The Chalk Girl

In perfect unison, the day campers looked skyward, but no rodents were coming from that quarter. However, another rat was running toward them. Twenty-three pairs of eyes rounded with surprise. And one little boy wet his pants – finally. It never failed.

Oh, and there – another rat – and another one. Vile creatures.

In a wide swathe across the far side of the meadow, sun worshippers abandoned their towels to lope away, and screams could be heard at that distance where people and their vocals were only ant size. Dogs barked, and parents on the run madly piloted baby strollers in all directions.

Mrs Lanyard motioned for the children to gather around her. The little redheaded rat maven stepped out from behind the others and came forward, her thin arms outreaching, silently begging for hugs and comfort.

Oh, Lord, that child was filthy.

The girl’s formerly white T-shirt was a mess of dirt smudges, grass-colored smears and food stains, some red as blood. And, of course, as was the case with the unwashed, the dreaded head-lice infestation was to be expected. ‘Stop!’ Mrs Lanyard stepped back and put up both hands to ward off the advance of this urchin.

The child’s large blue eyes had a wounded look. Her arms slowly lowered to her sides. Coco turned to the other children, who took their cue from the old woman and also shrank away from her. The little girl’s smile collapsed, and her hands folded over her stomach, as if this shunning had come with the pain of a punch.

A boy screamed, ‘Look! Look!’ He jabbed the air with his pointing finger. ‘More rats!’

Oh, dear God, there were dozens of them.

Mrs Lanyard raised her cane, prepared to defend the little ones against this moving brown carpet of quivering, twitchy fur that was headed their way. However, the children – all wonderfully equipped to survive – promptly abandoned the old lady and ran off. The odd child followed after them, her hands fluttering like small white wings in a panic.

It was an inconvenient moment to suffer a massive stroke, but fortunately, mercifully, it would prove fatal for Mrs Lanyard.

The rats were so close.

She sank to her knees. The wind took her straw hat to sail it far and wide. Now her pink scalp could be seen through thinning white strands of hair.

The rats were squealing, onrushing, almost here.

Her eyes rolled back, and there was no more fear, though vermin were all around her, dividing into columns to skirt the obstacle of her kneeling body, only wanting to get past her. Stone dead, she pitched forward to lay her head upon the grass, cutting her face on a jagged shard of glass from a broken bottle. There was just a trickle of blood from this wound, for her heart had ceased to beat and pump it.

Twitchy soldiers of the rat army, those closest to her, paused to look – to sniff – to taste.

Mrs Ortega could hear the sound of children’s high-pitched squeals as she rolled her wire cart toward the park playground. Her short frame was deceptively thin, for she was strong – a side effect of hard labor. Her heritage was advertised by jet-black hair from the Latin side and her mother’s Irish cream complexion. On a normal day during her travels down this path, she was sometimes accosted by women who were attracted by her cart of cleaning supplies. These strangers always approached with a needy, desperate look about them – a good cleaning lady was hard to find. And she would wave them off, saying, ‘Don’t even ask. I’m booked solid.’

Today, in a sharp departure from this routine, the cleaning lady was body-slammed by a stranger on the run, a young woman looking over her shoulder instead of watching where she was going.

A New Yorker, born and bred, Mrs Ortega had a store of curses for moments like this, choice words that would chill the hearts of a motorcycle gang. She raised one fist in prelude, and then she saw fear in the other woman’s eyes when pausing to scream a warning – ‘Rats!’ – before running on.

Obviously an out-of-towner.

The cleaning lady’s indignation subsided, and she lowered her fist. She gave handicap points to lame tourists; anyone frightened by the sight of a rat was surely feeble. New York City was the rat capital of the world. Her own neighborhood had once boasted more vermin than all of Manhattan, but her customer base, the Upper West Side, was becoming a major competitor for bragging rights.

Mrs Ortega entered a noisy playground enclosed in the concentric circles of a long, round bench, a fence and an outer ring of tall trees. She shut the iron gate behind her and took her customary seat near the drinking fountain. Nodding to nannies and some of the children she knew by name, the cleaning lady settled a delicatessen bag on her lap. She planned to eat a leisurely morning snack before taking the subway to SoHo. Years ago, one of her customers had moved downtown, and that should have been the end of him, but Charles Butler had made it worth her while to spend an extra train fare. She looked down at her wristwatch.

Lots of time.

There was time enough to notice a man standing just outside the fence, and the cleaning lady recognized his kind. She had a cop acquaintance, whose name for men like this was Short Eyes. The man was fixated on the jungle gym, a brightly colored structure with stairs full of climbing children and crossbeams for those who liked to dangle. And some whizzed down a metal slide, shrill, screaming happy kids – witless and fearless. But a few had good instincts, and they would survive to have progeny; native New Yorkers understood the darkest things about Darwinism. Short Eyes caught the attention of a small girl. He smiled – so creepy – and the child quickly turned away, her nose scrunched up, as if the sight of him could be a bad smell.

All the signs were there for even a child to see, but the children’s guardians were blind, chatting into cell phones or gossiping with one another. There were no moms in the playground today, only the hired help. Moms were good at spotting predators. Mrs Ortega was better. Her pervert radar was reinforced when Short Eyes used his camera phone to covertly take pictures of the youngsters.

Not wanting to alarm the nannies – brainless teenagers – the cleaning lady casually leaned forward, and one hand drifted toward the baseball bat nestled in her wire cart. This was an inheritance from her father, a Yankees fan till the day he died. She carried it everywhere, but not for sentimental reasons. It made a fine weapon. She watched the man – who watched the children.

And then she was distracted by a dirty little face framed in curly red hair. The child peeked out from behind a tree that was rooted in the playground’s cement floor. Her smile was too wide, too generous for any New Yorker’s spawn. This little girl was a strange one, all right – and yet familiar.

The cleaning lady sucked in a breath. Though the child had no wings, she was otherwise the living incarnation of a statuette on the mantelpiece at home. Mrs Ortega had a collection of fairy figurines, the legacy of a mother only one generation out of Ireland, a woman who knew the light and the dark side of the little folk: they sang and danced, smiling always, and they were mischief makers all. No good could come of seeing fairies in the flesh.

In the common-sense compartment of her brain, she knew this little girl was all too human and vulnerable, but the resemblance to the magical was uncanny and unsettling. Mrs Ortega turned her head to catch Short Eyes staring at this same child as he prowled along the fence. The little redhead was a likely victim, for she seemed to belong to no one. Easy prey. He was slowly rounding the perimeter, moving closer to the gate, stealthy, grinning; this was the way a cockroach would smile if it only could.

Mrs Ortega’s right hand wound around the handle of her baseball bat as the little girl approached one of the nannies, a fool teenager named Nancy, who suddenly took fright. And that was interesting because Nancy was built like a linebacker. The small child closed in on the older girl, arms outstretched, asking for a hug.

From a stranger? Well, that was scary.

The teenager left the bench at a dead run, so eager was Nancy to escape the threat of this tiny girl. The nanny collected her charges, twin boys, bundled them through the gate and swiftly walked them toward the park exit to West 68th Street. Thus abandoned, the fairy child’s head bowed, and her arms folded to hug herself.

What was that on the kid’s T-shirt? Oh, damn.

Mrs Ortega had an eye for stains and an expertise. A cop might be fooled by ketchup, but not her. This was blood.

The child suddenly smiled, then danced on tiptoe to the edge of the playground, where the pervert was waiting by the gate – the open gate. He was smiling, arms held out to receive her, and she ran to him, so happy, so anxious to give and get love.

Mrs Ortega pulled the baseball bat from her cart.

Three men in uniform stood in the shade of an ancient oak tree and watched the rats swarm over the bloody mound that was the late Mrs Lanyard.