I was relieved at first. I thought he’d come to save us . . . but then I saw the gun . . .”

  A sharp crack of wood splintering cuts her off. I look toward the skylight. Glass shards fly up. Simon is breaking through the glass to get through. I pull over one of the splintery crates and drag it in front of Lillian. “You stay here,” I tell her. “He won’t know you’re here. Wait until the police arrive.”

  She nods solemnly. “Don’t worry about me. Save yourself and your friends.”

  My friends, I think as I turn away from Lillian. I hurry across the roof toward Melissa, who was so recently my enemy. She turns when she hears me behind her, face drawn and haggard in fitful light breaking through the clouds. “She made it,” she says. “AJ’s down.”

  “You go,” I say. “I’ll try to keep Simon talking until you’re safe.”

  She looks toward the skylight as it crashes open and then down the long drop to the rocks below as if measuring her chances. But then she looks at me. “I think you’ll be better at that than me. Just . . .” She grasps the handles of the ladder and turns to step on the highest rung. The metal groans. “Remember that Simon loved Cass once and there’s nothing worse than realizing the person you loved was an illusion.”

  “Okay,” I say, “I’ll keep that in mind. Now, go!” />
  She starts the climb down and I turn to find Simon standing just a few feet behind me. There are glass shards on his shoulders and a streak of blood on his cheek, which gives him a manic, rakish air like it’s a new fashion statement.

  “For God’s sake, Joan, what’s going on?” he demands. “Have you gone insane?”

  He says it so reasonably that I find myself considering the possibility. Isn’t it more likely that I’ve gone insane than that Simon is here to kill me? I haven’t really been the same since I got hit on the head. But then—

  “I just saw Pat Shanahan’s wife shoot the doorman in the lobby,” I say. “So did Melissa Osgood.” I don’t mention AJ.

  “I don’t know what happened in the lobby. As for Melissa, I wouldn’t trust her motives. Have you asked yourself what she’s doing here? Did you know that she bought the apartment below you?”

  “No . . .”

  “Has it occurred to you that Melissa is the one with the motive to discredit you? Even to kill you? She blames you for ruining her life. Now she’s gotten you up on this roof, scared to death of me.” He takes a step toward me. “If you fell, what would people think?”

  “I-I don’t know.”

  “No? Use your brains, Joan.” It’s what he’d say when I brought him some piece of information he found questionable or if I failed to see the logic of some argument he was making. “Remember what’s down in your apartment—a wall covered with Post-its and Internet clippings, half of which is about some murder case from the 1940s. People will say you went crazy. Melissa will say that your mania and obsession discredit our story about her husband. She’s the one who benefits from your death. What benefit do I gain?”

  He smiles and takes another step forward. I shuffle backward and feel the iron of the ladder against my calves. I want to turn and see if Melissa is down on the ground yet—no, I want to call her back up here to answer Simon’s accusations. I want a better explanation for Simon’s guilt than that vague pablum about nothing being worse than realizing the person you loved was an illusion.

  Simon standing right in front of me is not an illusion. The western light makes the blood on his face ruby red and the glass on his shoulders sparkle. “Joan,” he says softly, taking another step toward me, “why would I encourage you to write the story and then try to stop you?”

  It’s a good question. Simon always told me to look at both sides of a question—to anticipate the counterargument. “You didn’t encourage me at first,” I say, remembering now that first meeting. “You told me I didn’t have enough.”

  “That was being a good editor. I wanted you to make sure you had enough evidence.”

  “You delayed the publication for three years.”

  “To make sure the story was ready.”

  “You told me not to explore the incident at the Hi-Line—”

  “Because it was unsubstantiated. There was no police record—”

  “Because Shanahan had it erased.”

  A muscle twitches at his temple. “Who told you that?”

  “Someone who was there. Someone who said you were there too.”

  “So what? I told you I was at the party. I’m a journalist. It’s my job to observe what the rich and famous get up to when they think no one’s watching.”

  “Is that what happened?” I ask. “You saw your old idol getting hauled down to the police station and you saw an opportunity?”

  “To do what?” he asks. His face, caught in the light, looks stony. “If I saw Cass taken into custody, why wouldn’t I report that? Why would I keep it secret?”

  “Because you wanted control, maybe? Or you never gave up wanting to impress the rich boy from college?”

  Simon laughs. “Well, that would have been a fool’s errand. Men like Caspar Osgood think it’s their due for men like me to come to their aid.”

  “Is that what happened?” I ask, hearing the anger in Simon’s voice. “You helped him out and then he wasn’t grateful. I bet he ignored you even more, ashamed that you’d seen him at his worst. That must have made you angry. No wonder you agreed eventually to let me do the story. But you kept the Hi-Line incident back. You counted on using it as leverage if Cass threatened to sue you.” I recall how blithely he’d burned those cease-and-desist letters we both received the day before the story came out. How confident he’d been, standing outside the restaurant. “That’s why you didn’t tell Sylvia about the story. You knew she was friends with the Shanahans and that she would warn them.”

  He looks at me skeptically. “And why would Sylvia think the story about Cass would affect Pat Shanahan—”

  “Because she was there that night. You told me you were her plus one. She would have seen you go to the station with Cass and Shanahan and suspected you helped Cass. And it was Sylvia who called Wally Shanahan the night of my pub party.” I picture myself preening in front of Andrea Robbins, bragging that there were other lines of investigation I could pursue, even one about an incident at a private club. “Sylvia overheard me talking about the Hi-Line incident and called Wally to warn her. Did Wally call you?”

  “Why would Wally Shanahan call me?” he asks.

  It’s a good question. The truth is I don’t know but then I have a hunch, and Simon always says that a good reporter follows their hunches. “She knew you were at the station and that you helped Cass get out of that charge. She knew that you had your own reasons for not wanting that information to be made public. You were the perfect person to make sure no one found out that her husband cleared Cass of those charges.”

  “Enough!” he barks. “You don’t have an ounce of evidence.”

  “There’s the witness who saw you with Shanahan at the police station and who saw you following me home the night the article came out.”

  He smiles. “Have you considered maybe that I followed you home for other reasons? That maybe”—he lifts his hand to my face and caresses my cheek—“I thought we could spend a pleasant night together.”

  At the touch of his hand I flinch, and with that flinch Simon’s mask falls away. He slides his hand behind my neck and erases the space between us. The backs of my knees press against the metal frame of the ladder, the top part of my body tilting over into empty space. As soon as he has control over my body he no longer has to lie.

  “I only meant to put you out long enough to retrieve the girl’s phone number. Believe me, Wally suggested I do much worse, but I told her I could keep you under control. I didn’t think it would be hard; you were always so hungry for validation. I was only going to tie you up and blindfold you to make it look like a burglary, but then you had to struggle and hit your own head on the floor.”

  He runs his fingers up my scalp. “Honestly, it was such a blow I thought you were dead. Oh, I was horrified at first! I even considered calling 911. But I had to search through your files first to make sure you didn’t have anything about the Hi-Line incident in your notes and I realized that I might have left it too long, that I wouldn’t be able to explain how much you had bled, and then I thought, Would it be so bad if she died? And I felt something turn inside of me. Why should I be the slave to circumstances? I’d wondered that since college when I met people like Cass and Melissa who had so much when I had so little and I thought that all I had to do was be their friend and then I could have what they had. I thought if I wrote his papers for him in college and his stories for the Times he would be grateful. I should have learned when he claimed I had stolen my stories from him that there was nothing he wouldn’t stoop to. When I saw what he did to that server, I thought it was an opportunity to watch him fall, but then I saw that Pat Shanahan would come to his rescue and I knew he was going to get out of that too. Nothing would ever touch him. I thought why shouldn’t I benefit from some of Cass’s luck? I’d have something I could always hold over him.”

  “Was that the only reason?” I rasp. “Or did you think he’d be your friend again?”

  He tightens his grip on my scalp. “That would have been s
tupid,” he says. “No one likes the man who sees you when you’re down. He avoided me like the plague after that. . . . He even—” He breaks off, his face contorting. I sense the moment of weakness, what Simon taught me to look for when interviewing a source.

  “What did he do?” I ask. “You helped him out of a jam and then . . . he did something worse than just avoid you.”

  “The bastard had me blackballed!” he spits.

  “Blackballed?” I repeat.

  “From the Hi-Line. Sylvia nominated me and asked Cass for a letter supporting me and he wrote instead that I wasn’t the right sort for the club. Of course, the letter was supposed to be confidential but Sylvia found out.”

  “That’s . . .”. I want to say ridiculous. Could Simon really have been motivated by something so petty? I say instead, “So you decided to get back at him. How fortunate that I showed up with my story.”

  He laughs. “You were the third ex-Globe intern whose résumé I forwarded to Sylvia. I figured eventually I’d get one with a complaint. The fortunate part for me was that you were so easy to control. Such a good girl, eager to please and follow the rules. As long as I kept you away from the Hi-Line incident I’d have something to leverage Cass with.” He laughs, his mouth so close to mine I can smell his coppery breath. “Cass himself taught me that trick. When he accused me of plagiarism at the Times and I told him I was going to go to the editor in chief to defend myself he threatened to reveal that I’d lied on my college application to Brown—a tiny doctored recommendation letter, but enough to ruin a man like me. You know what Cass said to me the night I went to his house?”

  He seems to expect an answer even though I can’t speak or shake my head or, for that matter, do I know what he’s talking about. When did Simon go to Cass’s house? Then I realize with horror that he must mean the night Cass killed himself. His grip on my scalp is so tight it feels like a vise, cutting off the flow of blood. I make a grunt that doesn’t sound like me at all, but he takes it as an expression of curiosity, a signal to go on with his story.