The Chalk Girl

Losing them is easy in the Ramble. We know where to hide so no one can find us. Hell, even we can’t find us. We hold our breath, Phoebe and me. They pass us by, and then they double back – double-fisted. Hunting. They call out our names – so angry because they can’t find us, hurt us. Then Humphrey and the girls gang up on another target. From the first scream to the last, we can’t move. We can only listen to what they do to that poor crazy bum. They do it forever, dragging out the pain. The wino screams. Phoebe cries. I’m scared out of my mind – still scared even as I write this line.

—Ernest Nadler

Phoebe Bledsoe ran down the alley and across the garden to her cottage. Only time enough to dress, and then she would have to hurry, run all the way if she must. She dare not be late to the gathering at her mother’s mansion.

The gleam of a garden lantern shone through the crack as she opened her front door, and there on the floor was a note that had been slid under the sill.

Another threat?

‘Don’t turn on the light!’ Dead Ernest stood by the window, looking through a slit in the curtain. ‘Light attracts bugs like Willy.’

Phoebe’s hand hesitated on the wall switch and then dropped to her side. She made her way across the dark room by touch of chair and couch and table to find the drawer with the flashlight. She clicked it on and trained a yellow beam on the notepaper. Willy Fallon’s handwriting was almost illegible. Phoebe had to labor over every obscenity.

‘Murder makes people crazy,’ said Dead Ernest.

No, none of them had been crazy – only cruel.

A shadow passed by the curtain of the front window. Then came a knock at the door, and Willy Fallon yelled, ‘I know you’re in there!’ Rapping knuckles escalated to banging fists. ‘Tell your mother she has to talk to me!’

Willy slammed her body into the door. Screaming and kicking at the wood, she finally got the attention of the night watchman. On the other side of the garden, old Mr Polanski opened the school’s back door. Armed with his own flashlight, he aimed it at the intruder.

Willy fled.

They were driving home from Birdland in Midtown traffic. Riker had always loved the city best by night with the car windows all rolled down. He stared at the windshield, a panorama of neon colors and diamond-bright headlights. A duel of Latin music versus rap blasted from car lanes up ahead, but the detective hardly noticed. He had trouble on his mind.

The child sleeping in his arms was lightly snoring. He turned to the man behind the wheel, who had just ended the story of a surprise visit from Rolland Mann. ‘When Mallory said she took care of it, did she say how?’

Charles Butler shook his head. ‘She only told me he wouldn’t be back – ever.’

‘Well, I know she didn’t kill him. Word gets out when you shoot the top cop.’ Riker slumped low in the passenger seat. What had she done to that man? Could things get any worse? The tallest buildings were behind them now as the car traveled south through Greenwich Village, a neighborhood built on a more human scale. He looked down at the sleeping child. ‘So when were you planning to tell the kid that her granny’s dead?’

‘I thought I’d deal with one trauma at a time,’ said Charles. ‘Perhaps we’ll talk about the death tomorrow.’

‘Mallory told her yesterday.’

Charles’s hands tightened around the wheel, the only sign that he was angry. His voice was calm as he turned east on Houston. ‘Coco took it in stride, didn’t she? No crying, right?’

‘Yeah. How’d you know?’

‘She always knew Granny was dead. Coco never asked me any questions about her – never talked about going home. She knew she had no one to go back to. That’s why she fastened all her hopes on Mallory. From the moment they met, Coco was angling for a new home and someone to love her.’ They shifted across the lanes of wide Houston in silence, and then, as Charles made the turn down to SoHo, he said, ‘This would be a good time for Mallory to back off – just walk away. There has to be a breach that a real parent can step into. That has to happen very soon.’

‘You’re probably right, but Mallory thinks the kid knows more than she’s telling. It’s gonna take us a while to crack the fairy-tale code.’

‘I say it ends now. I have the strongest legal claim on Coco. Thanks to Robin Duffy, I’m the recognized guardian in both New York and Illinois. The law says—’

‘Mallory is the law.’ The Mercedes pulled up to the curb in front of the saloon that Riker called home. ‘You got no shot. You never did.’

Charles cut the engine. ‘I’m very close to placing Coco in a permanent home. That’s what she needs right now. She’s in crisis. The child can’t go on this way. But Mallory won’t sign the papers to let her go . . . This is heartless.’

Riker did not want to end the night like this. ‘Heartless? Yeah, that’s my partner. But you know she’d take a bullet for Coco . . . and maybe she already did. You never asked her how she solved your problem with Rolland Mann. She just told you the kid was safe, and you believed her. Absolute faith, right? I guess it never occurred to you that she could ever go into a fight – and lose everything. Charles, you know – you know she went after that bastard and scared him shitless. That’s her style . . . That’s her romantic side,’ he said to the sorry man who loved Mallory – heart or no heart.

The salon at the mansion was in full swing when Phoebe Bledsoe arrived with sweat stains under her arms from racing two blocks on this muggy night.

The caterer’s people, all more formally dressed, carried trays laden with glasses of red wine and white, moving through a babble of voices from every quarter of the wide room. Most of her mother’s guests stood in conspiracies of two and gangs of four or more. Others sat on chairs, divans and sofas positioned in conversational clusters. In this social hierarchy of furniture, there could only be one throne. High above her mother’s favorite chair, the chandelier burned bright with electric candles and a thousand pieces of reflecting crystal. Another chair, a smaller one, had been placed beside her mother’s, allowing only one person at a time to curry favor. It was the most coveted seat in the house, and people made wide circles around it, waiting for a chance at the ear of Grace Driscol-Bledsoe, a maker and breaker of careers and fortunes.

Phoebe’s late father had called this weekly affair the Night of the Toadies. As a child, she had taken this term to mean a squishiness of character, slimy souls – and a stink. ‘Yes,’ he had said to her then, ‘that’s exactly right.’

She walked about the room as her mother’s feeble apprentice, accepting kisses from familiar CEOs and politicos, but only handshakes from the up-and-comers. Every fifteen minutes, the drab companion, Hoffman, popped into the room to see that all was well with her employer, and then, after a moment or two, popped out – a clock’s broken cuckoo silently announcing the quarter hour. And finally, finally, at the end of the evening, when the room had been cleared of every toad, and coffee was served for two, Phoebe sat in the petitioner’s chair beside her mother.

‘Seriously? That’s what this says?’ Grace Driscol-Bledsoe stared at the note of scrawled lines. ‘Willy’s pushed a few of these through my mail slot, but I never actually tried to read one.’ Nor this one – she crumpled it into a ball and set it on the small table that held her coffee cup.

‘Did you really throw Willy out of the house?’

‘Hoffman did – with the help of those lovely detectives who interrogated you. I rather hoped they’d shoot her, but they only loaded her into an ambulette.’

‘If you’d just talk to Willy, she’d leave me alone.’

‘Scary little beast, isn’t she? Well, you could move back into the mansion with me. It’s very safe here, and your old room is always waiting for you.’

Of course it was. This was an old conversation. It had gone on for years. She was still regarded as her mother’s runaway child. And this was not the first bribe to bring her home – only the most callous one.

‘So that’s what it’s going to cost me to get rid of Willy?’ Phoebe stood up, preparing to leave now that she understood her true place – a bit of a shock. She was one of the toads.