The Chalk Girl

upon this poor bloodstained baby – Mallory’s ticket to the street. No more desk duty. A lost child was found, and this had the makings of a great press release to lessen the damage to tourism done by bloodthirsty rats. The mayor would be so grateful.

Redbrick walls, trees and flowers enclosed the courtyard of the zoo’s cafe. The luncheon crowd was terrorized by screaming gangs of toddlers and faster youngsters pursued by frazzled young women. Older women, veteran mommies, sat quietly, waiting for the children’s batteries to run down. And strolling pigeons were beggars at every outdoor table.

Coco, a born storyteller, alternately chomped a hotdog and gave the detectives more details of her odyssey through Central Park. No question could have a simple answer without the embroidery of fantasy. In respect to the spots on her T-shirt, she said, ‘The blood comes from the same place the rats do.’ She pointed upward. ‘There are rats who live in the sky.’ She looked from Riker’s face to Mallory’s, correctly suspecting skepticism in their eyes. ‘Some do,’ she said with great dignity and authority. ‘Sometimes it rains rats, and sometimes it rains blood.’ She shrugged one thin shoulder to tell them that this weather phenomenon was a bit of a crapshoot.

Mallory’s indulgence was wearing off. ‘You saw the rats with the woman who—’

Riker put up one hand to forestall a grisly account of Mrs Lanyard’s demise. ‘So you saw all those rats in the meadow, huh?’

‘Yes. Then everyone ran away. Me, too.’ In the child’s version, a few dozen rats became a horde of thousands, and all of them were big as houses with teeth as long as her arms. ‘Rats are prolific breeders.’

Riker wondered how many six-year-olds had prolific in their small store of words.

‘Whose blood is that?’ Mallory was not a great believer in sky rats and blood rain.

‘It’s God’s blood,’ said Coco.

Riker stared at the red stains. The elongated shapes did suggest drops falling from above, but so much of the world was above the head of this child. ‘Where were you when the blood landed on your T-shirt?’

‘In the park. There are lots of rats in the park. Most people never see them. They’re usually nocturnal.’

‘Nocturnal? That’s a long word for a little girl,’ said Riker. ‘How old are you?’

‘I’m eight.’ She said this with pride. It might be true. She was smaller than other children that age, but her words were bigger.

Mallory placed her own hotdog on Coco’s tray, and the child fell upon it as if she had not been fed for days. ‘You were in the park at night? That’s how you know rats are nocturnal?’

‘I read that in a book.’ The little girl demolished the second hotdog. ‘Granny used to give me book lessons every day. That was before I went to live with Uncle Red. But when it got dark, he had himself delivered to the park. I went to look for him, but he turned into a tree.’

‘So you were here all night?’ Now Riker was incredulous. ‘All by yourself?’

‘Yes. I listened to the tree all night long – every night. You know the way trees cry. They don’t have mouths, so it sounds like this.’ She covered her mouth with both hands and made a muffled plaintive sound.

Riker felt a sudden chill with this hint of something true. He stared at the blood on the child’s T-shirt.

Whose blood?

Mallory used a napkin to gently wipe mustard from Coco’s chin, rewarding her with this little act of kindness – training her – like a puppy. ‘Let’s go find your Uncle Red.’

It was the freelancer’s day off from the despair of never landing a full-time job, and all he had with him was a damn camera phone. Though he had seen it happen with his own eyes, no photo editor would ever believe that rat had fallen from the sky. He had snapped the picture seconds too late, only able to capture an image of a rodent riding the back of a woman. He had followed the screaming lady on a chase of many twisty paths before losing her.

It was his first time in the Ramble, which had no helpful signs with cute names for these trails, and he had been traveling in circles for nearly an hour. As he walked, he looked down at the image displayed on his camera phone, looking for landmarks of the place where the rat-ridden woman had begun her mad dash. Finally he was on the right path again. Yes, this was where he had seen the rat come down from the sky. Looking upward at the overreaching branches, he conceded that the rodent had most likely fallen from a tree, though it was still a hell of a shot.

But when did rats start climbing trees?

He stared at the picture on the small screen of his cell phone, the photograph of a woman with a rat in her hair. In the background, there was a smaller figure – a red-haired child, her head tilted back – looking up at what? More tree rats? He stood on the exact spot where the curious little girl had been standing an hour ago. Staring up into the dense leaves, he detected something green but not leafy. A bulging bag was strung up on a high branch, and – holy shit! – it moved. A rat emerged from a tear in the bag, and now the creature was coming down through the leaves, dropping from one bough to land on a lower one. An acrobat rat? It paused on the lowest limb to have its picture taken. Click. Fat and ungainly, the rodent barely kept its balance with tiny vermin hands. A drunken rat? Its fur was slicked down, and the rat shook itself like a wet dog, splattering the freelancer’s white shirt – oh, crap – with drops of blood.

Mallory led a short parade of vehicles. Behind the detectives rode two patrolmen, and the third cart was driven by a park ranger. The little girl sat on Riker’s lap, her head turning from side to side, looking for a dead bird, she said. They were traveling north, heading back toward the Ramble again, with only the child’s cryptic clue of water tied with a fat orange ribbon; and that would be the maintenance crew’s fence around a sliver of the lake, the same place where Mallory had tossed a teenager’s phone into the water. As the three carts rolled along West Drive, the detectives learned that the formal name of Coco’s granny was Grandmother. Uncle Red had no other designation.

And this child had survived more than one night in the park.

‘Stop!’ When the carts pulled over to the curb, Coco jumped out to inspect another drinking fountain, the third one along this route. ‘This is it,’ she said, pointing to the eyeless dead bird in the basin. She recoiled from the buzzing flies that covered the tiny corpse, and she ran to the end of a curved stone wall, holding both hands over her ears.

Mallory called the little girl back to the cart, and the search party headed into the Ramble, rolling on paths too narrow for larger vehicles. Coco could offer them no more guidance, but Mallory seemed to need no directions, and Riker had a fair idea of where she was going. She stopped the cart at the place where she had earlier paused for a closer look at something that passed for minor vandalism. Now she pointed to a small section of chicken-wire fence that had been forced down. ‘Coco, have you seen that before?’

‘I didn’t do it,’ said the little girl. And Riker had to smile, for this was his partner’s trademark line. Coco climbed down from his lap to stand on the path. ‘We’re here.’

The park ranger left his own vehicle. ‘The kid should get back in the cart. We’ve got a rat swarm in the Ramble. That’s why you don’t see any people here. They swarmed, too.’

‘We’re half a mile from Sheep Meadow,’ said Mallory. ‘Aren’t rats territorial?’

‘Yes, ma’am, but these aren’t the same rats.’ The ranger pointed east. ‘Our new exterminator flushed another swarm out of a building on the other side of the Ramble. He was supposed to kill them, but he just got them stoned on chemicals.’

‘He fumigated rats . . . in a park.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ said the ranger, his face deadpan, his voice without affect. ‘And now they’re all so wonderfully uninhibited.’

‘Well, that explains a lot.’ Riker settled the child on the passenger seat of the park ranger’s cart. ‘Okay, honey, you stay here and talk rats with the funny man.’

When the detective had joined his partner by the downed section of fence, the ranger called to them, ‘Watch out! The rats are more aggressive now, and they bite. If you see one, don’t run. That only encourages them. I think they like it when you run.’

Mallory pointed to the ground where deep twin ruts were overlapped by shallow ones. ‘A tire-tread pattern for two wheels. That fits with something small, like a hand truck.’

‘A delivery guy’s dolly. Coco said her uncle was delivered to the park.’ Riker’s shoes left no footprints on the dry dirt. ‘So the dolly came through here after the rain, when the ground was soft.’