The Dark Tide Free for a Limited Time

by Andrew Gross

  But it was real. Captured there. No matter how much she might want to deny it!

  Charlie’s face.

  Karen was staring at her husband.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The morning was clear and bright, the suburban New Jersey road practically deserted of traffic, except for about thirty bikers cruising in unison in their colorful jerseys.

  Coasting near the front of the pack, Jonathan Lauer cast a quick glance behind, searching out the bright green jersey of his friend Gary Eddings, a bond trader at Merrill. He caught a glimpse of him, boxed in. The perfect chance! Crouching into a tuck, Jonathan began to pump his legs and weave a path through the maze of lead riders of the peloton. When a path opened up in front of him, he broke free.

  Lauer, the imaginary announcer exclaimed in his head, a bold, confident move!

  While for the most part they were just a bunch of thirty-something dads sweating off a few carbs on a Sunday morning, privately he and Gary had this game. More than a game, a challenge. They always pushed each other to the limit. Raced each other in the final straightaway. Waited for the other to make the first move. The winner got to brag for a week and wear the pretend yellow jersey. The loser bought the beers.

  Calves pistoning, leaning over the handlebar of his brand-new carbon-fiber LeMond, Jonathan built a margin of about twenty yards, then coasted freely into the curve.

  The finish line, the bend after the intersection with 287, was a half mile ahead.

  Looking back, Jonathan caught a glimpse of Gary trying to free himself from the pack. His blood started to pump, accelerating as the country road turned into a perfect straightaway in the last half mile. He’d moved at the right time!

  Pedaling fiercely now, Jonathan’s thighs were burning. He wasn’t thinking about the new job he had started just a few weeks before—on the energy desk at Man Securities, one of the real biggies—a chance to earn some real numbers after the mess at Harbor.

  Nor was he thinking about the deposition he had to make that week. With that auditor from the Bank of Scotland and the lawyer from Parker, Kegg forcing him to testify against his former company after taking the attractive payout deal that had been offered him when the firm shut down.

  No, all that was in Jonathan’s mind that morning was racing to that imaginary line ahead of his friend. Gary had maneuvered out of the pack and had made up some distance. The intersection was just a hundred yards ahead. Jonathan went at it, his quads aching and his lungs on fire. He snuck a final peek back. Gary had pulled up. Game over. The rest of the pack was barely in sight. No way he could catch him now.

  Jonathan coasted underneath the 287 overpass and cruised around the bend, raising his arms with a triumphant whoop.

  He’d dusted him!

  A short time later, Jonathan was pedaling home through the residential streets in Upper Montclair.

  The traffic was light. His mind drifted to some complex energy index play someone had described at work. He was relishing his win and how he could tell his eight-year-old son, Stevie, how his old dad had smoked everyone today.

  As he neared his neighborhood, the streets turned a little winding and hilly. He coasted down the straightaway on Westerly, then turned up, Mountain View, the final hill. He huffed, thinking how he’d promised he’d take Stevie to buy some soccer shoes. His house was just a quarter mile away.

  That was when he spotted the car. More like a large black façade, a Navigator or an Escalade or something with a shiny chrome grille.

  It was heading right for his path.

  For a second, Jonathan Lauer was annoyed. Hit the brakes, dude. It was a residential street. There was plenty of distance between them. No one else was around. It flashed through his head that maybe he had taken the turn a little wide.

  But Jonathan Lauer didn’t hear the sound of brakes.

  He heard something else.

  Something crazy, his annoyance twisting into something else. Something horrifying, as the SUV’s grille came closer and closer.

  He heard acceleration.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Over the next few days, Karen must have watched that two-second clip a hundred times.

  Horrified. Confused. Unable to comprehend what she was seeing.

  The face of the man she had lived with for eighteen years. The man she’d mourned and missed and cried over. Whose pillow she still sometimes crept over to at night and hugged, whose name she still whispered.

  It was Charlie, her husband, caught in an unexpected freeze-frame as the camera randomly swept by.

  Outside Grand Central. After the attack.

  How the hell can that be you, Charlie…?

  Karen didn’t know what to do. Whom she could possibly tell? She went for a jog with Paula out on Tod’s Point, and listened to her friend going on about some dinner party she and Rick had attended, at this amazing house out on Stanwich, when all the while she just wanted to stop. Face her friend. Tell her: I saw Charlie, Paula.

  The kids? It would shatter them to see their father there. They would die. Her folks? How could she possibly explain? Until she knew.

  Saul? The person he owed everything to. No.

  So she kept it to herself. She watched the captured moment, over and over, until she was driving herself crazy. Confusion hardening into anger. Anger into hurt and pain.

  Why? Why, Charlie? How can that be you? How could you have done this to us, Charlie?

  Karen went over what she knew. Charlie’s name had been on the Mercedes dealer’s transit sheet. They had found the remnants of his briefcase blown apart, the charred slip of paper from his notepad she had received. He’d called her! 8:34. It didn’t make any sense to Karen.

  He was there on that train!

  At first she tried to convince herself that it couldn’t be him. He would never, ever do this to her. Or to the kids. Not Charlie…. And why? Why? She stared at him. People look alike. Eyes, hopes—they can play crazy tricks. The picture was a little fuzzy. But every time she went back to that screen, replayed the image she had saved for maybe the thousandth time—there it was. Unmistakable. The sweats coming over her. Accusation knifing up in her belly. Her legs giving out like jelly.

  Why?

  Days passed. She tried to pretend to be herself, but the experience made her so sick and so confused, all Karen could do was hide in her bed. She told the kids she had come down with something. The anniversary of Charlie’s death. All those feelings rushing back at her. One night they even brought dinner up to her. Chicken soup they had bought at the store, a cup of green tea. Karen thanked them and looked into their bolstering eyes. “C’mon, Mom, you’ll be fine.” As soon as they left, she cried.

  Then later, when they were asleep or at school, she’d go around the house, studying her husband’s face in the photos that were everywhere. The ones that meant everything to Karen. All she had. The one of him in his beach shirt and Ray-Bans that they’d blown up for the memorial. Of him and Karen dressed in black tie at her cousin’s wedding. The personal items she had never cleared off his dresser in his closet: business cards, receipts, his watches.

  You couldn’t do this to me, could you, Charlie? To us…

  Not you…

  It had to be some kind of coincidence. A freakish one. I trust you, Charlie…. I trusted you in life, and I’m goddamned going to trust you now. In a million years, he would never hurt her this way.

  Karen kept coming back to the one thing she still had of him. The torn sheet from his notepad someone had found in Grand Central. From the Desk of Charlie Friedman.

  She felt him there. Trust had to win out here. The trust of eighteen years. Whatever she saw on that screen, she knew damn well in her heart just who her husband was.

  For the first time, Karen looked at the note sheet. Really looked at it. Not just as a keepsake. Megan Walsh. The random name scrawled there in Charlie’s barely legible script. The scribbled phone number: 964-1650. And another number, underlined in
his bold, broad strokes:

  B1254.

  Karen closed her eyes.

  Don’t even go there, she admonished herself, suspicion snaking through her. That wasn’t Charlie. It couldn’t be.

  But suddenly Karen stared wide-eyed at the scribbled numbers. The doubts kept tearing at her. Seeing his face up on that screen. It was like a piece of his past, a link to him—the only link.

  Crazy as it is, you’ve got to go ahead and call, Karen.

  If only to stop yourself from totally going insane.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  It took everything Karen had to do it.

  In a way it made her feel like she was cheating on him, on his memory. What if that wasn’t even him up on that screen? What if she was making all this up, over someone who simply looked like him?

  Her husband had been dead for over a year!

  But she dialed, secretly praying inside that the number wasn’t to some hotel and B1254 a room there, and this was how she would have to think of him. The weirdest doubts crossed Karen’s mind.

  “JP Morgan Chase. Fortieth and Third Avenue branch,” a woman on the line answered.

  Karen exhaled, relief mixed with a little shame. But as long as she’d gone this far, she might as well go all the way. “I’d like to speak with Megan Walsh, please.”

  “One moment, please.”

  It turned out Megan Walsh was the manager in charge of the Private Banking Department there. And after she’d explained that her husband was now deceased and that Karen was the sole beneficiary of his estate, B1254 turned out to be a safe-deposit box that had been opened at the branch a year before.

  In Charlie’s name.

  Karen drove into town the following morning. The bank was a large, high-ceilinged branch, only a few blocks from Charlie’s office. Megan Walsh was an attractive woman in her thirties, with long dark hair and dressed in a tasteful suit. She took Karen back to her cubicle office along a row with the other managers.

  “I remember Mr. Friedman,” she told Karen, her lips pressed tightly in sympathy. “I opened the account with him myself. I’m very sorry for your loss.”

  “I was just piecing through some of his things,” Karen said. “This wasn’t even listed as part of his estate. I never even knew it existed.”

  The bank manager perused Karen’s copy of Charlie’s death certificate and the letter of execution from the estate. She asked her a couple of questions: First, the name of their dog. Karen smiled. (It turned out he had listed Sasha.) His mother’s maiden name. Then she took Karen back into a private room near the vault.

  “The account was opened about eighteen months ago, last September.” Ms. Walsh handed Karen the paperwork. The signature on the box was plainly Charlie’s.

  Probably just business stuff, Karen assumed. She’d see what was in there and turn whatever it was over to Saul.

  Megan Walsh excused herself and returned shortly with a large metal container.

  “Feel free to take as much time as you need,” she explained. She placed it on the table, unlocking the clasp in Karen’s presence with her own duplicate key. “If there’s anything you need, or if you’d care to transfer anything into an account, I’ll be happy to help you when you’re done.”

  “Thank you.” Karen nodded.

  She hesitated over it for a few moments, after the door had closed and she was left alone with this piece of her husband he had never shared with her.

  There was the shock of seeing his face up on that screen. Now this box that had never been mentioned as part of the estate or even come up in any of Charlie’s business files. She ran her hand a little cautiously along the metal sides. What could he be keeping from her in here?

  Karen drew open the large container from the top and peered inside.

  Her eyes stretched wide.

  The box was filled with neatly arranged bundles of cash. Wrapped packets of hundred-dollar bills. Bearer-bond notes bound with rubber bands with denominations scrawled on the top sheet in Charlie’s handwriting: $76,000, $210,000. Karen lifted a couple of packets, catching her breath.

  There’s at least a couple of million dollars here.

  She knew immediately this wasn’t right. Where would Charlie get his hands on this kind of cash? They shared everything. Numbly, she let the packets of bundled cash drop back into the case. Why would he have kept all this from her?

  Her stomach knotted. She flashed back to the two men from Archer two months before. A considerable amount of money missing. And the incident with Samantha in her car. Two hundred and fifty million dollars. This was only a fraction of that amount.

  She was still gaping at the contents of the box—it started to scare her. What the hell is going on, Charlie?

  Toward the bottom of the container, there was more. Karen dug around and came out with a manila envelope. She unfastened the clasp and slid out what was inside. She couldn’t believe what she saw.

  A passport.

  New, unused. Karen flipped through it. It had Charlie’s face inside.

  Charlie’s face—but with a completely different name. A fake one.

  Weitzman. Alan Weitzman.

  In addition, she slid out a couple of credit cards, all made out to the same false name. Karen’s jaw fell slack. Her head started to ache. What are you hiding from me, Charlie?

  Confused, Karen sank back into the chair. There had to be some reason for all this that would make sense. Maybe the face she’d seen on that screen was not really Charlie’s.

  But here it was…. Suddenly it seemed impossible to pretend anything else. She ran her eyes down the activity sheet again. The box had been opened two years before. October 24. Six months before he died. Charlie’s signature, plain as day. All the entries had been his. A couple shortly after the box was opened. Then once or twice a month, seemingly like clockwork, almost as if he were preparing for something. Karen skimmed to the bottom, her gaze locking on the final entry.

  There was Charlie’s signature. His quick, forward-leaning scrawl.

  But the date…April 9. The day of the Grand Central bombing.

  Her eyes fastened on the time—1:35 P.M. Karen felt the sweats come over her.

  That was four and a half hours after her husband had supposedly died.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Karen held back the urge to retch.

  She felt dizzy. Light-headed. She grabbed onto the edge of the table to steady herself, unable to free her eyes from what she saw on that sheet.

  1:35 P.M.

  Suddenly, there was very little that made sense to Karen in that moment. But one thing did, flashing back to his grainy image from that handheld camera up on that screen.

  Her husband was definitely alive.

  Reeling, Karen ran through the contents of the safe-deposit box once again, accepting in that moment that everything she had felt and taken for granted over the past year, every shudder of grief and loss, every time she’d wondered empathetically what Charlie must have felt, every time she’d crawled over to his side of the bed at night and hugged his pillow, asking, Why…why?—it had all been nothing but a lie.

  He had kept it all from her. He had planned this.

  He didn’t die there that day. In the blast. In the hellish flames.

  He was alive.

  Karen’s mind shot back to that morning…Charlie hollering to her over the dryer, about taking in the car. In her haste, words she had barely heard.

  He’s alive.

  Then to the shock that had gripped her at the yoga studio as, glued to the screen, panic taking over her, she slowly came to accept that he was on that train. His call—the very last sound of his voice—about bringing home dinner that night. That was 8:34 A.M. The blown-apart top piece of the briefcase with his initials on it. The sheet from his notepad that someone had sent.

  It all came tumbling back—deepening with the force of a storm circling in her mind. All the pain and anguish she had felt, every tear…

  He was there.
On that train.

  He just hadn’t died.

  At first it was like the cramp of a stomach flu forcing her insides up. She fought back the urge to gag. She should be jubilant. He was alive! But then she just stared blankly at the cash and the fake passport. He hadn’t let her know. He’d let her suffer with the thought all the past year. Her confusion turned to anger. She sat there staring at the fake passport photo. Weitzman. Why, Charlie, why? What were you devising? How could you do something like this to me?

  To us, Charlie?

  They had loved each other. They had a life together. A family. They traveled. They talked about things they were going to do once the kids were gone. They still made love. How do you fake that? How do you possibly do this to someone you loved?

  Suddenly Karen felt jelly-legged. All that money, that passport, what did it mean? Had Charlie committed some kind of crime? The room began to close in on her.

  She felt she had to get out of there. Now.

  Karen clasped the box shut and called outside. In a moment Megan Walsh came back in.

  “I’d like to just leave this here if I could for now,” Karen said, brushing the perspiration off her cheeks.

  “Of course,” Ms. Walsh replied. “I’ll just give you my card.”

  Karen asked her, “Did anyone else have access to this box?”

  “No, just your husband.” The bank official looked back quizzically. “Is everything all right?”

  “Yes,” Karen lied. She took her purse but before running out requested a copy of the activity sheet. “I’ll be back in a few days to decide what to do.”

  “That’s fine, Mrs. Friedman, just let me know.”

  Out on the street, Karen sucked a breath of cooling air into her lungs. She steadied herself against a signpost. Slowly, her equilibrium began to return.

  What the hell is going on here, Charlie? She turned away from people passing by on the sidewalk, afraid they would think her a lunatic to be reeling around in such a distraught state.