Ghosts of Bergen County (16 page)

The rooftop was gravel. There was a flagstone path that led to a patio of sorts, with iron tables and chairs. The flagstones were painted with abstract designs. The condensers whirred. The fans exhaled the building's stale air. He filled the glasses with ice, then with Scotch. They stood on the northwest corner, beside the parapets, two feet high, metal flashings mounted across the walls of the building. He sat on one wall and she sat on another. The city traffic moved below. The lights on Eighth Avenue flashed yellow. Trucks made deliveries. The moon was gone. Stars and planets paled in the night's haze. Then a gray light emerged behind them. They turned to face it, reflections of the tips and spires, the blinking antennas and towers of the buildings in Midtown. He stood and stumbled. He needed to take a leak, he said, and disappeared behind the mechanical systems. She needed to, too, but decided to hold it. She was standing when he appeared again. It was brighter now, the light revealing the other rooftops. He said he didn't want the night to end. He said something about his play, about the ghost in his play, a girl who had died years ago. Then he whooped and kicked his heels in the air. She said she needed to go to sleep. He said not yet. They went back and forth like this. Then he did something unexpected, the way she remembered it. Or maybe it was the way she constructed it in her mind, with her memory fuzzy from alcohol and fatigue. Or maybe she dreamed it. He leaped onto the parapet and balanced there. She might have turned away. She needed a place to lie down. Sometime later he was gone. Maybe to pee again. Maybe to bed. She went to the parapet, across the painted flagstones and the gravel on the roof deck. She peered over the edge. Something told her to. Like a command. Perhaps it was a command that told the playwright to jump onto the wall. She peered over the edge and found him, crumpled clothes and body on the dawn pavement. Fall, jump, or push. There were three possibilities. No more.

“He was frightened,” she agreed with Ferko. “The driver.”

“He didn't need to be.”

She pushed her lips together, weighing this.

“Okay,” Ferko said, “of course he was frightened. But he didn't need to turn tail and run. Mary Beth would be better if that hadn't happened.”

The bells on Ivy's front door jingled, and Tina and Dave came in. Tina had dyed her hair deep red. Dave had added a splash of purple to his black. They'd copped. Jen could tell by the way Tina tapped her finger against her front pocket, where Baggies bunched like tissues.

“Look at
you
,” she said, meaning Jen's eyes. She wrapped an arm around Jen's neck and squeezed, then placed her purse next to Jen's. “Can we join you?” Tina looked at Ferko, ceding to him the right to reject.

But Ferko responded only with his mild face. Jen guessed he didn't mind. Jen guessed he didn't mind anything.

“Tina and Dave, do you know Ferko?”

“Ferko,” Tina said, “the name everyone loves to say.”

Dave stood behind her, hands in his front pockets, rocking on his toes and heels. “We'll catch up and find you,” he said, meaning it was time to use in the tiny stall upstairs.

“Where were we?” Ferko asked when they reached the stairs. “Let's put this to rest before your friends come back and start talking about skateboards.”

“They don't ride skateboards.”

“Where do they work?”

“They don't do that, either.”

“I
love
your friends.”

“You were talking about Mrs. Ferko.” Jen considered warning him against betrayal, but there wasn't time. She was on the cusp of some meaningful connection she'd been waiting years to make, a connection that Tina and Dave's eager presence would likely impede.

“The point was closure,” Ferko said. “The guy's leaving somehow prevented that for her. Maybe. But I wasn't there. She was.”

“
She
meaning the Mrs.”

“But the leaving part,” Ferko said, “the running. That wasn't necessary. Nor was it fate. It was a decision. I understand the motivating factors. Still, it was a decision, and that's what made it wrong.”

He was getting somewhere, Jen could see. He was putting two and two together. But Jen's problem was vexing. When she'd finally sorted it in her mind, after she'd associated Ferko's hit-and-run with her night with Felix DeGrass, she came to recognize that everything since—the bike accident, the copping and using, and all the subsequent copping and using—had occurred for a reason. Not fate, like Ferko suggested, which connoted an accident, a fatal accident (wasn't
fatal
a derivation of
fat
e
?), an unpreventable fatal accident. No, she thought, fate had no room for reason, for purpose, for a higher purpose. Maybe she believed in God after all. Because they
were
connected—Felix DeGrass, the baby Catherine, Solomon DeGrass, and Ferko himself. She recognized it, or thought she did. Now she just needed to figure out what it was telling her to do.

“I guess I'd ask him,” Ferko said, “whether he regrets that decision.” There was something like emotion on his face, and Jen wondered if it was on hers, too. But then Ferko's vanished. Dave and Tina appeared at their sides. Ferko scooted to make room for them.

“Let's talk skateboards,” he said.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Mary Beth got out of bed, as usual, after Gil had left to catch his train. She packed a bag with water and snacks. She left the house at the usual time, but, instead of turning right on Amos Avenue and walking up toward the School on the Ridge, she turned left, down Amos Avenue to the Glen, the way she once had with Catherine in the stroller. Despite Mary Beth's entreaties, Amanda hadn't revealed herself in the house, and Mary Beth didn't yet know how to confront Gil about the ghost.

But she had a theory, which took her down Amos, to Glen Street, past Lyttondale and the School in the Glen, past the coffee shop and hair salon, the store that sold toys and children's books, past the pub and restaurant to the town's public library, a freestanding structure built with stone left in the Glen when the ice retreated tens of thousands of years ago. The library stood next to the municipal building, which stood next to the train station, all built with the same stone.

She arrived just as it was opening, just as the librarian turned the key in the front door and pushed it to let Mary Beth in. She was the first visitor, and she greeted the librarian, and, not knowing what else to do, followed her to her desk in the center of the main reading room. Computers lined the wall to the left, and the popular library, arranged alphabetically by author, was shelved to the right.

“I'm wondering if you could help me.”

“That's what I'm here for.” The librarian wore a cheery smile. It seemed suddenly important that Mary Beth not act desperate, that her research was for casual interest only. Glen Wood Ridge was not a place of desperation. Lives were lived here—normal, productive lives. She wished to adapt.

“I'm looking for maps of the town, something historical, maybe going back fifty years.”

“Of Glen Wood Ridge.”

“Yes.”

The librarian stood, holding her smile. Mary Beth supposed that a library was a wonderful place to work. “Let's see what we can find.”

Mary Beth followed the librarian past the line of computers, past the sections for biography and world history and US history and New Jersey history to a section comprising two shelves: Local Interests.

“Here.” The librarian hooked her finger to the top of a thin volume, pages folded and stapled, not bound, with a beige cover:
Glen Wood Ridge: A History
, by Emmanuel Wright. “This was commissioned by the town council to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the town's founding.” She opened the book to its title page. “See.” She tapped her painted nail to the copyright—1968. “The town was founded in 1918.”

Mary Beth knew this, of course. The metal signs stationed at various points on the town's perimeter said so, and it was the thing the real estate agent had shared when he'd driven them out here the first time, giving Mary Beth hope for the old house she'd wanted. But she'd wound up with a new one, and only now had learned that, despite being new, it inexplicably had a ghost. Things happened for a reason, she thought, with such clarity it startled her.

“It has a map?” she asked.

“Two.” The librarian flipped the pages until she got to the center, where longer pages were folded into each other. “They're a bit brittle. I don't want to rip them. They need a flat surface to lie on.” She handed the book to Mary Beth and tipped her head toward the nearest table in the main reading room, at the end of the row of books in which they now stood.

More patrons had entered the library. Senior citizens booted up computers and browsed new releases. A young mother queued in line at the checkout, preschoolers hopping around her like bunnies.
Catherine's friends
, Mary Beth thought.

It felt good to be in a public place, in air conditioning, where normal people went about their business. It wasn't her house, and it wasn't the woods beyond the field at the School on the Ridge. Perhaps Amanda was lurking behind the study carrels or among the shelves, wondering why they weren't on the fallen tree, talking.

The book was a homegrown affair. The author was a resident, born in Glen Wood Ridge in 1922. Mary Beth wondered if he was dead now. The two maps were uncredited, mimeographed from originals drawn by the same hand with what looked like a black felt-tip marker. Labels, such as names of streets, municipal buildings, the rail line, and schools were written in all capital letters. The town boundary was drawn in dots and dashes. The flourishes were charming, with open spaces depicted with out-of-scale grass blades and rows of crops, such as corn, complete with tassels and thieving birds. Trees were drawn with half circles and S-shaped lines. The 1918 version showed the houses in the Glen, and a farm,
PORTER
'
S FARM
, on the land that now encompassed the newer developments on the Ridge. By 1968, Porter's Farm was gone, replaced with the Ridge's familiar streets, including Porter Lane, which bisected the old farm, ranch houses drawn with precise uniformity, the School on the Ridge and its ball fields behind it, and the edge where the woods met the ball fields, where the path led down into the ravine and Amanda's tree.
COUNTY PARK
, the newer map said. And up Amos Avenue, between the Glen and Porter's Farm on the earlier map and the Glen and the Ridge on the later map—in a space that had only since been replaced by a parenthetical curve called Woodberry Road, containing thirty-some houses, including a four-bedroom Cape with dormers and a front porch situated in the center of the block and sold to the Ferkos in 2004—was a long driveway and a structure in the woods:
MILLERS
'
PLACE
.

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.