The Chalk Girl (13 page)

Mallory curled her fingers into a fist and banged the table with the force of a hammer.

Phoebe Bledsoe’s eyes were wide open now as she edged her chair back a few inches. Prompted into a more helpful frame of mind, she studied the hair sample. ‘I still don’t know who she is.’

Mallory hit the table again, beating out the rhythm of a drummer – or a shooter –
bang
,
bang
,
bang
, staring all the while at her suspect. Under the table, the Bledsoe woman’s fingers intertwined in a death-grip prayer.

Well, insanity made everybody nervous. It was an interesting moment for the watcher in the darkened room. His detective, the one recently voted the most unstable, was pretending to be unstable.

Riker leaned toward Phoebe Bledsoe. His was the reassuring face of reason. ‘You really need to cooperate. My partner here wants to charge you as an accessory to kidnapping.’

‘
I
kidnapped Humphrey? That’s crazy!’ The woman paused to steal a glance at Mallory, probably worried that she had offended the insane detective with the slur word
crazy
.

‘No,’ said Riker, ‘not your brother. I mean that little kid he snatched.’

Her mouth opened to mime the words,
Oh, no
. The shock was real. She shook her head. ‘I want a lawyer!’

Riker slumped low in his chair. ‘Like I said, Miss Bledsoe, you’re
only here for questioning. If we have to charge you with a crime,
then
you get a lawyer.’ While he packed up his envelope, preparing to leave, the suspect was rising from the table.

Mallory’s hand flashed out to close around the woman’s wrist, and she said, ‘Sit down.’ Her words had no rising or falling notes, no human qualities. ‘You’re not going anywhere.’

‘I think I know what my partner is trying to say here.’ Riker stood up. ‘She wants to spend some quality time with you.’

The frightened woman turned her head to stare at an empty chair on her own side of the table, as if intently listening to someone who was not there. Miss Bledsoe smiled, taking some comfort from her invisible companion. And Lieutenant Coffey had to work on a relative scale of insanity for the occupants of the other room.

Oh, please, not another nut who hears voices
.

Schizophrenics were next to useless in court.

Riker sat down at the table.
Slowly
. No sudden movements. ‘So . . . Phoebe, who’s your friend?’ He casually gestured toward the empty space that commanded all of her attention.

Crazy was a game of musical chairs, for now the woman stared at Riker as if he might be crazy.

A stretch limousine was a common sight at the Driscol School, though not in the summer months of vacation. In the backseat of this one, an attorney cautioned his client. ‘Miss Bledsoe, if anyone shows you another badge, just hand the bastard my card.’ It was the second business card he had given her in the past half hour. Perhaps this young man sensed that Phoebe had already forgotten his name. In another few minutes, she would not recall any distinction to set him apart from the law firm’s other errand boys, all Yalies and Harvard graduates.

The rear door was opened by a chauffeur. She stepped out onto the pavement in front of the school, and the car rolled away. Phoebe
looked up at the large building that dated back to an era when stone filigree was in fashion – and gargoyles. Two such monsters sat above the lintel, set to spring on anyone entering by the massive front door. The less grandiose neighbors, all brownstones, were also unchanged since the 1800s. The Landmark Society was rabid in the matter of external renovations, and with only the flaw of fluorescent street lamps replacing gaslight, they had managed to stop time on this Upper West Side street.

The school’s founder had been a man with a penchant for carving his family name in stone all around the town. This mad quest to keep the Driscols in the public eye had been defeated elsewhere by urban planners who had torn his monuments down. But here on the façade of this building, the name remained in letters etched so deep that centuries of wind and rain could not obliterate them.

A narrow space between the Driscol School and the building next door was closed off by a tall wrought-iron gate. Phoebe fished through her purse for the key and unlocked it. On the other side of the iron bars, she made her way down an alley that opened onto a generous back garden. Chairs and tables were set in conversational groupings, and there were small benches here and there for the solitary teacher or student when classes were in session. Lush green ivy covered the rear wall, and flowers of many colors filled the wide wells of ancient trees.

A flagstone path led to a tiny cottage that had been a carriage house in the horse-and-buggy days. An anomaly in a city of skyscrapers, it sat on an adjoining plot of land not entailed to the school. Before the age of soaring real-estate prices, this had been a way station for family members who had depleted their trust funds or fallen into some other disgrace.

It was a hiding place.

Phoebe occupied the cottage with the grudging consent of her
mother, the last of the Driscol line. By terms of the family trust fund, Phoebe did not count because she carried her father’s name. She was merely a Bledsoe, declared so on her birth certificate.

A small boy walked beside her on the path. He was fair of hair and spindle-legged. For the entire eleven years of his life, he had been called Ernie. In later years, Phoebe had renamed him Dead Ernest, a pale joke, a poor play on words; being dead earnest had gotten him killed. In this incarnation that walked beside her, the child was much thinner. His T-shirt and jeans were dirty, and there were dead leaves in his hair. He had lost one shoe and a sock – and his life.

The little boy’s feet made no sound on the flagstones. She had never mastered footsteps for her old classmate – never tried – for no one knew better than she that he was not there. And so the policeman’s remark – ‘Who’s your friend?’ – had been somewhat unnerving.

‘I thought they’d never let us go home,’ said Dead Ernest. He never said anything to elicit a response from her. They held no two-way conversations. Only crazy people spoke to the dead.

The boy who was not there had sprung from sessions with a child psychiatrist after the –
incident
. Dr Fyfe, a believer in confrontational therapy, had said to her then, ‘Imagine the anxiety that troubles you. Picture it as a person. Talk to it, yell if you like, but get it all out.’ One snag – Phoebe had never been a confrontational child. And so she had constructed a facsimile of angst – Dead Ernest – but never railed against him. She had only listened to him, hour upon hour. After a succession of silent sessions, the young listener’s therapy had been terminated.

Dead Ernest lived on.

Phoebe opened the cottage door to a large room with a high ceiling and a sleeping alcove. Apart from the kitchenette, every bit of wall space was lined with books. These volumes had been
accumulated by generations of Driscols in hiding. They were all works of fiction – escape hatches.

She removed her gray dress – Dead Ernest called it her cloth of invisibility – and draped it over the back of a chair. The armoire’s door was opened to a lineup of cotton frocks in bright colors and bold prints.

‘You’re running late,’ said the dead boy with one shoe.

Quite right. She had only twenty minutes to get downtown to the café on Bleecker Street. Phoebe undid her bun, and brown tresses fell in waves to her shoulders. After donning her dress and slipping on sandals, she ran a comb through her hair. Next came the perfume and a bright swatch of lipstick.
Done
.

She walked out the door, down the alley and into the street to flag down a taxi. Dead Ernest’s legs were shorter; he ran to keep up and followed her into the backseat of the yellow car. And now they were off on a wild ride with a cabbie from the school of Oh-was-that-a-red-light? The first blown traffic signal was followed by the driver’s diatribe on the thieving city of New York. ‘They speed up the yellow lights. Maybe you noticed, lady? If you’re walking, you can start across an intersection on the green, watch it go from yellow to red, and die before you get to the other side. I
love
this town.’ After three court stories about the tickets he had beaten, the car stopped on the corner of Bleecker Street and MacDougal.

‘You made it,’ said Dead Ernest.

With minutes to spare.

Phoebe Bledsoe was always the first to arrive at the Mexican restaurant. Over the years, she had known this place as a coffeehouse and café under different ownership, décor and menus. Only the location was unchanged – and the time of her rendezvous. She sat down at a table far from the sunshine of the front window. The old gold cigarette lighter was pulled from her purse, and she rubbed it between her fingers. As if by magic, the door opened, and a young
man with long, dark hair walked in. He had always been slender, and now he was thin but still handsome – and probably stoned. It was hard to tell. He moved with an animal grace so deep, so innate, that he could not stumble or falter or fall even by an accident of overdose. He took his customary seat on the other side of the room. It must be one o’clock. He was never late.

‘He’s two years older than you,’ said Dead Ernest, as if this still mattered outside the society of children. ‘You never had a chance.’

True, Toby Wilder had been beyond her then, as he was now. Yet this was the high point of every day, having lunch with Toby at separate tables. She put away the gold cigarette lighter. One day, she should return it to him, though she was loathe to part with this memento – and he might remember that he had dropped it in the Ramble all those years ago.

‘He looks like a sleepwalker,’ said the dead boy.

She stared at the real and solid young man. Were Toby Wilder’s eyes less blue, less bright? No, but they lacked focus. When he looked out the window, he was blind to the jumpy foot traffic of tourists jamming the sidewalk – blind even to the waitress who handed him a menu – deaf to the girl when she asked what he wanted for lunch. And there was one other difference between Toby the child and his grown-up self: He had found a way to be still. His feet did not tap, and there was no tabletop drumming of the fingertips.

He had lost his music.

CSU investigators worked in the deep green shade of the Ramble, policing the ground around one of the hanging trees. They placed small yellow cones to mark the sites of found gum wrappers and cigarette butts. They had already removed a slew of rats shot dead by police officers. Every bullet spent had required a ballistics test and paperwork.

‘Damn cops,’ said a CSI, who concentrated on the holes in the bark of a tree, the only holes not made by gun-happy rat killers.

They all looked up from their work when a park ranger called out to them, ‘We found another one!’ The team of men and women followed him across Tupelo Meadow and into the woods. The ranger stopped and pointed upward. ‘Wait till the wind
comes up.’ And now a mass of leaves waved aside to expose a green sack hanging from a high tree branch, well hidden from the flashlights of last night’s searchers. It was a rare thing to arrive ahead of police and rescue workers, who contaminated every crime scene.

All eyes were on the team’s newest member, CSI John Pollard, a small, well-muscled young man, who spent his free time mountain climbing. A tree should be easy. It was. Within a few minutes, he had made his way up through the leafy boughs and clouds of gnats to reach the burlap sack and its bulging load. On the ground, other CSIs gathered round the trunk, waiting for him to release the victim into their hands. But first, a nature photograph – click – a pristine shot of the branch untouched by ham-handed detectives. His fingers explored the outside of the sack. Its contents were stiff, unyielding.

No sign of life. No need to hurry.

He used a screwdriver to leverage the rope along the bough by a bare inch for one more shot.
Click
. There were no ruts or burns in the bark. The bagged victim had not been hauled up here by this rope. He found the loose end of it neatly coiled in a fork of the tree. Before he let the coil fall down to unravel into waiting hands –
click
– a picture of the slipknot that held the sack in place.

The rope dropped, and two CSIs pulled on it. The slipknot came loose, and the sack was quickly lowered through the tree limbs. As John Pollard climbed down, his eyes turned toward the ground, where his teammates were cutting into the burlap to preserve the rope’s closing knot, and he had a glimpse of jet-black hair and naked flesh – a woman.

Wilhelmina Fallon stirred after she felt the hands probing her. She came awake to pain in every joint of her body. Then came the elevator sensation of going down and down. Finally, she lay on
solid ground and felt a breeze blow across her bare body as the rough material was pulled away. Pairs of hands worked on the ropes at her wrists and ankles, then wadding was plucked from her ears, and a stranger’s voice said, ‘It looks like wax.’ Another voice said, ‘Bag it.’