Andrew Gross - The Dark Tide

The finish line, the bend after the intersection with 287, was a half mile ahead.

Looking back, Jonathan caught a glimpse of Gary trying to free himself from the pack. His blood started to pump, accelerating as the country road turned into a perfect straightaway in the last half mile. He’d moved at the right time!

Pedaling fiercely now, Jonathan’s thighs were burning. He wasn’t thinking about the new job he had started just a few weeks before-on the energy desk at Man Securities, one of the real biggies-a chance to earn some real numbers after the mess at Harbor.

Nor was he thinking about the deposition he had to make that week. With that auditor from the Bank of Scotland and the lawyer from Parker, Kegg forcing him to testify against his former company after taking the attractive payout deal that had been offered him when the firm shut down.

No, all that was in Jonathan’s mind that morning was racing to that imaginary line ahead of his friend. Gary had maneuvered out of the pack and had made up some distance. The intersection was just a hundred yards ahead. Jonathan went at it, his quads aching and his lungs on fire. He snuck a final peek back. Gary had pulled up. Game over. The rest of the pack was barely in sight. No way he could catch him now.

Jonathan coasted underneath the 287 overpass and cruised around the bend, raising his arms with a triumphant whoop.

He’d dusted him!

A short time later, Jonathan was pedaling home through the residential streets in Upper Montclair.

The traffic was light. His mind drifted to some complex energy index play someone had described at work. He was relishing his win and how he could tell his eight-year-old son, Stevie, how his old dad had smoked everyone today.

As he neared his neighborhood, the streets turned a little winding and hilly. He coasted down the straightaway on Westerly, then turned up, Mountain View, the final hill. He huffed, thinking how he’d promised he’d take Stevie to buy some soccer shoes. His house was just a quarter mile away.

That was when he spotted the car. More like a large black façade, a Navigator or an Escalade or something with a shiny chrome grille.

It was heading right for his path.

For a second, Jonathan Lauer was annoyed. Hit the brakes, dude. It was a residential street. There was plenty of distance between them. No one else was around. It flashed through his head that maybe he had taken the turn a little wide.

But Jonathan Lauer didn’t hear the sound of brakes.

He heard something else.

Something crazy, his annoyance twisting into something else. Something horrifying, as the SUV’s grille came closer and closer.

He heard acceleration.

Over the next few days, Karen must have watched that two-second clip a hundred times.

Horrified. Confused. Unable to comprehend what she was seeing.

The face of the man she had lived with for eighteen years. The man she’d mourned and missed and cried over. Whose pillow she still sometimes crept over to at night and hugged, whose name she still whispered.

It was Charlie, her husband, caught in an unexpected freeze-frame as the camera randomly swept by.

Outside Grand Central. After the attack.

How the hell can that be you, Charlie…?

Karen didn’t know what to do. Whom she could possibly tell? She went for a jog with Paula out on Tod’s Point, and listened to her friend going on about some dinner party she and Rick had attended, at this amazing house out on Stanwich, when all the while she just wanted to stop. Face her friend. Tell her: I saw Charlie, Paula.

The kids? It would shatter them to see their father there. They would die. Her folks? How could she possibly explain? Until she knew.

Saul? The person he owed everything to. No.

So she kept it to herself. She watched the captured moment, over and over, until she was driving herself crazy. Confusion hardening into anger. Anger into hurt and pain.

Why? Why, Charlie? How can that be you? How could you have done this to us, Charlie?

Karen went over what she knew. Charlie’s name had been on the Mercedes dealer’s transit sheet. They had found the remnants of his briefcase blown apart, the charred slip of paper from his notepad she had received. He’d called her! 8:34. It didn’t make any sense to Karen.

He was there on that train!

At first she tried to convince herself that it couldn’t be him. He would never, ever do this to her. Or to the kids. Not Charlie… And why? Why? She stared at him. People look alike. Eyes, hopes-they can play crazy tricks. The picture was a little fuzzy. But every time she went back to that screen, replayed the image she had saved for maybe the thousandth time-there it was. Unmistakable. The sweats coming over her. Accusation knifing up in her belly. Her legs giving out like jelly.

Why?

Days passed. She tried to pretend to be herself, but the experience made her so sick and so confused, all Karen could do was hide in her bed. She told the kids she had come down with something. The anniversary of Charlie’s death. All those feelings rushing back at her. One night they even brought dinner up to her. Chicken soup they had bought at the store, a cup of green tea. Karen thanked them and looked into their bolstering eyes. “C’mon, Mom, you’ll be fine.” As soon as they left, she cried.

Then later, when they were asleep or at school, she’d go around the house, studying her husband’s face in the photos that were everywhere. The ones that meant everything to Karen. All she had. The one of him in his beach shirt and Ray-Bans that they’d blown up for the memorial. Of him and Karen dressed in black tie at her cousin’s wedding. The personal items she had never cleared off his dresser in his closet: business cards, receipts, his watches.

You couldn’t do this to me, could you, Charlie? To us…

Not you…

It had to be some kind of coincidence. A freakish one. I trust you, Charlie… I trusted you in life, and I’m goddamned going to trust you now. In a million years, he would never hurt her this way.

Karen kept coming back to the one thing she still had of him. The torn sheet from his notepad someone had found in Grand Central. From the Desk of Charlie Friedman.

She felt him there. Trust had to win out here. The trust of eighteen years. Whatever she saw on that screen, she knew damn well in her heart just who her husband was.

For the first time, Karen looked at the note sheet. Really looked at it. Not just as a keepsake. Megan Walsh. The random name scrawled there in Charlie’s barely legible script. The scribbled phone number: 964-1650. And another number, underlined in his bold, broad strokes:

B1254.

Karen closed her eyes.

Don’t even go there, she admonished herself, suspicion snaking through her. That wasn’t Charlie. It couldn’t be.

But suddenly Karen stared wide-eyed at the scribbled numbers. The doubts kept tearing at her. Seeing his face up on that screen. It was like a piece of his past, a link to him-the only link.

Crazy as it is, you’ve got to go ahead and call, Karen.

If only to stop yourself from totally going insane.

It took everything Karen had to do it.

In a way it made her feel like she was cheating on him, on his memory. What if that wasn’t even him up on that screen? What if she was making all this up, over someone who simply looked like him?

Her husband had been dead for over a year!

But she dialed, secretly praying inside that the number wasn’t to some hotel and B1254 a room there, and this was how she would have to think of him. The weirdest doubts crossed Karen’s mind.

“JP Morgan Chase. Fortieth and Third Avenue branch,” a woman on the line answered.