Goodwill

Sorting through book donations is my favorite part of the job. I can get completely lost in a box of books. That’s why I wait till the quieter afternoons at the thrift store, when one of the other volunteers is out front, to pull out a box and go through it one volume at a time.

You get a lot of junk, of course, but now and again, between the dog-eared holiday reads and endless copies of Fifty Shades of Grey, you find a gem. I once found a first edition Jack Kerouac which auctioned for more money than the store makes in a month. I may have a library full of valuable books in the Upper East Side home I inherited, but nothing beats the thrill of discovering something special in all those piles of cheap paperbacks. My late husband always said I had something of the magpie in me.

A book will tell you a lot about the donor. A dedication on the flyleaf, a scribble in the margin, something slipped between the pages: the slightest detail can tell a more interesting story than the book itself. If the creases in the spine get more spread out towards the back of the book, you know the reader got more and more engrossed as they went along; if the creases stop abruptly after a few chapters, you know they abandoned it. If I’d ever had to work to earn a living, I’d like to have been a Private Investigator. I think I’d have been a good one.

I got my chance to find out one day, when a small black notebook turned up in a box of books. It was clearly an accidental donation, because the first few pages had been written on. I shook out what I thought was a bookmark and a slip of paper floated to the floor. It was a check for $20,000. I stared in disbelief at all those zeroes. The signatory was a name I vaguely recognized: Lyle B. Masterson, and it was from a very exclusive bank. The recipient was Stephanie Williams: a name so common that no amount of Googling could identify her. Who was she? And how had she managed to lose track of a check for so much money?

I told myself it was no more than my civic duty to report the check missing, though really, I was gripped with curiosity. I’m sure that’s why I looked up Lyle B. Masterson himself rather than calling his bank. It turned out he was a wealthy entrepreneur – hence why the name rang a bell - and it wasn’t hard to track down a switchboard number for his company, MasterSun Holdings. Getting past the predictable gauntlet of his cronies was another matter.

“I’m afraid Mr. Masterson is very busy but if you put the check in the post, I can make sure he is notified and the check is destroyed,” his assistant said briskly.

I tried to persuade her to put me through, saying perhaps I could offer valuable information about where it was found, but she said if Mr. Masterson had any queries, he would get in touch with the recipient direct. She took my details and hung up just slightly before I’d finished saying goodbye.

I posted the check, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Stephanie Williams. Was she going out of her mind with worry? Would she be able to get Lyle B. Masterson to write her a new one? I was still thinking about her three days later when a MasterSun Holdings gift basket arrived at my house – a nice touch, but I’d have taken just one piece of information about Stephanie Williams over a hamper of coffee, biscuits and packets of shriveled dried fruit.

I’d hoped the notebook would yield some clues, but in spite of a flyleaf saying ‘This notebook belongs to...’, it contained no contact details – just three pages of loopy, slanted writing that was somehow elegant yet barely legible at the same time. The notes were headed ‘Meeting with LBM’ - presumably Masterson – followed by lots of numbers and dollar values, with the word ‘exclusive’ scrawled and underlined beneath. Finally, in large capitals, she had written the words ‘THE OLD EMBASSY’. It looked promising, but it turned out to be the address of one of Masterson’s many overseas properties. It led me back to him but gave nothing away about her.

By then, initial curiosity had turned into a minor obsession. I kept the notebook underneath the counter at the store and in my spare time I scoured it for any clues I might have missed. The internet offered many potential candidates but none with any conclusive links to Masterson. Was she Stephanie Williams the architect, based in Queens, perhaps designing one of his properties? Was she Stephanie Williams the lawyer at a big Manhattan firm, advising him on one of his deals? Maybe Stephanie Williams was a lover he kept on the side, or a blackmailer he was paying off? So many stories suggested themselves.

After about a week of non-stop searching – and even one or two long-shot calls to Stephanie Williamses, my investigation ran out of steam. Things at the store settled back into their usual routine and I swapped the notebook for a slightly beat-up Margaret Atwood for my lunchtime reading.

Then a couple of weeks later, I ran out of coffee, and it turned out that the clue I needed was sitting in my pantry the whole time. I remembered that the MasterSun gift basket had contained a bag of grounds, and I was halfway through waiting for the coffee to brew when I saw the name on the packet: The Old Embassy. Finally, I had a lead! Within seconds I’d Googled ‘Stephanie Williams and coffee’ and discovered the Facebook page of a café just a couple of blocks away from the thrift store – a business founded and managed by one Stephanie L. Williams.

***

The coffee shop was tiny – just a scrubbed wooden counter dividing a gleaming barista coffee machine from a ledge with three stools that faced out onto the street. It wasn’t in the best location, overshadowed by a subway bridge and tucked beneath an enormous billboard, but its narrow shop front spilled warmth and light into the cold November street and inside it was painted in brilliant fire colors. A glass display was packed with home-baked goods and the air was heavy with the smell of freshly ground beans. Right at the heart of it was a thirty-something year-old woman, her Afro spilling from a striking print wrap, her face shining with a big welcoming smile and the steam from the coffee machine.

“Are you Stephanie Williams?” I asked, as my turn came to approach the till.

“That’s me!” she said brightly, drying her hands. “How can I help?”

Suddenly conscious of the line behind me, I blurted out the story as quickly as possible and apologized that I hadn’t been able to track her down before sending back the check. “You must have been so worried!”

“Ah, the check” she said with a cryptic half-smile. “Let me get you a coffee and then when I’ve served these people, I’ll tell you why I haven’t been losing sleep over that money!”

It wasn’t the reaction I was expecting. In fact, I was a little annoyed that she didn’t seem more relieved, given the days of detective work it had taken to track her down. I poked at the froth of my coffee, somewhat disappointed.

When there was finally a lull, she came and sat on the stool next to me. At closer range, I could see how tired she was – rubbing the small of her back and rolling her shoulders.

“Twenty thousand dollars” she said, shaking her head at the memory of it. “I’d never seen a check for that kind of money in my life. I don’t want you to think I’m the kind of person who just loses track of twenty grand!

“The truth is, I was going through a really hard time. My baby daughter was sick, and I had to take someone on to run the shop while I took care of her. I was on my knees; I thought we would fold. Then suddenly big shot Lyle Masterson is in my little café taking an interest! I went to meet him at his big fancy office in Manhattan and he said he wanted to help me expand the business and find a better location. All I had to do was start using his coffee exclusively – the Old Embassy brand.

“At first I thought ‘this is it! The answer to all my problems!’ But when the high wore off, I couldn’t shake this bad feeling about him, you know? Sure enough, when I started looking into his business, there were all these alarm bells: lawsuits, allegations of child labor, a shady supply chain... He was pushy, mailing me a contract and a check and saying I could sign it as soon as I’d ‘come round’. His people had written in some clause that said if I cashed the check, the deal was done.

“I kept telling myself I was going to cash that check. I carried that notebook around for weeks with it tucked into the little pocket in the back and I must have walked past the bank a hundred times. But somehow I couldn’t. I didn’t start this business to make money out of other people’s suffering.”

“My goodness”, I said, realizing I’d been listening so intently that my coffee was going cold. “So you just never cashed it?”

“Nope. Time went by and I kind of liked carrying that check around with me as a reminder that no amount of money is worth selling out for. Only then I lost the notebook!” she laughed “and honestly, it was kind of a relief”.

“But you said you were on your knees,” I said incredulously. “How did you manage without the money?”

“I guess it took a dream coming true to make me realize I could do without it”, she said, getting up to serve a customer. “I started up a bakery delivery sideline with my brother that brings in some extra cash, and my daughter got better, thank God, so I could catch my breath again. It’s not the first time I’ve been close to folding, but somehow I’ve always managed to hang in there. And sure, I may be tired, but at least I still have my soul!”

I was about to say how rare it was to find that kind of integrity – how proud she should be of what she’d built; but I realized she wasn’t waiting for my congratulations. She was already back at the counter, smiling and setting up the next shot of espresso.

“Listen, thank you,” she said between customers, waving away the money I offered for the coffee. “I really appreciate you taking the trouble, even though you probably think I’m crazy now you’ve heard the story!”

I shook my head warmly, and promised I’d be back as a paying customer. After all, I’m not so wealthy and out of touch as to think that a business can survive on principles alone. I started to go there every morning, sitting in the corner, where the flashes of paint met in a glorious explosion, as she flitted from till, to refrigerator, to coffee machine with the energy of a hummingbird.

But I knew the day I met Stephanie Williams that I was going to do more to support her. It’s the thing I love most about having money: being able to support causes I care about – from volunteering at the thrift store to investing in things that inspire me.

So, after a month of walking the extra two blocks for her coffee, I finally returned that notebook, but I put a fresh check inside it from me, for $20,000, with no strings attached.