Without a Word (11 page)

“I couldn't say. I suppose it's possible.”

He shook his head.

“Not possible?” I asked.

“I don't know. It's just that…” He'd been looking down. He met my eyes now. “Having a kid, it's not like buying a pair of shoes, they pinch, you return them or you throw them away. I don't understand bringing a child into the world and then abandoning her.”

He might have meant Sally, but I had the strong feeling it was Bechman he was talking about, Bechman who'd stolen Charles's wife and the child that should have been his. And then what, visited once or twice a week? How much more time could he have spent with them when he had another family to care for in Larchmont, his
real
family?

I began to wonder if beneath the sadness there was a fulminating rage, and if so, if that rage was on behalf of his
“niece,” or perhaps for himself, for the damage Bechman had done to him.

And what of Celia, living on her own with JoAnn, waiting for those crumbs of time Eric Bechman could spare for them? How angry had she been? And was the “bad day” she was having today nothing, perhaps, compared to the bad days she had when Bechman was still alive?

We took the long way home, weaving in and out of my favorite Village blocks, then discovering one of the last street fairs of the season, mostly people selling things they no longer wanted, an old manual typewriter, used books, stuffed animals, some with a missing ear or tail, that had once belonged to kids who were now in college, a bicycle that looked as if it might be okay after a few days in the repair shop, shoes with run-down heels, vintage clothes and just plain used clothes, some embarrassingly worn. One person's junk, another person's treasure. That wasn't only true for porcelain statues, lamps without shades, the shawl your grandmother crocheted that was filled with terrible memories rather than warmth. It was true for dogs, an abandoned mutt at the shelter, at least one of the lucky few, becoming someone else's beloved companion, and for people, a lover one woman dumps becoming the perfect man for someone else.

I thought of the way some people would sit outside selling their chipped knickknacks for a buck or two apiece, or hoping to, and other people held on to everything, mismatched china, a nasty dog, a distracted mate. I thought about Leon and Madison, living as if they were roommates
as much as parent and child. And I thought about Sally, wondering again if she'd left or if she'd been taken away.

When I got home, I fed Dashiell, then went upstairs and turned on the computer. First I Googled Sally's name, Sally Spector, and got nothing. Then I tried her maiden name, Sally Bruce. Still nothing. So I tried Sally Madison, Sally Roy, Roy Spector, Roy Bruce, Bruce Madison, even, thinking she might have a sense of humor, Sally Forth. Nothing. I thought about what Ted had said, that I wouldn't find her unless she wanted to be found. I hoped he was wrong.

I picked up the pages I'd printed on chronic tic disorder, read some more about the syndrome that had shaped Madison's life for the last five years and perhaps had helped shape her mother's life as well. The dopamine blockers that were used to treat the tics, I read, had a limited rate of success and a high level of side effects. Most of the sites I found said that the tics might last into adolescence for some children, or they might last indefinitely. Tics, it reminded me again, grew worse during emotional stress. Unfortunately, I had already seen firsthand that that was so. But when I read on, I found something odd, something that made me curious: the fact that the tics and trembling that characterized the disease were absent during sleep.

It was late, but not too late. I dialed Leon's number. When he answered, I asked if he could drop Madison off at my house around four the next day. He said he could. I gave him the address. I asked if he'd send a change of clothes, her pajamas and a toothbrush, too. There was a silence on the line, Leon thinking over what I'd said. Fair enough, I thought, waiting until he was ready to answer.

“You want her to stay over?” he asked.

“I do,” I told him. There was another silence and then I heard Leon cough. “Emil/Emily, too?” he asked.

I don't know why it was the question about the turtle that
made my chest tighten the way it did. For a moment I felt so sad it was hard to breathe. I found myself pulling a Leon, nodding into the phone.

“Yes,” I said when I could. “Whatever—or whomever—she wants to bring.” And then, “If she's willing to come at all.”

“She will be,” he said.

“How do you know that?”

“The jacket you found, Sally's jacket? She slept in it last night.”

When I hung up I needed some air. I needed to be moving. I grabbed the keys to the Siegal house, and barefoot, Dashiell running ahead and barking, I crossed the garden and entered the town house via the back door, running up the stairs to close the window I'd left open. Then I went back to my own house and up to my office.

I studied the file cards full of notes I'd tacked up over the desk, adding some new ones, holding Celia Abele's card for a moment and then deciding not to wait, to call her right away, to try to see her in the morning. It was after ten, late to call a stranger, but I didn't think Celia would be asleep, and hearing Leon's voice a moment before, sounding as if he himself was the child I was supposed to save, I couldn't wait another moment.

I reached for the phone and then hesitated. Perhaps it wasn't Leon who needed saving. Perhaps it was someone else. When Leon had mentioned Emil/Emily, for a moment I was back in my mother's kitchen the day she said she was leaving.

Was that why this case pulled on me so, because when I looked at Madison, I saw myself as a little girl? My mother had come home, but not to me. From that time on, I knew I was alone, or if I wasn't, I could be at any moment. Isn't that what Madison knew? Isn't that why she clung so hard to Emil/Emily, someone that couldn't run away and leave her?

Celia answered on the first ring. She agreed to meet me for breakfast the next morning, after she dropped JoAnn off at school. When I asked where she wanted to meet, she gave me her address.

It was late and I was cold and wanted to go to bed. I decided to check my e-mail before shutting down the computer, to see if there was anything else from Classmates.com. And there was, just one letter. It was from one of the people who had written before, the one who hadn't bothered with a last name.

“Your not Sally,” it said. “Who are you?” It was signed “Jim.”

Eric Bechman, Charles Abele had told me, was thrilled to have a daughter, but not thrilled enough, it seemed to me, to put little JoAnn and her mother, the late doctor's lover, into a building with an elevator or perhaps on the garden floor of a lovely old town house. By the time I'd climbed to the tiny top-floor apartment where Celia Daniels Abele lived with her daughter, I was thinking that perhaps the doctor hadn't been quite as thrilled as he let on. But that was no secret to Celia, Bechman's wife up in Larchmont having her teeth capped or doing Pilates with a private trainer or whatever it was you did in Larchmont, while she, Celia, had to carry her groceries, her baby and the stroller up all these stairs. Dashiell might have been the only one who found the trip to apartment 4B a total joy. He ran ahead, waiting for me at each landing with a manic smile, his mouth open, his tongue lolling out to one side, his eyes ablaze. Was he hoping for another flight to climb, then another still?

“JoAnn would love a puppy,” Celia said, greeting me at the door with the teakettle in her hand. “But with all these stairs…”

As if I hadn't noticed.

She headed back to her kitchen. Dashiell was already inside. I followed him into the small, sunny living room and sat down on the couch. While Celia was making tea and heating the croissants, I slid off my jacket, letting it just fall behind me. The living room had an exposed brick wall and a small, nonworking fireplace. The couch I was sitting on opened up to a bed. The thickness of the seat told me that. And with two apartments to a floor, there could only have been one bedroom in Celia's apartment, the one that faced back, south, over the garden below and the one from the town house on the next block, back-to-back, like married couples who had stayed together but had nothing on earth to say to each other.

There was carpeting on the floor, nubby and in shades of oatmeal, very much like the one in the apartment she'd moved out of, and the furniture was decent. Had he paid for everything, I wondered, the blue vase on the windowsill with the single rose in it, long past its prime, the round coffee table in front of the couch, the two chairs facing the couch, one with a stain on it that might have come from a bottle of milk that spilled sometime back or a sippy cup with a loose top more recently, the bookshelves, the small color TV set, the primitive wooden carving of a bird of some kind? In this neighborhood, even a small walk-up would have a hefty rent, $1,800 a month, maybe more. If Celia hadn't been working all these years, how had Bechman come up with all this money without anyone knowing about it? That was the real question.

She came in with a tray and set it down on the coffee table, her blonde hair, cut to chin length, falling forward as she bent, covering her pretty face, her pale freckled skin, her large, sad eyes.

“She was never what you'd call a happy child,” she said, as if I'd asked her to tell me about Madison a minute ago
rather than the night before on the phone. “She was odd, very bright, her own little person, you might say. Even all those years ago, you knew there was something different about her, something out of the ordinary.”

“In a nice way?” Her ex had said she'd liked Madison, but I didn't want to bring him into the conversation just yet, if at all.

“Oh, yes, for me, at least. I found her, well, compelling. You could have a conversation with her, at seven. Imagine that. And she'd notice things none of the other kids would notice, the fact that one of the doorways was raised, you'd have to step up to get into one of the offices or the fact that a light would blink when the phone rang. She had just as much reason to be scared as all of Eric's other patients, but she never seemed scared. She just seemed, well, curious, interested.”

“Did she socialize with the other kids?”

Celia thought. “No. Not really. Only with adults. Sometimes she'd get into a conversation with me, sometimes with one of the parents, almost never with the kids. Or she'd take a book and read aloud to one of the toys, as if it were real.”

“Did she bring the turtle?”

“I heard about that.” She shook her head, a slight smile on her lips but not in her eyes. “The turtle came later, after.”

“After her diagnosis? Or after her mother disappeared?”

“Both. And also after I had left my job.”

“Had she stopped talking while you were still there?”

Celia nodded. “Poor thing,” she said. “Poor girl. Yes, she had. The last two times I saw her, she wouldn't speak. She let me hug her, though, the last time I saw her.”

“Did she know it was the last time she'd see you? Did she know you were leaving?”

Celia nodded. “Eric, Dr. Bechman, said not to tell her. He said she was in the middle of…” She stopped, looked off
to the side, wiped her eyes with her fingertips. She wasn't wearing any makeup, no nail polish, no wedding ring either, I noticed. “A crisis,” she said. “And that my telling her I was leaving wouldn't be a good idea. But I disagreed. I didn't like the idea of just disappearing from the life of a troubled child without any explanation. Little did I know what was coming,” she said. “Poor kid.”

“So you told her that last time?”

“No. I told her as soon as it was decided. I told her I'd only see her three more times.”

“Then Sally was there when you told Madison you were leaving?”

“She was.” Her face darkened. “That was the last time I saw her. As it turned out, she walked out of Madison's life before I did.”

“What about the other kids? Did you say good-bye to them?”

“No. It didn't matter one way or another with the other kids. Some were friendly, some not, but none of them…” She raised one hand, trolling for the right word. “None of them related to me the way she did. None of them were affectionate.”

“She was?”

“Very. She'd bring me presents and then tell me a story about each one. One was a rock named Gilbert.” A real smile this time.

Celia got up and walked over to the bookshelves. At first I thought she was going to pick up the picture of JoAnn sitting on a swing, being pushed by her mother. Did that mean her father had taken the photo, that he'd gone out in public with his daughter? Perhaps not. Perhaps it was Uncle Charles who took the picture, JoAnn laughing, too young to know she shouldn't be as happy as it seemed she was. But it wasn't the photo Celia picked up. It was a smooth stone, the
size of her fist, that had been on the shelf next to the picture of her daughter. She brought it back to where we were sitting, turning it over in her hand.

“Gilbert?”

She nodded. “‘Gilbert was a very special stone,' she told me. ‘Why?' I'd asked her. So she held him up to my ear. ‘Listen,' she said. And I did. ‘Can you hear it? He's singing. He always sings when he's sad.' Then standing there, leaning on the desk, right next to my chair, she sang a little song she made up, ‘Gilbert's song.' None of the other children did that either.”

“Gave you singing stones?”

“No. Came around to my side of the desk. It was as if I were the teacher and they were in the classroom, as if they were a little afraid of me.”

“How odd.”

Celia shook her head again. “Not really. Have you ever gone to the other side of the receptionist's desk at a doctor's office?”

“I guess not,” I told her, the stone, Gilbert, still cupped in her hand.

“Do you think she did it?”

Celia put the stone down on the coffee table and rubbed her palms against her skirt. She scowled, picked up her cup of tea, put it back down, almost tipping it over. “I've wondered about it.”

I nodded. “And?”

“If she didn't,” she said, “who did?”

I stayed where I was, but it took a lot of effort. I wanted to stand, to loom over her, to grab her by the throat and shake her. Was that the way people thought, I wondered, that Madison had committed the crime because they didn't know who else might have? If that was the way a friend of Madison's thought, what chance did this kid have with the cops?

“Just because we don't know who else may have done it doesn't mean Madison did,” I said.

Celia opened her mouth, but I put a hand up, telling her no, telling her I wasn't finished yet. I reached for the stone, cradling it in one hand, touching the smooth surface with my other hand. Then I lifted Gilbert to my ear and cocked my head as if I were listening.

“Gilbert has a question,” I told her.

She leaned forward, expecting something light, perhaps something funny to change the tone, to make things more bearable. But that wasn't at all what I had in mind.

“How did he pay for all this without his wife knowing? Is she that much in the dark about his finances?”

There was a slight gasp, her breath whistling as she inhaled, and that quickly, Celia Daniels standing suddenly, brushing some hair off her face, picking up the tray and heading for her kitchen, letting me know the interview was over.

I got up and followed her.

“Well?” I said.

“Why is that your business?” she demanded, the delicate skin of her face flushed, as if she'd just climbed all those stairs, her daughter pulling on one hand, a heavy bag from D'Agostino's in the other.

“You have no right,” she said, her small, thin body visibly trembling. “It was between us. We weren't hurting anyone else.”

“Is that right?”

No answer.

“Not your ex-husband? Not Mrs. Bechman? Not your daughter?”

“What happened between Charles and me, that's over. That's ancient history. And Mrs. Bechman didn't know.”

“Which makes it okay?”

“Look,” she said, getting angry now, “we didn't plan this. What happened happened and we were making the best of it, doing what was best for JoAnn and…” She took a big breath, let it out. “And none of this is any of your business.”

Her back was to the counter. There was nowhere to go, and she knew it. There was nowhere to go in another way, too, because if I didn't get the answers I wanted from her, she knew I'd get them some other way, and that whatever that other way was, it would be worse, it would be public. Who was she protecting at this point? Her lover's reputation, his widow, her daughter? And if she was protecting JoAnn, who was protecting Madison?

“It
is
my business,” I said quietly, nearly whispering it. “I'm here to speak for a little girl who's accused of murder and who refuses to speak for herself.”

“What does one thing have to do with another?” she asked.

“That's one of the things I have to find out, don't I? So what was it, all told, five thousand a month? What about health insurance? He couldn't still carry you at the office, could he, not with two partners looking at the books? So how did he do it? With health insurance,” I shook my head, contemplating the late doctor's monthly nut, “it would have been a considerable amount.”

“He was a consultant,” she said. “It's no big deal, it's done all the time, except…” Her eyes were wide now, and I could smell her fear.

“Except?”

Dashiell had gotten up when I did. He put his paws up on the sink now, asking for water.

“Well, it was separate from his practice, of course,” shrugging, playing the little woman who didn't fully understand her man's business now. “It was hard, you know, putting in extra hours, but he had to do something so that he
could…” Her hand made a small circle and then dropped to her side.

“Afford to take care of you?” I asked.

There was a bowl in the drainer. I filled it with cold water without asking and put it down on the blue vinyl tile kitchen floor for Dash, waiting for him to drink before continuing, wanting to make sure Celia heard every word.

“And this additional work he took on,” I said, “it paid him in cash?”

Celia frowned.

“It was off the books?”

“I, well, I guess so. It would have had to have been. It would have been awkward if it showed up on his taxes.”

“Very.”

“I know what you're thinking. I worried about it, too. Doctors' incomes are scrutinized so carefully by the IRS, but he said it was safe and it wasn't all that much money.” She bent and picked up the empty bowl, placing it in the sink. “He didn't want to hurt her. He didn't want to hurt his sons. It wasn't the way you think it was. He wasn't a bad person.”

I lifted one hand, let it drop. “What else could he do? What other choice did he have?”

“Exactly,” she said, so happy I understood their situation at last.

Celia smiled. I smiled back.

“And who was it he did this consulting work for,” I asked, “to keep you and JoAnn in groceries?”

“Drug companies,” she said, her voice even lower than mine had been.

“Drug companies?”

“For their advertising divisions. They do these focus groups, you know, asking people questions about new drugs they want to market, and they need experts to lead them. They pay very well.”

“What sort of questions?” wondering why they needed a doctor to ask them. Were they technical questions perhaps?

“For instance,” Celia said, “he'd ask them if they'd be more likely to choose a pill that was pink or one that was blue.”

“I see.”

“And he'd ask them about the wording of the ads, which words appealed to them, which would make them trust the product.”

“And they needed a doctor, a specialist, to do this because…”

“Oh, it gave people the sense the drug company was really concerned about the needs and preferences of the patients.”

I nodded.

“But I did worry about it. About the fact that it was…”

“Illegal?”

She made one of those little gasps again. “Oh, no, not illegal.”

“Off the books isn't illegal now?”

“Well, yes, but…”