Ghosts of Bergen County (2 page)

“My sweetheart and I cohabitate.” Somehow Greg managed this proclamation without a whiff of irony. He glanced toward the window, where Prauer and Grove had parted. They took their seats—the black king and the white king, facing each other. The tug on the river had motored out of view.

“Game face.” Greg touched his chin and the smile he'd worn since the instant of recognition vanished, replaced by the intimidating, blank look of a boxer at a weigh-in—eyes small, mouth drawn to a frown.

And then he was gone, back to his seat, and Ferko took his, across from Greg's. The toe of Lisa's shoe, suspended from her crossed leg, touched Ferko's ankle. She leaned over and picked up his pen and wrote in his notebook,
You know a lot of people!
She dropped the pen, hesitated, then picked it up again and underlined the words
a lot
.

Ferko crossed it out and wrote at the top,
Initial Meeting w/ Grove
, along with the date. She was flirting, sucking up, or it was simply her way. It was difficult to distinguish the sincere from the bullshit, especially when the sincere traversed such a wide moral spectrum. The fortunes of associates like Lisa were tied to those on the higher rungs—the Ferkos and Coslers—for the slather from the annual bonus and the juice from the next assignment. She had to play nice, right? Though it was true that each time they'd worked together (there'd been only three instances) he'd known
someone
on the other side. Maybe she was right—he knew a lot of people. And maybe his value to Prauer was ripening. Promise sparked like a flash on a camera, blinding him for an instant before the table was revealed, the conference room, the bank of windows, the haze between here and Queens, and Scott Horowitz, Grove's attorney, the meeting's host, who sat to the left of his client and began to speak, a preamble of how the parties got here. It was a speech Ferko had heard a hundred times at the start of as many different pitches. He could deliver it himself if pressed. He knew the words. He knew the punch line: the company was for sale! He leaned back and soaked up the lack of pressure. He was making good money to sit here and listen.

Greg Fletcher's sleepy eyes dimmed. His face was still boyish, his hair unkempt. He listened to the preamble with an indifference to match Ferko's. They were peers, right? They would go one-on-one—valuation, strategy, negotiation. It was no longer about brawn, about arm strength or foot speed. It was about creativity, intellectual agility, collaboration. And names couldn't hurt Ferko any longer.

The toe of Lisa's shoe brushed his ankle. He nudged her elbow with his. He would speak with Greg, his once-tormentor, at the meeting's conclusion. There was this deal. There were others. And Jen Yoder, the homecoming queen. Beyond Greg Fletcher's sleepy head, beyond the glass that separated meeting from sky, the day was as bright as that.

CHAPTER TWO

Jen Yoder hadn't planned a detour when she mounted her bike on the sidewalk outside of the Deveraux office building, pushed off, and headed south down Fifth Avenue, but then the traffic stopped at Thirty-Fourth and the only direction things were moving was west, so she took that as a sign and followed the cars and imagined a route that took her all the way to the Hudson, then south around the tip of the island and up the East River to Tenth Street. She lived in the East Village. It would be an adventure—part pilgrimage, part distraction. She'd call it the West Side loop. She was trying to find new things to do, take on new challenges, and here was one: a circuitous route home. The bike paths along the rivers were used by cyclists in sleek clothes on sleek bikes, often going faster than the cars on the adjacent expressways. Jen rode a beach cruiser, a one-speed with a foot brake and too-wide handlebars, with which she'd clipped, over the years, more than a few side-view mirrors on parked cars. She wasn't a fast cyclist, but she figured this diversion was only eight or so miles, something she could do in a little over an hour.

Plus, it was a beautiful afternoon, a rarity in summer. The fierce heat had yet to arrive. She pedaled with the traffic along Thirty-Fourth, the breeze in her face, then turned left onto Seventh and followed the one-way south to Twenty-Fifth, where she turned right and dismounted. This was the pilgrimage part. Chelsea. The playwright, Felix DeGrass. She'd done the pilgrimage before but it had been years. She walked her bike along the road, chin raised, eyes on the looming rooftop over a dozen floors up, and imagined the fall. She hadn't seen it at the time. She didn't think so, anyway. But now she did clearly, from this angle, from the street below—a man, limbs churning the way one turns pedals on a bicycle, his speed accelerating until he hit the pavement.

She closed her eyes a moment, then reopened them. It was just a streetscape. People in summer clothes. She waited for a car to pass, then crossed Twenty-Fifth and pushed her bike up the curb and onto the sidewalk and stood on a square about thirty feet from the corner where Twenty-Fifth met Eighth.
This plac
e
?
she wondered, picturing the approximate spot on the sidewalk where the body was when she'd peered over the edge of the rooftop. Eight years ago. Now nothing marked the sidewalk, and people went about their business, circumventing her as she took up too much space with her bike and its wide handlebars, gazing down at the sidewalk and up at the rooftop, and again came the image of the man falling toward her—so clearly that she braced for the impact. Was this a ghost? According to Jen's father, who wrote books about ghosts, they inhabited the places where they lived and died. Felix DeGrass had lived here, in this building. He'd died here, on this sidewalk.
Inhabited
—that was the word Jen's dad used in his books—not
haunted
. Jen wasn't sure she understood the distinction. But while she might have felt haunted by the image of the man falling off the roof of the building, there was no ghost of Felix DeGrass. Not here. Not now. The image was just her mind doing what she commanded of it. Twenty-Fifth Street and Eighth Avenue were peopled with the living, walking and driving and cycling east and west, north and south, except Jen Yoder, standing on a square of concrete, surveying the scene, when something caught her eye—a flyer stapled to a telephone pole:
AUDITIONS!
the flyer said. Someone was putting on a play.

She'd acted in college, at Columbia. She played a closeted lesbian in a production called
Tri
. There were three characters—all women—who shared a house in Brooklyn. Jen played Gail, a recent dropout from
NYU
. The other housemates were Frances and Lana, sorority sisters and recent graduates of an unnamed (and presumably small) liberal arts college upstate. There was a fourth character, too, a man named Jonah, though he never made a physical appearance on the stage. But his presence in the three women's lives informed every scene. Jen's Gail had crushes (to varying degrees and against her better judgment) on each of her housemates, while each of her housemates had fallen (to varying degrees and against her better judgment) for Jonah, who had developed a crush on Gail. The housemates lived their lives in and out of the house in Brooklyn (though the living room was the production's only set), while Jonah phoned from time to time, and the one-sided conversations with whoever happened to answer revealed the relationships of the characters as much as those scenes when the women were hanging out, either all together or in one of three combinations of two. Jen loved the geometry of the script, which she thought of as a kaleidoscope of triangles. In New Jersey she'd been a cheerleader, our team against yours. The world was more complicated than that.

Yet, despite her experience in
Tri
, she convinced herself that she'd done the play only as a lark. She convinced herself that she didn't have the discipline of the other actors—those majoring in theater arts. And so she majored in history, which, to Jen, meant she'd had few ambitions, a quandary that hadn't seemed to vex her father.

Then, years later, the playwright of
Tri
, another student at Columbia Jen once counted as a friend, became somewhat famous—first in theater and then in films—which gave Jen hope that there was still an avenue in. This hope lingered until the other playwright, Felix DeGrass, was with her one night and then was gone and she slid down the slide and never bothered to climb back up.

Until now, finding this flyer in the approximate spot where Felix had died. It meant something, it had to, and, in addition to riding her bicycle home this afternoon via the Hudson River Greenway, Battery Park, and the East River Bikeway, she would also call the number that had been written multiple times across the bottom of the flyer and cut with scissors into two-inch strips. There were only three tabs left, and Jen tore one off, unshouldered and unzipped her bag, and found the smallest inside pocket, one so small that all she kept inside was a book of postage stamps. And now this phone number. She slipped it inside and zipped the pocket. Then reconsidered. She should call it now before she forgot and, months later, found the number in the tiny pocket only to realize it was too late for it to be of any use, or worse, have no recollection of what the number was even for. She was that sort of a fuck-up. She dug in her bag for her phone just as it rang, which startled her, and she wondered, during a brief, confused interlude between the first and second rings, whether the persons holding the auditions had somehow called her. But of course they hadn't. Her phone told her it was Greg Fletcher.

“Hey!” she answered.

“Long time,” he said, which must have been a joke. They'd seen each other last week, when she'd bumped into him at Lexington and Eighteenth and they hung out in a bar nearby.

“Guess who I ran into today?”

“I'm supposed to guess?”

“Gil Ferko.” He paused a moment, presumably to give her a chance to react. When she didn't he asked, “Do you remember him?”

She thought she knew the name. “From Edgefield?”

“He lived on Holt,” Greg said.

Jen knew Holt. The houses were newer than where she grew up, near the high school. “Skinny kid?” she asked, because a blurry image had formed in her mind.

“That's him. Black hair that stuck straight up. Crooked teeth.”

And with that the image was complete. Gil Ferko had been a quiet kid. She remembered him in kindergarten and she remembered him in high school. Thirteen years. How did she never get to know him?

“I think his teeth got fixed,” she said, remembering the high school version.

“They did indeed,” Greg said. “His hair doesn't stick up anymore, either.”

“How was I supposed to guess Gil Ferko, Fletcher?”

“It's just a saying, a way to start a conversation, to introduce a new concept. You're always running into people you know. You said so yourself.”

“I know a lot of people.”

“Well, I know some, too.”

She read the phone number from the flyer. She'd call it once this call ended. She wished to improve herself. Taking up acting again was one way, and here was another: “Do I brag,” she asked, “about all the people I know?”

“A little.” Greg's voice was sweeter than she'd expected.

“Seriously,” she said, “am I
tiresom
e
?”

“Of course not. Besides, it's true: you know a lot of people. And I need to know more.”

The bar off Lexington had been in a basement, a place so nondescript its name hadn't registered. She wasn't even sure how they'd found it, how she'd known it existed. Down a set of narrow, concrete stairs, the walls were wood-paneled, the floor linoleum. A wood bar stood to one side, with mismatched stools, across from a pool table that took quarters. In between were metal tables and chairs, arranged without pattern. Someone's playlist spilled from speakers mounted on corner brackets. There was no TV. Everyone knew each other—including Jen, who chatted up a couple of guys from Sons of Squirrel, just back from a two-week tour in a borrowed van that had taken them as far west as Columbus, Ohio. It was like hanging out in someone's basement. Later, when it was time to close, they merely locked the doors and lit a joint and passed it around. Then another. The thin crowd thinned further. Jen and Greg sat in a corner more or less by themselves. It felt like a dream, where your past collides with your present in a surreal setting. Here was the first boy she'd ever kissed. The summer after seventh grade. That part was real. She told him her recurring dream, where she broke into people's houses, sometimes those of her neighbors growing up in Edgefield, and hung out in their basements until she was discovered and fled. And he told her his recurring dream, where he committed a crime and set about destroying the evidence until it was too small to be seen by the naked eye. His were glassy in the bar's dim light. She imagined the dream version of Greg Fletcher in a conference room, shredding reams of paper as the
FBI
closed in.

“Are you free this Friday?” he asked her now, over the phone. “Lunch?”

“I think so.”

“With me and Ferko. He's the man.”

“The skinny kid is the man?”

“Well, his boss is the man. William Prauer. Have you heard of him?”

“No.”

“Read the paper. The dude's
acquisitive
.”

“That's a good thing?”

“Which makes the skinny kid the man by association,” Greg said, then paused. “I used to call him
Gaylord
. I came up with that nickname. Do you remember that? It stuck, at least for a while.”

Jen didn't remember the skinny kid having a nickname.

“I need to make up for that,” Greg said, his voice infused, to Jen's ear, with genuine remorse.

Still, she couldn't help herself. “To do more deals?” she asked.