Linwood Barclay - Elevator Pitch

Then there were the Headley supporters who took out their anger against Barbara. “When’s the last time you actually did anything for the city, you cunt Jew?” asked PatriotPaul. Was it worth replying to tell PatriotPaulthat, while raised Presbyterian, she no longer belonged to any organized religion whatsoever? Perhaps not. The numerically named C67363asked, “How’s anything ever going to get done in this city when people like you are always complaining?” It was downright charming when someone could express an opinion without being vulgar.

Barbara scrolled through a few more. On very rare occasions, someone might actually have something useful to say, maybe even point Barbara in the direction of a future article, although she wasn’t seeing anything like that tonight.

But then there was this:

“Sorry about your friend. It’s often the case that innocents are lost in the pursuit of a greater good.”

Barbara blinked, read it again. It was a reference, of course, to the column’s postscript about Paula Chatsworth. How she’d worked briefly at Manhattan Today , how she’d shown so much promise, how her life had been cut short by tragedy when she clearly had so much still to offer.

It was, for Barbara, an emotionally honest bit of writing, and her sadness at the young woman’s death was genuine. People came to the big city to pursue a dream, not get killed in some freakish accident.

Barbara read the comment again.

“Sorry about your friend. It’s often the case that innocents are lost in the pursuit of a greater good.”

What the hell was that supposed to mean?

What “greater good” could the author possibly be referring to?

The author went by the handle GoingDown.

“Very fucking funny,” Barbara said aloud, shaking her head. But then she thought, maybe it wasn’t intended as an elevator joke. The writer could be an oral sex aficionado.

She was about to close the laptop when it dinged. An incoming email.

From Arla.

Barbara could not remember the last time she’d heard from her daughter. A few weeks, at least. Could it have been as long as a month?

Barbara clicked on the email.

“Hey,” Arla wrote. No “Dear Mom.” That would be too much to expect, Barbara knew.

It went on: “I have news. Want to meet for a coffee or something tomorrow?”

News? What kind of news could Arla have? So far as Barbara knew, she wasn’t seeing anyone. Then again, Arla had never been big on sharing the details of her private life with her mother. It would have to be something big for Arla to actually propose getting together.

Maybe Arla had been seeing someone. Maybe Arla was engaged.

Would she be expecting her mother to foot the bill for a wedding? Christ, how much was Headley offering to ghost-write his bio again? Mid–six figures?

No. No way. Arla would have to need life-saving surgery before Barbara would sink that low.

Maybe Arla was pregnant.

Wouldn’t that just be history repeating itself.

Anything was possible.

Barbara clicked on Reply and began tapping away.

“Sure,” she wrote. “When and where?”

The boy gently pats the woman’s arm as she sits in the chair. He believed she was simply asleep, but he has to be sure. She does not look well. Her forehead is glistening with sweat.

“Mom? Mom, are you okay?”

She opens her eyes slowly, focuses on the boy. “I guess … I nodded off there.”

“You’re sweating like crazy. For a second it looked like you weren’t even breathing.”

Her gaze moves beyond the boy. “Oh, Lord, I didn’t even put the groceries away. The ice cream’ll be melted.”

The boy gives her arm a squeeze. “I already put it away. You should have sent me to the store instead.”

“Don’t be silly. I’m perfectly capable. A little extra exercise never hurt anybody.” She finds enough energy to smile. “Why don’t you get us both a little ice cream? It’s chocolate. I’ll sit right here. My legs are killing me.”

The boy gets out a couple of bowls, takes the ice cream from the freezer, and spoons out two small servings. He hands one bowl to his mother, then perches himself on the arm of her chair while he eats his. She eats hers very slowly, as if this simple task takes effort.

Chocolate is his favorite. But he finds himself too worried to enjoy it. He doesn’t know how much longer things can go on this way.

The four elevators at the Sycamores Residences, a thirty-story York Avenue apartment tower just below Sixty-Third, were in constant use. Kids heading off to school. Men and women leaving for work. Nannies arriving to look after toddlers. Building maintenance staff heading to the top floor to vacuum hallways, working their way back down to ground level.

New Yorkers headed out from this residence to every corner of the city. Some worked at nearby Rockefeller University. Several units in the building were set aside for visiting professors and scientists who came to Rockefeller from all around the globe.

Although an exact count was not known because residents came and went, some people had guests, and others had sublet their apartments without informing building management, it was generally believed that any given time about nine hundred people lived in the Sycamores Residences. The building, like so many others in the city, was a small town unto itself.

Only three of those roughly nine hundred people were in Elevator Number Two when it happened.

Fanya Petrov, forty-nine, a visiting scientist from Russia, was staying on the twenty-eighth floor; she had been waiting the better part of five minutes and the elevator still had not arrived. She followed, with increasing frustration, the digital display above the doors, telling her where the elevators were. She’d hear them traveling through the shaft, whizzing past her floor on the way to the top of the building. Often, inexplicably, the elevator car would sail right past on its descent, not stopping to let her on. Was someone from building maintenance overriding the functions?

Since coming to New York three weeks earlier, she had learned that the magnificent view of the East River and the Queensboro Bridge that had at first so impressed her was not worth the aggravation of the slow elevators in the building. She’d have been happy with a room on the first or second floor. Who needed a view? She had learned that if she was to be on time for her appointments at Rockefeller, she had to allow herself an extra ten minutes because of the elevators. She’d take the stairs, but really, was she going to go down twenty-seven floors? It wasn’t particularly exhausting—she had done it a few times—but it was time-consuming. And she just knew that the moment she entered that stairwell, the elevator doors would be parting.

She blamed the children. And their parents.

There were so many youngsters in the building, and they always forgot something. Only yesterday, after thinking she’d caught a break when the elevator showed up almost immediately, the doors opened at the twentieth floor to allow a young man and his ten-year-old son to board. As the doors were closing, the boy shouted, “I forgot my lunch!”

“For Christ’s sake,” his father said, sticking out his arm to stop the doors. “Go!”

The boy bolted from the elevator, ran down the hall to their apartment, fumbled about in his pocket, looked back, and said, “I don’t have my key!”

Fanya had closed her eyes and said to herself, You have got to be kidding me . Well, not exactly that, but the Russian equivalent. Fanya spoke English fluently, but she was not up to speed on American phrases of frustration.