The Chalk Girl

advertise the generations of police in her foster father’s lineage – and to call in favors owed to that good old man. On the day of her return, she had laid the watch on her desk as a plea and a dare to take her back. But today she held it up as an illustration of time passing. The mayor would be waiting, fuming, only moments from imploding.

Jack Coffey shrugged, and this was akin to waving a white flag of surrender. Sometimes losing was a good idea. Failure could be so restful. His tension headache was gone even before his two detectives had been dispatched uptown to Central Park. Mrs Ortega was sent downtown to City Hall – a problem solved – and, by the scales of wins and losses, this might be a break-even day.

The lieutenant allowed half an hour before he turned on the volume of the television set. It was tuned to the cable channel for city coverage, and he expected to see the cleaning lady and the mayor in a press conference. Instead, he saw a picture of Columbus Circle, and around it ran a river of vehicles flowing from the tributaries of broad avenues. The camera narrowed its field and shifted to the sun-washed plaza of Merchants’ Gate, the southwest entrance to Central Park. The lens zoomed in on a monument, and atop this high pylon stood the golden statue of Columbia Triumphant riding her chariot drawn by three sea horses. The camera panned down to the tight shot of a little boy with many microphones framing his face.

And the lieutenant heard the second fairy sighting of the day.

The boy on camera invoked a celebrity pixie of storybook fame to describe a child who was still at large in the park. ‘But she wasn’t blond like Tinker Bell. This girl had red hair.’ The boy’s smile became sly. With special glee and a touch of the ghoul, saving the best for last, he announced, ‘She was covered with blood!’

Oh, great. Just great.

‘I bet you’re wondering how I know you’re lying.’ Mallory did not say this unkindly, but her partner thought she did stare at the boy in the way a cat might gaze at its food – no eye contact. Riker wondered if she saw the child as all of one piece, like a slab of meat that wore a little baseball cap.

The young day camper was slow to realize that he was no longer safe in the company of smiling, solicitous reporters. This tall blonde was an altogether different sort of creature – and he was in deep trouble. His mouth hung open when he looked up at her, as if she outsized the golden statue that was merely larger than life.

Mallory grabbed the little boy’s hand and marched him around to the back of the monument that marked the entrance to Central Park. Riker followed close behind them to shield this kidnap from cameras on the other side of the plaza, where reporters interviewed the rest of the Jersey children, and where street musicians cranked up the music to compete with the honking horns of crazed drivers. Cars were frozen in a massive gridlock around Columbus Circle, and uniformed officers ran along the curb of the plaza, waving ticket pads at news vans insane enough to double-park. A civilian audience lined up to watch this circus, and food vendors appeared out of nowhere to cater the party.

No one noticed the child snatched by the detectives.

‘That girl did have blood on her.’ The six-year-old’s voice was whiny now, but he did not cry, and Riker gave him points for that. The little boy looked down at his shoes, a sure sign of guilt.

‘Last chance,’ said Mallory, as if the authority to send him to hell was hers alone. ‘Tell me what—’

‘He lied.’ A second tiny camper, a girl with a ponytail, stepped out of Riker’s shadow and crept up to Mallory, saying, ‘That girl wasn’t covered in blood.’ The child cupped her hands around her mouth and whispered confidentially, ‘It was just a little blood.’ She pointed to her own T-shirt and described the small red stains as they appeared on the missing girl’s shoulder and one sleeve. ‘Here, and here, too. Oh, and her name is Coco.’

Riker opened his notebook. ‘Coco, huh?’ After jotting this down, his pen hovered over the page. ‘So . . . about this blood. Did you see a wound or a cut?’

‘No, she was just spotty, and she looked like this.’ The little girl put two fingers into her mouth and stretched it into a wide Halloween grin with gaps of missing baby teeth.

‘Well, that sort of fits.’ Riker held up a photograph of Mrs Ortega’s fairy figurine, and he showed it to this more reliable witness. ‘Did Coco look something like—’

‘That’s her!’ The little girl squealed as she jumped up and down, so excited she could hardly stand it. ‘I forgot about the wings!’

Riker sighed.

And the little boy, the confirmed liar, nodded. ‘Yup, she had wings, all right.’ Small hands jammed into his pockets, he looked up at the sky with newfound nonchalance. ‘She’s probably in Mexico by now.’

Mallory hunkered down, her face a bare inch from the boy’s. No escape, no mercy. And Riker winced.

‘Tell me something,’ she said. ‘About those stains on Coco’s T-shirt – did you see that blood before the rats ate Mrs Lanyard?’

The little boy’s body jerked to attention, eyes gone wide with the shock of a popped balloon. Evidently, this runaway camper had never looked back to see the rat attack. And the reporters – those jackals – had been too sensitive to tell him that the old lady was dead. All of this was apparent with the child’s tears, big ones and so many of them.

The detectives had an answer of sorts, and they moved on to enter Central Park.

If asked, Coco would say she had walked two hundred and eighty-three miles in the past hour to cross a span of parkland equal to four city blocks. In her reckoning, time and space were arbitrary things, though she did strive to be precise with her numbers.

The child followed four steps behind a woman whose face she had yet to see. Coco planned to ask if this stranger would please hold her hand. She badly needed to hold on to someone, anyone. It was a flyaway day with no anchors to a solid world, and tears were a near thing from moment to moment. But now her attention strayed to a man with a blue shirt and gray pants just like Uncle Red’s clothing. But this could not be him.

Uncle Red had lately turned himself into a tree.

The lady ahead of her stopped and looked up. During Coco’s travels through the park from nights into days, she had noticed that other visitors never looked up – only this woman. Maybe the stranger had heard a tree crying. Trees did that sometimes. But not this one. Oh, and now the red rain came down here, too, but only a few drops, and they landed on the back of the lady’s dress.

‘You’re spotted,’ said Coco. ‘You’ve got red spots – like mine.’

The woman whirled around, and a rat fell from the tree to land on her head. The lady screamed and batted at it, but the rat was tangled in her long hair, and now it was also screaming. Trembling, Coco rose up on her toes, poised for flight, and then she was off, feet touching lightly to ground as she ran, outrunning sound, chasing it out of her brain. Now there were footfalls behind her – too heavy for rodent steps, even if all the rats in the world stood on one another’s backs. But she never looked over her shoulder to see what was behind her. After a long time, forever and ever, she found herself safe among the lions.

THREE

I’m two grades ahead of my age group. So I have classes with all three of them. In History, Aggy the Biter sits next to me, clicking her teeth. Every now and then, she reaches across the aisle to pinch me. Testing the meat?

—Ernest Nadler

Riding shotgun with his partner would have been more exciting in a real car. Mallory rarely used a siren, preferring to frighten other motorists with close encounters that threatened their paint jobs and taillights. But today she was limited to the top speed of this small park vehicle, a glorified golf cart with a peanut-size engine.

Riker played navigator, consulting a map of narrow roads, meandering trails and the highways of Central Park. As they traveled north, he drew an X over a brand-new city landmark, the spot where the rats had eaten an out-of-towner. They were drawing close to the playground near 68th Street, where Mrs