Rachel Alexander 09 - Without a Word

they’d been washed up onshore someplace, beached and barely able to move. The ones who hadn’t had electrolysis had beards showing by morning, not a pretty sight. But I wasn’t interested in purchasing their services. I was interested in talking. Perhaps one of them had seen Sally and her dog get into a truck. Perhaps, I thought, sitting outside with a cup of tea, the cool morning air waking me up, I should have my head examined. The hookers were all hard-core junkies. They wouldn’t remember yesterday, let alone something they might have seen in passing five years earlier. Hookers as witnesses? The cops say, if hookers clean up well, they can be great witnesses in court. But I doubted that these particular hookers could be cleaned up. By the time they hit this stroll, they were beneath rock bottom. Most of them wouldn’t talk to me unless I offered money for conversation, and in that case, they’d give me what they thought I wanted to hear. “Yeah, baby, a little blonde with her dog. Sure, I remember, she got into a poultry truck, a beef truck, one of them pork trucks, whatever kind of truck you got in mind, she got into it. Never saw her sorry white ass around here again.”
    Did the hookers even live five years, the lives they lived, the work they did, the chances they took?
    And what about the butchers? Very few were still open at night, and of those that were, none would rat out a trucker. They wouldn’t tell me if they saw a trucker negotiating with a hooker. And they wouldn’t tell me if they’d seen Sally getting into a truck with one either.
    A witness in the meatpacking district? Not on a bet.
    After feeding Dashiell, we headed over to Leon’s building. It was Sunday morning, late enough for most people to be awake, early enough that they might still be home. I thought I’d start with the Goodmans, see if they would talk to me.
    “I wasn’t surprised to hear what happened,” Nancy Goodman said. She was standing in the doorway but hadn’t invited me in. “She’s a very disturbed little girl.”
    “Not for nothing,” I said. I waited for that to sink in.
    “I suppose not.”
    “And no one could blame Alicia for not wanting to see her again.”
    “It wasn’t Alicia’s decision. Sam and I thought it would be a bad idea, too dangerous.”
    “Alicia still wanted to play with Madison?”
    Nancy bit her lip.
    “She wasn’t afraid of her? Or angry?”
    “She’s a kid. They were friends. But we thought...”
    I waited.
    “We thought better safe than sorry.”
    “I would probably feel exactly the same way if I were in your position,” I said, figuring Alicia for an only child, her mother not yet understanding that no matter what you did or didn’t do, your kids would get hurt, the price you paid to be a human being, to be alive. “Still,” I said, “I can’t help feeling for Madison. She’s so isolated.”
    “Ms. Alexander, did you come up here on her behalf, to see if Alicia could play with her? Because if you did . . .“ She was shaking her head, out of words for the moment.
    “No. Well, yes and no. I didn’t come to see if Alicia could play with Madison. But I did come on Madison’s behalf. As I mentioned, Leon’s hired me to try to find Sally. He thinks if I can, Madison might talk again.”
    Nancy sighed, took a long look at Dashiell and stepped out of the way. “Come in,” she said, the weight of what she was about to tell me almost too much for her to bear. “Sam is out with Alicia getting bagels and lox. We can talk until they come back.”
    I followed her into the living room, a large sunny room with lots of plants and pictures of the family all over the walls. The room was done in a pale green, the rug a slightly darker shade, as if Ms. Peach had been their decorator.
    Nancy sat on the edge of the couch. I took a chair facing it and sat there, signaling Dashiell to lie down.
    “Were you friends, you and Sally?”
    “No, I wouldn’t say we were. The girls played, usually here. Sally was in school and time to study was precious to her. I didn’t mind having them both here, as long as they got along.”
    “And they did?”
    “At first, yes.Madison always seemed very happy to stay here. Sometimes she’d ask to stay for dinner or ask to sleep over. She was...“ Nancy bit her lip and turned away. “One time when she was here, she told me she was hungry. I offered her a cut-up raw carrot, Alicia’s favorite snack. She said, ‘Oh, a raw carrot. Thank