The Good Stranger (A Kate Bradley Mystery)

by Dete Meserve

  I ordered a dozen assorted delicacies. Then, with the sun rising behind me, I balanced the bright-blue box on my right hand and raced through the streets of Manhattan back home. Giddy with excitement, I scurried up the stairs and placed the box on the neighbors’ doorstep.

  I scribbled a note:

  Hope your day gets better. Your neighbor.

  ANC’s head of security, José Valles, was frowning. Maybe that was his perpetual look, because between his beefy build, broad face, and buzz cut, he seemed like someone who rarely smiled. Who had suspicions about everyone and everything.

  He scanned the “stop looking for Marie” letter and the postcard, his breath coming in deep sighs; then he searched something on his laptop before fixing an intense pair of brown eyes on me. “The person did this more than once, so it’s not a casual threat. Don’t go anywhere alone. Or late at night. Lock your doors. Be sensible. But I don’t think these are enough to warrant a beefed-up security detail on you.”

  “Any ideas on why they might not want me to find Marie?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe finding her will lead to the letter writer and they’ve got a criminal history. Or maybe they’re worried that if you find Marie, she’ll be locked up for what she’s doing.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Locked up for helping people?”

  “You’re a reporter,” he said, a dark expression crossing his face. “People are arrested all the time for reasons that don’t make sense.”

  He was right. And it made me think for a moment that maybe finding Marie might be putting her in danger. Maybe some people would harass her for not choosing them or make death threats because she’d helped the “wrong people.” The world was filled with hordes itching to be offended, to post inflammatory messages or to “take her down” on Twitter. Just because Marie was doing good things didn’t make her exempt from the wrath of social media trolls. Maybe that’s why she was hiding.

  With so many people looking for her, might she stop all the giving to reduce her chances of being discovered? Yet the uptick in the number of gifts people were reporting seemed to suggest that she wasn’t afraid of getting caught. As if she knew she was several steps ahead of all of us.

  Later that morning, I checked in with the Kindness Busters and learned that all their tech—GoPro cameras, motion sensors, even a drone—still hadn’t turned up anything. The leader of the group—who would only identify himself as Peter Venkman, the name of the character Bill Murray played in the Ghostbusters movie—told me that Manhattan had “too many people and too much stuff going on, making it easier to do kindness under cover of the crowds.”

  But tech aside, what puzzled me was that no one had come forward claiming to be behind the secret good, nor had any of their friends or neighbors. When reporters had searched for an anonymous Good Samaritan in Boston who had left blankets and gloves for the homeless in city parks, one of her friends had told reporters who was behind it. Here, no one was talking—no neighbors, no friends—which seemed almost impossible, considering how many people had to be involved.

  I considered the idea that dozens, maybe hundreds of people were behind it. That someone started it, and now legions of copycats were running around riffing on the original idea. But despite the journalists swarming the streets of Manhattan and the tech work by the Kindness Busters, not a single person had been spotted. Which made me return to my theory that this was a small, covert group with a compelling reason for secrecy.

  If cameras and drones couldn’t spot them, then how would I ever find them? Even if I had an entire team devoted to it, I couldn’t have “spies” in every restaurant, flower shop, party-supply store, hospital, and pharmacy in Manhattan. The scope of what they were doing was too big.

  As I sat at my newsroom desk, I suddenly realized I could harness a power few people had: the ninety-three million who followed ANC on Twitter.

  I journeyed upstairs through the vast warren of ANC offices until I found one of the social media directors, Amanda Rockwell. I told her what I wanted to do, and she looked at me with a tired expression through oversize glasses.

  “Yeah, I kind of love the way Manhattan is these days. The balloons everywhere. People are less pushy. Even on the L train. Someone paid for my coffee at Starbucks today. But why do we need to know who’s doing it?”

  “Well, for one thing, we work for a news network. Finding out is what we do. But you know why else I want to find out? Because I want to know why someone would spend so much time and money giving to complete strangers. Aren’t you curious?”

  “I guess I assumed they’d eventually tell us. And we’d find out it was some company who wanted to make us feel good about their product. Branding or something. Or maybe a promotion for a movie or a play on Broadway . . .”

  “What if it isn’t?”

  She frowned. “Why else would they do it?”

  “That’s what we need to find out.”

  Amanda made sure my tweet was posted that afternoon. It read: “SECRET GOOD: Who is behind the cash, flowers, balloons, free meals, free rent, paid-up hospital bills, etc. in Manhattan? ANC wants to know. Email any and all tips to ANC reporter KateBradley@ANC.com.”

  “Your story just got interesting,” Mark was saying the next morning in the newsroom. “You know those gift cards on windshields all around town? Some guys used bolt cutters to break into a parking lot in the East Village to get at them this morning. And when other people saw what they were doing, it started a stampede. Hundreds of people flocked to that parking lot. A teenage boy got trampled. Couple of guys got in a fistfight, and one of them ended up in the hospital.”

  “All because of twenty-dollar gift cards?”

  He nodded. “Yep. The whole thing snarled traffic in the area for forty-five minutes.”

  “You want me on it?”

  “Nope. I already sent MJ,” he said, referring to another journalist at ANC. “Keeping you on the shutdown story. But you know what I think the point of all this supposed kindness is?”

  “A marketing gimmick?”

  He shook his head. “To expose that we’re all selfish. Greedy. We’re seeing it here. People will do anything for twenty bucks.”

  “That’s cynical.” Listening to him, I wondered if I was hearing myself in fifteen years. The only difference between us was that I kept stubbornly looking for proof otherwise. I wondered if he, too, had searched for goodness in others and never found it. Then the cynicism slowly settled in, and like concrete curing over time, it hardened and became solid.

  He shrugged. “Reality. People only do good things for two reasons. You want to know what they are?”

  “Enlighten me,” I said, but I could see my sarcasm was lost on him.

  “Because we think there might be some kind of benefit to us. Or because we think it will make other people respect us more. That’s it.”

  I relaxed my face, hoping to hide any trace of my mounting frustration. “Those are the only reasons someone might be doing kind acts for strangers? Some are estimating they’ve already spent a half-million dollars. You’re saying they’re throwing around that kind of money just to prove that we’re all inherently selfish and greedy?”

  He blew out a breath and looked at me as though I were a foolish child. “It’s a game, Kate. You notice how many followers that NYCMiracles page has? A hundred thousand, right? But people are only interested to the extent that they might get something out of it. And the people who’re doing it? They’re exposing humanity at its selfish worst. That’s why they’re hiding in the shadows. Why they don’t want you to figure out who they are.”

  The report from the scene in the parking lot played over and over again on ANC and other networks. It was a horrifying mash-up of cell phone video showing people shouting, shoving, pushing, and scuffling with each other, occasionally punctuated by shots of victorious people holding up twenty-dollar gift cards as though they had just won the Super Bowl. One woman even snatched a gift card from the hands of a kid wearing a dinosaur T-shi
rt. It took two police officers pushing through the mob to break up the fights and disperse the crowd, but not before an ambulance was called.

  The story played so often that even I had the sense that there was a contagion of violence and an epidemic of bad people everywhere—all of which completely wiped out any memory of the secret good that had swept across the city. Was Mark right about this whole venture exposing the worst in all of us? And if it was, then surely all the acts of kindness would end. The people behind it had proved their point.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The gift cards continued. In fact, judging from the posts on NYCMiracles and the texts I was receiving, the giving was increasing. Someone had left cash to fill the gas tanks for weary motorists at a station in Lower Manhattan. Dozens of people living on the streets reported getting packages of clothing and shoes delivered to them by Amazon. And droves of lucky Manhattanites arrived at bodegas and coffee shops to find their meals had already been paid for.

  Sure, there were a few conspiracy theories still floating around suggesting that we check the flowers and balloons for listening devices. Maybe Google was listening in on our conversations through these gifts? But a guy named Noah who had found a gift card on his windshield summed it up best in his text to me: I was raised to believe that strangers are dangerous. We can’t trust them. But seeing what these strangers are doing makes me wonder if maybe we’ve got that wrong.

  As I grabbed a cup of coffee from the kitchen, my phone chimed, alerting me to a text from Scott.

  Want to swing by my office? A friend of mine is here. He’s got intel on the gift cards.

  I smiled. I’d teamed up with other reporters before, but there had often been a competitive tension or disagreement on how to approach the subject. Working with Scott had none of that. It wasn’t that we agreed on everything, but he seemed to trust my instincts. I was beginning to trust his too.

  On my way.

  Scott’s office was somewhere on the seventh floor, the plush, light-soaked level that housed many of the network’s brand-name hosts and their prime time shows. The floor was a hive of activity, so I had to navigate past a newsroom and around producers scrambling to start a production meeting for one of our political-news shows before I found his office at the end of a long hallway.

  The first thing I noticed was that his walls were covered in photographs. Framed collages of press passes decorated one wall, while behind his desk was a huge photo of dolomite formations, shrouded in fog, and rising high from Vietnam’s Ha Long Bay. A wardrobe of shirts, ties, shorts, and T-shirts hung on a rack in the corner.

  “Kate,” he said, rising from his chair. He was dressed casually. Dark jeans, equally dark polo. White Adidas. “This is my friend Richard. We went to high school together. He’s a quant jock at one of the management-consulting firms here.”

  “Quant jock?” I asked, shaking his hand.

  “Financial modeling. Analysis.” Richard was tall, with a super-lean build that made me think he was either a marathon runner or gifted with the metabolism of a hummingbird.

  “Another name for a numbers genius,” Scott said. He motioned for me to have a seat on the couch. “He’s noticed something important about the gift cards.”

  Richard opened his laptop. “My wife found one on the windshield the day this all started. I got curious, so I began plotting the streets where the cards were found, based on what people were posting on social media. The data sets can be a little wonky, because lots of people who get the cards don’t post about it. But there is a pattern. Most are around the Morningside Heights area.”

  “I just moved here from LA. Where’s that?” I asked.

  He pointed to a map on his laptop. “A neighborhood that borders the Upper West Side and Harlem.”

  “Home of Columbia, Barnard, and a bunch of other universities,” Scott added.

  My thoughts were racing. “What if the gift cards are the work of some college students running a social experiment? A few years ago, Harvard did a study where they gave college students twenty dollars to spend on either themselves or someone else. They were trying to see if people were happier if they kept the money or gave it away.”

  “And?” Richard asked.

  “The people who gave the money away reported greater happiness.”

  Scott’s eyes lit up. “Maybe a similar experiment is at play here? It would explain a lot.”

  “Another thing I tracked,” Richard said. “Most people report getting the gift cards in the early-morning hours. Before six. Which means they’re being delivered in the dead of night—four or five in the morning. Maybe earlier.”

  “College students are up at those hours,” Scott offered.

  I pointed to the map on Richard’s laptop. “The area looks relatively small. Maybe thirty blocks total. We could probably canvass the whole thing by running it tomorrow morning.”

  Scott nodded. “Easily.”

  “You guys really are hard core.” Richard shook his head. “You’re actually going to run the entire neighborhood to try and catch these people in the act?”

  “Absolutely,” I answered.

  “Of course,” Scott added.

  He stared at us, wide eyed. “For a story?”

  “Yes, but I need to be careful,” I said. “Someone’s been sending me messages, telling me to stop looking for Marie.”

  The color drained from Scott’s face. “Are you kidding me?”

  I shook my head. “I got notes both here and at my apartment. I showed them to security.”

  “Does José have any idea who’s sending them?”

  I shook my head. “None.”

  His tone was serious. “We have to be smart about this.”

  “If you ask me,” Richard piped up, “and I know you haven’t—it’d be a heck of a lot safer if you took a car or taxi. Or hired a detective to do this work.”

  I was silent for a moment, thinking. I had to be sensible, but I refused to live in fear, confining my life to my apartment and the newsroom. “I want to do this,” I said quietly.

  “Then I’ll run with you,” Scott volunteered. “And I’ll make sure we’re not followed by any crazies. What time tomorrow morning?”

  “Four?”

  “You know, you two are cut from the same cloth.” Richard closed his laptop. “But you’re both nuts.”

  “This is a problem,” I was saying the next morning when Scott showed up for our run. I pointed to his Yankees cap. “The cap isn’t enough of a disguise. Everyone’s going to recognize you. And when they do, our friends leaving the gift cards are going to scatter.”

  “You didn’t recognize me when you first saw me in this cap.”

  “I had just been run over by a guy on a bike. We can’t hope everyone is going to be dazed and confused like I was.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  I looked at him: mussed hair, blue eyes, a hint of stubble on his jaw. Not much was going to keep people from looking at him. “Hoodie. Tied tight around your face. That’s all I got.”

  “Fair enough.” He removed the cap and tightened the hoodie so only his eyes, nose, and full lips showed. “But then you’ve got to wear the ball cap.” He placed it on my head and smiled. “Looks better on you anyway.”

  Morningside Heights before dawn was hushed, faintly aglow. As we ran at a clipped pace, Scott was easy to talk to as he pointed out a famous diner, Tom’s Restaurant, whose exterior was used as a stand-in for the fictional café in Seinfeld, and called out all the colleges and universities in the “Academic Acropolis.”

  I learned that he had studied political science at Yale, but otherwise, Scott didn’t talk much about his past, steering the conversation either to something we were running by or to questions about the people we were hoping to find.

  Ninety minutes later, after scanning every car and peering at every awake person—even following some for a few blocks—we’d covered a lot of ground but hadn’t discovered anything.

  “Maybe this is a bus
t,” he said, slowing to a stop at a street corner. He unzipped his hoodie, revealing a slim-fitting black Zoolander T-shirt underneath.

  “You’re only saying that because you’re beat,” I teased.

  He shot me a boyish grin. “You think so, do you? Truth is, I’ve got a better idea. You know what sounds really good right now? Waffles. With warm syrup.”

  “You know what sounds even better?” He looked up at me, and there was that spark again. “Another two miles. If I don’t get some kind of foothold on this story, I’m going to be stuck on the government-shutdown political beat forever.”

  “There are worse things, you know. And research shows waffles will help you face the reporting challenges ahead.”

  His doe-eyed, hungry expression was convincing. Almost.

  “I’d like to see your research sources.”

  “Okay. Want some proof? They’re the reason I made it through an ice-climbing expedition in the Canadian Rockies for one of last season’s episodes.”

  “Waffles are.”

  “Serious. The extreme cold—not to mention three hours of climbing up sheets of ice right after dawn—were knocking us out. It’s a scary climb with no margin for error. But our cinematographer kept coaxing the team, saying, ‘Get this done, and we’ll all be eating plates of waffles.’ It worked.”

  “Okay, somewhat convincing.” Why was I always smiling around him?

  Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed movement down the block. The slightest blur in between the cars parked within inches of each other in a tight line.

  I touched Scott’s arm and gestured. In the dim predawn light, someone was weaving between the cars. Their back was to us, and from my vantage point, I couldn’t tell if it was a man or woman. They could have been casing the cars to see if people had left them unlocked, but it looked like they were stopping briefly at each one, making some kind of hand movement, then moving on, heading away from us.

  We ran softly, making as little noise as possible. “Hope this doesn’t end up being someone passing out junk mail flyers,” I whispered.