He heaved a disappointed sigh. “From where you sit, it may be hard for you to see it, but people are scared, the economy’s bad, and we’re more divided than ever. That’s what we cover here.”
“From where I sit?”
“We can’t pretend the world isn’t in chaos by chasing after a story about a woman who received keys to a new van—”
“From a stranger. While thousands and thousands of purple and white balloons and flowers mysteriously appear around Manhattan.”
“And what about the gift cards that someone’s leaving on windshields all over?” a man said from behind me.
I turned to face him. He was in his midthirties, dressed in a tailored dark-blue suit and holding up a gift card wrapped in purple ribbon. “Found one of these on my windshield this morning. They’re all over town. Hundreds of them.”
Mark looked intrigued. Or maybe his interest was just for appearances because the man speaking was Scott Jameson, star of the very popular ANC series Wonders of the World, where Scott explored the most wild and beautiful locations in the world. Mark took the gift card from him and turned it over in his hands.
“Something’s going on,” Scott said. “Worth looking into.”
Mark frowned. I could feel a no bubbling up. “All right,” he sighed. “Give it a shot, Kate. But make it brief.”
Before I could reply, he walked away.
I blew out a breath. “Thank you. He was putting the kibosh on that story before you got here.” I held out my hand. “I’m Kate Bradley.”
“Scott Jameson.” He shook my hand with a firm grip. “We’ve met.”
Scott was tall, over six feet, with the kind of piercing blue eyes that look great on camera. But although I had seen practically every episode of his show, I knew I’d never met him. I would’ve remembered.
“I don’t think—”
“Fifth Avenue. Your collision with a bike,” he added.
“That was you?”
“Not the one on the bike. The one who helped you up.”
“Sorry, I didn’t recognize you—”
“You had a lot going on that morning. Besides, I was in disguise. I was wearing a Yankees ball cap. And I’m a Cubs fan.”
I laughed. “The disguise worked. Thanks for your help. It wasn’t one of my better mornings in Manhattan.”
“Some days here are actually tests of your survival skills.”
“And thank you for helping convince Mark to give me this story.”
He flashed me a smile. “That’s three thank-yous in less than thirty seconds. Obviously, you’re not a real New Yorker.”
“Guess my Los Angeles stripes are showing.”
“They are,” he said in a conspiratorial tone. “But if you don’t want everyone else to know that you’re not from here, you’ll drop all the thank-yous.”
“Manhattan rule number seventy-two.” I pretended to write in my notebook. “No thank-yous.”
“Besides, you don’t need to thank me. You had already convinced Mark before I got here. He just likes for his reporters to claw and fight for the stories they want to do.”
“I heard that can get you fired around here.”
“Sometimes it does,” he agreed. “Mostly it makes for stronger reporting. But glad you’re taking on this story. The city has a kind of weird and wonderful feel to it right now.” His eyes met mine as he handed me the gift card. “Welcome to ANC, Kate. Let me know what you find out.”
CHAPTER SIX
By the time I had returned to my desk, NYCMiracles already had dozens of posts on it. A twenty-seven-year-old woman named Cathy had gone into Duane Reade in the West Village and discovered that the pain medication she needed after a recent surgery had already been paid for by an anonymous donor. She left there with $500 worth of medicine. Free. When I reached out to her through Facebook, she called me back fifteen minutes later.
She sounded like she’d been crying. “Our medical bills are more than we can manage, so I usually go without when it comes to pain medicine. But knowing that someone did this for me?” Her voice broke. “They’ll never fully understand what that means.”
“Any idea who did it?”
“The pharmacist said the guy paid in cash and wouldn’t leave his name.”
“What’d he look like?”
“Told me the guy was young, like maybe just out of high school.” She blew her nose. “And that he paid for ten other people who had open pharmacy orders.”
After I hung up with Cathy, more stories rolled in. The most bizarre example was a man named Hector who reported that the funeral home where he worked just received $25,000 cash by courier to pay off the funeral expenses for three families who were having services there that day.
Thankfully what happened at the Kmart in NoHo offered a solid clue. The manager’s post said that right after the store opened, a woman handed him $15,000 in cash and instructed him to pay the layaway balances of as many people as he could.
“I told her no,” the manager said when I tracked him down by phone later that morning. “I mean, we really aren’t set up for that. But she insisted. So I got a couple of clerks, and we dug in. Took hours.”
“What did she look like?”
“Hard to say. She was wearing these big sunglasses. White frames.”
“Indoors?”
“Yeah. And a red scarf, tied kind of fancy around her neck. Reddish hair, I think. One of the layaway customers found out what she was doing, dropped to her knees, and started crying. That’s when the woman took off.”
After we hung up, I wondered if this was all a momentary blip. A brief wave of kindness in the wake of the power outage. In the days that followed 9/11, people across the globe reached out with overwhelming help and support. Maybe this was the same thing.
I’d had a lot of experience with “good” stories like this in LA. I’d broken the story about the anonymous Good Samaritan leaving $100,000 in cash on LA doorsteps. A few months later, I was able to uncover the Robin Hood–like group who was stealing from the überwealthy and staging large-scale giving events for the poor. But what made this story different was how widespread it was—it wasn’t a handful of people receiving money, like the recipients of Good Sam. It was hundreds. Maybe thousands. And it wasn’t just the needy who were benefiting. Almost anyone seemed to be a possible recipient. But the scope of it meant there must be—there had to be—a group of people involved.
Were they all working together? Or was this kind of like “the wave” at a baseball game, started by a group and later imitated by copycats?
I wanted to be the one to get the answers, so I doubled down. I posted on the NYCMiracles page:
I’m Kate Bradley, a correspondent at ANC. If you have experiences with the good stuff that’s spreading through NYC or tips on who might be behind it, I want to hear from you. Text me at (323) 555-9999.
“Trade you,” Stephanie said, slipping a mug of coffee on the desk in front of me.
“For what?”
“Your story for mine. While I’m slogging through a report about the man who was found dead at the home of a prominent political donor in Chicago, I heard Mark is actually letting you work on a story about the good stuff happening.”