Rachel Alexander 09 - Without a Word

attempt to preserve the work she’d done so far, for, possibly, all the years she was married, would be to give herself away, something she’d done once and perhaps didn’t want to do again.
    Or was this another reason to think that Sally Spector was no longer alive? Would someone work that hard, at night, after caring for a young child all day, and then simply drop it?
    I picked up the picture of Madison and Roy again, holding it under the light. Something about Madison made me think she was frightened. Was it Roy she’d been afraid of? She didn’t seem scared of Dashiell. If not Roy, then what? Or who?

CHAPTER 8

    Leon opened the door and looked more than ready to bolt. He had a heavy-looking camera bag over one shoulder, the shoulder hiked up to keep the bag from slipping off. “When do you want me back?” he asked, already moving sideways to slip by me.
    “In a couple of hours. That okay?”
    “Madison,” he called over his shoulder, “Rachel’s here. I’m going.”
    He waited. I did, too. Nothing happened.
    Leon shrugged.
    “See you at twelve, twelve-thirty,” I said.
    Leon hesitated.
    “Just go,” I said, flapping my hand at him.
    After closing the door, I unhooked Dashiell’s leash. He headed straight for the short hallway that led to Madison’s room. I heard a door open. I heard Dashiell’s nails clicking on the bare wooden floor, then the door closed. I waited, but Dash didn’t return.
    Standing quietly in the vestibule next to Leon’s desk, I listened for more, some sound coming from Madison’s room. But there was none. Was it wise to let Dashiell be alone with her? I wasn’t naive enough to think that, because of her age, Madison couldn’t have killed Dr. Bechman. But if she had, she’d done it for a reason. She’d have no reason to harm Dashiell, I thought. At least none that I knew of.
    I walked down the hallway to Madison’s room and stood there listening, to what end I didn’t know. Did I expect to hear Madison chatting away to Dashiell? I waited a moment, then knocked, expecting what had happened last time, no response. But the door opened and there stood Madison, Dashiell at her side, Emil/Emily in her free hand. She backed up, leaving the door open. I took that as an invitation and walked in, immediately feeling like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. Madison’s walls were blue, not a pale blue wallpaper with little rosebuds on it, not a Wedgwood blue with white molding, not a sky blue with blue-and-white-striped curtains. Madison’s room was the blue of the ocean, the walls covered with enormous fish, a coral reef, underwater reeds curving gracefully as if from the flow of the water and, of course, turtles. It was the kind of painting a proud parent might tape up on the refrigerator, but it was huge, floor-to-ceiling and wrapped entirely around the room, as if the room itself, and Madison, were underwater.
    “This is fantastic. Did you do this?” Forgetting I wasn’t going to get an answer.
    Madison walked over to her desk, which was under the window that faced the D’Agostino’s on Bethune Street, through which I saw a homeless man with a plastic bag full of empty plastic bottles sitting on the ground, leaning against the brick wall, his eyes, like Madison’s, hidden behind dark glasses. There were two more windows over the bed, facing Greenwich Street, the sun pouring in from those. Which might explain why Madison was wearing her sunglasses indoors, if I didn’t know better. I could see one eye twitching when she leaned over to put Emil/Emily into the tank that sat on one side of her desk. There were a few inches of water in it, enough so that the turtle could swim, and a big rock that he/she could climb up on to get out of the water. Madison picked up a book, sat on her bed and began to read, as if I weren’t there.
    Dashiell hopped up on the bed and lay down next to her, leaving me standing alone between the doorway and the desk and, if I had anything else to say, talking to myself.
    Dashiell had no trouble understanding Madison. He didn’t need words to get along or know what someone was feeling. Well, maybe I didn’t either. After all, I’d been a dog trainer and had no trouble understanding the dogs I was hired to train. And I’d done pet-assisted therapy with autistics. No words there, either.
    Madison seemed absorbed in her book, not the kind of fiction with a lesson to be learned in the end that most kids end up reading, but a book on