Ghosts of Bergen County Read online

  For Alice, Brigit, and Travis

  Fate is the mistake that was meant to happen.

  —MICHAEL MEADE

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Part I: June 2007

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Part II: July 2007

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Part III: August 2007

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  There were no witnesses except the woman who’d been up all night, had consumed two beers and three vodka tonics before switching to (and sharing) the playwright’s Scotch, and she (the witness) could remember the morning only in snatches, like the digital stills and clips that cycled through her computer’s screen saver. There was the club where she’d met the playwright. There were her friends leaving the club. There was the playwright tucking his loose curls behind his ear. There was the playwright in the stairwell of his building. There were the vents, condensers, and fans, the mechanical infrastructure on the roof, looming like the lunar module on the surface of the moon. There was the sun coming up over Chelsea. There was the playwright on the pavement below. And one other image, which came to her in the early afternoon, when she woke in her bed, naked, her dress and underwear bunched on the floor: the playwright, leaping from the gravel rooftop to the parapet that framed it, gilded and smooth and almost shining in the morning light, leaping the way an acrobat leaps from one tightrope to a higher tightrope, arms spread, for balance not flight. And it was this last image she trusted least, because it was the clearest and sharpest, as though it had never actually happened, as though she remembered it only from the dream she’d just dreamed.

  PART I

  JUNE 2007

  CHAPTER ONE

  Gil Ferko sat in a conference room on the fiftieth floor, arranging business cards before him according to who sat where across the table—a narrow oval, with eight chairs on each side. Ferko’s chair wasn’t in the middle; nor was it on the end. He was a bishop, an important enough guy, strategic to a point, comfortable in his role, able to take a piece or two if such an opportunity presented itself. He had the king’s ear; though, more accurately, the king had Ferko’s ear.

  The king in this case was William Prauer, a founding partner at Riverfront Capital. He was thirty-five, two years younger than Ferko, and worth a few hundred million, rumor had it. Prauer had worked at Goldman, then at age twenty-nine launched Riverfront in a Midtown office a half-dozen blocks from either river. Since then, Prauer had timed metals, then automotive, buying at the trough and holding, sometimes selling, always higher, while the rich guys from Europe and the Mideast and the pension funds in the US kept betting with him, pouring billions into his funds. Now he was on to retail, and posted up, in the corner of the conference room, with Roy Grove, the controlling shareholder of Grove Department Stores, with sixty stores operating in eleven states that once comprised the Confederacy. It didn’t make sense to Ferko—this push for Grove, a brand beaten down figuratively and literally, as lately, it seemed, the paths of hurricanes crossed the nearest Grove store with alarming precision. Three roofs blown off last season alone. It didn’t make sense that Prauer and Grove were doing their little dance in the corner, lips to ears, practically holding hands. Prauer had friends in media, rich friends who bought his funds and were conflicted enough to deliver bad news on a company like Grove, with closely held equity and publicly held debt. If Prauer couldn’t buy the equity from the Grove family, he could buy the debt in the market. He had plenty of time. Ferko had watched Prauer do it before—buy bonds on the cheap and convert them to equity. He had a reputation as a shark because he was one. Now Ferko watched his boss with Roy Grove. Was Prauer threatening the man? Win-win was a myth, a platitude the losers consoled themselves with each time they lost. Ferko had been with the losers. He could hardly believe his luck now. He hadn’t gone to the right schools. He’d never paid his dues, working sixty to eighty hours a week on the lower rungs. He was sure that one day he’d be discovered, banished to some faceless box in an industrial park in Parsippany or outside of the Oranges, where his former classmates—the MBAs who, like Ferko, had completed their degrees at night, part-time—compared monthly budgets with actual results and noted variances on a spreadsheet. Was Ferko really better than them?

  “Do you know any of these guys?” Lisa Becker whispered into his ear, indicating the business cards Ferko had arranged before him. She sat to his left, the knight to Ferko’s bishop, the nimble piece that was brought out early and arguably worked the hardest. She was thirty-one, unmarried and unattached, though Ferko suspected she was seeing George Cosler, a managing director, another bishop, who oversaw automotive for Prauer. Ferko wondered if that relationship had brought Lisa to this meeting, this conference table, at Ferko’s elbow. The toe of her shoe touched his ankle. And again. She played guard for a women’s basketball team in some city league.

  Ferko shook his head no. Grove was represented by a new firm started by a couple of guys from New York who collected some bankers from California and called themselves, not so cleverly, EastWest Partners. This was their first transaction, as far as Ferko knew. But then he read the name on the business card he was holding: GREGORY A. FLETCHER, PARTNER, EASTWEST. Ferko glanced up and found Greg sitting directly across the table—the right age, late thirties, with a full head of hair the color of sand. But this Greg Fletcher had sleepy eyes, half slits. Ferko thought of those mailings you sometimes get with photographs of missing kids and computer-generated age progressions of what they might look like now. Greg had been thirteen when he left Edgefield Junior High. Then Ferko saw it—the sideways grin, directed at an associate, then across the table at him.

  “Gaylord Ferko,” Greg Fletcher said.

  Here’s what happened to those guys who tormented you growing up: they became investment bankers and private equity kings.

  Not the bullies, the ones who frightened you physically. The other guys—the ones you envied, because they were popular. Years ago, they came up with stupid names to call you, like Gaylord, which stuck, because Greg Fletcher could hit a baseball and throw a football and shoot a basketball better than anyone else in fourth grade. Back then Ferko hadn’t known what to make of Greg Fletcher’s sudden interest, even as Ferko understood it was merely for ridicule. Still, he went with it. First because he had no choice, but then because Greg Fletcher was actually talking to Ferko. Which became a bigger deal in fifth grade and bigger still in sixth, when Greg advanced to the regional finals of the Punt, Pass, and Kick competition, and everyone watched during halftime of the Giants-Cardinals game, at home, on their TV sets, as Greg was introduced in a Giants uniform, number one, along with the other shaggy-haired kids, the other Greg Fletchers of New Jersey and New York, with a ball in one hand and a helmet in the other, standing along the home sideline at Giants Stadium. Ferko cheered. He waited. Then Greg proved he was human. His punt was not the best. His pass wobbled and fell outside the hash marks. His kick knuckled and died. And he didn’t advance. No Hawaii. No Pro Bowl. He remained a loca
l hero until seventh grade, when his locker was next to Ferko’s. Then Greg moved to California.

  Now Ferko stood at the far end of the conference table, by the window that faced east, where a tugboat pushed up the East River, and shook Greg Fletcher’s hand.

  “This is weird, man,” Greg said. “Like déjà vu, you know?”

  “Like memory,” Ferko said.

  “Dude, I know the difference. I was just thinking about you the other day.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure, man.” His hair was actually longer than it had been in seventh grade. He swept it out of his eyes with his tanned fingers. “I’ve been back east a year or so. I ran into Jen Yoder. She trades metals for Deveraux, so she’s interested in our world.”

  Ferko was unsure whether our world included him.

  “We get together every now and then,” Greg said. “We’ll loop you in. She’s still very cool.”

  “That’s cool,” Ferko said, like a parrot. Jen Yoder had been untouchable in high school. She’d walked the halls on a raised dais, it seemed, in her white cheerleader uniform on game days, her black hair spilling down her back, her face freckled, light-complexioned. Was she even pretty? He remembered her perched on the back of a convertible, with an armful of lilies, cruising laps around the track that circled the football field, where Greg Fletcher’s old buddies—who could never throw or kick the football as far as Greg, but that year, Ferko’s senior year, were on their way to the state finals—stood and applauded along with those in the bleachers, the parents and the students, including Ferko, who’d realized years before, when he’d first been called Gaylord, the benefits of invisibility, of blending in. So much so that now he couldn’t be sure he had actually been there that day, standing in the bleachers, when Jen Yoder was named homecoming queen. Maybe it was a picture in the yearbook he remembered, the victory lap in the convertible from some movie he once saw. He couldn’t remember a single conversation with her. He imagined Greg calling her later, telling her he ran into Ferko, and Jen saying, “Who?” “Gaylord,” Greg would say, and Jen would say, “Who?”

  She’d had a party at her house the night of graduation, smack in the middle of the two-week window that marked the end of high school and the start of the next stage, when the spirit of achievement trumped the cliques and their laws of exclusion. Ferko swam in the pool in Jen Yoder’s backyard. He drank beer from the coolers that had been stashed beyond the hibiscus, away from the lights of the pool deck and the patio and the imposing house, in the dark part of the yard, where the leaves on the trees cast shadows in the moonlight, and where, later, as Ferko left, faceless couples sat along the stone wall, making out. He walked home alone in the moonlight, his hair, which he wore long then, still damp from his swim in Jen Yoder’s pool.

  “You’re married,” Greg Fletcher said now. His thumb and forefinger touched his own bare ring finger like pincers.

  Ferko looked at his gold band and shrugged. It was a symbol, sure, an asset even. It defined men; those pushing forty who lacked one began to exude an air of damage, despite the feigned envy of their peers. He supposed his ring scored him one up on Greg. It was, perhaps, the first time Ferko had had anything on Greg. Though he remembered Mary Beth, at home in their dark room, the heavy curtains drawn to proscribe the fine day. The truth was something else.

  Ferko prepared himself for the logical follow-up, the one about kids. He’d come up with an answer some months ago that had proved useful in deflecting the question: We don’t. Vague enough, casual enough, true enough. The answer defeated the question, conquered it, rendered it as inconsequential as the asker had intended.

  But Greg didn’t ask the logical follow-up, which left a void in the small talk, one Ferko was eager to fill: “And you?”

  “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 r
ooftop 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 place? 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.