Rachel Alexander 09 - Without a Word

couldn’t even hear Leon breathing. “Leon?”
    “Oh,” he said.
    “Oh, yes or oh, no?”
    “Oh, yes. I was nodding. I forgot you couldn’t see me.“
    “I’ll be there at ten,” I told him. “Day after tomorrow.“
    “I’m working on the papers for you.”
    “Good. When will I be able to get them?”
    “Tomorrow night, after eight.Madison goes to sleep at eight.”
    “I’ll be there,” I told him.
    “Just ring the bell. I’ll bring them down.”
    This time I was the one who nodded, but not until after Leon was off the line. It wasn’t that I’d forgotten that Leon couldn’t see me. I was nodding to myself, agreeing with my plan to try to get to know Madison. As I walked home, that’s all I could think about, wondering how I might connect somehow with this unreachable person, wondering when I did, if I did, what her response would be, wondering if she had, indeed, killed Dr. Bechman in a fit of rage, as the authorities presumed.
    When I got home, Dashiell and I stayed outside for a while. I thought I’d sit on the steps, look up through the branches of the oak tree in the center of the garden and watch the stars. But it was cloudy and there wasn’t much to see, the sky an inky black with just the occasional wisp of silver-gray cloud visible beyond the tree. Dashiell sat next to me, on the top step, waiting to see if I might toss a ball or order a pizza, or perhaps just waiting with no other purpose in mind. I thought we’d stay out for a while and then go in and go to bed, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Madison.
    What if Sally were still alive? What if I were able to find her? What if I could convince her to come back and try to help the daughter she’d abandoned five years earlier? And suppose she did that, suppose she agreed and suppose, as Leon wished, seeing her mother, Madison began to talk again? And suppose when she did, she said she had killed
    Dr. Bechman, that she was guilty as charged? Or rather as not yet charged.
    I worried at first that even if Madison did speak up, no one would believe her. But that would only be the case if she claimed she hadn’t killed Dr. Bechman. I was pretty sure that if she confessed to the crime, everyone would think she was telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, even her own father.
    Was that why I was so concerned about this angry, uncommunicative little girl, because in the end she might have no one else on her side? I hadn’t even been hired to solve the crime she’d been thought to have committed. I’d only been hired to try to find Sally.
    Sally.
    Had she planned to disappear, wouldn’t she have left when Leon was out working and Madison was in school? She could have taken some things then, some clothes, some money. She could have left a note.
    But that’s not what had happened. She’d gone out to walk Roy. And then what? Had someone snatched her off the street? Had her body floated to the surface somewhere like the one that had turned up near LaGuardia Airport? Was Sally dead and gone, buried in potter’s field or in some woods in New Jersey, her bones, perhaps, dug up and carried away by animals, one or two at a time?
    Or was it something else entirely, a lover, say, closer to her own age, someone she’d met quite by accident at the supermarket or in the drugstore, someone she’d been seeing and couldn’t find a way to tell Leon about?
    Or had she just wanted some air? And once outside, once she’d started putting distance between herself and the life she’d been living, she found she couldn’t go back. Who hasn’t imagined that scenario, I thought, walking out of the house one night, letting the door close behind you, never going back. You wouldn’t necessarily know where you were headed. That wasn’t the point. You’d only know where you had been, and that it was a place you didn’t want to be, a place you couldn’t be, not ever again.

CHAPTER 5

    After a swim at the Y, I stopped at home to drop off my wet swimsuit, make a couple of phone calls and pick up Dashiell, heading back where we’d been the night before, to Dr. Bechman’s office. It seemed that Dr. Bechman wasn’t the only one who didn’t have hours on Friday morning. According to the two recordings I’d just listened to, the entire office would be closed Friday morning. Dr. Willet’s recording said that in case of an emergency, he could be reached at St. Vincent’s Hospital. His pager number was repeated twice. Dr. Edelstein