The Chalk Girl

was most vulnerable in sleep.

Barefooted, she padded down the hall to the room where her father had died. It was much the same as it had been all those years ago when Papa had been crippled by a stroke.

As a girl, Grace had seldom visited the sickroom, so repulsed was she by the sight of that drooling man rolling his eyes and making pathetic attempts to form words, half her father’s face gone slack and the other half crying. In recent years, Grace came here all the time. Taking inventory soothed her. The closet had been restocked with supplies, and now she counted the bottles of medicines not yet invented in the days of Papa’s drawn-out death. Prized above all of them were doses of tbs, not legally obtainable outside of a hospital. This precious contraband was also kept in Hoffman’s black bag – kept close at hand every hour of the day and night.

Moonlight gleamed on the chrome rails of the mechanized bed – her inheritance. It was still serviceable, though a new mattress had been purchased against a day when Grace might suffer another stroke of her own, a trauma more debilitating than the other two. It ran in the family – this other legacy from her late father. Papa, thank you so much.

She inspected the red lights on a march of bedside machines, assurance that they were operational. Last, she opened a door to a linen closet, making certain that the stacks of sheets had not become musty while awaiting the worst day of her life.

And the checklist was done.

There were clinics in this country that were not so wonderfully equipped. This room guaranteed that she would not end her days in a nursing home, however feeble she might become. Hopefully, by the time she could no longer fend for herself, Hoffman would have been replaced by another nurse, one with greater incentive to keep her alive. And Phoebe would sleep at the foot of the bed, much like a good and loyal dog.

Phoebe Bledsoe’s friend, Mr Polanski, was a skinny twin to Santa Claus and a kindred soul, another one who walked with the dead. The night watchman could not part with his late wife, and so he took her with him on his solitary rounds. But not tonight. ‘I talk to her more as I get older,’ he said, accepting a thermos of ice tea from Phoebe’s hand.

‘But your wife never talks.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘not like your Dead Ernest. I missed that little boy when he left us.’

Years ago, Mr Polanski had been the Driscol School’s man of odd jobs, a janitor and a fixer of leaks, a mender of cracks in the plaster and sometimes a roofer. In later life, physical labor had been too hard on him, and so he had become the protector of priceless furnishings and artwork. With a change of title from handyman to watchman, he had been kept on in this place of tradition – just another antique to the board of directors.

And Phoebe, a former student, had been recycled as the school nurse.

She accompanied the old man on his rounds, and they strolled through the gallery of alumni portraits dating back to the 1800s. Most of the people pictured here were renowned in the seas of politics and commerce. These lying walls advertised respectability beyond reproach.

The gallery opened onto the dining hall, a vast space lit by streetlight slanting down from a bank of tall windows. The long mahogany tables and their chairs wore ghosty dust covers. Long ago, this had been a place of sanctuary. The table in the far corner was where she had sat with Ernie, two children catching their breath and licking wounds in the no-cruelty zone of lunch hour.

Mr Polanski and Phoebe retraced their steps to the grand staircase and climbed to the next floor, where classroom doors stood open in a hallway lined with wood paneling and freestanding lockers that clanged when hit with the soft body of a child. Ernie had once asked her why he was the only one singled out for physical violence in a school that offered so many variations on torture. Phoebe had theorized then that it was because he was two years younger and ten years smarter than his tormentors.

When Mr Polanski had completed his rounds on every floor, they descended the back stairs to the garden door and went outside into a warm night scented by flowers. The watchman shined his torch on shrubs that hid a portion of the rear wall from the rooftop security lights.

Phoebe stared into a patch of absolute darkness where it was daylight in an old memory. This was where Humphrey and the girls had Ernie pinned down, his back to the wall. And here he had disappointed them. All his fear had been spent that day. The boy had given himself up for dead and faced them down with a calm resolve.

A mistake.

Nothing could have angered them more. Before they tired of him, one of them – was it her brother? No, that time it was Willy Fallon. She had grabbed Ernie by the ears and knocked his head into the gray stone wall. The little boy had slumped to the ground, leaving a slick of his blood to mark the spot. It was still there on the following day. And all that day long, other students had streamed into the garden to gawk at a child’s blood. Eleven-year-old Phoebe knew the teachers had seen it, too, but they kept walking past it.

Mr Polanski saw the train of her gaze, peeked into her mind and said, ‘It took me a long time to get rid of that stain.’

No. Phoebe shook her head. It’s still there. And it was on her hands. It was everywhere.

THIRTY

Phoebe wants no part of this. Okay with me. But she won’t come back to school. She won’t even come to the phone when I call her house.

I need to talk to somebody.

I think about that dead wino all the time. Twenty times a day, I can hear him screaming. It took that poor crazy man a long time to die. I remember counting off the minutes from the hiding place in the Ramble. That’s what I tell the police. But Detective Mann doesn’t believe me.

—Ernest Nadler

By early-morning light, Detective Mallory scrutinized the alley gate for the Driscol School. ‘A ten-year-old kid could pick that lock. It’s an antique.’

‘I’m sure Miss Fallon used a key,’ said the white shield, Arthur Chu. ‘She got something out of her purse, and then it only took her a few seconds to open this gate.’

Riker finished reading the prowler report filed by Mr Polanski, the night watchman. ‘No mention of Willy’s name, no description.’ He pocketed his bifocals and turned to his partner. ‘But the time works with Arty’s sighting of Willy Fallon on the run. Mr Polanski thought Phoebe must’ve left the gate open. Maybe that’s how Willy got in so fast.’

Officer Chu shook his head. ‘She pulled something from her purse to—’

‘But you didn’t see a key,’ said Mallory. ‘You were across the street. It was dark.’ She reached into the back pocket of her jeans and pulled out a velvet pouch that contained her kit of picks for breaking and entering. Inspector Louis Markowitz had confiscated it on the night of her arrest at age ten – nearly ten. She had lied her age up to twelve years old, and, failing at that, they had later agreed that she might be eleven. After his death, she had found the pouch among the contents of her foster father’s safe-deposit box. Sentimental old bastard, he had been unable to part with baby’s first lock picks. She showed them to Arthur Chu. ‘Maybe this is what Willy got from her purse.’ She restored the pouch to her back pocket and then held up a pair of bobby pins. ‘Or these.’ The detective turned her back on the white shield for a few seconds’ work – and the gate swung open. ‘A kid could do it.’

The somewhat dejected Officer Chu was dispatched to Willy Fallon’s hotel to continue his shadow detail. And when the young cop was out of sight, Riker said, ‘Poor guy. If he’d been right about that key—’

‘I think he was.’ Mallory faced the narrow alley beyond the gate. She could go no farther. The police had been barred from getting within two hundred feet of Phoebe Bledsoe’s residence behind the school. ‘This lock is at least a hundred years old. Who knows how many keys are floating around?’ She looked up at the lintel above the school’s door, where the Driscol name was engraved. ‘I bet Phoebe’s mother has a key to this gate – or had one.’