Free Midnight Voices by John Saul Page B

start feeling better. And as she watched Mr. Fleming leave the building and start down Central Park West, there was something in the way he was walking that made her feel like maybe something was about to happen.
    Something good.
    Suddenly, as if he’d felt her watching him, Mr. Fleming turned around and looked up at her. Seeing her peering down from the window, he waved at her, and even from her room on the seventh floor, Rebecca could see his smile. It was the first time she’d seen him smile since the awful thing had happened to his family, and the smile told her she was right.
    Everything
was
going to get better.
    She could just feel it.

    It was seeing Rebecca Mayhew in the window that finally made up Anthony Fleming’s mind, and when he walked into his office on West 53rd Street, right next door to the Hundred Club, he smiled brightly at Mrs. Haversham, who was his only employee. She looked after the mail, took care of the bills, and did the bookkeeping. The business itself, the management of money, was conducted by Anthony Fleming. It was a business he both enjoyed, and was good at, and over the years he had managed to shape it into his idea of near perfection: he invested only on his own behalf, and on the behalf of a few people he enjoyed as friends as well as clients. He never invested his clients’ money in securities he would not have in his own portfolio, and he believed in putting his money where his faith was. Thus, both his funds and his clients’ were invested as conservatively as the décor of his office, which was done entirely in old mahogany, old leather, and old prints.
    Things that stood the test of time.
    But this morning Anthony Fleming ignored the
Wall Street Journal
that was placed exactly in the center of his desk, and pushed the half-dozen specialized investment newsletters to one side.
    When he turned his computer on, he barely glanced at the condition of his stock portfolio before bringing up a search engine and typing in two words:
    Caroline Evans.
    He hit the return key, then sat back to see what, if anything, he could find out about the woman he’d met in the park on Saturday.

    This was the worst part of Andrea Costanza’s job—having to check up on the children in foster care. She knew it had to be done, knew there were places where the children simply weren’t safe. The problem was that you never knew what you were looking at. Last year she had taken a child away from a couple up in Harlem, certain that the family was already far overextended. The father had just lost his job, and what with their own two children to take care of, along with two nieces and a nephew, Andrea had judged that the foster child—an eight-year-old girl with a history of abuse and a learning disability—was just too much for them. The woman, in particular, had begged her to leave the child with them, but Andrea had stood firm, having already found a far better home—a couple on the Upper West Side who could not only give the child far more individual attention, but a room of her own as well.
    A room the foster father had apparently begun invading on the very first night the girl was there, as soon as his wife went to sleep. By the time Andrea got around to the first evaluation visit two months later, the little girl had retreated into a nearly catatonic silence, which it had taken a pediatrician only five minutes to diagnose.
    When Andrea asked the woman why she hadn’t taken the child to a doctor earlier, the woman had said her husband—a child psychologist—had told her nothing was seriously wrong, that the little girl had to be given time to adjust to her new surroundings. The little girl had been admitted to Bellevue Hospital—where she was to this day—and Andrea had nearly left her job with Child Services. It took her supervisor a week to convince her that anybody else would have made the same mistake, and that she shouldn’t—
couldn’t
—blame herself. “These things happen,” he’d