Run You Down (Rebekah Roberts #2)(62)

“Yes,” he says. “I am sorry I did not call you last night. I wanted to wait until I had confirmation. You are right. Aviva has been living in New Paltz for almost ten years. I spoke with her roommate Isaac yesterday. Something is wrong, Rebekah. Her roommate says he hasn’t seen her in almost a week. He is very worried. And I think he is the only person she has to worry about her.”





CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE





REBEKAH


Saul’s train from Grand Central is scheduled to arrive at 3:15 P.M. I arrive at the old brick station a little early and sit waiting on one of the long wooden benches, seat backs at ninety degrees, forcing a kind of posture that feels as historic as the space. Almost no building in Orlando is more than fifty years old, and here below the soaring arched ceiling, red brick walls, molded columns, and iron gas lamps, I feel suspended in time. People have been waiting for trains in this room, according to the plaque on the wall, since 1888. I imagine waiting for Aviva here. Waiting a hundred years. Lights going off and on, sun up and down, people in and out, and me, sitting upright, elbowing away despair.

“Could you stop that?” says the man next to me. I look at him and he looks at my right leg, which is popping up and down like it’s plugged in. “You’re shaking the whole bench.”

I stand up. “Sorry.”

Saul’s train arrives on time.

“I had a friend run a criminal background check on Sam,” says Saul as we get into the car. “He was arrested for drugs about four years ago and got three months in jail.”

“One of the girls I talked to said he got transferred to state prison.”

Saul nods. “According to my source in the DOC, he stabbed another inmate. Repeatedly. The man survived, but his intestines were significantly damaged. He has to wear an ostomy bag for the rest of his life. Sam’s sentence might have been more like ten years, but apparently several witnesses testified that the man sexually assaulted Sam and he was defending himself from further attack. Wardens won’t always take something like that into account.”

“It doesn’t exactly seem right to call him lucky,” I say, quietly.

“No,” says Saul. “It doesn’t.”

We cross over the Hudson River, wide and white-capped in the wind.

“It’s pretty,” I say, aloud but to myself.

“Yes,” says Saul.

We ride in silence for a while, and within just a few minutes arrive in New Paltz. A sign announces the SUNY campus. College kids in hooded sweatshirts, backs bent beneath overstuffed backpacks, cigarettes and enormous mugs in their hands, trudge down a main street with hippie clothing and incense shops, a couple bed-and-breakfasts, a taco joint, a Starbucks, and a record store. It’s no use trying to pretend I’m not in agony. What if she is there? Around the corner.

“I wonder if Aviva went to college,” I say.

“It’s possible,” says Saul.

As an adolescent, I sometimes imagined that Aviva had taken off to fulfill some wild, lusty dream of life. I assumed she’d never tell anyone about me because she’d all but forgotten. But I thought that before I had any idea about her life at all. Now, I know she didn’t run off to Mexico or Bali; she went back home to Brooklyn, then to Israel, then back to Brooklyn again, and then to a sleepy town upstate. Not exactly Eat Pray Love.

We turn right off the main drag and immediately see the flashing lights. And the black smoke.

“What’s going on?” I ask, although clearly Saul has no more information than I do.

“I don’t know,” says Saul.

I get out of the car and start running. I run past half a dozen gawking college students, three police cars, and two fire trucks before I see the yellow house. The front window is shattered and the wood above it turned to black, smoldering charcoal. Smoke rises weakly from inside the ruined center of the home. The black netting I’d seen over the bushes has melted, creating a row of monstrous little shrubs that look like creatures from hell. Red and blue emergency lights shine off the little pond in the yard, left, I assume, by the fire hoses. A stream of water pours off what’s left of the front gutter. I grab the first official-looking person I see, a pimply twenty-something in a jacket that says UNIVERSITY POLICE.

“Is everybody okay?” I ask.

“They took one guy in an ambulance,” he says.

“Was anyone else inside?”

“I don’t know,” he says.

“Rebekah!” Saul comes running from behind with my coat.

“What happened?” I ask the university cop, my teeth chattering with adrenaline.

“Some kind of explosion,” he says. “I was over on Main Street and I heard a crash. Like glass breaking. I came running up the hill and the fire was pouring out of that window. It took them an hour to put it out.”

“Do you know the people who live here?” asks Saul.

Good question. I am completely off my game. I am not thinking like a reporter; I am not really thinking at all.

“No,” says the cop. “I don’t think they’re affiliated with the school.”

Behind him, some of the students who had been lingering across the street begin walking toward us.

“I’m a reporter,” I blurt out, grabbing my coat from Saul and pulling my notebook and pen from its pocket.