The Colors of Madeleine 01: Corner of White (35 page)

Elliot took a bite of the hazelnut slice. It wasn’t so bad. A little dry maybe, but the hazelnut flavor was both rich and subtle at once.

“I have to tell you,” she continued. “This is a super town, of course, but it was so good having a friend from home. Did you know Mischka at all? Did she teach you? No? Well, the thing about her was, she seemed very shy and reserved, but she could be so ironic and witty. We used to play board games most nights — she always won, of course. Or we’d watch
The Greenbergs
together and eat marzipan….” Her voice faded and she gazed around the room.

Elliot also looked and caught more details. There was a bookshelf, a framed print of the Lake of Spells on the top shelf. Through the door, he could see the fridge in the kitchen, scattered with magnets, and he could just make out a handwritten note, headed:
Healthy Foods You Must TRY to Eat!
with a smiley face. On the window ledge was a jar of gold stars, and on the table, a scattering of papers, scissors, and glue.

“I try out all my craft activities at home,” Miss Hattoway explained. “Mischka was so much better than me at crafts. Better fine motor skills.”

A sudden memory came to Elliot. At school, he’d known Mischka Tegan’s name, and he must have seen her around, but all this time, he
hadn’t had any clear memories of her. Now he recalled an announcement she’d made at assembly once. Something about a class excursion. She’d read from a small piece of paper. Most teachers didn’t do that; mostly, they just leaned in to the microphone and talked, remembering what they had to say and not caring if they got it mixed up.

The paper had slipped from Mischka Tegan’s fingers while she talked and had fluttered very slowly through the air, and she’d watched it flutter for too long. Elliot remembered thinking that the fact that she’d dropped it must have stunned her. Then she’d snatched it from the air.

That’s where the memory ended. Elliot must have stopped listening.

“I guess you miss her,” he said now.

“Anyway,” Miss Hattoway continued, ruffling her voice back into place. “Anyway, we had some lovely nights. Although, of course, that more or less stopped when she took up with the Baranski brothers.” She glanced over at Elliot. “I mean with your dad and your Uncle Jon, of course.”

“How did they get to be friends anyhow?” Elliot asked, just as if they were chatting about neighborhood acquaintances.

“Oh, Mischka borrowed some equipment from your father, for an experiment at school. I’m not sure of the details. Anyway, they hit it off, and they started going to the Toadstool Pub every other night. I suppose Jon just joined the party. I used to watch them from here while I graded schoolwork.”

She pointed to the window, and Elliot stood, moving closer so he could look out.

Down below, the square was mostly dark and quiet, but the Toadstool was still open. There were clusters of people huddled around tables, coats on, collars up. By looking out, Elliot seemed to be fishing up sounds from below. Now he could hear small murmurs of laughter, a woman’s aggravated voice, the deep voice of a man curling into a joke, another murmur of laughter.

He looked away from the Toadstool, and there across the square was Clover Mackie, rugged up in blankets on her front porch, a blue mug beside her as usual.

Elliot smiled at that and turned back to Olivia, feeling stronger.

“It was always the three of them?” he asked. “Dad and Jon and Mischka?”

“No, on occasion it was just your dad and Mischka. I suppose Jon had work to do back at the Watermelon. When the Toadstool closed, they’d come up here sometimes. I’d usually be in bed by then, and they’d listen to music and talk and talk. I’d have to put my ear-plugs in to get to sleep.”

Elliot turned away again, staring at the window. The room seemed to swim with unasked questions.

“You’ve been drinking tonight, haven’t you, Elliot?”

Elliot turned, startled. There was that perspicacity again. But she was smiling in her warm, grade-school-teacher way.

“You look like your dad,” she added gently.

He stared at her.

“Most people,” he said, “say I look more like my mother.”

“No, no. You’ve got his eyes. And the lines across your forehead when you’re thinking hard, when there’s something you want to say, those are your dad’s.”

He asked then, and the effort was like wrenching the plug out from a huge basin of water.

“Were they planning to run away together?”

Olivia Hattoway did not say anything. She looked at him and her eyes clouded with tears.

For a moment he felt himself swaying with heartache, then there was a hit of irritation in his chest. What was that supposed to mean? Silence and teary eyes? What did she mean by that?

He asked a different question instead.

“There was nothing missing from her things? That’s what you said in your witness statement.”

“That’s right,” agreed Miss Hattoway, and she sipped from her glass of milk. “That’s what I said. But do you want to know something ridiculous? I forgot all about her teddy bear.”

“Her teddy bear?”

“Yes, she had this teddy — from childhood, you know — used to keep it on her bed at college, and the same thing here. I would never have teased her because there’s the issue of my own fluffy rabbit.” She paused, but Elliot did not laugh, so she continued. “Anyway, a few days after I talked to the Sheriff, I realized it was gone. The teddy bear was gone. I didn’t think it was worth wasting police time — amending my witness statement or whatever — because it was just an old teddy. Elegant in its way, and sweet too, which is just like Mischka actually.”

“Is it,” said Elliot, only not as a question. He looked around the room one more time. “I think I’ll go home now.”

“All right,” Miss Hattoway agreed. “I’m glad you came by.” She walked toward the door and reached for the handle, then stopped.

“Oh, and one other thing,” she said. “Well, Mischka always wore this bracelet — it looked a simple thing, but she once confided in me that her dad gave it to her on her sixteenth birthday. The stones in it came from the Dark Caves in the Swamp of Golden Coast — worth a fortune, stones like that. So, she’d have been wearing that on her wrist, of course. I mean, that wasn’t left behind.”

Elliot nodded, and he reached for the door handle himself. But Miss Hattoway’s hand remained in his way, twisting the knob slowly.

“The funny thing was, I was looking at Shopline — that network thing where people buy and sell things — I was looking at that a few weeks after the … the disappearance, and somebody was selling a bracelet just like Mischka’s. I thought to myself:
If that’s Mischka selling her bracelet, she’ll be set up for life.
”

She took her hand away from the door and half turned to Elliot.

“I suppose I should have mentioned
that
to the Sheriff, but who knows how many similar bracelets there are in the Kingdom? Could
be hundreds. And if it
was
her, if it
was
them, well, I guess it was kind of clear they didn’t want to be found.”

Elliot looked at her, and she was gazing at him with something like compassion, those tears welling up in her eyes again.

Now he remembered what Corrie-Lynn didn’t like about Miss Hattoway. It was the fact that she was always crying.

Elliot didn’t much like it either.

He closed the door behind him.

He drove the truck home. He went right up to his room, pulled out his folders of research about Purples, carried them downstairs, and dumped them in the trash.

14.

M
adeleine waited for almost two hours in the rain on Parker’s Piece.

Then she went home.

Her mother was sitting cross-legged on the couch, drinking coffee. There was an envelope in Holly’s lap, and as the door opened, she took this into both hands and held it in the air.

But seeing the state of Madeleine, she let it fall again.

Water trickled from Madeleine’s forehead and ran rivulets down her cheeks. Her eyelashes were wet. Her backpack was so drenched it was leaking black dye onto her shirt.

She dropped the backpack onto the floor and sparks of water flew up. She drew out the book that was clamped beneath her arm, and it left behind a drooping water shadow. The book cover itself was looped with water stains, its pages clumped together and dissolving.

Holly Tully couldn’t wait. She lifted the envelope again. “You wrote to him?”

Madeleine snatched the envelope from her mother’s hand. Her body trembled. It was from her father! That was his address on the front in such familiar —

Her excitement unravelled.

The handwriting was familiar because it was her own —

It was her letter to her father, stamped:
RETURN TO SENDER
.

He’d sent it back.

Madeleine shrugged. “Yeah? So?” She went into the bathroom and returned with a towel around her neck.

“You went out without an umbrella,” said Holly.

“It wasn’t raining when I left.”

“This is England, Madeleine. Have you written to him before?”

“No.” She rubbed at her head with the towel, so her voice vibrated. “I also emailed Tinsels, but she pretended to be someone else. I know I had the right address — Tinsels33 — she chose it cause 33 was the number of her favourite racehorse.” She looked thoughtful. “Dad must have told her to pretend not to know me, on account of being so mad at me.”

Her mother nodded.

“He must get a lot of unwanted mail,” Madeleine continued, “to need a stamp that says
Return to Sender
. Don’t most people just
write
that on?”

The mistake was, she tried to smile at that moment. The movement of her mouth sent a faulty signal to her cheeks and eyes, and it all fell apart and she was crying.

“Oh, sweetheart.” Her mother reached out but Madeleine covered her face with her hands and sobbed, “I am
not
crying!”

“Okay.”

“It’s just —” Her voice fought its way between the gasps. “I’m so selfish and stupid, and Dad was right! On the skateboard and his beard, and now we’ve lost everything! We’ve lost him and Tinsels and the others and our life, and we’re trapped here spinning straw in a non-life! And it’s all my fault! Cause I’ve always been so selfish! Always running away! And I’ve brought you with me, and I’ve brought
it
with me too, haven’t I? My selfishness! I’ve killed Byron! And Elliot Baranski isn’t real!”

“All right,” murmured her mother, standing up now, trying to hug her from behind, until the surges of sobs began to slow and fade.

Then Madeleine sat on the couch. She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands.

“I wasn’t crying,” she explained.

“No, of course not,” her mother agreed. “You weren’t making any sense either. A skateboard and a beard and you’ve killed Byron. What’s Byron?”

“The poet.”

“Well, you didn’t kill him. He’s already dead.”

Madeleine burst into tears again.

Holly waited.

“
Tell
me,” she said eventually, exasperated.

So Madeleine turned her face into the couch, and began to speak.

She told her mother everything, starting with her father’s warnings about her selfishness; the way he was after the skateboarding incident; that she knew it was her fault they were here because if she hadn’t run away that weekend, her mother would never have left.

She told how Jack had found her email to Tinsels; that she’d realised Jack was the poet Lord Byron; that she’d been leaving letters for a stranger in a parking meter; and that the stranger had not shown up at Parker’s Piece.

When she finished, she was calm again. She straightened up on the couch.

“So you’ve got a total loser for a daughter,” she said. “Who knew?” She scratched the side of her mouth. “I guess Dad did.”

“Cut it out now,” said her mother. “I’m trying to think. I need to get my thoughts in order and present them in an incisive, persuasive way. Because
I’m
the one with the answers today, which won’t always be the case — for instance, if you were weeping about a mathematics problem, well, I’d be clueless and we’d both end up weeping. Not that you
were
weeping, of course.”

Holly reached for her coffee, which was now cold. She drank from it anyway. She needed a haircut: Her fringe was so long it touched the coffee mug. She set the mug back down again.

“Okay, I’ve decided to start simple and work back. So, I am now formally telling you, as your mother, that I want you never to become a smoker, never to own your own motorbike, never to get a chess board tattooed onto your face — and never ever to write to an imaginary friend in a parking meter again.”

Madeleine smiled. “It’s okay. I’m done with him anyway. He left me in the rain for two hours.”

“Although we
could
hide out in the street and watch until he or she comes creeping up to the parking meter, and then we’d — but no. It’s dangerous. You know that. Elliot Baranski is imaginary, but the person writing these letters is not. I remember when you were little, you had so
many
imaginary friends. Your imaginary friends had imaginary friends of their own. So. Just watch your tendency to slip out of the real world. Come back and join us here, okay?”

“Like I said, I’m already back.”

Holly ignored her, frowning at the ceiling.

“Jack and Belle! That’s easy too. It’s sad that you hurt them, but we all hurt our friends sometimes. We feel terrible. Then we say sorry. Jack’s got a heart as big as a planet, and even with all her weirdness, Belle’s a good person. They’ll forgive you, I promise.”

Madeleine shrugged, but Holly grabbed her shoulders and stilled the shrug. “This is
not
an issue on which you have opinions! Your face
must flood with the revelation that I’m right! And then you nod gratefully. Which reminds me.
Jack is not Byron.
He’s Jack.”

Madeleine almost shrugged again, but stopped at her mother’s warning glance.

“And really, why shouldn’t you write to an old friend and complain about your life? It’s a
huge
change you’ve had to deal with — why shouldn’t you take a while to realise that it’s the right one? Or to see that Jack’s not just some temporary distraction, but actually a great kid?”

“I should have realised,” said Madeleine.

“Hush. Now, about the skateboarding incident. Where was your mother?”

“Excuse me?”

“When you were ten years old and speeding down the hill towards a highway, where was your mother? Where was I?”

“I don’t have a clue.”

“Exactly!”

Now Madeleine kicked off her shoes and swung her feet onto the couch. “You were doing well for a while there,” she said.

“I know! But now I’m doing better! Because that was my brilliant rhetorical swoop. Listen, Madeleine, children on skateboards aren’t being
selfish
, they’re being children. You were young and a little crazy. That was your thing. I was probably getting my hair and nails done. Or having another meeting where we figured out how to get richer. If you’d flown into that traffic and been killed, I can guarantee nobody would have said: ‘What a self-centered little girl!’ They would have said: ‘Where were her parents?’”

Madeleine bit at a fingernail. “Well, one parent was there. Dad was there. By the side of the road.”

Holly stopped. She studied Madeleine’s face, then looked away. She was making a decision.

She made it.

“I think I should tell you something,” she said. “About your dad. About the night you ran away.”

Their eyes met, and the expression on Holly’s face was fierce and complicated. Madeleine realised she was trying to send her a warning: preparing her for what she was about to hear.

“The night you ran away,” Holly began, “we were in the penthouse suite and I was about to get in the shower when we got word that you were at the station buying a ticket for London. Well, I was annoyed, of course. Of course I was. Your dad was already dressed. He was at the mirror. I remember he was brushing his cuff links or putting on his hair — that was the wrong way around but whatever. Anyway, so I said, ‘We’d better go get her ourselves.’ I said, ‘What is this, fifteen times she’s run away now?’”

“Seventeen and a half,” Madeleine put in.

“Thanks. Anyway, I said, ‘I don’t think we should send somebody else to get her. I think we should skip tonight’s party and spend the night with her, and figure out why she keeps doing this.’ I’ll never forget the expression on your dad’s face when I said that. I saw it in the mirror. It was like he was right on the verge of a tantrum but caught himself just in time. Something crumpled in his forehead and around his mouth, then he set his chin firmly, and he said, ‘Let her go,’ and he said in a voice that was almost a whine but that tried to sound perfectly reasonable — he said … do you know what he said?”

Madeleine shook her head slowly.

“He said, ‘They’re serving 1990 Château Latour Pauillac tonight.’”

The room was still.

“Did you hear me?” Holly repeated.

“Yeah, yeah, I got it.” Madeleine picked at her teeth irritably with her thumbnail. “That’s a good wine, right? So then what?”

“He meant it, Madeleine. Our thirteen-year-old daughter was running away and he didn’t want to rescue her because they were having nice wine at a party.”

“So?” Madeleine shrugged. “He likes wine. He knew I’d be okay on the Eurostar. He thought it’d teach me a lesson.”

“You were
thirteen
. You don’t let thirteen-year-olds skip off to London to teach them a lesson! You don’t risk your child’s life because you
like
wine, and if you do, it means you have a problem.”

Now the thumbnail caught at Madeleine’s gum and she grimaced.

“You’re making him sound like an alcoholic,” she said. “He did not have a problem! He never even got hangovers! He was running a corporation, so
how
could he have been a drunk? He was right to let me go that night.
You
were the one who was wrong to follow me. And now it’s
my
fault that you’re here instead of still with him!
I broke up your marriage!
”

She was crying again, but her mother spoke low and fast. “Just because somebody’s not passed out in a gutter, doesn’t mean they’re not an alcoholic. Sure, he was running the show but you can get away with a lot of mistakes with a corporation that size. Especially surrounded by people who are often just as trashed as you are.” Holly took a breath, and spoke even faster: “It wasn’t just wine, you know, it was dope and pills and cocaine, and he never got hangovers because he never stopped for long enough to get one.”

Abruptly, Madeleine’s eyes were dry. “This is stupid,” she snapped. “If it was that serious — if you really thought he had a problem — you should have
done
something about it, not just run away! Which proves that you
know
there was no problem.”

Now Holly’s face softened and there was so much sympathy in her eyes and the set of her mouth that Madeleine felt strangely panicked.

“I tried a million times to make him slow down or cut back,” Holly murmured. “I shouted, cried, and talked, talked, talked. I wrote him letters, I even wrote him a poem once. I left books about substance abuse all over the house. But he could always point to someone else we knew and say, ‘You think
I’ve
got a problem? Look at him, he was rushed to emergency for alcohol withdrawal last week!’ Or he would
pretend to agree to slow down, but then a moment later there’d be that glug-glug-glug of wine pouring into a glass. There was always one more night club, one more jazz bar. He was so quick to get angry, but it was more than that — he had this restlessness, this need to move, and it was like he was lost deep inside himself. I think, if you let yourself, Madeleine, you’ll realise that a part of you knew that.”

Madeleine was shaking her head. “No chance, because you’re wrong.”

“It’s not your fault that we’re here,” Holly said, ignoring her. “It’s
my
fault that we weren’t here sooner. We escaped, Madeleine.” Holly separated her words, handing them over one at a time. “We’re not trapped here, we were trapped there. Sure, we sparkled and glittered and flew through the world, but it was only an illusion of flight. We were trapped in the orbit of a man who was no longer truly there.”

“But —” Madeleine waved her arms around at the sloping walls, the cracked floorboards. “But look where we are now!” Her eyes were blurring with tears again, and her mother reached for her hands and pulled her up.

“Look, there’s a you-shaped print on the couch. Any other mother would have made you change out of those wet clothes before we talked. You need to have a bath or you’ll end up with pneumonia and die, which would be an unexpected plot twist in our lives. Or the couch might get pneumonia. Even more unexpected.”

She went into the bathroom and emerged again, talking over the sound of blasting tap water.

“This is too much for you. Don’t think about any of it for a while. Instead, let’s make this like one of those children’s stories where you get cold, wet, and bedraggled, but then you have a bath. And you wash away all terrible thoughts about yourself, and all confusing thoughts about your father, and you just be you. Then we drink hot chocolate, and get on with our brand-new lives.”

Madeleine shrugged.

“There you go shrugging again. Listen, England is a perfect place for our new life, and here’s why. It’s summer but it’s so grey and rainy
that the whole bath-and-hot-chocolate thing works. Which is not a feature many countries offer.”