Ghosts of Bergen County (26 page)

“I'll call,” Ferko said after a moment.

“People owe us. They want our deals. They pant like dogs. They beg for bones. We've got red meat.”

“The dogs aren't hungry.” It was a bold thing to say, and it surprised Ferko that it had come from him.

“Who. Have. You. Called?” Prauer turned up the volume and left a beat between each word. “Citadel?” he asked.

“I'll call them,” Ferko said.

“Dimension?”

“I'll call them.” There was a hint of defiance in his voice. Again, a surprise.

“Damn right.” Prauer slid his phone across the tabletop. Ferko stopped it with the heel of his hand, and everyone—even Greg—watched the phone expectantly, as though it might activate on its own, start calling lenders, sharing data, and producing commitments.

“I said I'll call them.” Ferko pushed the phone back. It stopped in a spot roughly between the two, and Prauer picked it up and waved it at Ferko.

These sorts of flare-ups occurred more often than they should have. Ferko had been on the receiving end a few times. He'd survived them before. He doubted he would this time. Prauer stood and exited without a word—a goodbye or a so long or even a demand for an update by a fixed time. Silence swelled in his wake. Lisa stared at the keys of her laptop. Greg was as amused as his perma-smirk allowed.

“Don't be an asshole, Greg,” Ferko said.

“Great metaphor, Gil. Mrs. Wall would be proud.” He glanced Lisa's way. “Seventh-grade English,” he said, by way of explanation.

“Ahhhh, we were just talking about teachers,” she said.

“How much did you tell him we could finance?” Ferko asked.

“Relax,” Greg said. “Bill's a big boy. He writes these deals with no financing outs because he's prepared to finance them himself.”

“He hasn't had to yet.” Ferko looked to Lisa, as though for confirmation, and she nodded.

“I haven't seen it.”

“The market's turned,” Ferko said.

“It's not that bad,” Greg said.

Silence filled the room. He looked sheepish, an expression that elicited—somehow, and against Ferko's better judgment—sympathy.

“There's a price for everything,” Greg said. “He pays more. Maybe the funds guarantee.”

Lisa closed her laptop, stood, and collected her paper files.

“I hope you know what you're doing,” Ferko said.

“Who have you called?” Greg asked. It was the same question Prauer had asked, but there was no malice in Greg's inflection.

Ferko didn't answer. Was Greg mocking him?

“I need to know so that we don't call the same people.”

Ferko collected his notepad and the random pieces of paper he'd printed to comprise his file.

“Let's get this done,” Greg said, the way he might have as a quarterback in a huddle.

Ferko stood, and Greg did, too. Taller, of course.

“I'm bringing you along,” Greg said, “whether you want to come or not.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Gil and Mary Beth drove past strip malls anchored by big-box stores, set behind acres of asphalt and cars parked in rows like crops. The highway was four lanes on each side, and Gil stuck to the right-middle, driving too slow for safety—fifty-five (the speed limit), and even less—while the North Jersey warriors in their luxury cars and
SUV
s sped past on either side. They were housewives, back-to-school shopping with kids in tow. They were sales types, late for appointments in the vast business parks concealed behind the few stands of trees.

Mary Beth had pages on her lap, directions from the Internet—Glen Wood Ridge to Princeton—north out of town, then west, then south on the interstate to some state highway that went straight to campus. An hour-twenty, according to the printout. They had plenty of time to make their two o'clock appointment. Gil could drive as slow as he wished.

Too often the pace here frightened her, and she blamed it, sometimes (and only in her mind), for Catherine's death. But just as often, and usually more, she remembered the moments before the accident, when the front wheel of the jogging stroller rolled down the sloped curb to the asphalt on Lyttondale Avenue. The wheels were like those of a bicycle, sixteen inches, with a rim and spokes and a tire with a tube that inflated with a pump. She'd grown up in a newish development with cul-de-sacs and curved streets that connected at right angles. She'd had a bike, a five-speed with a banana seat. She was something of a tomboy. She rode alone, up and down the sloped curbs, standing on her pedals. She'd loved the sensation, and she'd imagined Catherine did, too, when the front wheel fell suddenly and the stroller's nose dipped or when the front wheel lifted—a wheelie—followed by the back wheels rolling up the curb, and Mary Beth would let out a high-pitched
Whoops!
regardless of the direction—up or down—and, though it was impossible in those moments to see Catherine's expression, she always imagined one of agreeable surprise—eyes wide, cheeks pink.

They'd been conditioned to drive, even from their house on Woodberry Road to the Glen. Gil drove his car there every morning and parked in the municipal lot next to the train station. It wasn't even a mile. She'd measured it once, at the end of her run, on a morning when she'd finally made it up Amos Avenue without having to walk. She'd felt exhilarated. She undid the baby's harness and held her against her sweaty tank top and glistening neck and collarbone. Then she unlocked the car and placed the baby in her car seat—rear-facing—buckled this harness, and left the stroller on the front walk and retraced her route, noting the mileage on the odometer. It was three and a half miles in all, including 0.9 from the train station in the Glen. She understood, of course, why Gil drove. It was fifteen minutes to walk each way and five to drive; he saved twenty minutes each day he drove. But since this past winter, when she'd begun to leave the house again, she'd done so on foot, walking
up
Amos Avenue instead of
down
. It was a form of exercise, a new way to grieve. She had the time and the need. Not everyone did. She saw it now as a blessing, as the cars sped past on either side. She actually felt sorry for their drivers, the ones with jobs and families and normal lives that kept them hustling, just as she felt sorry for the man who'd caught the front wheel of the stroller on Lyttondale Avenue and tipped it and dragged it, only to stop and free himself and steer around the obstacle and speed off. The shadow behind the wheel of the blue car was a man. She'd always known this, though she couldn't say how. Even in the first numb interview with the police, she'd called the driver
he
. “He?” the policeman had asked. He wore a uniform and a mustache. She had to explain that she hadn't actually seen the driver (or the license plate or, for that matter, the car itself, except to identify its color), but she was sure the driver was a man. The officer wrote that down. She was told later she'd been in shock. She didn't know what that meant, and she still didn't after looking it up on the Internet. She doubted such a condition existed. She'd merely been numb, ambivalent in a way that made
numb
feel
hollow
—ambivalent toward the man driving the car and ambivalent toward her own culpability, until the threads of anger weaved something harder and larger, the way cells turned cancerous and spread. And she'd welcomed this anger, which was, at least, a real emotion, even if it was only directed inward and made her withdraw from the world, with its sun and sky and clouds and rain, from the lawns and streets and sidewalks and curbs. She'd pulled her shades, unable to blame or accept blame. Until—now she felt sympathy. Was that it? She remembered sympathy. Did sympathy encompass forgiveness? Could she include herself?

It was a blessing to be unhurried, and Gil, it turned out, was the type of hero who drove slowly, who didn't ask a lot of questions, whose patience exceeded reason. For most of two years she'd wondered why he hadn't left her. It turned on this: driving to Princeton, New Jersey, for a meeting with Solomon DeGrass, who, years ago, as a boy, might have stolen a chicken from a woman named Dorothy Miller and her granddaughter, Amanda. It sounded like a crime from 1883 instead of 1983, but Mary Beth had sent the alleged perpetrator an e-mail, pretending to be a student, and made an appointment. It wasn't hard to do. The semester hadn't yet started. It was the middle of August, and schedules weren't set. Dr. DeGrass was probably her age. Amanda, if she'd lived, would now be thirty, a contemporary, one of the young mothers pushing a stroller in Glen Wood Ridge, like Mary Beth just a few years ago. Maybe the old house—Amanda's farmhouse—would still be there, and Mary Beth's wouldn't. Maybe Mary Beth and Gil would live in the Glen or on the Ridge or in some other town without a Lyttondale Avenue. With Catherine. It made her head swim.

She'd brought the article from the
Crier
, folded in her pocket, but she hoped not to use props. She trusted that she'd know what to say when the time came. This journey was for Amanda, she'd told Gil, even as she knew it was for herself and Catherine and Gil. Cars passed on the left and right, and Gil let them, his hands on the wheel at ten and two like a kid with a learner's permit.

Jen had arrived late to Penn Station and missed the ten o'clock, which meant she missed the connection at Princeton Junction and had a half-hour wait for the train to campus. None of this portended well for her new life as a sober non-fuck-up, but she'd thought too late to print out a map of the town and the campus so she'd know how to get from the train station to wherever she was going, and this small act of non-planning had started a cascade of lateness that landed her two miles from Solomon's office ten minutes before her appointment. The old Jen might have hoofed it with her thumb out in case a generous soul would give her a lift. The old Jen wouldn't have even thought to call Solomon to warn him she was running late. But this new Jen let her city instincts take over: she went looking for a cab and, of course, this being a train station, she found one, spent the dollars she would have spent on dope only two weeks before, and made it to the arts center, where Solomon held office hours, with three minutes to spare.

His office door was closed, though. She checked the number against the info she'd copied from his web page. She took a breath. Then she knocked.

But there was no answer.

She knocked again. She examined the seams, where the door fit the frame. No light came from inside the office. She opened her phone and dialed the number she'd copied, and the phone rang from the other side of the door. It rang and rang. Then a recording kicked on: “This is Solomon—” She hung up. She remembered her professors at Columbia. They advertised office hours they never seemed to keep. It was a joke, she'd decided, so she caught them after class.

Now she leaned her back against the tile wall and slid to the floor. A piano played behind a door farther down the hall, a jaunty tune, like one from a scene in a costume drama, a party in a grand ballroom within a lavish estate, where the gentlemen bow in their tights and powdered wigs and the ladies curtsy in their gowns and then are led by their delicate fingers to a single square on the marble floor. They turn to face their partners. Eyes meet. Then the dance commences, a human wheel that turns as one, like the wheels of the coaches that carried the guests to the party. Now the coaches rest outside with the horses that pulled them. The animals are watered and brushed and stand together, black eyes reflecting the flame of the gaslight and the cold stars in the sky. Their drivers have moved to the galley for talk and tobacco.

Jen closed her eyes. The piano notes, muted by the closed door—by wood and distance—floated like dust in the empty hall. She belonged outside with the horses, she realized, or in the galley with the help. But not in the stuffy party. She wasn't sure why. She wasn't sure how she knew this, but she always had, even when she was young and popular, still unspoiled, standing in front of the full bleachers at an Edgefield football or basketball game, chanting those incessant cheers, even when she rode that ridiculous lap around the track that ringed the football field on the back of Jonathan Fahey's vintage convertible with an armful of lilies, waving to her subjects, the queen who'd been crowned.

“Ms. Yoder?”

She opened her eyes.

Solomon DeGrass wore his hair to his collar. It was brown, light enough at the tips to be called blond. Chlorine-damaged, perhaps, though his pallor did not suggest a summer spent outdoors. He brushed his bangs from his eyes and reached down and took her hand and shook it, and she allowed herself to be helped up. He was taller than Felix. Thinner. The younger brother, though older than Felix had been on the one night she'd known him. So was Jen. She gazed into his eyes, and a memory swamped her—Felix on the rooftop, the distant lights from the taller buildings shaping his eyes like question marks, infusing them with wonder. And Solomon, now, in the dim hallway, his eyes as curious as a child's.

“Dr. DeGrass,” she said.

“Solomon.”

They stood there for a moment, her hand in his. He'd been expecting someone younger. The piano had gone silent.

“Please.” He tried one key from a ring, then a second. The door opened and he flipped on a light. The room was windowless, a square, seven by seven, made smaller by the books that lined the walls. There was a metal desk, eighties-issue, too big for the space, like an old Lincoln parked in an alley. A closed laptop with a light blinking sat on top, surrounded by paper. Solomon sat in the desk chair and swiveled it and then stood when he realized that more papers were piled in the seat of the second chair, next to the door. He removed these and set them on the floor in the corner, beneath a framed photo of a woman with two babies in a double stroller and a second with two kids—a boy and a girl, maybe four—in adjacent swings on a playground.