The Good Stranger (A Kate Bradley Mystery)

by Dete Meserve

  He leaned back against the balcony railing. “When I covered Hurricane Irma in the Florida Keys, people rallied together for complete strangers too. They opened their homes, brought meals, helped track down prescriptions. Donated thousands of items. Maybe this is a little like that?”

  “We often see people help out in disasters and catastrophes. But many of the people they’re giving to aren’t in any crisis at all. I can’t figure out their endgame.”

  “A skeptic. I get that. Especially given how many stories of manipulation we cover every day. But they told the 134th Street tenants ‘You’re all connected.’ What do you think that means?”

  “I don’t know.” I set down my pizza slice. “Is this all just a way to get attention or attract millions of followers? You know, like a cell phone or cable company wanting to ‘connect’ us through their services. Or is this a legit group, trying to bring our attention to something important? Something we just can’t grasp yet.”

  He handed me a bottle of water. “And which do you hope is true?”

  I was surprised by his question. Journalists cover what is. Not what we hope it to be. “I want to believe there’s something good behind all of it. Even though that puts me in a club of one at ANC.”

  “I’d like to join your club,” he said. Then he flashed that smile of his, the one that drew in millions of viewers each week, but here it made me feel like he saw the best in me.

  “Why? We’re probably only going to get our hopes dashed and find out this is just some scam. Who would possibly think there’s something good behind all of it?”

  “I would.”

  I smiled. “Because you’re an eternal optimist, or just crazy?”

  “Crazy, of course.” He took a quick swig of water. “And because of something that happened to me a few years ago.” He looked out over the darkening skyline, gathering his thoughts. His voice was quiet, reflective. “I was on a skiing trip in Colorado with my cousins and had gotten way ahead of them on this one really rough trail. We shouldn’t have been out there then—it was practically a whiteout. The next thing I knew, I had flipped over a mogul and was thrown so far I was partially buried in a huge snowdrift. I got the wind knocked out of me and couldn’t move. I panicked because I was pretty sure no one would be out there in those conditions. Suddenly a man comes up and pulls me out. Then my cousins called out to me, and when I turned around, the guy was gone. He’d completely disappeared. My family was in the press the next day offering a reward to whoever it was that saved my life that day, but he never came forward. I’ve always wondered who he was.”

  He surprised me. I had been holding my breath, thinking his curiosity about this story was motivated by ambition. I’d even considered that he had initially offered to help because he was curious about Senator Bradley’s daughter. But his story made me realize his interest was genuine. Made me think it might be safe to tell him mine.

  “When I was little, I thought the whole world was like that,” I said. “People doing almost magical things for other people. My mom died in a car crash when I was five, but what I remember about it was the three guys who came to her rescue. They never identified themselves—even after reporters searched for them—but my dad always talked about how they tried to rescue her. How grateful he was that they tried. Even though I’d lost my mom, the world still had a kind of magic to it. Neighbors would come over or invite us to dinner. Friends came over with books and treats. Some of my dad’s staff took me to a theme park one time, to the beach another. It wasn’t until I got a little older that I realized that the world isn’t like that. Most people aren’t like that.”

  “I’m sorry about your mom,” he said, softly. “Maybe we’re both lucky to have crossed paths with the few people who have the altruism gene, a talent for helping others.”

  I thought about that for a moment. “Or maybe we all have a little bit within ourselves, waiting for the right experience to spark it into action.”

  As we polished off the pizza later that evening, I told Scott about my breaking-news beat in LA—covering wildfires, murders, shootouts, earthquakes, freeway chases, and other tragic events.

  Surprisingly, he’d seen several of my stories, including my Robin Hood reports when they aired on the network. He tried every conceivable line of questioning and tactic to get me to divulge who the Robin Hood was behind the string of high-tech robberies in the mega-estates—even making outrageous guesses like Kim Kardashian and Chuck Norris—but I wouldn’t crack.

  “You are tough,” he said, smiling. “I’d have better luck breaking into Fort Knox than getting an answer out of you.”

  “That’s because you gave up too soon. Before you figured out my weaknesses,” I answered, then realized how flirty that sounded.

  “You have weaknesses?”

  Our eyes met briefly, and the charge between us was so strong that I looked away.

  My cell phone vibrated in my purse, offering a good distraction.

  “You’re very popular. That thing’s been ringing all evening.”

  “I posted my phone number online saying I’m the correspondent to text or call if they have tips about any of the good stuff we’re seeing.”

  He grinned. “So you’re tough and bold.”

  I reached into my purse and glanced at the screen. Seven missed calls, and one unknown number calling me now.

  I answered. “Kate Bradley.”

  “Hiya, Kate. You don’t know me, but I run a wholesale party-supply shop on Twenty-Third in the Flatiron,” the man said. “I saw your report about all the balloons that are everywhere around the city. I saw the guy.”

  “You saw what guy?”

  “The guy who’s doing it. When I came in the front door of the shop this afternoon, a guy was leaving here with six shopping bags of our bulk-pack latex balloons. Probably had more than ten thousand balloons in those bags. That’s not unusual for us, really. But then I noticed they were all purple and white. So I followed him.”

  “You followed one of your customers? What’d he look like?”

  “Shorter than me, but most people are. I’m six foot two. He was wearing a gray hoodie with the hood pulled tight around his head, so I couldn’t get a look at his face. Once he went inside his apartment, I stopped following him. It wasn’t the safest of neighborhoods, and I didn’t want to get myself killed.”

  “Where’d he go?”

  “828 East Thirtieth Street. He went into the first apartment on the right. First floor.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  No.

  That’s all the email said. One crystalline word.

  I’d emailed Mark asking if I could follow up on the lead about the party-store guy, and his emphatic reply came a swift thirty seconds later. It wasn’t difficult to read between the lines of his one-word answer: the government shutdown had entered its third day, and he needed me to cover it. The story about the gifts mysteriously appearing throughout the city? Over.

  At least in his mind.

  In mine, that meant I’d have to chase the lead before I headed into work. I set my alarm to get up early and threw on my running gear and shoes, determined to combine my morning run with a trip to 828 East Thirtieth. The address was about two miles away, a fairly straightforward path that I could run instead of slogging through town in a taxi or on the subway. And I could listen to the news rundown on my earbuds on the way there. A gold-star multitasking morning.

  As I stepped outside my apartment, I almost trampled a bouquet of flowers on my doorstep.

  I reached down to pick them up and realized that they were the same purple-and-white bouquets people were finding on doorsteps all around the city.

  I blinked back tears. It was easy to dismiss something like this as “trivial” . . . until it happened to you. The simple flowers—given to me by someone I didn’t know—made the city seem softer. Smaller.

  I breathed in their sweet scent, remembering a morning when Eric had surprised me with a sprawling bouquet of the orange popp
ies that grew wild in his garden. I let the scent and memory envelop me: The air, soft and still. The low timbre of his voice. A lone butterfly fluttering by.

  My neighbor Cora must have heard my door open because she peered into the hallway.

  “Ov-va!” she said, picking up the flowers. “What are these for?”

  “We all got them.” I pointed down the hallway, where bouquets were stationed at every door.

  She eyed the scene with suspicion. “From who?”

  “The same anonymous people who are doing this all over the city.”

  It was the first time I’d seen her smile. “Oh good. I was worried they were from a man I know who needs a green card.” She put the flowers to her nose. “Purple is my daughter’s favorite. Purple dresses. Purple flowers. When she was little, she wanted everything purple.”

  “Enjoy,” I said, then turned to go back in my apartment.

  “You remind me of her,” she said. “Anna. She is about your age. Thirty.”

  I turned to face her. “She lives here in Manhattan?”

  She shook her head. “Optyne. Ukraine.” She looked at me with pale eyes, pausing as if wondering if she should say more. “The war is such misery there. But all my family—my mother, brother, sisters—anyone who’s left is in that village.”

  “Do you go back often?”

  Her face fell. “Never. I come here three years ago to make money and send it back for them.”

  “Must be hard for you to be so far from home.”

  Her hand caressed the flowers. “I am fortunate. I clean homes for the man who owns this building. He lets me to pay less rent so I can send more to them. They have nothing.” She gazed at the flowers. “And today? I have these.”

  Then she turned and disappeared back into her apartment.

  The path to the address the party-store owner had given me was an easy run, but the city smells were getting to me. I’d become used to the putrid scents wafting up from the subway vents and even the wet-dog smell of the mounds of trash bags, but the stench of burning rubber and diesel-exhaust fumes mixed with a hint of burnt pretzel was making me nauseated.

  I ran faster until I spotted the apartment building I’d seen on Google Maps—three stories, with an entrance flanked by sagging faux-Corinthian columns. Luckily, the front door hadn’t closed properly, so I was able to slip inside. I knocked on the first door on the right.

  “Who’s there?” a woman asked from inside the door. I had the sense she was looking through the peephole.

  “Kate Bradley.” I flashed my friendliest smile. “From ANC. I have a quick question for you.”

  I heard her unlock the dead bolt and unchain the door. She squeezed the door open a few inches. “How can I help you?”

  “I’m looking for a guy who came in here yesterday. Wearing a gray hoodie.”

  She opened the door a little wider, and I could see she was petite, five four at most, and in her midtwenties, with long blonde hair tied back into a ponytail. She held a fresh bridal bouquet, white roses. “I think you have the wrong address,” she said with a slight drawl. “No guys live here.”

  “Are you sure? Someone saw him entering this apartment yesterday morning.”

  “Positive. I was here all day yesterday.”

  I nodded at the flowers. “Are you the bride?”

  She laughed. “Maid of honor. My friend’s getting married this weekend. She’s the one who lives here. But no one came here, except a couple of bridesmaids in the morning.”

  “Maybe I got the apartment wrong then. Do you know if there’s a guy who lives in the building who might have come in here with huge bags of balloons?”

  She shook her head. “No idea. I’m from out of town. Dallas. And only here for the wedding. My friend went out to run a few errands. Why are you looking for this guy?”

  “We’re thinking he might be behind all the purple and white balloons everywhere.”

  Her face brightened. “I saw them! Not at all what I expected for my first time in Manhattan. You think the person doing it lives here, in this apartment building?”

  “Actually here. A witness saw the guy come into this apartment.”

  She shook her head. “They’re mistaken. Sorry.”

  After that, I knocked on all six doors of the apartment building, but no one matched the description, and no one had seen anything unusual. Everyone said I had the wrong address.

  Was there a desperate clutter of cats tied to the bottom of every subway car? That’s what it sounded like. A grating, incessant whine as I waited for the train to arrive later that morning, after playing real-life Frogger by dodging disgusting puddles of water, rust, and the unknown on the platform. And the smell. A vaguely metallic, greasy, dusty funk that surely had to be carcinogenic.

  When the train finally showed up, I rushed inside, surprised to see that the few open seats had something on them. A rock maybe?

  I rolled my eyes. Was someone using stones to save seats on the subway?

  “It’s not saved,” a thirtysomething woman with thick cornrows said to me, breaking the cardinal rule of subway riding: no conversation with strangers. “They were on the seats when we got on.”

  I’m sure I looked like I didn’t trust her.

  “Go ahead, take it.”

  I picked up the rock and turned it over. Handwritten with a Sharpie, it read:

  SOMEBODY LOVES YOU.

  Tears stung the corners of my eyes. Maybe the words were true once. But not anymore. Suddenly I was missing Eric all over again. The quirky smile on his face when he was cooking up something special for me. The warmth of his hands as they skimmed my body.

  I wondered if things would’ve been different if he’d actually come to Manhattan. Would we have been happy? Or would the sacrifices he’d made—giving up being captain of the search and rescue team he loved—have strained our relationship to the limits? Made him angry and resentful. Of me.

  Why wasn’t it possible to have all the things we loved all at the same time?

  As I turned the stone over in my hands, I was certain about one thing. I wanted him to be happy. Even if that meant I couldn’t be with him.

  I glanced at the woman next to me and saw her eyes shining with moisture too. Maybe everyone was longing for something they couldn’t have.

  “Mine says: ‘You Matter,’” she said softly. “Some people are keeping them. I guess that’s okay, right?”

  I nodded and clutched the stone tightly. I was never going to hear him whisper he loved me again. Or see his face light up when he laughed.

  I blinked back tears. The loss of him made my chest ache. Empty. Yet somehow the stone, its message, offered a flicker of hope.

  “Disheartening, discouraging, deflating. That’s what’s on the docket. Government shutdown. Teacher’s strike in Chicago. Wildfires in LA,” Mark was saying to me and a few other correspondents and producers as we stood at the front of the newsroom that morning. “We got our hands full. Let’s start with the shutdown. Kate.”

  “Working on the impact on NASA, USDA, all the acronyms,” I answered quickly, because I’d already learned that speaking at a regular pace made Mark impatient.

  He pointed at Stephanie. “How are you coming on the Jaymie Clancy kidnapping story?”

  “I’ll have a report ready by nine.”

  While Mark scribbled and rearranged the news-assignments list on his iPad, I used the brief lull to pitch a story idea. “The Times had an article this morning about a group of millennials calling themselves the Kindness Busters. They’re putting cameras everywhere, trying to catch the people who’re behind the good—”

  “We got no time for that,” Mark interrupted.

  Stephanie shook her head at me, warning me not to press further.

  “Wait, they’re trying to bust the people doing good?” Isabelle the producer asked, furrowing her brow. “Like, get them in trouble? Or just figure out who they are?”

  “That’s what I want to find out.”


  “They catch anyone on camera?” Mark asked.

  I shook my head. “Not yet, but—”

  Mark’s eyes were ice cold. “Then not a story.”

  He turned and started talking to a reporter who was covering the high-profile murder trial of a police officer accused of shooting a man during a routine traffic stop.

  “Not a story,” I whispered to Stephanie. “But also, not a thing he can do to stop me from calling them.”

  Stephanie shot me a nervous look. “Be careful.”

  My phone chimed and my dad’s photo flashed up, so I headed to a quiet corner of the newsroom to answer it.

  “Sorry I couldn’t call you back until now,” he said. “I’ve seen some of your coverage of the shutdown. You’re doing great.”

  “You’re my dad. You have to say that.”

  “Everything okay? Have you had a chance to run the five-mile loop through Central Park we mapped out?”

  I managed a smile. Ever since I was in second grade, my dad and I had mapped out the best running trails to try out together in whatever city we were in. And although my dad was in his early sixties, he could run them nearly as fast as I could, if he didn’t stop to take phone calls. “Not yet. I’m waiting for you to get here, and we’ll do it together.”

  “Hopefully soon. You liking the new job?”

  I drew a deep breath and lowered my voice. “It’s tougher than I expected. And covering this shutdown isn’t exactly what I wanted to be doing here.”

  “Still, you’ve only been there a few days, and you’re already covering the biggest story across the globe right now.”

  I sighed. “I didn’t come here to cover politics.”

  “I know it can be tough being my daughter.”

  “It is. But worth it. Most of the time,” I said, with a small laugh. “It’s Manhattan that’s the problem. My crummy apartment. This job. The city. It feels like I don’t belong here.”

  He was silent for a moment. “Could be that you’re searching in the branches for what appears in the roots.”

  I frowned. “You always say that, Dad. But what’s that supposed to mean here?”