Without a Word (9 page)

I wrote Barbara back and said I'd like to get together. Or maybe talk on the phone. “Send your number. There's too much news for e-mail,” I wrote, hoping for a face-to-face.

Jim didn't bother with a last name. I wrote him back and asked if we could get together for a cup of coffee—“too much news for e-mail,” I wrote again, hoping it would get me what I wanted. Jim didn't say where he was, but if there was a chance of learning something about Sally, I was willing to travel.

It was almost time to travel now, on foot, back to Sally's block. I put on a pair of faded jeans and dug my old work boots out of the back of the closet. I was already wearing a white T-shirt so I unhooked my bra, pulled my arms out of the sleeves and dropped the bra on the bed. I twisted up my hair and fastened it to the back of my head with a big barrette.

I checked my watch, then took it off. Sally hadn't been wearing one the night she'd disappeared and neither would I. I didn't have a white jacket with a hood. I wasn't Sally and Dashiell was no Border collie, but all I could do is work with what I had.

I got to Sally's block around nine and sat on the stoop for what seemed like ten minutes, fully aware as I sat there waiting that no matter what I did that mimicked Sally's behavior that night, I wasn't a twenty-three-year-old gorgeous blonde, that Dashiell carried very different baggage than a Border collie and that this was now and not then in dozens and dozens of ways I couldn't begin to name. I knew that even if I were Sally, what happened this night might not reflect at all on what had happened five years earlier; you can't step into the same river twice. Despite that, I was going to give it my best shot.

If Sally had no money, maybe just a ten or twenty stuffed into her pocket along with the pickup bags, no credit cards and a medium-sized dog, how did she disappear? Was it even reasonable to think she hadn't been abducted, raped, murdered and dumped? Was there a remote possibility that her story didn't end with Sally's body weighed down with a concrete block and dropped into the Hudson or buried somewhere in New Jersey, but with Sally in Flint, Michigan, say, alive and well and living a different life under another name?

There was only one scenario I could think of that might have gotten Sally out of town. I walked downtown first,
stopping whenever I saw a car, standing off the curb and sticking my thumb out, smiling hopefully. I tried Greenwich Street, where Sally lived, then walked a block over to Washington, which went in the opposite direction. I even tried hitching alongside the West Side Highway, although picking up passengers there would be dangerous and probably against the law. It was possible that hitchhiking was against the laws of New York City anyway, but that wasn't the point. Someone still could have stopped to pick up Sally and Roy. People broke laws all the time, for any reason you might imagine.

Not one car stopped for me during the first hour I tried hitching. It could have been because I wasn't seventeen years younger than I was, blonde and really beautiful. It could have been that with all the bad press pit bulls got, no one wanted a strange pit bull in their car. On top of everything else, Dashiell is white, and while everyone thinks there's nothing scarier than a black dog, and that may be so during the day, there's nothing eerier than a white dog in moonlight. Dashiell, glowing in the dark, his eyes an iridescent yellow in oncoming headlights, looked like everyone's worst nightmare. But some of the drivers never saw Dashiell. Twice he was hidden from view by parked cars. Once there was a Dumpster in the way. Still, no one stopped. No one even slowed down. People might stop, or not stop, for any number of reasons. I'd never know why, and worst of all, none of this told me whether Sally had been able to get a ride.

Near the end of the second hour, or what seemed like the second hour, I wondered what the hell I thought I was doing. But in some ways, I'm like Dashiell. Once I get an idea in my head, I have trouble letting go of it. So I kept trying. Halfway through the third hour, I got a better idea. I headed back toward Leon's block, wanting to try a different route,
starting where Sally would have started, from her home. I walked north, turned the corner, and headed a block west to Washington Street and then north again toward the meatpacking district, where, for one reason or another, all the cars slowed down. I didn't think I'd pass for one of this particular stroll's transvestite hookers, not in my faded jeans, work boots and clean scrubbed face, but at least the traffic wouldn't be speeding by.

I began to read what was on the huge semis parked nose-in on either side of the street, another reason that traffic was slower as they negotiated the slalom path of the meat market during working hours. It was an off hour for deliveries, but there were still a lot of markets open, a lot of trucks pulling in to unload poultry from Kansas, pork from Ohio and Nebraska, beef all the way from Montana, the refrigerated trucks so loud it would have been difficult to hear anything else. The first truck stopped for me before I got to Little West Twelfth Street.

“Where you going, little lady?” he asked, leaning toward me, his hand on the passenger door. If picking up hitchhikers was illegal in New York, it was twice as illegal for truck drivers. Company policy forbade it and it said so right on the side of the truck.

“As far as I can get,” I told him. “I've had it with New York.”

He patted the seat. “Hop in,” he told me.

I held up Dashiell's leash.

“Sure, your pooch can come, too.”

“Where are you headed?” I asked.

“Back to Illinois. A little company will help keep me awake.”

I nodded. “Thanks,” I said. “I was thinking I'd go north.”

“Suit yourself,” he said, pulling the door closed. The truck made a sound as if it was exhaling right before he drove off.

I watched out for the hookers, careful not to impose on their territory, a gaffe which could get my throat slit with a razor blade. The next truck was going to Georgia, the one after that to North Carolina. While none of the cars stopped, about half the trucks passing did. Only one guy asked me, “How much?” The others were all clear that I wasn't that kind of girl.

I didn't need to stay out any longer. If I wondered if it were possible for Sally to get out of the city with no money, no credit cards and a dog, I had my answer. It was possible. Whether or not that had happened was another story altogether.

I liked walking Dashiell in the meatpacking district during the day. The side streets were pretty empty, even with all the recent gentrifying, pricey restaurants and pricier shops. It was a place I could take him off leash and not bother anyone, a place where there were always dog treasures to be found, a dropped work glove, an old boot, an empty water bottle. It would be the perfect place for Roy to get the chance to run, too, but Sally wasn't the one who walked Roy. It was Leon who often took the dog with him when he went out shooting. Had Leon worked in the meat market, a favorite location for fashion shots? Perhaps Roy had turned to the left, had looked at Sally with his round brown eyes, had led her this way. And then what? Had she just decided to go on the spot? Or had one of the trucks stopped to offer her a ride without her asking for it, the way the truck from North Carolina had stopped for me.

“Can I give you a ride home?” he'd said, a little guy, sitting on a couple of pillows to get high enough in the cab to see over the steering wheel. When he smiled, I saw he had a front tooth missing. “You look like you might be lost,” he said when I hadn't answered right away. “This ain't no place to be walking your dog at night.” And when I still hadn't responded, “I won't hurt you. You have my word on that.”

He reached out his hand for mine, I thought to help me up into the cab, but then he said his name, “Fred White,” as if that was the assurance I'd been waiting for.

When I shook my head, he shook his right back at me. “You take care, hon. Maybe walk him that way,” he said, pointing toward Ninth Avenue. “These ladies here, they don't play nice.” Fred winked, shut the door and drove off.

Dashiell and I headed home. No wonder there were so many people who disappeared and were never heard from again, I thought. It was so easy.

You could hitch a ride out of town, no problem. But then what? You get out of the truck the next day in Fayetteville, say, and go job hunting with your Border collie? So what if you could get out of the city. Wouldn't that just be the beginning of your troubles, not the end?

Sally would have needed a job, preferably one that included room and board. I checked my watch, remembering only afterwards that I'd left it at home. Sally would need a watch, too, I thought. If she got a job, she'd have to get there on time in order to keep it. But she couldn't buy a watch until she had the job—one of those dilemmas.

I thought it was probably too late to call Leon, ask him what work skills Sally had. We walked back along Greenwich Street, just in case. If I saw a light in Leon's window, I would have called. But Leon's window was dark. It was Madison's room that had the lights on, Madison up past midnight. I wondered if she was reading in bed. Or if she'd had a bad dream. I wondered if Madison were willing to talk, if she needed to talk, would Leon be willing to listen? I wondered if anyone had ever listened to Madison, and if no one had, maybe that was why she'd stopped speaking.

Why call Leon anyway, I thought, heading over to Hudson Street, crossing over to the side where the playground was, the sandbox empty, the swings still, no sound of little
kids having fun. What skills could Sally have had, knocked up at fifteen, taking care of a baby all day when she was sixteen, then starting school at night? There wouldn't have been a chance for her to work summers either. She'd been too young. Maybe she'd babysat. Kids started that at thirteen or fourteen, those without huge allowances and credit cards, and I didn't for a minute think Sally fit into that group. Could she have gotten a job as a nanny? That would have given her room and board plus a little bit of money. But how would you do that without references? And how would you do that when you had a Border collie with you? If you had a Border collie with you. If things didn't look too good for Sally, they looked even worse for Roy.

Not a nanny, I thought the moment I woke up. Or had I been dreaming? She couldn't have walked out on her own child to end up taking care of someone else's. I didn't believe that was possible.

After breakfast, I checked the want ads, looking for jobs that included food and lodging, or if not food, at least lodging. A place to stay, that would have been the first problem that needed solving. Of course, the jobs in the
Times
were mostly local. I didn't know what Sally might have found in other cities, or in a town so small it only made it onto local maps.

I thought about the truckers, most of them lonely, some of them trying to deal with their loneliness by spending a few bucks and a few minutes with a transvestite hooker. A lot of them willing to bend the law and pick up a woman and a dog, have company part of the way back home. If Sally had been picked up by a trucker, might someone have seen that?

The hookers were out on weekend mornings. After working all night, they looked like they'd been washed up onshore someplace, beached and barely able to move. The ones who hadn't had electrolysis had beards showing by
morning, not a pretty sight. But I wasn't interested in purchasing their services. I was interested in talking. Perhaps one of them had seen Sally and her dog get into a truck. Perhaps, I thought, sitting outside with a cup of tea, the cool morning air waking me up, I should have my head examined. The hookers were all hard-core junkies. They wouldn't remember yesterday, let alone something they might have seen in passing five years earlier. Hookers as witnesses? The cops say, if hookers clean up well, they can be great witnesses in court. But I doubted that these particular hookers could be cleaned up. By the time they hit
this
stroll, they were beneath rock bottom. Most of them wouldn't talk to me unless I offered money for conversation, and in that case, they'd give me what they thought I wanted to hear. “Yeah, baby, a little blonde with her dog. Sure, I remember, she got into a poultry truck, a beef truck, one of them pork trucks, whatever kind of truck you got in mind, she got into it. Never saw her sorry white ass around here again.”

Did the hookers even live five years, the lives they lived, the work they did, the chances they took?

And what about the butchers? Very few were still open at night, and of those that were, none would rat out a trucker. They wouldn't tell me if they saw a trucker negotiating with a hooker. And they wouldn't tell me if they'd seen Sally getting into a truck with one either.

A witness in the meatpacking district? Not on a bet.

After feeding Dashiell, we headed over to Leon's building. It was Sunday morning, late enough for most people to be awake, early enough that they might still be home. I thought I'd start with the Goodmans, see if they would talk to me.

“I wasn't surprised to hear what happened,” Nancy Goodman said. She was standing in the doorway but hadn't invited me in. “She's a very disturbed little girl.”

“Not for nothing,” I said. I waited for that to sink in.

“I suppose not.”

“And no one could blame Alicia for not wanting to see her again.”

“It wasn't Alicia's decision. Sam and I thought it would be a bad idea, too dangerous.”

“Alicia still wanted to play with Madison?”

Nancy bit her lip.

“She wasn't afraid of her? Or angry?”

“She's a kid. They were friends. But we thought…”

I waited.

“We thought better safe than sorry.”

“I would probably feel exactly the same way if I were in your position,” I said, figuring Alicia for an only child, her mother not yet understanding that no matter what you did or didn't do, your kids would get hurt, the price you paid to be a human being, to be alive. “Still,” I said, “I can't help feeling for Madison. She's so isolated.”

“Ms. Alexander, did you come up here on her behalf, to see if Alicia could play with her? Because if you did…” She was shaking her head, out of words for the moment.

“No. Well, yes and no. I didn't come to see if Alicia could play with Madison. But I did come on Madison's behalf. As I mentioned, Leon's hired me to try to find Sally. He thinks if I can, Madison might talk again.”

Nancy sighed, took a long look at Dashiell and stepped out of the way. “Come in,” she said, the weight of what she was about to tell me almost too much for her to bear. “Sam is out with Alicia getting bagels and lox. We can talk until they come back.”

I followed her into the living room, a large sunny room with lots of plants and pictures of the family all over the walls. The room was done in a pale green, the rug a slightly darker shade, as if Ms. Peach had been their decorator.

Nancy sat on the edge of the couch. I took a chair facing it and sat there, signaling Dashiell to lie down.

“Were you friends, you and Sally?”

“No, I wouldn't say we were. The girls played, usually here. Sally was in school and time to study was precious to her. I didn't mind having them both here, as long as they got along.”

“And they did?”

“At first, yes. Madison always seemed very happy to stay here. Sometimes she'd ask to stay for dinner or ask to sleep over. She was…” Nancy bit her lip and turned away. “One time when she was here, she told me she was hungry. I offered her a cut-up raw carrot, Alicia's favorite snack. She said, ‘Oh, a raw carrot.
Thank
you,' as if I'd slid a pan of hot chocolate chip cookies out of the oven and told her she could eat as many as she wanted, then take the rest home.” She shook her head. “She was a very needy little girl, even before Sally left, disappeared. Leon's, well, vague. There's something insubstantial about him, do you know what I mean?”

I shrugged. I wasn't here to share what I thought about Leon with her.

“And Sally, she had her nose in a book most of the time.”

“Studying?” I asked.

“Or just reading. Even when I'd run into her at the playground, Madison would be on the slide or in the sandbox and Sally would be reading, not paying attention to Madison at all. And if Madison came up to her, she'd hold up one finger, you know, to tell her to wait until she'd finished the sentence she was reading or the paragraph she was underlining.”

“What about Leon? Did he pay attention to Madison?” I asked, picturing the empty refrigerator, wondering when Madison's sheets were changed last, or if she and her father
ever went to the movies or sat on a bench by the river and watched the boats go by.

“Oh, Leon's Leon,” she said. “He's a perfectly nice man, I suppose, and I'm sure he wouldn't hurt a fly, but his head is in the clouds. After Sally left, before…”

“The accident?”

Nancy nodded. “I sent my maid down. I told him, ‘Leon, every other week. You've got to do it.' The place was falling apart. If not for Annie, oh, I just can't imagine.”

“But he must care for Madison. He hired me to…”

“He's very protective. I'm sure he cares a lot, in his own way. He just doesn't have very good parenting skills.”

“And neither did Sally?”

“I hate to speak ill of…”

“We don't know that,” I said.

She nodded. “Right. But where could she be all these years?”

“That's what I'm hoping to find out. That's why I'm here.”

“Here? But what could I possibly tell you? What could I know?”

“You're helping a lot. I'm wondering, besides school, what Sally was interested in? What else did she like to do?”

Nancy shrugged. “Read,” she said. “She just wanted to get lost in her books.”

I heard the door open. A man's voice said, “Show Mommy what you got her.” And a young girl, taller and heavier than Madison, appeared in the archway to the living room with a bouquet of flowers. She stopped when she saw me, or perhaps it was seeing Dashiell that made her pause.

I stood. Dashiell stood, too, wondering if this was another little girl he was supposed to befriend. But then Sam put his hands on Alicia's shoulders, ready to snatch her out of harm's way, so I dropped my palm in front of Dashiell's face, signaling him to stay where he was.

Nancy got up to see me out. “I'll explain later,” she said to Sam as we passed him.

At the door, I thanked her for her help. She wished me luck. I was grateful. I thought luck was exactly what I needed, as much of it as I could get.

I took the stairs down to the third floor and rang Nina Reich's bell, but there was no answer. So I wrote a note on one of my cards and slipped it under her door. I took the stairs again, to the first floor and the apartment under Leon's. Ted was home, but apparently I woke him up. I apologized, told him who I was, why I was there, and offered to come back later. He turned around, padding back toward the kitchen.

“You drink coffee?” he asked without turning or stopping. He looked lost in his striped velour robe, Jacob's coat of many colors, a small, slim man with tousled hair and sleepy eyes.

“Tea,” I said, wondering how I had the nerve to be so demanding when I'd just woken up a perfect stranger.

“Caf or decaf?” He turned around this time. “I was hoping he'd do something,” he said. “
Something
. He sure took his good old time. Go sit down, Rachel. I'm going to take a sec and get dressed while the water boils.”

“You're sure? I can come back later.”

“Sit, sit,” he said. “I'll only be a minute.”

It was funny to be in Ted's apartment after being in Leon's. The layout was the same, the style another story. Where Leon's cluttered dining room began, Ted had a carousel horse facing the entrance, head down, mouth open, a foreleg bent and raised. The body of the horse was white, the leather saddle trimmed in gold. Beyond the horse was a round marble table, white, with leather chairs, a chandelier overhead. Ted's living room was white, white carpet, white sofa, white drapes. White, in New York City. How did he keep it so clean?

The walls were covered with pictures, too, but unlike Leon's, these pictures were all personal. They were all of Ted. Ted, it appeared, was an actor, so I got to see Ted in a hat, Ted in
Cats
(though with all the makeup, I couldn't tell which one he was), Ted as the master of ceremonies in
Cabaret
—so that was why he looked slightly familiar; he was a Joel Grey look-alike, at least in makeup. I was looking at that poster, the one for the road show of
Cabaret,
when Ted appeared, now wearing an ecru linen shirt with pale blue linen slacks. He'd obviously taken the time to put his head under the faucet and apply a ton of product to his hair. It did the trick, too. Not only was his hair slicked back, but he looked awake now, lively, as if this weren't a visit about a missing neighbor, but rather showtime.

“I was his understudy on Broadway,” glancing at the poster, then back at me. “The man never so much as caught a cold.” He shook his head. “So talk to me. Do you think the kid did it?”

“Do you?” Thinking about her fingerprints on the needle.

“She's angry, sullen, peculiar, pouty, exasperating, let's see, what else? Oh, yes, she's becoming an adolescent. Did you notice? Or was she wearing one of Sally's shirts? I bet Leon hasn't noticed. Did I mention angry? Or didn't you get to see the eyes she hides behind those dark glasses?” He shivered dramatically. “And then there's her father, so totally lost without Sally, he's barely alive. Why
wouldn't
the kid want to commit murder?”

I looked at the sofa, then back at Ted, communicating the way Dashiell does.

“I already told you to sit, missy. Do you want it engraved?” A moment later, from the kitchen, “What do you take in your tea?”

“Nothing,” I said, anxious to hear what he had to say. “What makes you so sure?” I asked. “About Madison?”

He poked his head around the corner. “I'm not. So if you don't find Sally, then what? It doesn't look like a very promising gig for you, does it, what with Sally gone so long and the kid not talking?”

“I'm not ready to give up on it,” I told him.

He walked back into the living room, glanced at a poster in which he was standing sideways, hat low over his brow, pelvis tipped back, arms at odd angles. “Theo Fowler is Fosse,” it said. And under that it said “October 1–22, 1994, Miracle Theater, St. Paul, Minnesota.”

“If she's still alive,” he said, “you won't find her. Not unless she wants to be found.”

“And what makes you so sure of that?” I asked. Dashiell was still checking out the room, poking his nose under things, around things, having a good sniff.

Ted turned and left again, coming back a moment later with a tray which he put down on the glass-topped coffee table, coffee, tea, biscotti, linen napkins, sugar, lemon, cream, spoons. How had he done all that so quickly?

He sat on one of the white leather chairs that faced the sofa, the coffee table between us. “She could come back, you know, even after all these years. He'd take her back. There's no question in my mind.”

“And you think she will, when she's ready? You think until that time, should that time ever come, I won't be able to find her?”

“Are you good?”

“I work hard,” I said.

He looked at Dashiell, maybe for the first time, then back at me. “What do you have so far?”

“A way she might have gotten out of town without money and without using her credit cards. Even with Roy.”

Ted leaned closer. “How?”

“I'm not saying this happened. I'm only saying it could have happened. I tried it myself last night.”

“What? What did you try last night?” He reached for his coffee, then changed his mind. “I'm all ears. Don't leave out any of the sordid details.”

“Hitchhiking.”

He sat back. “You're kidding.”