One duplicitous turn deserves another. She’d introduced herself as Jadzia Hernandez. That’s the name on the expertly forged passport that had been delivered to her suite last night, along with a laptop, and a bouquet of white ginger lilies.
She’d slept on crisp hotel linens and boarded her flight long before dawn. Subjected to the Monty monologue, she’d attempted to read the airline magazine, but the type was blurred even when she held it at arm’s length. Her once perfect vision has changed. The world has changed, beyond the secluded tropical haven where she’s spent the last three decades. These days, everyone is plugged into something, lost and insulated.
Not Monty. He has much to say and questions to ask, like whether she’s coming to New York on business, or pleasure.
“Ninguno de los dos,” she tells him. Neither one.
He waggles bushy eyebrows and says that he can give her pleasure. She shrugs as if the innuendo went right over her head and resumes staring down at ribbons of gray highway winding through gray hills dotted with gray buildings. She remembers a place with turquoise water and verdant mountains and rainbow-hued homes, and knows she’ll never see it again, never see—
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have begun our final descent. Please be sure that your seatbelts are securely fastened . . .”
Monty taps her shoulder and informs her in clumsy Spanish that someone who doesn’t speak English won’t be able to navigate ground transportation, and she can share his cab to the city.
“Mucho más barato para compartir,” he adds.
Much cheaper to share it? So he’s not even offering to pay her way?
“No, gracias,” she says with a smile and fantasizes about killing him with her bare hands.
When the plane’s wheels bump and race the runway, she turns on her phone and tilts the screen away from her nosy seatmate as her messages load, type magnified to compensate for her farsightedness.
Welcome home.
She smiles.
“Feliz Año,” Monty says as they part ways in the terminal, pronouncing the second word without the tilde and thus unwittingly transforming the intended “Happy New Year” into “Be happy, asshole.”
“Be happy, asshole,” she returns in flawless English, waiting long enough to see Monty’s jaw drop before disappearing into the crowd.
Central Park West
Stockton Barnes gets off the subway at Eighty-Sixth Street and reaches into his overcoat pocket for his cigarettes before remembering he’d kicked his pack-a-day habit more than three years ago. Damn. If ever there was a time he could use a calming smoke, this is it.
Outside, across the street, every bench along the low stone wall is vacant; the park beyond splotched with glowing lampposts and fringed by tall, bare limbs. He hears a shout from the playground tucked back in there. Not a child, not at this hour, though when Barnes was growing up in Harlem, his father sometimes brought him to the park after dark.
“Don’t tell your mother, son. She’ll say it’s dangerous. That woman thinks everything’s dangerous.”
Nothing bad ever happened to Barnes on a midnight playground, and his father met his untimely death at home. Keeled over at the breakfast table. Heart attack.
Striding north, Barnes sucks deep breaths of chilly night air into lungs that are growing healthier and pinker by the minute.
Pedestrians are few—a dog-walking matron wearing more fur than her Pomeranian, a jogger in a headlamp, a pair of teenaged girls in identical thousand-dollar black down parkas with red arm patches. The jackets had been designed for arctic explorers but are all the rage in Manhattan’s toniest neighborhoods. Barnes’s own, a hundred blocks north, isn’t one of them.
He turns left onto West Eighty-Seventh Street. New Year’s Day is just winding down, and already he counts more bedraggled Christmas trees tossed at the curb than are lit in brownstone windows.
For many, the holidays are steeped in loneliness, depression, and stress: overspending, overtiredness, overindulgence; fighting off the flu or still fighting with family over the November election results; coping with weather woes and travel snafus. None of those scenarios apply to Barnes, but this isn’t the merriest of seasons for him, either. A longtime detective with the NYPD Missing Persons Squad, he’d just spent December chasing down people who weren’t where they should be, or where their families expected them to be.
’Tis the season for reflecting on the year behind, assessing the one ahead—and for some, resolving to make significant changes that don’t involve significant others. Precious few disappearances at this time of year—at any time of year—involve foul play, though it does happen.
Turning right onto Broadway, he spots his destination. He’s eaten at most of the all-night diners in the city, this one included. It’s not an old-school greasy spoon like some, or one that caters to hipsters or tourists. Just your basic counter-booths-and-tables joint: pie behind glass, ketchup bottles on the tables, and a thick, laminated menu offering everything from hash browns to seared mahi-mahi.
Forty minutes late when he steps over the threshold, he figures she must have given up on him. There aren’t many customers at this hour, and he doesn’t see her. There’s just one Black woman here, way back in a corner booth, intent on her cell phone. That’s not her . . .
Wait, yes, it is.
He’s seen Amelia Crenshaw Haines on television many times and met her in person twice. She’d always worn business attire, fully made-up, her sleek hair falling to her shoulders. Tonight, she has on a navy hoodie emblazoned with gold letters. Her hair is tucked under a Yankees baseball cap, and her face, when she looks up, bears no evidence of cosmetics.
She puts her phone away as he slides into the booth. “Trying not to be recognized?”
“Recognized?”
“You’re a celebrity. On TV, and all. People must bother you when you’re out in public.”
“Oh, yeah. Me, Halle, Taraji, Beyoncé . . . pesky fans stalk gals like us, you know?”
“Sorry I’m late.”
“What happened? Get hung up watching the big Rose Bowl comeback?”
“What comeback?”
“Penn State scored twenty-eight points in the third quarter. USC tied up the fourth with a minute left and won with a forty-six-yard field goal.”
Ah, a fellow football fan—and even prettier without all the trimmings. She’s precisely the kind of woman who might have convinced this longtime ladies’ man to give monogamy another try . . .
If their paths had crossed in another time and place.
If she didn’t already have a husband.
And if Barnes, who’d been briefly, reluctantly married and long divorced, hadn’t promised himself that he’ll never go down that road again.
“Unfortunately, I missed the game,” he says. “I got held up by a case.”
“It’s fine. I have nowhere to go, except bed.”
Barnes doesn’t want to picture her there. No, he does not.
Nor does he want to wonder why she needed to meet with him at this hour on a holiday, though he suspects he knows the answer.
“Every living creature is equipped with natural instinct, Stockton,” his friend Wash had once told him. “Listen to yours.”