The Good Stranger (A Kate Bradley Mystery) by Dete Meserve

Author:Dete Meserve [Meserve, Dete]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-05-18T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Wherever he was taking me was in Central Park. As we ran in the warm pools of light beneath its old-fashioned streetlamps, I tried to guess. “Belvedere Castle? Conservatory Water?”

“Nope. But we’re almost there.”

The roar of traffic had died down to a whir in the distance, and except for the two of us, this section of the park seemed empty. Even though the wind had picked up a little, I was surprisingly warm. Being with him had that effect on me. Our relationship was easy—the kind of relaxed friendship that had been so natural to make in college but was becoming more complex as I entered my thirties. Yet I felt something growing between us—something more than a friendship—and I wondered if I was imagining it. Maybe I was so desperate for connection in this city that I was mistaking his friendliness for something more.

Then suddenly we left the part of Central Park I knew, the one I’d seen in movies and TV, and we slowed to walk down a stone path that wound through gardens crowded with flowers whose sweet and pungent scents whispered in the air.

“What’s your favorite Shakespeare play?” he said.

“You’re asking me that because . . .”

“Because we’re in the Shakespeare Garden.”

Then it all made sense: the rustic fences, the wooden benches, the hedges and shrubs that looked as though they had been lifted from another time.

We stopped in front of a long, curved stone bench with an eagle’s wing carved into the end. “I know it doesn’t look like much. Tourists pass it thousands of times a day and don’t realize its magic. Why don’t you sit here . . . ?”

I sat, thinking he would join me, but instead, he walked to the other end of the forty-foot bench. To my complete surprise, he pulled out his phone and began scrolling.

“They call this the whispering bench. It’s the one place in the city you can whisper and the other person can actually hear you,” he said, but his voice seemed to be coming from the stone bench itself. “Full disclosure, I’m using a Shakespeare app. So no, I’m not quoting from memory.”

“You’re actually going to read Shakespeare to me?”

“What else would you do on a whispering bench in a Shakespeare garden after midnight?

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,

Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,

With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:

There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,

Lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight.”

I’d always imagined that if a man read Shakespeare to me, it would feel corny or contrived. But as in any Shakespeare play, a lot of what happened had to do with the characters’ intentions. This wasn’t a grand romantic gesture to woo or impress me. Scott was working to help me forget about the city that had crumpled me and instead make me fall for the place he’d grown to love.

“What’d you think?” he asked.

“I think I want one more.”

It took him a minute

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