Ghosts of Bergen County Read Free Page A

between the first and second rings, whether the persons holding the auditions had somehow called her. But of course they hadn’t. Her phone told her it was Greg Fletcher.
    â€œHey!” she answered.
    â€œLong time,” he said, which must have been a joke. They’d seen each other last week, when she’d bumped into him at Lexington and Eighteenth and they hung out in a bar nearby.
    â€œGuess who I ran into today?”
    â€œI’m supposed to guess?”
    â€œGil Ferko.” He paused a moment, presumably to give her a chance to react. When she didn’t he asked, “Do you remember him?”
    She thought she knew the name. “From Edgefield?”
    â€œHe lived on Holt,” Greg said.
    Jen knew Holt. The houses were newer than where she grew up, near the high school. “Skinny kid?” she asked, because a blurry image had formed in her mind.
    â€œThat’s him. Black hair that stuck straight up. Crooked teeth.”
    And with that the image was complete. Gil Ferko had been a quiet kid. She remembered him in kindergarten and she remembered him in high school. Thirteen years. How did she never get to know him?
    â€œI think his teeth got fixed,” she said, remembering the high school version.
    â€œThey did indeed,” Greg said. “His hair doesn’t stick up anymore, either.”
    â€œHow was I supposed to guess Gil Ferko, Fletcher?”
    â€œIt’s just a saying, a way to start a conversation, to introduce a new concept. You’re always running into people you know. You said so yourself.”
    â€œI know a lot of people.”
    â€œWell, I know some, too.”
    She read the phone number from the flyer. She’d call it once this call ended. She wished to improve herself. Taking up acting again was one way, and here was another: “Do I brag,” she asked, “about all the people I know?”
    â€œA little.” Greg’s voice was sweeter than she’d expected.
    â€œSeriously,” she said, “am I tiresom e ?”
    â€œOf course not. Besides, it’s true: you know a lot of people. And I need to know more.”
    The bar off Lexington had been in a basement, a place so nondescript its name hadn’t registered. She wasn’t even sure how they’d found it, how she’d known it existed. Down a set of narrow, concrete stairs, the walls were wood-paneled, the floor linoleum. A wood bar stood to one side, with mismatched stools, across from a pool table that took quarters. In between were metal tables and chairs, arranged without pattern. Someone’s playlist spilled from speakers mounted on corner brackets. There was no TV. Everyone knew each other—including Jen, who chatted up a couple of guys from Sons of Squirrel, just back from a two-week tour in a borrowed van that had taken them as far west as Columbus, Ohio. It was like hanging out in someone’s basement. Later, when it was time to close, they merely locked the doors and lit a joint and passed it around. Then another. The thin crowd thinned further. Jen and Greg sat in a corner more or less by themselves. It felt like a dream, where your past collides with your present in a surreal setting. Here was the first boy she’d ever kissed. The summer after seventh grade. That part was real. She told him her recurring dream, where she broke into people’s houses, sometimes those of her neighbors growing up in Edgefield, and hung out in their basements until she was discovered and fled. And he told her his recurring dream, where he committed a crime and set about destroying the evidence until it was too small to be seen by the naked eye. His were glassy in the bar’s dim light. She imagined the dream version of Greg Fletcher in a conference room, shredding reams of paper as the FBI closed in.
    â€œAre you free this Friday?” he asked her now, over the phone. “Lunch?”
    â€œI think so.”
    â€œWith me and