Rachel Alexander 09 - Without a Word

my pocket. “We may never know what was in the heart of the killer the first time, Doctor. We may never know his or her intent. It might have been, as the police suggest, something that happened in the heat of the moment, a mindless explosion of rage that left Bechman dead for a reason no one could have guessed. But what happened to Celia was another story. That death was clearly premeditated, coldly planned and heartlessly executed.”
    “And it left that poor little girl without a mother,” she said. “Things like that shouldn’t happen, not ever.”
    “I couldn’t agree more,” I said, thinking about two little girls, not one. “I’ll wait for your call.”
    She reached out and touched my arm, then turned away and headed home.
    I avoided the park on the way home. I was mostly thinking about what Dr. Edelstein was going to find. It was hard to think about anything else. But something else was trying to get my attention, something I had seen that had invaded my subconscious. Walking along the dark side streets of the Village, I tried to play it out of hiding, the way you would tease a cat out from under the bed with a feather on the end of a string. But whatever it was, it stayed beyond reach, safely hidden in the dark.

Chapter 31

    There was no use waiting around the house all morning for a call that wouldn’t come until afternoon. I took Dashiell for a long walk, then headed for the Y to swim. Would I ever stop thinking of Madison’s room when I was swimming, of the way Sally had painted the walls in the hope that the underwater scene would calm her daughter, as if that were all it took, all the kid needed? She did it for Madison, that’s what I’d been told. Perhaps that wasn’t so. Perhaps she’d painted her daughter’s room that way in an effort to stay, as a way of trying to bring the world she needed to the place where she was. And then like a siren, all that blue called to her, pulling her away from Madison and Leon, drawing her to a more comfortable place, a world of fish and coral and rocks, a world without people, like the one on her daughter’s walls.
    My head in the water, my arms reaching out in front of me, then driving the water back, I was in that world, too. No matter that there was someone swimming laps in the next lane, that in other parts of the Y people were walking on treadmills, riding stationary bicycles, doing yoga, step aerobics, ballet. All I could see was the pale blue of the pool’s water as if I were alone in the world.
    Was that what Sally was after? Was that what she had achieved? No emotional attachments, a job where strangers came and went, no one staying long enough to make things personal. And when she wasn’t working, a world away, apart, a cool, quiet place where she never had to tell a needy child to be quiet, a lonely husband that she had to study, where she never had to tell her family that she didn’t love them, at least not enough, that she never had and never would.
    Where had she gone? I wondered. Someplace else where she could slip under the radar, work off the books, spend her time reading and swimming. I thought of the dog, Roy, waiting on the shore, a demanding breed, but nothing compared to the demands of family, nothing compared to the demands Madison must have made on her. Sally could meet Roy’s demands, a walk in the morning, a swim in the afternoon, a game of fetch when the air cooled down at night. Perhaps he slept on the foot of the bed, too, and that might have been all she needed, all she wanted, all she could handle.
    Floating on my back at the end of my time in the pool, I thought about the people Dashiell and I did pet therapy with. Some of them had come not to trust another human. But they trusted Dashiell. They trusted a dog’s nonjudgmental attitude. They felt safe with him. And for some, that safety allowed them, over time, rapport with the person who had brought the dog. Sally had stopped, it seemed with Roy, Roy who would never ask a question that would tear her to shreds, Roy who would never ask for more than she could give.
    I picked up lunch on the way home. Then, sitting at my desk, sharing my sushi with Dashiell, I began to go over all my notes again, knowing that sometimes what you were looking for ended up being right under your nose all along.
    I had started a time line for Sally’s disappearance, at least for the one when Paul spirited her away from the meat market in his truck. I put that in a folder. It was no