Rachel Alexander 09 - Without a Word

enormous slab of unwrapped salmon, cream-colored stripes of fat running through the orange flesh, was arced over a small man’s shoulder as he carried it into a Japanese place. A brown paper bag of baguettes sat on the stone step outside a small French bistro, not yet open.
    Dashiell sneezed as we passed the open doorways making loom for the odors of cumin, soy sauce, ginger and the sweet, yeasty smell of the warm bread. But when we got nearer to the park, he began to walk faster, the dog run on his mind. We could hear the dogs barking when we turned the other way, Dashiell looking up at me wondering why I was betraying him.
    “Soon,” I told him. We had hours before Madison was due at my house, and at least one of those belonged to him.
    I could see the lights on inside Dr. Bechman’s office. Ms. Peach was already at her post. Perhaps she’d come in early to catch up on her paperwork. Good for her, even better for me. Because on the way over, I’d realized that the silly story she’d told me wasn’t true. She hadn’t come back for her book, not from West Sixty-eighth Street where the phone book said she lived. She’d come back because Celia had called her to find out why Eric Bechman hadn’t shown up for dinner with his paramour and their daughter. It was Celia, it had to have been. Had she tried to page him and gotten no answer? Or was she afraid he’d forgotten and gone home? Was she afraid she’d have to tell JoAnn again that Daddy was too busy to join them that evening?
    I rang the bell, and Ms. Peach came to the door, frowning at first because it was too early for patients to start coming, then even more so when she saw it was me.
    She waved her hand from side to side, as if she were erasing a blackboard, as if erasing me. “I can’t talk to you now,” she said through the glass.
    “It’ll only take a minute,” I said back.
    “It’s against our insurance regulations,” she lied, as if I hadn’t heard that one before, the excuse for everything nowadays. “No patients in the office before business hours.”
    “I’m not a patient,” I said.
    Ms. Peach stood firm, shaking her head from side to side.
    “I only have one question,” I told her.
    When she saw I wasn’t about to go away, her chest heaved once. She reached for the lock, twisted it, opened the door and then filled the doorway so that I would say what I had to say standing in that little alcove under the stairs and not think she was letting me in.
    “I just met Celia,” I said.
    Her lips thinned out, her nose becoming pinched as she inhaled, and stood aside, making room for me and Dashiell.
    He went first. I followed. Ms. Peach, Louise, die phone book had said, bringing up the rear.
    I went into the waiting room and sat on one of the easy-to-clean faux leather couches. Dashiell lay down next to a stuffed animal that was lying on the rug on the far side of the coffee table, a wooden rectangle covered with coloring books and games.
    “Celia suspects there’s a third family somewhere, east of here perhaps?” I pointed toward NYU, in that direction.
    “There most certainly is not.” Sitting across from me, her cheeks trembling.
    I smiled. “Only the two, then?”
    Louise Peach flushed from the neck of her white wash-and-wear uniform right to her hairline, but she didn’t speak.
    “Tell me the story about the book again,” I said, “the one you came back to get. Must have been a thriller, something you couldn’t put down, something that couldn’t wait another day while you took a night off to watch Who Wants to Marry My Dad?”
    “ She called. Or did she tell you that already? Why are you even here if you know everything there is to know?” Arms crossed over her bosom.
    “I came to ask about the money, the off-the-books side business that paid the rent and sundries for Celia and JoAnn.”
    “There was no...“
    “A consulting job? That paid cash? Surely...“ And then I stopped in mid-sentence. The way Ms. Peach furrowed her brow, I wondered if it was possible she didn’t know, that only Bechman, his employer and Celia knew. And since Celia hadn’t mentioned the name of the company, perhaps even she didn’t know that much. The less said, the safer. It was, after all, against the law.
    “I can’t talk to you about this,” she said. ‘It’s—”
    “Illegal?”
    Ms. Peach looked around, as if there was someone else in the office who might hear us. Perhaps there was. Perhaps one of the doctors had come in