Everything to Lose: A Novel

by Andrew Gross

  “Tie, tie, tie, tie, tie . . . ,” he began to drone.

  “I thought that was funny,” I said. “Why don’t you put aside what you’re doing and get back to your math. That’s what you’re supposed to be doing now, right?”

  “I like drawing.”

  “I know you like drawing, Brandon. And I like your drawings. But it’s math time now.”

  “Tie, tie, tie . . . ,” he said, tuning me out.

  “Brandon, please . . .”

  He started drawing jagged lines through his math page, jerking his pencil in defiance, defacing the homework.

  “Brandon, stop! Now.”

  “Tie, tie, tie . . .”

  “Brandon, you heard me.” I reached for his hand. “I said stop!”

  He tightened the grip on his pencil without even looking up, continuing to scrawl his angry lines. I finally pulled it out of his grip and he looked up at me, like I’d stolen something from him, and I saw a wildness I knew.

  Mean Brandon.

  “Why would they want anyone else? If they do, I could go over and kill them.”

  I looked at him in shock. “Brandon, you know that’s not funny!”

  “I don’t mean it to be funny, Mommy. I’ll send Polydragon. He can do that, you know! He can go over and eat them, like Chicken McNuggets, if I tell him to. M’wom, m’wom, m’wom!” he said, making loud chomping noises.

  “Brandon, stop that now!” Sometimes he just said things, things he knew were inappropriate and would make me angry. Sometimes it was something else that he just couldn’t control.

  He suddenly looked away before he could get a reaction and the fierceness was gone. “That was just a joke, Mommy. I’m not really going to do it.”

  “Well, it wasn’t funny,” I said. “You know better. You have to watch what you say.”

  “I’m going to watch TV.”

  “Brandon!”

  He got up, leaving his schoolbook on the counter. Most any other time I would have brought him back, put the math book back in front of him, and made him stay on task. But tonight I just exhaled, spent and not up to the effort.

  For years, we couldn’t get him to even look at his at-home assignments. He would just stare at the page, muttering his persistent, distracting phrases. Or scribble illegibly, even though he knew exactly what to do. Or sometimes hurl the book in anger or rip pages out. And if he received a time-out and was sent to his room, he would go in the bathroom and slam the toilet seat up and down for an hour.

  At least that was the old Brandon.

  I went back to the iPad and continued my search. First I put in “Joseph Kelty,” as I always did. Then “Bedford, New York, auto accident.”

  Nothing.

  On the Journal-News site I did find another article on the continuing string of home break-ins, the third in the Mount Kisco area, not so far from us. I also saw something about a new exercise studio opening up in Armonk dedicated to the barre method, which I’d been dying to check out.

  I was about to exit when it caught my eye:

  Pharmacist Tied to Fatal Auto Accident Found Dead in Briarcliff Home

  My heart came to a stop. I clicked on the link and began to read:

  Roland McMahon, a pharmacist with the CVS company, was found hanged in his Briarcliff Manor home, an apparent suicide.

  “Oh my God! Rollie.” I exhaled. I felt my stomach fall.

  The body was discovered by his wife, Annemarie, Wednesday night after she’d returned from an outing with friends. Attempts to revive Mr. McMahon by paramedics proved unsuccessful and he was declared dead at the scene.

  There was a photo, the image there of the guy I recalled: ruddy-faced, soft around the belly, his tie undone, and acting a little squeamish at the sight of Kelty in his mangled Honda.

  I leaned closer:

  Coincidentally, McMahon, 58, who worked at the CVS store in Bedford as their chief pharmacist, was in the news in the past month as the only eyewitness of a fatal accident on Route 135 in which Joseph Kelty, of Staten Island, New York, was killed. No one was criminally charged and Sergeant Richard Toomey, of the Briarcliff Manor Police Force, insisted, “There was no reason to consider the two incidents as related in any way.”

  Annemarie McMahon, being consoled by her daughter, said, “We’re all in shock. I’d just left him. He was staying home to watch a game. He never once showed any sign of depression or anything like that. It just makes no sense that he would do something like this. We were leaving on a cruise of the Caribbean in two weeks.”

  A family member said McMahon had no known financial problems and was in good standing at work. He leaves behind a wife and three grown children. He was a member of the Pharmacological Society of America and was voted Westchester Pharmacist of the Year in 2007.

  A knot tightened inside me. He’d hanged himself?

  I read the article again, and it didn’t get any less troubling. I didn’t have a clue if what had happened was connected in any way to the crash. More specifically, to the money I’d taken. Meaning, my imagination started to run away with me—whether he’d actually killed himself at all. Or . . .

  I shuddered as a presentiment of fear wormed into my brain. Or, if someone was trying to track the money. Oh, God, Hil . . .

  Maybe it would come out that he’d had cancer; or that he’d lost his life’s savings in a kind of speculative investment; or that he was being treated for depression; or that he was having an affair. You hear about these things all the time. I thought back to what I’d told him at the site. “I’m Jeanine . . .” That was all. No last name. No way to find me. I’d been careful, I reassured myself.

  And even if something had happened, something unimaginable, crazy, he had no way to trace me. But it all tingled terrifyingly on my skin.

  Poor Rollie. Could he really have killed himself?

  I thought back through everything I could remember from the moment he came down the slope. There was no way anything could point to me if, as insane as it sounded, this somehow wasn’t a suicide after all.

  Right?

  Inwardly, I think I knew it from that very moment. Despite what the obituary said. Despite the police saying that they weren’t looking at the two events as being related.

  Why would they? They didn’t know.

  But I did.

  As far as anyone else would be concerned, Rollie would have been the first person at the accident.

  The only person.

  The only person for anyone who might be on the trail of what had happened to that money.

  You’re thinking crazily, Hilary. I tried to bring myself back to reality. You’re watching too many detective shows . . .

  But if it wasn’t—I pressed my fingers to my forehead—if what happened to Rollie wasn’t a suicide at all, but the work of someone who had managed to track him down, let’s say from an article in the newspaper, or from the cop who came on the scene just as I took off. Polluto. Or from the fucking police report, for all I knew. That was all possible, right . . . ?

  Someone looking for that money . . .

  Then I’d basically set him up. He was killed because of me.

  I was the one they were really looking for, not him.

  My stomach went into free fall.

  Suddenly I noticed Brandon back at my side, the defiance gone. “What’s wrong, Mommy? You’re all white.”

  “Nothing, baby,” I lied, drawing him close to me.

  I’d saved the biggest lie for myself. That in trying to help my son, had I now put him in danger? If Rollie had been murdered for what he didn’t know, for what he had no idea had taken place, what would they do if they found me?

  “Nothing,” I kept repeating, stroking Brandon’s hair over and over, terrified inside. “Nothing’s wrong, honey.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The whole thing happened so quickly, Tom O’Byrne thought to himself as the basement window burst open and the bay began to pour in; there wasn’t even time to say good-bye.


  Everyone knew a heavyweight of a storm was coming in. But there had been a lot of storms before, and nothing had caused more than a nuisance of flooding. Midland Beach was the kind of place where you not only knew everyone on the block, but likely knew their parents too. And their parents. Houses were passed down for generations, where married children still lived with their parents: construction workers, Con Ed supervisors, cops and firemen. These were people who were used to downed trees and flooded basements. Storms had come and gone. They’d all been there before.

  What they weren’t used to and didn’t fully understand, Tom included, was that the streets they’d grown up on, played on, drove back and forth on every day, lived out their lives on, were in a bowl. A topographic bowl, dipping a few feet below sea level from Father Capodanno along the bay all the way up to Hylan. So they stayed, even though it was designated as a group one evacuation area. They stayed because they’d always stayed, and nothing had happened before.

  By 11:00 P.M. the winds were ripping off the bay. A few trees were down, power lines; the storm was battering the clapboard houses pretty good. But no one was prepared for the swell, which by midnight had swept through the bungalows along the beach and over Father Cap Boulevard.

  It took only minutes for Midland Beach to become part of New York Bay.

  Tom knew it was time to get the family out a little before eleven. He’d spent his entire life in this old blue Victorian. It was his father’s, and you didn’t just run away. He got their son, Rich, to take his mom to the Bonanos, who lived on higher ground up on Todt Hill. Tom waved them off, saying he just wanted to grab a few documents out of the basement, just in case, and he’d be right behind. While he was down there, stuffing his will and his deed into a briefcase, the fifty-foot oak in their yard came crashing down into the house, slicing a ten-foot gash in the sunroom that faced the bay. By the time Tom tried to come back up, the first floor was under three feet of water.

  He went back down and called Sheila on her cell, as water burst through the storm window under the porch and into the basement. It was too small to crawl through and the water was beginning to come in. He tried the stairs one more time, but the current was so powerful it knocked him back down. He called 911, but it wouldn’t go through. They must be overrun. He called his wife again and left a message she didn’t receive until much later. “Hon, this isn’t looking so good.”

  By two A.M. the wind and tide had carried away their back porch and the first floor of their once proud home had become part of New York Bay. It knifed through the creaking eighty-year-old planks, engulfing every memento of their once happy lives. Four hours later it receded, like a dark thief, taking everything the O’Byrnes had accumulated in their lives back out to sea.

  It took the armoire his wife’s grandmother had brought over from Trieste. Her collection of antique ceramic boxes, and her filigreed old frames with the early photos of their grandparents and her parents’ wedding. It took the pictures of Rich’s graduation from the fire academy, guaranteed to bring a tear to Tom’s eyes.

  It took the oil painting of the Verrazano Sheila’s brother had completed just a week before he passed. From lung disease, which he’d contracted as a first responder on 9/11. Tom’s antique filigreed cigar box. The boxing shorts Muhammad Ali had worn when he knocked out Leon Spinks.

  It washed away every memory. Every celebration.

  And days later, Tom laid to rest, as Sheila walked through the gutted remains, shuffling through the mud and shattered glass and rotted wood that was now all that was left of their lives, she discovered something else the storm had taken: the hand-painted lacquer box that held the baby hair and photos of their daughter, Deirdre, the things closest to Sheila’s heart.

  Along with something else of their daughter’s they kept inside it. Something they hadn’t looked at in a long time, but that now, though it wasn’t clear right then, would turn out to be the most valuable possession in their lives.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Patas pimentón . . . ,” Charles Mirho said, pushing the plastic menu across the table at the taquería in downtown Yonkers. “They’re basically potatoes in kind of an omelet, lots of garlic and paprika . . .”

  “I’m not really hungry,” Dennis Finch replied, glancing around uncomfortably. The motor vehicles clerk was the wrong side of fifty, with the pasty coloration of someone who had spent the last decade behind a counter in a government office and wire-rims that seemed a size too large for his narrow face. “Why don’t we just get on with it?”

  “Suit yourself.” Mirho shrugged, taking another bite. “Empanadas are good too.”

  “Look,” Dennis said, “I narrowed the information you gave me down to four names.” He took a manila envelope from under his jacket. “First name Jeanine, a recent-model Acura SUV—it’s called the MDX, by the way—and a Westchester address.”

  “Lower Westchester,” Mirho said, not looking up while eating. “You sure I can’t interest you in something here?”

  “You realize I could lose my job for what I’m doing?” Dennis hissed under his breath.

  “You want me not to call you again?” Mirho shrugged, dipping a forkful of potato in oil. “Just say the word. You don’t think there’s a dozen underpaid dweebs—one probably in the booth right next to yours—who’d be thrilled to make a couple of grand for half an hour’s work? Next time, you oughta think about things like that when you push your kid to go to law school.”

  The clerk glared and pushed his glasses higher on his nose. This would have been the time to get up and take what he had back with him, which was probably what he should have done in the first place.

  Instead, he sighed, “Look, let’s just get on with it.” He pushed the envelope across the table. Mirho wiped his fingers clean and opened it, pulling out what was inside.

  Four printed-off pages.

  “First, I think you owe me something,” the DMV clerk said, putting his palm over Mirho’s hand.

  Mirho’s gaze settled on Dennis’s hand. “Three . . . two . . . one,” he counted and lifted his eyes to meet Dennis’s. “And trust me, Dennis, you don’t want to find out what happens next.”

  Slowly the DMV clerk removed his hand, Mirho’s jaw barely twitching into a smile that read something like Right decision, pal. He sifted through each of the four identities, each with its vehicle info and driving history and a grainy, printed-off photograph.

  The first was Jeanine Farancino. Not bad looking. A 2009 MDX. But she was from all the way up in Peekskill, definitely too far north, if Rollie’s version of what happened down there was true. Anyway, according to the records she was twenty-four, and as per Rollie, his Jeanine had a kid old enough to be at basketball practice.

  The second was a Jeanine Lisa Kramer. She was from Dobbs Ferry, which definitely made her a possible.

  But Rollie called the woman at the accident site “pretty,” and with her square, pressed-in face and chopped-off hair, this Jeanine looked like she wouldn’t be able to get herself laid on a prison conjugal visit.

  Mirho turned the sheet again.

  Jeanine Ann Jackson. Thirty-one. New Rochelle. Another possibility, he thought, or would have, until he saw the photo. Black as freshly laid tar. Not sure exactly what ol’ Rollie went in for, Mirho thought, but while he was shitting himself up on the rafters, that fact might definitely have come up.

  “So are we square?” Dennis pulled the top of the sheet down. “I have to get back to work.”

  “Sure. We’re square, Denny boy.” Mirho stared back at him.

  There was a kind of ice in his tone that said to Dennis maybe he shouldn’t have said that, but Mirho just took an envelope from his jacket and slowly pushed it across. Dennis put his hand over it and surreptitiously brought it back in.

  “You said it was debt collection, right?”

  “Debt collection . . . ?” Mirho was giving some consideration to taking the guy behind the restaurant, stuffing him into a garbage bin, and slamming his head f
lat with the metal cover. And taking the two grand back, which at this point looked like it might not have bought anything of value.

  “You said this was about a debt? Someone owed a friend of yours rent money?” Dennis asked again, pushing up his glasses.

  “Sure. Debt collection,” Mirho said, chuckling. “Whatever gives you a good night’s sleep. Now, toodleoo, Dennis, get yourself back to your desk. There must be a line waiting for you.”

  The DMV clerk stood up and stuffed the money into his jacket. “Enjoy your meal.”

  Mirho waited until he had left the diner and then looked at the last sheet.

  He exhaled, disappointed. Jeanine wasn’t even her given name, but a middle name.

  This might not pan out at all.

  But she was pretty. And about the right age. Thirty-six. And the records said she lived in Armonk. Not too far away.

  He stared at the name again. Hilary Jeanine Cantor.

  Didn’t hurt to check it out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  I spent the next few days looking into whether Rollie McMahon had actually killed himself.

  I searched for whatever obits and follow-up news stories I could find. I found a family Web page on bereavement.com and scanned the postings—mostly stunned friends and relatives who couldn’t believe what had happened, testimonials from outsiders who had gone through something similar. I even thought for a second about going to the funeral. Then I decided, on the chance that there was any truth to what I feared, that this was the last place I should be. I didn’t know who might be there as well. Checking it out. While nothing I found contradicted Rollie’s death as being any more than it appeared—a sudden, unforeseen tragedy—the complete bewilderment of those closest to him, the fact that no motive had emerged—no depression, no financial reversal—coupled with what only I knew that connected him to what went on at Kelty’s accident, did nothing to calm my own fears that someone looking for that money had found their way to him.