charge you with a crime,
Mallory’s hand flashed out to close around the woman’s wrist, and she said, ‘Sit down.’ Her words had no rising or falling notes, no human qualities. ‘You’re not going anywhere.’
‘I think I know what my partner is trying to say here.’ Riker stood up. ‘She wants to spend some quality time with you.’
The frightened woman turned her head to stare at an empty chair on her own side of the table, as if intently listening to someone who was not there. Miss Bledsoe smiled, taking some comfort from her invisible companion. And Lieutenant Coffey had to work on a relative scale of insanity for the occupants of the other room.
Schizophrenics were next to useless in court.
Riker sat down at the table.
Crazy was a game of musical chairs, for now the woman stared at Riker as if he might be crazy.
A stretch limousine was a common sight at the Driscol School, though not in the summer months of vacation. In the backseat of this one, an attorney cautioned his client. ‘Miss Bledsoe, if anyone shows you another badge, just hand the bastard my card.’ It was the second business card he had given her in the past half hour. Perhaps this young man sensed that Phoebe had already forgotten his name. In another few minutes, she would not recall any distinction to set him apart from the law firm’s other errand boys, all Yalies and Harvard graduates.
The rear door was opened by a chauffeur. She stepped out onto the pavement in front of the school, and the car rolled away. Phoebe looked up at the large building that dated back to an era when stone filigree was in fashion – and gargoyles. Two such monsters sat above the lintel, set to spring on anyone entering by the massive front door. The less grandiose neighbors, all brownstones, were also unchanged since the 1800s. The Landmark Society was rabid in the matter of external renovations, and with only the flaw of fluorescent street lamps replacing gaslight, they had managed to stop time on this Upper West Side street.
The school’s founder had been a man with a penchant for carving his family name in stone all around the town. This mad quest to keep the Driscols in the public eye had been defeated elsewhere by urban planners who had torn his monuments down. But here on the facade of this building, the name remained in letters etched so deep that centuries of wind and rain could not obliterate them.
A narrow space between the Driscol School and the building next door was closed off by a tall wrought-iron gate. Phoebe fished through her purse for the key and unlocked it. On the other side of the iron bars, she made her way down an alley that opened onto a generous back garden. Chairs and tables were set in conversational groupings, and there were small benches here and there for the solitary teacher or student when classes were in session. Lush green ivy covered the rear wall, and flowers of many colors filled the wide wells of ancient trees.
A flagstone path led to a tiny cottage that had been a carriage house in the horse-and-buggy days. An anomaly in a city of skyscrapers, it sat on an adjoining plot of land not entailed to the school. Before the age of soaring real-estate prices, this had been a way station for family members who had depleted their trust funds or fallen into some other disgrace.
It was a hiding place.
Phoebe occupied the cottage with the grudging consent of her mother, the last of the Driscol line. By terms of the family trust fund, Phoebe did not count because she carried her father’s name. She was merely a Bledsoe, declared so on her birth certificate.
A small boy walked beside her on the path. He was fair of hair and spindle-legged. For the entire eleven years of his life, he had been called Ernie. In later years, Phoebe had renamed him Dead Ernest, a pale joke, a poor play on words; being dead earnest had gotten him killed. In this incarnation that walked beside her, the child was much thinner. His T-shirt and jeans were dirty, and there were dead leaves in his hair. He had lost one shoe and a sock – and his life.
The little boy’s feet made no sound on the flagstones. She had never mastered footsteps for her old classmate – never tried – for no one knew better than she that he was not there. And so the policeman’s remark – ‘Who’s your friend?’ – had been somewhat unnerving.
‘I thought they’d never let us go home,’ said Dead Ernest. He never said anything to elicit a response from her. They held no two-way conversations. Only crazy people spoke to the dead.
The boy who was not there had sprung from sessions with a child psychiatrist after the –
Dead Ernest lived on.
Phoebe opened the cottage door to a large room with a high ceiling and a sleeping alcove. Apart from the kitchenette, every bit of wall space was lined with books. These volumes had been accumulated by generations of Driscols in hiding. They were all works of fiction – escape hatches.
She removed her gray dress – Dead Ernest called it her cloth of invisibility – and draped it over the back of a chair. The armoire’s door was opened to a lineup of cotton frocks in bright colors and bold prints.
‘You’re running late,’ said the dead boy with one shoe.
Quite right. She had only twenty minutes to get downtown to the cafe on Bleecker Street. Phoebe undid her bun, and brown tresses fell in waves to her shoulders. After donning her dress and slipping on sandals, she ran a comb through her hair. Next came the perfume and a bright swatch of lipstick.
She walked out the door, down the alley and into the street to flag down a taxi. Dead Ernest’s legs were shorter; he ran to keep up and followed her into the backseat of the yellow car. And now they were off on a wild ride with a cabbie from the school of Oh-was-that-a-red-light? The first blown traffic signal was followed by the driver’s diatribe on the thieving city of New York. ‘They speed up the yellow lights. Maybe you noticed, lady? If you’re walking, you can start across an intersection on the green, watch it go from yellow to red, and die before you get to the other side. I
‘You made it,’ said Dead Ernest.
With minutes to spare.
Phoebe Bledsoe was always the first to arrive at the Mexican restaurant. Over the years, she had known this place as a coffeehouse and cafe under different ownership, decor and menus. Only the location was unchanged – and the time of her rendezvous. She sat down at a table far from the sunshine of the front window. The old gold cigarette lighter was pulled from her purse, and she rubbed it between her fingers. As if by magic, the door opened, and a young man with long, dark hair walked in. He had always been slender, and now he was thin but still handsome – and probably stoned. It was hard to tell. He moved with an animal grace so deep, so innate, that he could not stumble or falter or fall even by an accident of overdose. He took his customary seat on the other side of the room. It must be one o’clock. He was never late.
‘He’s two years older than you,’ said Dead Ernest, as if this still mattered outside the society of children. ‘You never had a chance.’
True, Toby Wilder had been beyond her then, as he was now. Yet this was the high point of every day, having lunch with Toby at separate tables. She put away the gold cigarette lighter. One day, she should return it to him, though she was loathe to part with this memento – and he might remember that he had dropped it in the Ramble all those years ago.
‘He looks like a sleepwalker,’ said the dead boy.
She stared at the real and solid young man. Were Toby Wilder’s eyes less blue, less bright? No, but they lacked focus. When he looked out the window, he was blind to the jumpy foot traffic of tourists jamming the sidewalk – blind even to the waitress who handed him a menu – deaf to the girl when she asked what he wanted for lunch. And there was one other difference between Toby the child and his grown-up self: He had found a way to be still. His feet did not tap, and there was no tabletop drumming of the fingertips.
He had lost his music.
