Ghosts of Bergen County Read online

  Yet, despite her experience in Tri, she convinced herself that she’d done the play only as a lark. She convinced herself that she didn’t have the discipline of the other actors—those majoring in theater arts. And so she majored in history, which, to Jen, meant she’d had few ambitions, a quandary that hadn’t seemed to vex her father.

  Then, years later, the playwright of Tri, another student at Columbia Jen once counted as a friend, became somewhat famous—first in theater and then in films—which gave Jen hope that there was still an avenue in. This hope lingered until the other playwright, Felix DeGrass, was with her one night and then was gone and she slid down the slide and never bothered to climb back up.

  Until now, finding this flyer in the approximate spot where Felix had died. It meant something, it had to, and, in addition to riding her bicycle home this afternoon via the Hudson River Greenway, Battery Park, and the East River Bikeway, she would also call the number that had been written multiple times across the bottom of the flyer and cut with scissors into two-inch strips. There were only three tabs left, and Jen tore one off, unshouldered and unzipped her bag, and found the smallest inside pocket, one so small that all she kept inside was a book of postage stamps. And now this phone number. She slipped it inside and zipped the pocket. Then reconsidered. She should call it now before she forgot and, months later, found the number in the tiny pocket only to realize it was too late for it to be of any use, or worse, have no recollection of what the number was even for. She was that sort of a fuck-up. She dug in her bag for her phone just as it rang, which startled her, and she wondered, during a brief, confused interlude between the first and second rings, whether the persons holding the auditions had somehow called her. But of course they hadn’t. Her phone told her it was Greg Fletcher.

  “Hey!” she answered.

  “Long time,” he said, which must have been a joke. They’d seen each other last week, when she’d bumped into him at Lexington and Eighteenth and they hung out in a bar nearby.

  “Guess who I ran into today?”

  “I’m supposed to guess?”

  “Gil Ferko.” He paused a moment, presumably to give her a chance to react. When she didn’t he asked, “Do you remember him?”

  She thought she knew the name. “From Edgefield?”

  “He lived on Holt,” Greg said.

  Jen knew Holt. The houses were newer than where she grew up, near the high school. “Skinny kid?” she asked, because a blurry image had formed in her mind.

  “That’s him. Black hair that stuck straight up. Crooked teeth.”

  And with that the image was complete. Gil Ferko had been a quiet kid. She remembered him in kindergarten and she remembered him in high school. Thirteen years. How did she never get to know him?

  “I think his teeth got fixed,” she said, remembering the high school version.

  “They did indeed,” Greg said. “His hair doesn’t stick up anymore, either.”

  “How was I supposed to guess Gil Ferko, Fletcher?”

  “It’s just a saying, a way to start a conversation, to introduce a new concept. You’re always running into people you know. You said so yourself.”

  “I know a lot of people.”

  “Well, I know some, too.”

  She read the phone number from the flyer. She’d call it once this call ended. She wished to improve herself. Taking up acting again was one way, and here was another: “Do I brag,” she asked, “about all the people I know?”

  “A little.” Greg’s voice was sweeter than she’d expected.

  “Seriously,” she said, “am I tiresome?”

  “Of course not. Besides, it’s true: you know a lot of people. And I need to know more.”

  The bar off Lexington had been in a basement, a place so nondescript its name hadn’t registered. She wasn’t even sure how they’d found it, how she’d known it existed. Down a set of narrow, concrete stairs, the walls were wood-paneled, the floor linoleum. A wood bar stood to one side, with mismatched stools, across from a pool table that took quarters. In between were metal tables and chairs, arranged without pattern. Someone’s playlist spilled from speakers mounted on corner brackets. There was no TV. Everyone knew each other—including Jen, who chatted up a couple of guys from Sons of Squirrel, just back from a two-week tour in a borrowed van that had taken them as far west as Columbus, Ohio. It was like hanging out in someone’s basement. Later, when it was time to close, they merely locked the doors and lit a joint and passed it around. Then another. The thin crowd thinned further. Jen and Greg sat in a corner more or less by themselves. It felt like a dream, where your past collides with your present in a surreal setting. Here was the first boy she’d ever kissed. The summer after seventh grade. That part was real. She told him her recurring dream, where she broke into people’s houses, sometimes those of her neighbors growing up in Edgefield, and hung out in their basements until she was discovered and fled. And he told her his recurring dream, where he committed a crime and set about destroying the evidence until it was too small to be seen by the naked eye. His were glassy in the bar’s dim light. She imagined the dream version of Greg Fletcher in a conference room, shredding reams of paper as the FBI closed in.

  “Are you free this Friday?” he asked her now, over the phone. “Lunch?”

  “I think so.”

  “With me and Ferko. He’s the man.”

  “The skinny kid is the man?”

  “Well, his boss is the man. William Prauer. Have you heard of him?”

  “No.”

  “Read the paper. The dude’s acquisitive.”

  “That’s a good thing?”

  “Which makes the skinny kid the man by association,” Greg said, then paused. “I used to call him Gaylord. I came up with that nickname. Do you remember that? It stuck, at least for a while.”

  Jen didn’t remember the skinny kid having a nickname.

  “I need to make up for that,” Greg said, his voice infused, to Jen’s ear, with genuine remorse.

  Still, she couldn’t help herself. “To do more deals?” she asked.

  “Well, I feel bad about all that stuff, but, yes, to do more deals.”

  Jen sighed. “I get off at two. Send me a text where you want to meet. Just make sure there’s a bar.”

  “A bar.”

  “It’s Friday.”

  “Of course.”

  They said their goodbyes, and she held her phone and regarded the numbers on the scrap of paper, then keyed them and put the earpiece to her ear. The phone on the other end rang until voice mail picked up. There was nothing in the message about auditions—just a woman with a Brooklyn accent repeating the numbers Jen had dialed and inviting her to leave a message, which she did:

  “Hello,” she said, conscious of her cadence, of slowing down her delivery and using her best stage voice. The audition started with this message, she told herself. “My name is Jennifer Yoder.” (She’d used her full name—Jennifer Yoder—when she’d performed in Tri. That was the name listed on the playbill.) “I saw your flyer in Chelsea and I’m calling about the auditions. Please call me. I’d love to hear about your production.” She left her phone number.

  It was a simple thing—leaving a phone message. People did it all the time. Yet she felt especially good about this message, with no ums or uhs, no awkward pauses. She used a clear voice, a smooth stream of words in the correct order. She closed her phone and zippered the bag, then chanced a last look at Felix DeGrass’s rooftop, allowing the image of the falling man to plunge toward her once more before she pushed her bicycle into the street and mounted it and continued west, down the hill, toward the Hudson and the bike path that followed the river south.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was still light when Ferko arrived home. The house was quiet, the mail strewn on the dining table. “Hello,” he said, under his breath, to no one. There were catalogs and cheap envelopes with cheap printing, windows through which his name was misspelled, glossy postcards from realtors a
nd remodeling contractors. He placed it all in the recycling bin that held paper. The bin was full, so he took it out the front door to the barrel beside the porch, half hidden by the hemlock.

  The house was new, a Cape, wood-framed, with cement siding and a porch with gray planks and white columns and a wood swing that hung from chains, affixed to the beadboard ceiling with hooks like small anchors. Mary Beth had loved the porch the moment they’d first parked at the curb on a May afternoon, in front of the lone remaining tall oak from the woods Woodberry Road had replaced. She’d wanted an older house—pre–World War II—but this one did the trick. She sat on the swing and made room for him, and he joined her and swung, their feet drawn up off the floor, while their agent fiddled with the lockbox and then with the key.

  Now the bench was empty. He sat on it, then regretted doing so. He should be inside, saying a proper hello. The porch was his after dark, after Mary Beth had gone to sleep. He’d sit in the shadows, with the porch lights out and two bottles of beer in a bucket of ice. He’d sip the beers over the course of an hour, while the evening bugs sang and the occasional car coasted past, its radio muffled, while dogs walked up and down the sidewalks on leashes, their masters mostly silent, though sometimes coaxing, the way a parent might coax a child.

  He was comfortable by himself, drawn to the quiet. So was she. It was a bad recipe, they’d joked when they first got together and recognized how alike they were. They’d met through mutual friends—party folk, a core group of extroverts who’d gone to Yale and functioned, in those days, in New York City in Y2K, like a star, throwing off heat, pulling others into their orbit. Neither Ferko nor Mary Beth were extroverts or had gone to Yale, yet here they were, attending the same rooftop party in the West Village. Later they adjourned to a corner bar, where Ferko, feeling magnanimous and tipsy, bought a round for the denizens, a couple dozen or so at that wee hour, including the complete strangers who happened to be there, and this discreet bit of generosity—buying a round for the bar—pulled these strangers, in that moment and for the next hour or two, into their orbit as well. Truth be told, Ferko had always wanted to stand beside a bar and announce loudly that the next round was on him, to receive the backslaps and the glasses clinking against his own, and he’d done a quick estimate, before committing, of the numbers in the narrow room and figured this was as good a time as any. He hadn’t yet spoken with Mary Beth at this point, but he’d noticed her, a new face, and if Mary Beth hadn’t yet noticed Ferko, she did so now. She told him weeks later, when they were alone together for the first time, shoulders touching in the back of a cab between one party and the next, his gesture was generous. She was impressed.

  It was a risk, they both knew, given their introspective natures; they needed others. When their others moved to different cities and suburbs, Mary Beth and Ferko moved here, to start a family, a new star, a new orbit.

  He stood and steadied the porch swing and went to see if she was asleep or awake.

  The next morning he woke to find the girl standing in the hallway outside their bedroom. The light was gray through the white curtains. It was dawn. He didn’t wish to turn from the girl to check the time. It had been some weeks, maybe a month, since he’d seen her last. She wore a striped shirt and shorts, like usual. She was barefoot. Five years old, maybe. He propped himself on his elbow. Her pigtails fell in messy braids, the color of the clay Mary Beth had turned over their first year in the house, before the accident that killed Catherine, before the girl with the pigtails appeared, before Mary Beth neglected the garden and it was reclaimed by weeds that he mowed each week this time of year. The girl’s bangs fell in her eyes. She was looking at him. Or maybe not. Maybe she was studying Mary Beth, who slept on her back, her mouth open, and in that moment of Ferko’s doubt, the girl vanished.

  He blinked, then brought his legs out from under the sheets, careful not to disturb Mary Beth. He went to the place where the girl had stood. He checked around the corners, down the stairwell. He poked his head into the guest room, his home office, and, finally, into the nursery, which was void of furniture except a dresser, where Mary Beth kept her off-season clothes, and a toy box that had once belonged to Mary Beth’s grandmother. It was a wood crate, lacquered, and painted with circus seals and elephants and the sorts of clowns that gave children nightmares.

  He opened it, half expecting to find the girl curled up inside, but all he found were papers and photographs, a stuffed caterpillar and a green plastic cup.

  There were holes in the back of the box. Mary Beth had insisted he drill them. “For breathing,” she’d said.

  He’d looked at her.

  “I used to hide in it,” she’d said, “when I was a girl. The lid is heavy.”

  “We’ll fill it with toys.”

  “We’ll drill air holes in the back first.”

  Now he closed the lid and went back to where the girl had stood, outside the bedroom door. He placed his palm on the runner. There was no heat. He put his nose to it. Mary Beth slept. He felt less alone, more hopeful. Once he’d been afraid. But the girl was calm, serene. He wished to know what she wanted. His clock said it was 6:28, time to shower, dress, and go to work.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  There was a voice mail message waiting when he arrived. “Gil,” Greg Fletcher said. “Spoke with Jen. You, her, me. Friday, lunch. Two o’clock. I’ll charge it to Roy Grove. She’ll be done with work. She wants beverages, is excited to see you, buddy. Call me.”

  Ferko hung up the phone. Something stirred inside of him—part hope, part nausea. It was inexplicable, really, that Jen Yoder wanted to see him. Such was the lure of nostalgia, perhaps. It blinded you to the facts—like, for instance, you’d spent the better part of your youth ignoring boys like Gil Ferko. He wondered whether it was some elaborate plot to embarrass him, to dominate him the way Greg once had when they were kids. Maybe Greg would somehow parlay this dominance into concessions on the Grove deal, forever diminishing Ferko’s worth to Prauer, boosting Greg’s fortunes and options. Or maybe they’d simply grown up, and the cliques no longer mattered. Maybe it was no more complicated than that.

  Lisa sent him the notes from the Grove meeting, and, in the days that followed, they worked together on an action plan and an information request, they pulled research reports on retail and Grove’s competitors, they scratched out the bones of a database, compiled the trading values and market statistics for comparable companies, and all the while Ferko counted down the days from Tuesday to Friday, back and forth on the train, while Mary Beth remained in bed and the apparition failed to appear. The lawyers exchanged confidentiality agreements, and Ferko realized, as he did at the end of every week, that weeks were finite, that something, if only endurance, had been achieved. This week retained an energy that Mary Beth’s melancholy could not dispirit. As things happened with anticipated events, the day approached like a ship at sea.

  The restaurant was more a bar, with high tables in front and booths in back. A pub. He’d have a burger, maybe, or an omelet. The front—floor-to-ceiling sliding glass—stood open to the street. TVs affixed to the walls showed a baseball game. He stepped inside and let his eyes grow accustomed to the light. Patrons were perched on barstools. Greg wasn’t one of them. Ferko turned back to the sidewalk, but he found only the efficient processions walking east and west. No loiterers or malingerers.

  “Table?”

  The hostess wore a red tank top and black pants. Her black hair (and a few errant strands of gray) fell past her shoulders. She wore eyeliner, a half-dozen earrings, and had a tattoo—a braided vine—around her wrist. She held a Bloody Mary in a tall glass, revealing the fine tone of her triceps.

  “Actually, I’m meeting some folks.” He craned his neck toward the booths in back.

  “Oh,” she said, “describe them.”

  “Well, there’s a guy, with longish hair. He’s about my age. They both are, actually. The guy and this woman.”

  “Oh,” she said, “what does she look like?
”

  He was about to break away, excuse himself and take matters into his own hands. There couldn’t have been that many tables in the back. He would look for Greg himself. The drink had a straw and a stalk of celery and flecks of black pepper floating on its surface like the freckles on the woman’s nose. Then she raised her eyebrows and put the straw to her lips and sucked the juice into her mouth.

  He stopped.

  “Jen?”

  “Ha! You haven’t changed a bit.”

  “Gullible?”

  “I didn’t say that.” She kissed him on the cheek and squeezed his wrist, then led him to a corner of the bar where there was an empty stool next to hers.

  The bartender appeared, and Ferko ordered a Bloody Mary, too. He was hungry, he told her, and her drink looked nutritious. It was a weird thing to say, he feared, but Jen pulled her celery stalk out, dripping tomato juice and vodka, and presented it to him. He took it and, without missing a beat, chomped.