Rachel Alexander 09 - Without a Word

his skin the color of honeysuckle, that yellowish white that looks great on a plant and really lousy on a person. But it was mostly his eyes that made him look so old, his sad, dead eyes.
    “Look, someone gone that long,” I shook my head from side to side, “Leon, if your daughter’s pregnant and that’s, that’s a problem, there are only a few choices that can be made. Why go through all this...“
    “Pregnant? Wouldn’t that be...“ For a moment I thought he was going to laugh, but then he looked as if he was about to cry. “Madison’s not pregnant,” he said. “She’s suspected of murder.“
    “Murder?” Why was he talking to me? His daughter didn’t need her mother, she needed a good lawyer.
    “They say she killed her doctor in a fit of rage. She gets them sometimes.”
    “Fits of rage?”
    Leon nodded.
    “And did she?”
    Leon looked shocked. Then his old, sad eyes looked even older and sadder. “I don’t think so.”
    “But you don’t know?”
    Leon shook his head.
    “Did you ask her?”
    “I did.”
    “Well, what did she say?”
    “She didn’t say anything. Madison doesn’t speak. She stopped talking three days after her mother disappeared.” He glanced around the run, as if to assess whether anyone might be listening, but there wasn’t a soul near enough, and besides, a Jack Russell had spotted a squirrel on a branch and was barking his fool head off. “I was hoping if you could find Sally for us,” he whispered, “maybe Madison would start to talk again. Maybe she’d say what happened that day instead of letting people who weren’t there say what was in her heart and what she did.”
    “Does she respond at all? Does she write things down? Does she nod for yes, shake her head for no?”
    “Sometimes she draws pictures, but even then, you can’t always know for sure what she’s thinking. There was a picture on the doctor’s desk, a heart with a scraggly line going into it.“
    “Stabbing it?”
    “It could look that way.”
    “And was she angry with her doctor?”
    Leon nodded. “She has these tics and he was treating her with Botox, to paralyze the muscles so that she’d...“
    “Look more normal?”
    “ ‘Pass for normal’ is what he said. Can you imagine saying that to a patient? To a kid?”
    Pass for normal, I thought. Isn’t that what we all tried to do?
    “But the last shot he gave her, he screwed up.” Leon looked straight at me. “He said it would go away, that it would wear off, but meanwhile it made one eyelid droop and she was really freaked out by it.”
    “So was the picture an expression of her anger, maybe a threat, is that what the thinking is?”
    He nodded. “She was his last patient of the afternoon. The receptionist was there when Madison showed up but not when she left. When she went back to the office, she found him, Dr. Bechman, dead.”
    “Stabbed in the heart?”
    “With the Botox injection that Madison had refused.” That did it for me. No way could I turn down the case now.
    “Alexander,” I said. “It’s Rachel Alexander.” I gave him a card with my landline and my cell phone numbers.
    It took him a while to find his card. It was in the third pocket he checked. I explained my fees and the advance I required. I said there might be some expenses in a case like this and that he’d have to cover those, too. And finally I told him I couldn’t guarantee I’d find Sally after all these years, that there was only the slimmest chance of that, but if he still wanted me to try, I would. He said he did.
    As for Madison, I hoped there’d be some other way to prove her innocence, if she was innocent, because even if I found her mother and even if the kid started talking again, told the cops what happened on that terrible day, said the blame wasn’t hers, who says anyone would believe her? Leon and I shook hands. Looking at his sad face, I wasn’t sure who needed Sally more, the husband or the daughter. And I had no idea at the time what I was committing myself to and how it would change my life.
    “So the receptionist found the doctor when she got to work in the morning?” I asked, wondering why no one had called earlier to say he hadn’t arrived home. “That must have been a shock.”
    “It wasn’t in the morning. She went back that night.“
    “Why would she do that?”
    Leon shrugged.
    “You think maybe his wife called the receptionist—if he had a wife?”
    “He did. He kept her picture on the desk. They all do