We Are Here (16 page)

“Hello, David,” said a voice.

He turned to see a man in battered jeans and untucked shirt, the one he’d last seen in Kendricks. The man was grinning, and this time it seemed more sincere and less threatening. Behind him stood a slim woman in a long black coat. She was smiling too.

The man took a step forward and put out his hand. “Welcome back,” he said.

“This what you had in mind?”

I looked up from a sidewalk table outside the Adriatico. Kristina stood outside the fence dressed more or less as I’d suggested: raggedy black jeans and sweater under a cheap coat, hair pulled back in a ponytail, the whole outfit topped with a pair of sunglasses nondescript enough not to look like obfuscation.

“Perfect,” I said.

“For what?”

“Thinking of entering you in this ‘Hottest New York Bag Lady’ pageant everyone’s talking about.”

“Careful,” she said. “We may not be back at the openly-mocking-each-other stage just yet.”

“Yeah, we are,” I said, coming around to kiss her on the cheek. “It was a dumb argument and I’ve said I’m sorry. That’s the end of it.”

“I see, master. So—what’s the plan?”

Something had been nagging at me since I’d gotten up that morning. It nagged as I walked to work. It nagged when I took a break to go thank the heater guys for fixing our unit, watching their faces while I did so and seeing nothing untoward. It nagged as I stood chain-drinking strong coffees and pushing pizza to passersby, and even while being patient with Mario’s sister, who’d picked up on the coldness between Kristina and me the night before and was taking an excessively maternal interest.

The nagging didn’t amount to much more than the idea that there was something I was missing, dots I was not joining up. Which was no help. But finally, halfway through selling someone two slices of pepperoni, I’d realized what the connecting line might be.

“We’re going for a walk,” I said.

The message on our window could have been put there at any time in the last however many years, some previous tenant’s thigh-slapping attempt to freak out a roommate that we’d never noticed simply because the lighting conditions hadn’t been right and it hadn’t ever occurred to us to clean the windows. I didn’t believe that, though. Neither did Kristina. Together with the overturned chair and the broken ashtray out on the apartment roof, it didn’t ring true—never mind the sensation I’d experienced when I opened the window, of someone (or perhaps more than one person) in sudden movement.

The message had been put there recently. It had to have been sometime after the last time I’d been out in my rooftop aerie to smoke, which was only the night before and so kept the timeframe tight.

“Face it,” Kristina said. Her pupils looked big and pale, green edging out the gray for once. “You know this just happened.
Tonight
.”

Against Kristina’s wishes I reopened the window (after taking a picture of the message on my phone) and climbed out. It was dark and the wind was strong and it felt like being on the battlements of a tottering castle tower. I confirmed what I’d suspected. If you were light and nimble—not to mention insanely reckless—you could probably access the scrap of flat roof from over the rooftops. By leaning against the nearest of these and standing on tiptoe, I got a glimpse over to the next building. Presumably if you kept going then somewhere there’d be a means of dropping into a gap and ultimately down to ground level. The tiles were wet and mossy and I wasn’t going to get any more intrepid about the investigation than that, certainly not in the dark.

I climbed back in. “There’s another possibility,” Kris said.

“Yeah, I know. Our window wasn’t locked. They could have got out there from our apartment. But that raises too many questions. Like how they’d have gotten in
here
.”

“Heater guys were here day before yesterday. They took forever and I had to leave for work, so I gave them a key to lock up. They shoved it back under the door, but I guess they could have made a copy and—”

“Nope. If Dack or Jez had tried to scrabble away over that roof, we’d be listening to the sound of ambulances right now and there’d be blood-drenched dents in the sidewalk the size of two small cows.”

“They could have done it while they were here. We wouldn’t have noticed until now.”

“But why? We pay them money and they drink in your bar and neither of them has a sense of humor that I’ve ever noticed.”

“So who did it?”

“You know who it’s got to be. What I don’t understand is why it says ‘us.’ ”

Kristina and I live a small, contained life. We hadn’t made any enemies in the city—one tries not to—or many acquaintances outside the restaurant and staff from others nearby. We’d barely seen the other people in our building. They had normal jobs and lived different hours. “Maybe it
was
a guy you saw the other night after all,” Kristina mused. “In the market, and afterward. Maybe there’s more than one person following Catherine.”

“That would help, sure. But in that case, who are we dealing with?”

“You got me. The question is whether
Catherine
knows.”

I thought about it. “I don’t think so. If you’re a woman being followed, you’ll assume it’s a man. She looked genuinely surprised when we told her we’d seen a girl. And I’m sure that was the same person as the one I saw the other night. The height and clothing were exactly the same. I just didn’t see a face then and so I made the same wrong assumption that Catherine had.”

Kristina nodded. “Okay. But here’s the thing. A person or persons unknown evidently not only realizes we’ve been tracking them, but also knows
where we live
. Either someone followed you back the other night …”

“ … or he/she/they were outside Catherine’s tonight and followed us back to the restaurant.”

“Which would not have been hard. Raised voices were involved.”

“I recall. But what—then they kicked their heels for a few hours before following one of us back here?”

“This is a
stalker
, John. That shit’s what they do.”

She had a point. I thought back over my solo walk home. I hadn’t been aware of anyone following me, but I’d been an irritable frame of mind and the incident with Lydia had deflected my attention too. Nonetheless, I believed I would have noticed someone trailing me. That meant if they’d done it tonight they must have waited and followed Kristina as she walked home later. It wasn’t far, and I knew Kris was capable of looking after herself—otherwise I’d never have considered letting her walk it alone, regardless of how bad a fight we’d had.

But still.

I locked the window and we went back to bed. I don’t know who went to sleep first, but we were both awake, listening for sounds on the roof, for quite some time.

We walked quickly over to Chelsea, retracing in reverse our steps from Catherine’s the night before. It was a nicer walk this time—except for being cold and cloudy—but there was no denying we were tense.

“I realized something,” I explained as we hurried west along 14th. “The two occasions on which I or we saw someone started in totally different locations—the Westside Market and outside the girls’ school—and at different times on different days of the week. It may have been the same person, it may not. But there’s a constant I should have noticed right away.”

“The way they were dressed?”

“Yeah, well, that too—but that’s not notable if it’s the same individual both times. I’m talking about the fact that I lost her/him/them in the same place. Somewhere along 16th.”

Kristina frowned. “That’s not much.”

“It’s all we’ve got,” I said. “And this is now our problem, not Catherine’s. Someone was outside our window last night. I want something done about that.”

We arrived on 16th Street without a plan. We walked along the north side and back on the south. Houses. Cars. The church. Trees. All in midafternoon mode with no one around. We stood halfway along the street for ten minutes. A car holding a woman and a child drove down the road and out the other end. Kristina was getting cold and cranky.

“If I pass out with all the excitement, leave me where I fall.”

“You were the one talking about setting up a detective agency. When I was a lawyer I dealt with private investigators, and this is how their lives are. You go somewhere and wait. For hours.”

“So their life sucks. But this is a nice street, John. We loiter here, someone’s going to call the cops.”

“You got a better idea?”

“Going home. Going for a beer. Going to Hawaii. Pretty much any sentence showcasing verbs of movement in a nonmetaphoric sense.”

I heard the sound of a door opening and turned, looking as bland as possible in case it was an eagle-eyed local making sure we weren’t casing out their house. Thirty yards up the other side of the street, the door on the right-hand side of the church was now open. The man I’d seen the previous afternoon stood in it, talking to someone inside.

“It’s the priest,” I said. Kristina was frank about not finding this an arresting development.

After a moment the man closed the door and trotted down the stairs. He let himself out the gate and closed it before setting off at a brisk pace.

I gestured to Kristina.

“What—we’re going to
follow
the guy?”

“No,” I said. “You are.”

“Say again?”

“I spoke to him yesterday. He’ll recognize me. You’re going let me know where he goes.”

“John, he’s a fucking
priest
.”

“He was here when we lost that girl.”

She started walking reluctantly. “What are
you
going to do?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

She rolled her eyes but got on it, scooting up the street after the priest’s disappearing back.

I walked back to take a look at the church. The central portion was three stories high, the width of two of the houses that lined the rest of the street. The ground level held a row of small windows with darkness beyond, suggesting that they fronted office space or storage. The two stories above had bigger glass, though they still looked to have been designed with little more than a protractor and ruler and as if to withstand impact rather than to inspire spiritual fervor. On either side stood a staircase leading up to a wooden door at the left and right extremes of the second level. All of it looked dusty and city-grimed and weightily functional.

I let myself in through the gate and walked up the steps on the right. I knocked on the door, which was heavy and large and made of wood. Nothing happened, so I knocked again, this time using the brass knocker.

After a minute I turned the handle and pushed. The door swung open to reveal a short, tidy corridor with a wooden floor and white walls and an area on the left designed to hold coats. At the far end was another door.

“Hello?”

I stepped inside. I called hello once more, then opened the second door. I wandered into a big room that tapered upward toward a pointed roof with exposed beams. The walls were paneled too, somber paintings dotted here and there. It was dark and gloomy and gothic without anything in the way of richness, the domain of a faith that didn’t pander to its audience by adding unnecessary pizzazz. Rows of battered chairs sat facing a single one, which faced back the other way. Behind this was a plain altar, surmounted by a simple metal cross. An unloved-looking upright piano stood to the side.

Turning, I was confronted with the street-side wall. There was a notice board with sheets of paper thumbtacked to it. Three big Palladian windows and five smaller ones above. The glass in each was a different shade of muted—blue, green, pale red, pale purple. Each had been protected from street-side vandalism by close-fitting sheets of chicken wire. As a spectacle of light it would not make you want to glorify anybody’s name unless you’d already been of a mind to do so.

My phone rang. It was Kris. “Where are you?”

“Heading back along 15th. He went into a deli. Came out with a bottle of water. Do you think that’s significant? Should I get a picture with my spycam?”

“Kris …”

“Okay, okay.”

She hung up. I wandered out into the middle of the room along the aisle between the two groups of chairs. I noticed a plain, narrow door at the end, behind the altar and painted the same color as the wall. It seemed likely that it led to the lower level. I considered finding out but decided that would be taking this too far, especially as there was presumably somebody still in the building. Also … I have no strong views for or against organized religions, but their structures possess a certain psychic weight. If you’re alone in a church they can make you feel you shouldn’t be. Church doors are often left open, but that’s for the faithful to come in and do their thing. I was not faithful and I wasn’t here in the hope of finding God or even myself. I’d seen—or thought I’d seen—the priest stopping to exchange words with someone on his way out. That person must still be here. If they appeared and asked my business, I didn’t have an answer.

As I was bringing my phone up to call Kris off the chase, it rang again in my hand. “Okay,” I said. “You’re right. This is a waste of—”

“Get over here,” Kris said. “Union Square.”

“Why?”

It sounded like she was running. “Just come, John.
Now
.”

Kris hadn’t given me anywhere specific to head for and so I dropped south a couple blocks to hit Union Square at the most obvious entry point, the paved area at 14th.

There was no sign of her when I ran across the street. I called her phone. She picked up right away but didn’t give me a chance to speak. “Where are you?”

“The bottom,” I said, out of breath. “Where are you? You okay?”

“Look around.”

I turned in a slow, winded circle. “I don’t see the priest, if that’s what you mean. Or you.”

“Okay. Wait there.”

A minute later Kristina came walking quickly toward me along the central path. “You scared me,” I said.

She smiled distractedly. “I’m fine. Just … come with me.”

She led me up the path into the heart of the park. When we got to where the two main crossways intersected, she stopped. “Stand here,” she said. “And be still.”