Ghosts of Bergen County

by Dana Cann

  Mary Beth glanced up, hoping Amanda would be there, but all she found were the same senior citizens at the same computers and no line to check out books. She left the maps spread on the table and returned to the Local Interests section, where she located the town’s master plans, updated every five years. She knew how to read these documents. She’d reviewed the most recent version when she and Gil had bought their house. Now she pulled one from 1975 and the most recent one, from 2005. In the 1975 master plan the property on the map labeled Millers’ Place was identified solely as Existing Residence on 18 Acres. The 2005 plan showed Woodberry Road. She went back and pulled each version of the master plan off the shelf, then stacked them next to her on the long table. She paged through these chronologically. By 1990, Existing Residence on 18 Acres had been replaced by Private Acreage to Be Purchased by County for County Park. By 1995, the land’s use had changed to Residential Housing, R/5.

  Mary Beth retrieved a pen and some scrap paper from her bag, and made notes:

  1918–1985 (approx): Miller House

  1990: to be bought by County for park

  1995: Woodberry development on the board

  She remembered reading old newspaper articles on microfiche. Now newspapers had digitized their archives, hadn’t they? The library hummed. Voices murmured and pages rustled. Fingers tapped keys and clicked mouses. She found an open computer next to a man scrolling through text, and she found the website for the Bergen Crier. She typed “Glen Wood Ridge” “Amanda Miller” and came up with no hits. Then Mary Beth removed the quotes around Amanda’s name, and the hits appeared, pages and pages—honor rolls, a woman with an award-winning garden, book reviews, feature profiles, business news, race results, births and obituaries, home sales, but none in which the names Amanda and Miller were connected in any meaningful way.

  Mary Beth narrowed her search to the five years between 1985 to 1990, when the use of the Miller property changed, according to the master plan, but again there was nothing useful, though there was significantly less unuseful content than before. So Mary Beth went back further and limited the search to the period from 1980 to 1985. The first headline astonished her: GIRL, 6, HITS TREE ON BIKE, DIES. July 18, 1983. Amanda Russo, who lived with her grandmother, Dorothy Miller, on Amos Avenue in Glen Wood Ridge, died Monday after the bicycle … That was the extent of the abstract, but it was enough. Mary Beth’s pulse quickened. Her breath came in audible rasps. She knew what she needed to do—click on the link and pay the newspaper’s fee, but she was unable to do so. Not yet. She wished to savor the moment of discovery. She thought of all the libraries around the world, the universe of data loosely connected by wires and codes, by signals that traveled through air. She imagined government and university archives, where scholars burrowed into warehouses of books, galaxies of paper, of words, pictures, and records. She imagined the smallest branch of the smallest system, with a few books on a few shelves and a terminal or two, possibly none. She imagined the sweep, and how the greatest discovery today would take place here, now, while the residents of Glen Wood Ridge checked out and returned and renewed books, while children were read to, while magazines were browsed, and while a ghost spied from behind a shelf.

  In a matter of weeks she’d been catapulted from a place like death into the blue sky by some unseen and untapped energy. She didn’t know where she’d land, whether she’d land on her feet or her head. It’s okay, Amanda had said. It doesn’t hurt. And Mary Beth conveyed the words to Catherine, the way mothers have conveyed words to their children for thousands of years. Okay. Didn’t hurt. And what else?

  She clicked open the article.

  Girl, 6, Hits Tree on Bike, Dies

  July 18, 1983

  By Vern Merriman

  Staff Writer, The Bergen Crier

  Amanda Russo, who lived with her grandmother, Dorothy Miller, on Amos Avenue in Glen Wood Ridge, died Monday after the bicycle she was riding collided with a tree in the woods adjacent to County Park.

  The accident occurred at the bottom of a steep ravine. Town police believe that the girl, 6, may have lost control of her bicycle at the top of the ravine or ridden down it purposely and lost control in the process.

  The dirt trails connecting the School on the Ridge to County Park and other parts of the town are popular with children on bicycles, according to Barry Saunders of the Glen Wood Ridge Police Department.

  “The hills are steep, and there’s loose dirt and rocks, roots and other obstacles. The thing we want to tell kids and their parents is to slow down and wear helmets,” Saunders said.

  Mrs. Miller, who has lived in Glen Wood Ridge since before the town’s incorporation, said her granddaughter came to live with her last year.

  “She didn’t have permission to ride down there,” Mrs. Miller told the Crier. “She could only ride her bike in the front yard and driveway.”

  Mrs. Miller, who raises chickens in her yard, said one of the birds was found a quarter mile down the trail from where her granddaughter died. The chicken has been returned unharmed to Miller.

  “We get kids all the time up here curious about our chickens,” she said. “I don’t know what one’s got to do with the other. But I wonder.”

  Mary Beth read it twice. The article at once made perfect sense and no sense. Amanda had mentioned chickens. She’d mentioned boys on bikes. Mary Beth searched for more stories but there were no more. An accident, based on the one article she’d found. But what about the chicken? Was that a clue? Mary Beth could have gone next door to the police department. She calculated back. It was twenty-four years ago, almost to the day. Amanda would be thirty now, only five years younger than Mary Beth. Were there any officers who would remember the case? No one Mary Beth had met after Catherine’s accident would have qualified. They were all younger than she was, as though the Glen Wood Ridge force was reserved for entry level only, a place to get your toes wet before moving on to larger towns with more challenging crimes. Nor did she want to run into any of those officers, if they were still there, and risk being identified as the wacky lady whose daughter died and who now, inexplicably, was looking for information about another dead girl, killed long ago. Could a private citizen even do that, go to the police and start asking questions to sate her interest? She wasn’t going to find out. She realized that she knew a witness. Maybe the witness was unreliable, but she was a witness all the same. She went to find Amanda, or let Amanda find her.

  Lisa Becker put her head in Ferko’s office. “Did you know your friend Greg is here?”

  “Greg?” The name didn’t register in the context of the Riverfront Capital offices.

  “Greg Fletcher,” she said, “the guy from the softball game.”

  “Greg Fletcher is here?”

  “With Prauer.”

  “That’s …” Ferko searched for an original word, but when he came up empty he said, “Weird.”

  “I just wanted to give you a heads-up, in case he stops by.” She turned, as if to leave, but then didn’t.

  “What are you working on?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Stuff.” Truth was, things were slow. He hoped no one noticed how slow before they picked up again.

  She bit her lip.

  “It’s a blip,” he said to acknowledge her unease.

  “The Grove team!” Prauer appeared over Lisa’s shoulder, with Greg in tow. Lisa stepped aside, an apparent effort to evade, but was trapped by Prauer and Greg.

  “My man!” Greg said, and shook Ferko’s hand.

  “Greg?” Ferko feigned surprise.

  Greg took Lisa’s hand. “We’ve met before. I’m Greg Fletcher.”

  “Hi,” Lisa said, like a lovestruck teenager.

  “Lisa Becker,” Prauer said, completing the introduction for her.

  Greg wore his sleepy look, his stoner smile.

  “Greg called me. First to gloat about softball.” Prauer left a pause for the laugh track, which arrived late, from Greg and Lisa. “And then to talk about the G
rove deal.”

  “What Grove deal?” Ferko asked.

  “So I said, ‘Let’s have lunch.’” Prauer leaned forward, fingertips on Ferko’s desk, and loomed.

  “The family’s falling apart,” Prauer said, addressing Ferko’s premature question. “Roy was the glue holding the family together. Now that he’s gone, there are elements that want out.”

  “There’s an opportunity,” Greg put in.

  “The surviving Groves cut Greg’s firm loose. He’s on our team now.”

  “Our team?”

  “Not directly, of course. That’s you and Lisa. But Greg quarterbacks, which I understand he used to do quite well back in the day.”

  “You told him about the Punt, Pass, and Kick competition?” Ferko hoped the spectacular failure of that day would prove a belated lesson in humility for Greg, even if Prauer failed to get it.

  “Greg, you didn’t tell me about that. I was in awe of those kids.” Prauer checked his watch. “I’ll let you guys talk.”

  He started to leave, but then stopped in the doorway.

  “Hey!” He raised a finger. “Why didn’t we think of killing Roy Grove?”

  This time the laugh track was timely.

  “Maybe we did,” Ferko said, trying to get into the spirit.

  But Prauer was gone.

  It was quiet for a moment. Greg occupied the spot Prauer had vacated. Lisa stood with her back to the open door, eyes wide, like a small mammal weighing escape.

  “The Grove team,” Greg said.

  Ferko, unable to speak, waited for what would come next.

  “Lisa, can I get a moment with Gil?”

  “Sure.” She left without looking at Ferko.

  He almost stopped her to prove a point—that it was his office, and he wanted her to stay. But the truth was he wanted her to go, too.

  Greg touched two fingers to the edge of the door. It swung slowly, under its own momentum, until it clicked in the doorjamb. He sat in the chair facing Ferko’s desk. He opened his hands, palms up, like a plea, before leaning forward, fingers interlaced, wrists on the edge of Ferko’s desk. Then he turned his hands over, fingertips touching the desktop like piano keys.

  “Dude, I didn’t call Bill. He called me.”

  He paused as though that were explanation enough.

  “I think he just wants me on his softball team. Should I be flattered?”

  Ferko didn’t say one way or the other.

  “At the same time, the Groves are all fucked up. They fired us, on the spot, because one of their cousins blew up Roy’s car.”

  “Who did it?”

  “Call the police.” Greg looked past Ferko, out his window, where there was a view of a white building. Greg was resetting himself, it appeared, blinking his heavy lids, like the lights on a computer tower when the machine reboots or backs up its hard drive.

  “Dude,” he said again, which was probably Greg’s way of not calling him Gaylord. “So, I’m really pissed off, being fired by the client like that. We all are. But I’m here in New York now, and I’m thinking I need to meet more people, so I accepted Bill’s invitation to lunch.”

  “He took you to lunch? To recruit you for softball?”

  Greg shrugged his shoulders and closed his thick eyelids. “He’s really into softball.”

  Ferko nodded his assent.

  “It’s cool.”

  Ferko nodded again, assuming that cool meant okay, because he thought it was okay, in a certain light, that Prauer wasn’t all work, that he made time for recreational pursuits, like softball, even if it was just one more competition that he had to win. After the loss to Greg’s team, Prauer had taken the next two days off, apparently unable to cope.

  “So I go to lunch with him and I want to bring him something, because, you know, he’s the man. So I told him there’s this one faction of the family, representing, like, thirty percent of the stock, that wants out, at any price. I mean, they’re sick of the whole business. They’re in mourning.”

  “You just told him that, unsolicited?”

  “I kept it in my pocket until dessert.”

  Ferko looked at him.

  “He’s persuasive,” Greg said.

  Ferko knew what Greg meant. Prauer got things without having to ask.

  “So, we’re going to buy from these guys?”

  “I tell you who to call and help you with the price.”

  Ferko scratched his chin. It was wrong, he knew, unethical and patently unfair. But perhaps not illegal. Not like murder, anyway. In the continuum of crimes committed by and against the Groves, this one was a blemish, possibly not even visible.

  “It’s a private transaction,” Greg said, as though he were reading Ferko’s mind.

  They let it settle over them, like a beautiful piece of chamber music swelling from stereo speakers. Ferko still had the remnants of last night’s dope running through his veins. He was thankful for that, and thankful, too, that he now had something tangible to work on. But he wondered what Greg’s presence meant for him. He was surprised how easily he could hold his own with Greg, at least one-on-one. He wondered how long it could last, Greg treating him like a peer, with respect, before he started hitting hard-liners at him, balls he knew Ferko couldn’t handle.

  “Have you seen Jen lately?”

  “I have.” He didn’t want to be more specific—say that it was last night—because here was another complication, if Greg were to become a fixture in Ferko’s professional life: the dope. He had to warn Jen, though she’d likely take no heed anyway.

  “Is she okay?” Greg asked.

  Ferko pushed out his chin. “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know. I finally saw her for lunch last week, and she seemed, I don’t know, wound up.”

  “She’s a little crazy,” Ferko admitted. “I think that trading thing makes people get that way.”

  He took heart. Jen hadn’t mentioned that she and Greg had had lunch, but maybe that meant she, too, recognized the importance of keeping Ferko’s personal and professional lives separate.

  “She said you and her are buds now.”

  Ferko didn’t know what to say.

  “That’s cool,” Greg concluded. He picked up a photo on Ferko’s desk, a picture of Catherine, the only one Ferko kept in his office, wearing PJs, pink with hearts. Her face was pink, too, from being pressed against the breast. She smiled like she meant it, splayed on the couch after what Ferko could only guess was a particularly satisfying feeding.

  “I’m sorry about your daughter,” Greg said.

  Ferko stared at him.

  “Jen told me.”

  Greg touched the frame of the next photo, one of Mary Beth in a wicker chair on the front porch, not long before the accident. Even then, in those happy days, she conveyed melancholy in her silences. Ferko had snapped this picture from the doorway, when she wasn’t looking. When the shutter sound clicked she’d looked up at him with an unreadable expression—peeved indifference he took to mean acceptance. He raised the lens again and she stuck her hand up, like a traffic cop signaling stop. He did. He stowed the camera, but got prints made of the single image he took, first in color and then in black and white. It was the latter he put in a frame and brought to the office. Mary Beth looked elegant in the photo, awakened by spring, even as her downcast eyes—looking, perhaps, at the tulips that came up every year, in spite of their neglect—betrayed her underlying sadness.

  “We’re going to get this thing done,” Greg said. Ferko was unsure what thing. His eyes must have asked it, because Greg went on: “This Grove thing. And other things, too. We’re going to be a team. We’re going to make a difference. And we’re going to make a lot of money.”

  She found Amanda straddling the fallen tree. The girl shot Mary Beth an impatient look, as though she’d been waiting for her all day.

  “There you are,” Mary Beth said cheerily.

  “This is where I live.”

  She was struck by the word live, but kept the i
rony to herself. She took her place on her end of the tree. “We have a lot to talk about.”

  “What happens to people in the woods?” Mary Beth asked her.

  “They chase boys on bikes and hit trees.”

  “You asked me that question the other day.”

  “I saw it in the library today, written on that TV.”

  “You followed me.” She meant it good-naturedly, but was afraid it came out as an accusation. “I didn’t see you,” she said.

  Amanda stared at her.

  “You’re a good reader,” Mary Beth said.

  “Just the top part.”

  Mary Beth retrieved the story she’d printed, and read Amanda the headline: “GIRL, 6, HITS TREE ON BIKE, DIES.”

  Amanda waited, as though she expected Mary Beth to read the rest of the story, and so she did. After she was through, Mary Beth studied the girl to gauge her reaction.

  “I’m sorry, Amanda.”

  “I told you it’s okay.”

  Mary Beth thought she might cry. In fact, she knew she should, but her medicine prevented her. That was the way she understood it, because she used to cry, before the doses were raised and raised again to a level where she could no longer do so.

  Besides, the girl watching her wasn’t going to cry, either.

  “It didn’t hurt,” Amanda said.

  “There’s nothing here about chasing boys on bikes.” Mary Beth waved the printout.

  “That’s the part I remember.”

  Mary Beth waited. She wasn’t going to ask her.

  “These boys came up like they always did to look at our chickens. They rode their bikes up our driveway. I was riding my bike in the front yard, kind of chasing the chickens around with my tires.” Amanda paused to glance toward the side. Then she leaned forward on the tree. “My grandma didn’t like that game,” she whispered.