On What Grounds (Coffeehouse Mysteries, No. 1) (A Coffeehouse Mystery) by Cleo Coyle
Authors: Cleo Coyle
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out a disgusted grunt and headed for the stairs. “Guess it’s time for me to finish getting dressed, before I get any more of a chill.”
Five seconds later I heard a sharp thump, and I knew on the way up the steps, he’d sent his fist into a wall.
T EN
I N 1849, four Sisters of Charity founded St. Vincent’s as a thirty-bed hospital for the poor in a small brick house on Thirteenth Street.
Today St. Vincent’s has 758 beds, and the only trauma center below Fourteenth Street in Manhattan. It’s also a teaching hospital—something I have firsthand experience with because its medical residents are outstanding customers.
I figured at least one of the red-eyed young residents who regularly stumbled into the Blend for double-tall lattes, triple espressos, and grande Italian roasts during their periodic thirty-hour on-call shifts would be able to tell me about Anabelle’s condition. So, as soon as the Crime Scene Unit left the shop and Tucker arrived to help Matteo open the coffee bar again, I grabbed an umbrella and trudged up Seventh Avenue South, through the pouring rain.
When I neared the hospital’s entrance, I paused at one of the building’s walls. Cold rain streaked the dark gray stone, trickling like tears down its smooth blank face. Just a few years ago, this gray wall wasn’t so blank.
I could still see the hundreds of photos—the faces, the names, the desperate messages scrawled beneath: “Have you seen…?” “Please, please call…” “Looking for my…wife, husband, son, daughter, brother, sister, lover, friend…”
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I had been in New Jersey, watching the breaking news on television like most of the country, but I still remember how hard it was to contemplate the details: the cut throats of stewardesses, the terror of passengers as commercial jets were turned into guided missiles, the horrible deaths of the Trade Center workers—people from all nations, all beliefs, all income levels, people who’d simply arrived early to get the job done—office workers, restaurant staffs, banking executives, security guards, and maintenance men.
Many of those killed had lived in this Village neighborhood. They had woken that morning unsuspecting, unaware it would be the last morning of their lives, the last opportunity to feel a new day’s sunshine, smell and sip a cup of freshly brewed coffee.
People forget as years go by, but this city will never forget. The terror, the tragedy, or the courage…
The firemen running up as others ran out. The businessman who wouldn’t leave his friend stranded alone in a wheelchair. Two figures in a window, high above the street, a man and a woman with locked hands, jumping together, like so many others before and after them who decided a falling fate was better than burning up alive amid the toxic cloud of melting office furniture and hundreds of gallons of jet fuel.
When the reality hit that morning and most of the city felt paralyzed, Madame Dreyfus Allegro Dubois descended from her Fifth Avenue penthouse, just a few blocks from this spot, and marched straight to the Blend, instructing the staff to brew coffee nonstop around the clock—and deliver a fresh thermos every two hours to every nurses’ station at St. Vincent’s. The Village hospital had treated over 1,400 patients, including some of the most severe trauma cases.
“At such times, you do what you can do,” Madame had said to me. “And we can do coffee, so that’s what we will do.”
And we did. Joy and I dropped everything to help. In the weeks that followed, we even helped Madame transport urns down the West Side Highway, to Ground Zero, the smoldering site of the collapsed World Trade Center, where firemen, iron workers, and hundreds of volunteers toiled tirelessly for months to recover remains and clear away the tons of smoking, twisted wreckage near the tip of Manhattan island.
Nothing would end the heartbreak of that fall and winter, certainly
Five seconds later I heard a sharp thump, and I knew on the way up the steps, he’d sent his fist into a wall.
T EN
I N 1849, four Sisters of Charity founded St. Vincent’s as a thirty-bed hospital for the poor in a small brick house on Thirteenth Street.
Today St. Vincent’s has 758 beds, and the only trauma center below Fourteenth Street in Manhattan. It’s also a teaching hospital—something I have firsthand experience with because its medical residents are outstanding customers.
I figured at least one of the red-eyed young residents who regularly stumbled into the Blend for double-tall lattes, triple espressos, and grande Italian roasts during their periodic thirty-hour on-call shifts would be able to tell me about Anabelle’s condition. So, as soon as the Crime Scene Unit left the shop and Tucker arrived to help Matteo open the coffee bar again, I grabbed an umbrella and trudged up Seventh Avenue South, through the pouring rain.
When I neared the hospital’s entrance, I paused at one of the building’s walls. Cold rain streaked the dark gray stone, trickling like tears down its smooth blank face. Just a few years ago, this gray wall wasn’t so blank.
I could still see the hundreds of photos—the faces, the names, the desperate messages scrawled beneath: “Have you seen…?” “Please, please call…” “Looking for my…wife, husband, son, daughter, brother, sister, lover, friend…”
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I had been in New Jersey, watching the breaking news on television like most of the country, but I still remember how hard it was to contemplate the details: the cut throats of stewardesses, the terror of passengers as commercial jets were turned into guided missiles, the horrible deaths of the Trade Center workers—people from all nations, all beliefs, all income levels, people who’d simply arrived early to get the job done—office workers, restaurant staffs, banking executives, security guards, and maintenance men.
Many of those killed had lived in this Village neighborhood. They had woken that morning unsuspecting, unaware it would be the last morning of their lives, the last opportunity to feel a new day’s sunshine, smell and sip a cup of freshly brewed coffee.
People forget as years go by, but this city will never forget. The terror, the tragedy, or the courage…
The firemen running up as others ran out. The businessman who wouldn’t leave his friend stranded alone in a wheelchair. Two figures in a window, high above the street, a man and a woman with locked hands, jumping together, like so many others before and after them who decided a falling fate was better than burning up alive amid the toxic cloud of melting office furniture and hundreds of gallons of jet fuel.
When the reality hit that morning and most of the city felt paralyzed, Madame Dreyfus Allegro Dubois descended from her Fifth Avenue penthouse, just a few blocks from this spot, and marched straight to the Blend, instructing the staff to brew coffee nonstop around the clock—and deliver a fresh thermos every two hours to every nurses’ station at St. Vincent’s. The Village hospital had treated over 1,400 patients, including some of the most severe trauma cases.
“At such times, you do what you can do,” Madame had said to me. “And we can do coffee, so that’s what we will do.”
And we did. Joy and I dropped everything to help. In the weeks that followed, we even helped Madame transport urns down the West Side Highway, to Ground Zero, the smoldering site of the collapsed World Trade Center, where firemen, iron workers, and hundreds of volunteers toiled tirelessly for months to recover remains and clear away the tons of smoking, twisted wreckage near the tip of Manhattan island.
Nothing would end the heartbreak of that fall and winter, certainly
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