Ghosts of Bergen County (28 page)

Solomon's office was on a quiet hallway on the second floor. The door was closed, the room marked by a number, which corresponded to the office number on his web page. She paused and sighed.

“Are you ready for this?” Gil's voice was a near whisper. He was a good sport, having never challenged her or even quizzed her about what
this
was. She'd explained it as best she could: the professor, when he was a child, had stolen Amanda's chicken, leading to the bicycle crash reported in the
Crier
, the one in which Amanda had died. Gil accepted all this without asking how she knew.

She knocked and the door opened a crack. A youngish face filled it, an expression lacking recognition or even acknowledgment that someone might be calling during office hours. His green eyes behind round lenses darted from Mary Beth to Gil, then back to Mary Beth.

“Dr. DeGrass,” she said.

The door opened farther and he stood in the space. He was the right age—in his thirties. She'd brought Gil for support and protection, if needed. Now, seeing Solomon's slender frame, the protection part didn't seem necessary.

“I'm Mary Beth. I made an appointment.” When Solomon made no gesture to step aside and invite them in, she added, “For two o'clock?”

He turned his thin wrist, but it had no watch. He kept himself in front of the gap between the door and the frame.

“We're a few minutes early,” she said, though she didn't believe this to be true. “Do you want us to wait?”

“No.” He cleared his throat. “I was expecting a student. That's not you, I don't think.”

“No, that's not us.”

He turned sideways and opened the door and she stepped through.

“This is my husband, Gil.”

They stood in the small space, facing one another. “May I?” Mary Beth asked, indicating the empty chair next to his desk.

“Of course!” He closed the door, which gave them more room. “I don't have a third chair.” He looked at Gil, who'd taken up residence leaning against a metal filing cabinet in the corner.

“He's fine,” Mary Beth said, as though he were nothing more than a henchman, someone whose job was limited to doing Mary Beth's bidding. He played it well, imparting no greeting—oral or physical—when introduced. He stood in stony silence, his face blank, his expression unreadable. She marveled at his perceptiveness. They were involved in a transaction of sorts, she realized, an exchange. Transactions were where Gil thrived. She could count on him to play his part.

“This is a strange day for appointments,” Solomon said, taking his chair after Mary Beth had taken hers. “I don't even know the nature of yours. I was expecting a student about my midcentury course this fall.”

“I misled you in my e-mail,” Mary Beth said. “I'm sorry about that.”

Solomon glanced at Gil. There was music playing from the small speakers that flanked his computer screen. It could have been static—just bits of drums and bass that didn't mesh in any way that made sense. It could have been jazz. It could have been something conventional, playing at a volume too low to hear properly.

“You grew up in Glen Wood Ridge,” Mary Beth said.

“Do I know you?”

“No, but I think you knew a friend of mine.” She considered leaving a pause, but determined there was no advantage to doing so. “Amanda Russo.”

Solomon blinked.

“Maybe you didn't know her name,” Mary Beth said. “She wasn't there long. She lived with her grandmother, Mrs. Miller, in the house with the chickens on Amos Avenue, between the Glen and the Ridge.”

He emitted something audible in his exhale—something akin to suffering. “Who are you?” he demanded.

“I told you,” Mary Beth said. “I'm Mary Beth, and this is Gil.”

“
Who
!” Solomon said. “I didn't ask your names. I asked
who
you are.”

“We're friends of Amanda's. I told you that.”

“Amanda's dead.”

“You
knew
her?”

“The Miller place and the chickens—yes, I remember her. She died. I was nine. It was a big deal. I'd never known anyone who'd died. An uncle, maybe. But she was a kid, younger than me.”

“Kids aren't supposed to die,” Mary Beth said. Something caught in her throat. She tried to stay composed.

“It was a long time ago.”

“That's why we're here,” she said.

Solomon waited. A horn blared through the static on the computer's speakers. Jazz.

“You left her,” Mary Beth said.

“
What
?”

“Kids aren't supposed to die, but you let her because you stole a chicken and you thought you were going to get in trouble.”

“Who told you that?”

“You let the chicken go and rode your bikes home and promised to never tell.”

“Who told you?”

“Amanda.”

“Impossible.” He looked at his computer screen, as though it might provide an answer. “Did she put you up to it? The woman who was here?”

“What woman?”

He picked up a pad of paper on his desk. “Jen,” he read.

“Jen who?” Gil asked from his perch in the corner.

“She's got the script.
You've
got the script.”

“When someone's hurt,” Mary Beth said, “you help.”

“What's it called?” Solomon asked.

“What's
what
called?” Gil demanded.

“The play,” Solomon said. “Felix's play.”

“Who's Felix?” Gil asked.

“The brother,” Mary Beth jumped in.

“He's dead,” Solomon said. “Do you know him, too?”

The conversation had been derailed. She wished to put it back on track.

“Of course you do,” Solomon said. “You know
her
.”

“Who?” Gil said.

“The woman who was here—Jen.”

“Jen who?” Gil asked again.

“Jen!” Solomon waved a pad of sticky notes and threw it on the desk among the other papers and magazines.

“You either stay and help,” Mary Beth said, “or you go get help.”

“How
dare
you? Get out of my office.” He stood. It was good, now, that Gil was here.

“Get out!” he said again. “You people are sick. Get out before I call security.”

She stood. Whatever happened was long ago, when Solomon was a boy. Now he was a cipher. She saw that. She'd come all this way for a simple insight. It would have to do.

She opened the door, and Gil followed. They were ten steps down the hall when Solomon called out: “Who are you?”

They turned. He was standing in the doorway, backlit like a rock star.

“Ghosts,” she said.

Some lies were truer than some truths. But with this one told, she'd never felt more alive.

The train trestled over swamps. Lower Manhattan gleamed though the window with too much blue sky, the empty space where the towers once stood. It was Friday, payday. If Jen had gone to work, she'd be off now, preparing for the weekend. People left Manhattan in August. They went to beaches on Long Island or the shore in New Jersey. Or they quit completely and traveled the globe. Jen preferred an empty city to a crowded beach. She felt the pull of the old routines. A couple clicks on her phone and she'd score. But there was no signal here, in the swamps beneath the electrical right-of-way. She couldn't go back now, anyhow.

It had been unnerving, seeing Ferko. Had he followed her? It had seemed possible, as she trailed him back inside the arts center and up the stairs to the second floor and the quiet hallway to Solomon's office. She'd kept her distance as the woman—Mary Beth—knocked on Solomon's door, and he let them in after some discussion and closed the door. It had seemed possible later, after raised voices, when the door opened again, and Ferko and Mary Beth emerged from the office, and Solomon called out a question so basic—“Who are you?”—she wondered if the interaction were occurring in reverse, if this were the
coming
rather than the
going
. Jen couldn't hear the answer, yet she could have stepped from the shadows and provided her own.
Who
was easy.
Why
was the question. Yet she couldn't ask. Not yet. Solomon closed his office door, and Jen followed Ferko and Mary Beth from a safe distance. Had she been following all along? They walked quickly, bounced down the steps like undergrads. She remembered the dead baby and the grief they carried. It wasn't evident. She followed them through the front door and blinked in the bright sunshine. She lowered her sunglasses. They crossed the street to the corner where Jen had first spotted them, and continued on. Still, Jen followed—dodged traffic and peered around the corner of the coffee shop, as they climbed into a hatchback, Ferko in the driver seat, Mary Beth in the passenger seat, pulled out, and drove away.

Which meant, of course, that they
hadn't
followed her, that they'd come on their own. Which meant
what
?

Now she checked her phone. It was a mile or two, as the gull flies, to Battery Park. Yet there was no signal. It astounded her. She'd received texts all week from friends asking what was up. She'd answered each with a single word:
kicking
, to which her friends responded:
?
or
!
or
?!?
. The pace of those texts had slowed, but now, with Friday night looming, they'd picked up again, before she'd lost her signal. The new entreaties were more cautious:
drink?
But Jen knew, too well, the laws of gravity, how drinks with certain friends in old haunts would lead to using. She wished to call her dad, but now she'd have to wait until she cleared the power lines, perhaps the tunnel into Penn Station. She'd buy a pack of cigarettes and a ticket to Edgefield, a Friday commute with unknown adults. She didn't know what to make of Ferko in Princeton. Shapes had drifted like floaters in her eyes since Greg Fletcher had reentered her life and Ferko had followed with his enigmatic wife and dead baby. Had she made any progress connecting them? She was clean. She'd made the pilgrimage to Princeton and Felix's brother. She'd confronted that part of it. But there was more. It wasn't over. Ferko and Mary Beth's presence today told her that. First she'd call her dad. Then discover what was next. Maybe one day, even one day soon, she'd use again, but she couldn't yet, before she'd even had a chance to begin not to.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

It didn't take Ferko long, leaning against the metal filing cabinet in the tiny office in Princeton, to recognize that Mary Beth was grilling Dr. DeGrass the way Jen had once urged Ferko—when they were at Ivy's on Houston Street after snorting dope in the unisex bathroom upstairs—to imagine grilling the driver of the blue car. And in that instant, when he recognized that Mary Beth was substituting Dr. DeGrass for the driver of the blue car, Ferko realized that the questions he'd posed to Jen those weeks ago at Ivy's were the wrong questions. He'd wanted to know the circumstances that led the driver to the right turn from Amos Avenue to Lyttondale Avenue in the Glen at precisely the moment when Mary Beth pushed the stroller into the street. He'd wanted to know where the driver was coming from and where he was going. Now it felt like what he'd wanted was a cop-out, an excuse to collect useless information. Because fate—at least Ferko's theory about fate—worked only to a certain point, after which you had to play the hand you were dealt. Fate was no longer part of it. And that was what Mary Beth was doing, in that moment, in Solomon DeGrass's office. She was
owning
it, taking control. There were things you could control and things you couldn't. Fate went only so far. Ferko remembered his conclusion—the driver's leaving was a decision, and that decision was wrong.

And it mattered.

But the questions he'd asked Mary Beth a dozen different times in a dozen different ways in the last two years didn't.
Why
, went one version,
push a stroller on a street when there's a sidewalk, buffered from the traffic by a curb and a stripe of grass?
But he saw now how that was like asking Amanda why she was riding her bike in the woods. It was obvious why, which led him to another question: Why hadn't he recognized that before?

He still felt Amanda's presence in the house, even if her presence was less tangible, less apparent. When he'd asked Mary Beth about Amanda today, on the way to Dr. Yoder's, she'd confirmed his sense of things. What about the woods below the School on the Ridge, Ferko had asked. Mary Beth had abandoned them because Amanda had, too. “I miss her,” Mary Beth had said, “but she's not really gone.”

Now they sat at a round table, four of them—Dr. Yoder, Jen, Ferko, and Mary Beth—on the deck beside the pool in Dr. Yoder's backyard. The table was metal, and the chairs were, too, with enough heft that they wouldn't blow over in a storm. The table had a hole in the center, where an umbrella could go, but there wasn't one. Perhaps it had worn out over the years. Perhaps it was unneeded, given the shade provided by the tall trees at the edge of Dr. Yoder's property. The table was in the shade. Half the pool was.

The water was clean, its surface skimmed of debris, even though the occasional leaf high up turned and fell. A few yellow ones had collected where the patio met the stone wall on which the faceless couples had sat in the shadows and made out at the high school graduation party Ferko had attended twenty years ago. There was beer then. Now he drank lemonade with ice poured from a glass pitcher. The cold front from a week ago was gone. The heat and humidity had crept up, as they tended to do in summer after fronts had passed and the clockwise circulation allowed the sultry air from the south to be carried again up the coast. They hadn't brought their swimsuits.