Chasing Manhattan

by John Gray

  Look back, look back, her mind nudged, you saw it even though you don’t realize it. Look back!

  “Look back at what?” Chase said out loud to herself, trying to tamp down this feeling of malice.

  Then, she did as her mind instructed, and looked back at the front of Matthew’s building. It was exactly the same. There was still no sign of her boyfriend or driver, and everything about the structure appeared precisely as it was twenty seconds ago.

  Inside the accountant’s office she saw the same man, now with his head down working on a computer. She relaxed her gaze and noticed the man’s broken neon sign blinking on and off every few seconds. The missing letters were still missing, his name was mangled beyond repair, the O,E,R,T was gone in ROBERT, the R,A,R was not lit up in RAKER, and only the A was blinking on the very end.

  Every four seconds when the sign came to life and blinked, this is what Chase saw: R B K E A

  Chase just stared at it, still not seeing what her subconscious clearly could. Then she closed her eyes and imagined those letters in that exact order on a Scrabble board R B K E A.

  Her mind started moving them around, the way you would playing the game, and that’s when she finally caught it. Those exact letters, in different order, spelled the word BRAKE.

  All week long she had been worried about everyone’s cars and trucks. Now, here she was, outside of Matthew’s building, and the word was staring her right in the face in bright red neon: BRAKE.

  Her eyes traveled up the building and everything looked fine, so why did she know in her heart that it wasn’t? Gavin and Matthew leapt to her mind.

  Chase knew they were moving something heavy, and cars weren’t the only things that had brakes. Chase grabbed her cell phone and dialed Gavin’s number, but her heart sank when she heard his phone ringing on the passenger seat next to her. She punched in Matthew’s name and hit “send” only to have it bounce directly to voice mail.

  Chase kicked open the truck’s door and jumped out. She started sprinting toward the building, with the vehicle still running, when the police officer she had spoken with a moment earlier bounded out of the barber shop and yelled, “HEY, YOU CAN’T LEAVE IT THERE LIKE THAT.”

  Chase didn’t hear a word the cop said, ripping open the building’s front door so hard it nearly shattered the glass. Her first instinct was to go to the elevator and hit the buttons to see where the car was at this instant. The numbers above lit up, revealing it was on the third floor and not moving. She quickly noticed the freight elevator to the left, and despite having a large DO NOT USE sign attached, the numbers above indicated the car was on the tenth, Matthew’s floor. She placed her hand on the steel cage and felt it vibrating, meaning someone was using it.

  STAIRS, her mind screamed, as she saw the door to the right. Chase was always impressed when, once a year, firefighters would raise money for the 9-11 charity by running up one hundred flights of stairs in full gear. Chase wasn’t carrying a hose or an ax but a heavy heart that was about to break if she didn’t make it in time.

  On the tenth floor Gavin locked the apartment door and was slowly returning to the elevator to ride down with Matthew and his 500-pound antique.

  Matthew was still inside the open elevator door, leaning back on the wooden table, when he saw Gavin meandering down the hall. He tapped his wristwatch impatiently and said, “Let’s go, let’s go. Times a-wastin’, young man.”

  Gavin deliberately started walking in slow motion to tease Matthew and said, “Oh, did you mean don’t walk like this?”

  As the two let out a hearty laugh, the fire escape door crashed open and Chase fell to the floor in a heap. Covered in sweat, her hair down in her face, and completely out of breath, she screamed, “GET OFF THE ELEVATOR.”

  Matthew stood frozen and confused. All he could think to say was, “Chase?”

  But he wasn’t moving. Why wasn’t he moving? Matthew just stood there inside the elevator, unaware of the danger.

  Gavin was ten feet from the elevator when Chase crashed through the fire escape door, falling face down on the dirty carpet. After screaming at Matthew, her eyes met Gavin’s and she looked frantic, wondering why Matthew just stood there, not moving.

  She screamed at Gavin now, “BRAKE, BRAKE, BRAKE,” pointing back to Matthew who was still standing inside the elevator car with the heavy butcher block table right behind him.

  Gavin only needed a half-second to understand Chase’s warning, lunging at Matthew and grabbing the front of his jacket with both hands, clenching his fists tightly around the material. He then yanked him backwards as hard as he could, causing both men to tumble on to the hard floor just outside the elevator car.

  Chase and Gavin stared at the elevator door still open, the butcher block table idle inside. They watched and waited when … nothing happened. Nothing.

  Matthew was rightly startled, and pushed Gavin’s hands off of him, saying, “What is wrong with you?”

  Gavin didn’t know what to say, turning instead to Chase, his expression confused.

  Chase was panting and tried to talk, still out of breath, “Downstairs, the accountant’s sign, the one that lights up. Most of letters are off and only a few turn on. R-B-K-E-A.”

  Gavin wasn’t following.

  Chase continued, more insistent now, “BRAKE. Gavin, they spell brake.”

  Gavin nodded, finally getting it, as Matthew said, “A sign is broken, so you tackle me? So, you’re both nuts then.”

  Chase and Gavin both looked at the elevator again and it seemed to be perfectly fine.

  Just then the elevator doors closed on their own, the steel cage now shut tight, and the car began to rumble, announcing it was about to begin its painfully slow descent with the cargo.

  “Oh great,” Matthew said, annoyed, “Looks like the table is taking a ride down without us. Just great!”

  It didn’t move, though. The car just rumbled loudly as if waiting for someone to get on. It was as if the car were saying, Come back in, Matthew, it’s safe in here. Hop back in.

  Chase then gasped out, “Matthew, do you remember what I told you happened to me in Vermont, seeing things, knowing things ahead of time?”

  Matthew, standing up now and dusting the dirt off his pants, responded, “Church windows, yeah, I remember. But we’re not in church, Chase. Besides, what does that have to do with Gavin slamming me to the …”

  Before the word floor left his mouth there was the piercing sound of steel cables snapping, and the freight car, with the heavy butcher block inside, dropped like a bag of soaking wet cement, disappearing out of sight.

  Down in the lobby the police officer was waiting for Chase to return, to give her a piece of his mind, when he felt the building start shaking and heard a rumbling sound that was growing louder. It sounded like an angry animal charging toward them in the dark. The officer had no idea what it was, but he could tell it was coming from the elevator shaft and coming fast.

  Instinctively, he screamed at a young couple standing in the lobby, “GET BACK.”

  Just as the two of them made it to the front door, the freight car, with all that weight and in a free fall, slammed into the ground floor like King Kong pounding his fist, causing pieces of the metal cage to shoot forward recklessly into the now-empty lobby. By some miracle, no one got hurt, but the force of impact managed to split the butcher block in two. If the fall did that to a solid 500-pound piece of wood, the officer couldn’t imagine what would have happened had people been on board for the deadly ride down.

  It turns out, the snow that melted on the roof, causing a leak inside Matthew’s building a few days earlier, had repeated the same ritual hundreds of times over the past decade. Snow. Melt. Leak. Snow. Melt. Leak.

  That dripping water didn’t just leave a stain on the ceiling in Matthew’s apartment, it also trickled down onto a mechanism called a shiv that sits above the freight elevator. That shiv holds in place the various cables that allow an elevator to go up and down, and after year
s of rust, it finally crumbled.

  All that freight elevator needed was the right amount of weight to cause the mechanism to snap and send the car falling. The emergency brakes that all elevators have had long ago stopped working, which is why the city inspector had taken the freight elevator out of service years ago. DO NOT USE, on all the signs, did not mean it was frowned upon if tenants rode in that old clunky deathtrap. It meant, DO NOT USE, as in EVER.

  Back upstairs, Gavin, still on his hands and knees from when he pulled Matthew out of the elevator, slowly crawled across the floor like a soldier ducking enemy fire. He reached the place where the freight elevator used to be and stuck his head into the dark shaft and looked down into the vast emptiness. Smoke and dust started billowing up from the ten-story drop, causing him to pull his head back out of the hole. Gavin looked up and found Chase’s grateful eyes, saying the first thing that came to his mind: “You were right. I’m so glad you came.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Finding Time

  A copy of the police report, via the insurance company at Matthew’s building, blamed the elevator mishap on damage to the mechanism over time, and a building inspector who failed to do his job. Once the inspector had deemed that freight elevator unsafe, he should have cut the power so it couldn’t move or tempt anyone to ever use it. The doors also should have been padlocked shut to keep people out.

  The drive back to Briarcliff Manor was quiet as a church on Monday morning, Gavin and Chase both processing what had just happened and secretly worried about what might happen next. Back in Manchester, when Chase received messages through Tiffany glass windows, there were only four of them, so that strange adventure had a defined beginning, middle, and end. But this? The wooden tiles from an old board game had endless possibilities that neither of them wanted to entertain.

  As Gavin’s truck pulled in front of the mansion, he and Chase caught a glimpse of their young neighbor, Charlie, laughing and running between their two homes. Right on her heels were Chase’s dog, Scooter, and Bella, the deaf pup that Charlie had adopted a couple of weeks prior. While elevators seemed to be dropping out of the sky in Manhattan, here in Briarcliff Manor, all was perfect in the world.

  “Hey, Charlie,” Chase yelled, as she waved.

  Charlie and the dogs came over to the front of the house, as Mary the tutor came running from the barn with something in her hand.

  “He forgot his present,” she said to Charlie, holding a small white rawhide bone.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, we probably should have asked first. Is Scooter allowed to have bones?” Mary asked Chase.

  Chase looked at Gavin with a confused expression and replied, “I can’t say if he’s ever had one. I’m sure he’ll like it, though.”

  With that, Mary gave it to Charlie, who turned toward Scooter, got him to sit, and then handed him his prize. The bone was bright white and about a half-foot long. At first, Scooter chomped on it, but then ran in a circle, not certain what to do with his unexpected gift. Suddenly, the dog looked around the yard and then darted over to the large maple tree out front.

  “He must want to chew it in privacy,” Gavin observed.

  Chase turned to Charlie and said, “Thanks for watching him while we were gone.”

  Charlie, using sign language, replied, “We love Scooter; he can visit anytime.”

  As Mary, Charlie, and Bella turned to go, Gavin said, “Look at that. He buried it.”

  All of them looked toward the large maple tree, its bright red leaves long gone, replaced with a light coating of snow, and saw Scooter kicking dirt onto his buried treasure.

  “He must be saving it for another day,” Mary said.

  Chase smiled and added, “Must be.”

  Mary and Charlie returned to their home, but as Chase and Gavin walked toward the front door of the house, they both noticed Scooter had something shiny in his mouth.

  “Whatcha got there, boy?” Chase inquired.

  The dog pranced over proudly and dropped it at their feet.

  “Is that …?” Gavin asked, without finishing the question.

  Chase bent down and scooped it up. “Holy moly. It’s a Rolex.”

  It looked weathered, but the band was still gold, and the glass on the face was dirty but in excellent shape.

  “Can I see that?” Gavin asked, taking it from Chase’s hand.

  He walked over to his truck, opened his glove compartment, and took out a packet of sanitized wipes. He pulled one out and started rubbing it on the watch, and in a matter of seconds the Rolex looked good enough to put in a display case at a jewelry store.

  Chase was trying to make sense of this. She looked at Scooter and asked, “Where did you get this, buddy?”

  The pup could only wag his tail, not understanding the question. At the same instant, Chase and Gavin both turned their heads toward the maple tree where Scooter had just been digging.

  Chase said to Gavin, “Remember the letter that was left for us? The rules.”

  Gavin replied, “Don’t dig under the maple tree in the front yard. Exact words.”

  After a long pause, Gavin added, “Why? Because you might find expensive jewelry. This house just keeps getting stranger and stranger.”

  Chase didn’t respond, instead walking slowly toward the tree and the spot where Scooter had just buried his bone.

  Gavin, anticipating what she might do next, said, “Chase, he was clear in the letter, don’t dig!”

  She turned with a sarcastic look, holding up the Rolex, and said, “It’s a little late for that, Gav.”

  Together, they knelt, using their hands to pull away the loose soil that Scooter had just overturned. They quickly found his bone and handed it back to the pup, who promptly walked off looking for a better hiding place.

  Below the spot where the bone was, Gavin saw something else shiny and another small item that was dark in color. He gently cleared the soil away to reveal a silver Timex watch and a black Bulova with a leather band.

  He looked up at Chase in astonishment, and said, “I’m going to grab a shovel.”

  By the time he’d gone a foot or so down, Gavin retrieved eight watches total. All were of different brands, styles, and costs.

  They took them to the kitchen, and, using soap and water, gently cleaned each timepiece. As Gavin would get one showroom ready, Chase was pulling up that exact model on her computer to reveal how much it cost. Some were worth as little as fifty dollars, but a Cartier they unearthed was valued at $11,000.

  “This is insane, right?” Chase asked Gavin.

  As he held three of the watches in his calloused hands, Gavin replied sarcastically, “In a house with vanishing flowers and talking board games? I’d say it’s par for the course.”

  The two of them fixed a late lunch of tomato soup and grilled cheese, as the watches sat lined up on the kitchen counter.

  Gavin was dipping his sandwich into the soup, when Chase suddenly grabbed her phone, scrolled through the contacts, and hit “send.”

  “Who you calling?” Gavin asked.

  Chase just raised her eyebrows, an expression that told Gavin, Oh, you’ll see.

  An older woman answered, but Gavin didn’t recognize the voice, causing him to move closer to see Chase’s iPhone. Two words in all caps: STONEWALL JACKSON.

  “Ah,” Gavin said with a smile. “Brave.”

  Putting the phone on “speaker,” Chase didn’t beat around the bush. “Ms. Jackson, it’s Chase Harrington, the one who bought the estate at Briarcliff. We found some watches buried in the front yard and I’m wondering if you could tell me why they are there?”

  There was a loud sigh into the phone and then, “Didn’t Nick the groundskeeper give you a letter with the rules?”

  Chase confidently replied, “He did, and we are following them to the letter. We place the roses on the wall every night, we don’t wash that one window and we never dig near that tree, I promise.”

  Ms. Jackson then, “And yet here you are calling me about
the watches.”

  Gavin jumped in: “The dog did it, ma’am.”

  For some reason just saying those words out loud made Gavin laugh.

  Stonewall heard the laughter and said, “And we think all this is amusing, do we?”

  Gavin again, “No ma’am, sorry ma’am. I laughed ’cause it sounded like Chase was saying the dog ate my homework or something. Truth is, our dog was burying a bone and decided to dig in the exact spot where the watches were. None of this happened on purpose.”

  Another pause, then from the phone, “And I suppose telling you to go bury them again and forget you ever saw them won’t quite do, correct?”

  Chase then answered nervously, “We’ll do as you ask, ma’am, but I’m curious if you know why they are there.”

  More silence followed, and then finally through the speakerphone came the words, “Fair enough, young lady. Go to the library in the house and find a novel called Somewhere in Time by Richard Matheson. You’ll find what you’re looking for in that book.”

  With that the phone went dead.

  Gavin took a last bite of grilled cheese and tossed it to Scooter. He and Chase shared a quick glance, then both took off like school children in a foot race, down the hallway toward the library, giggling with every step. Chase had the lead before Gavin grabbed her by the belt loop on her jeans and pulled her back, allowing him to be first through the door.

  “Cheater,” Chase laughed, as she spilled into the room right behind him.

  There had to be five hundred books spread out over two dozen shelves.

  “You start on the right, me on the left, meet you in the middle,” Gavin suggested, as if the two were on a treasure hunt.

  Both began scanning the endless books and titles, which were arranged in absolutely no order at all. A biography, next to a book on engineering, next to something from Nicholas Sparks.

  “GOT IT,” Chase screamed, before snatching the book down.