The little boy’s feet made no sound on the flagstones. She had never mastered footsteps for her old classmate – never tried – for no one knew better than she that he was not there. And so the policeman’s remark – ‘Who’s your friend?’ – had been somewhat unnerving.
‘I thought they’d never let us go home,’ said Dead Ernest. He never said anything to elicit a response from her. They held no two-way conversations. Only crazy people spoke to the dead.
The boy who was not there had sprung from sessions with a child psychiatrist after the – incident. Dr Fyfe, a believer in confrontational therapy, had said to her then, ‘Imagine the anxiety that troubles you. Picture it as a person. Talk to it, yell if you like, but get it all out.’ One snag – Phoebe had never been a confrontational child. And so she had constructed a facsimile of angst – Dead Ernest – but never railed against him. She had only listened to him, hour upon hour. After a succession of silent sessions, the young listener’s therapy had been terminated.
Dead Ernest lived on.
Phoebe opened the cottage door to a large room with a high ceiling and a sleeping alcove. Apart from the kitchenette, every bit of wall space was lined with books. These volumes had been accumulated by generations of Driscols in hiding. They were all works of fiction – escape hatches.
She removed her gray dress – Dead Ernest called it her cloth of invisibility – and draped it over the back of a chair. The armoire’s door was opened to a lineup of cotton frocks in bright colors and bold prints.
‘You’re running late,’ said the dead boy with one shoe.
Quite right. She had only twenty minutes to get downtown to the café on Bleecker Street. Phoebe undid her bun, and brown tresses fell in waves to her shoulders. After donning her dress and slipping on sandals, she ran a comb through her hair. Next came the perfume and a bright swatch of lipstick. Done.
She walked out the door, down the alley and into the street to flag down a taxi. Dead Ernest’s legs were shorter; he ran to keep up and followed her into the backseat of the yellow car. And now they were off on a wild ride with a cabbie from the school of Oh-was-that-a-red-light? The first blown traffic signal was followed by the driver’s diatribe on the thieving city of New York. ‘They speed up the yellow lights. Maybe you noticed, lady? If you’re walking, you can start across an intersection on the green, watch it go from yellow to red, and die before you get to the other side. I love this town.’ After three court stories about the tickets he had beaten, the car stopped on the corner of Bleecker Street and MacDougal.
‘You made it,’ said Dead Ernest.
With minutes to spare.
Phoebe Bledsoe was always the first to arrive at the Mexican restaurant. Over the years, she had known this place as a coffeehouse and café under different ownership, décor and menus. Only the location was unchanged – and the time of her rendezvous. She sat down at a table far from the sunshine of the front window. The old gold cigarette lighter was pulled from her purse, and she rubbed it between her fingers. As if by magic, the door opened, and a young man with long, dark hair walked in. He had always been slender, and now he was thin but still handsome – and probably stoned. It was hard to tell. He moved with an animal grace so deep, so innate, that he could not stumble or falter or fall even by an accident of overdose. He took his customary seat on the other side of the room. It must be one o’clock. He was never late.
‘He’s two years older than you,’ said Dead Ernest, as if this still mattered outside the society of children. ‘You never had a chance.’
True, Toby Wilder had been beyond her then, as he was now. Yet this was the high point of every day, having lunch with Toby at separate tables. She put away the gold cigarette lighter. One day, she should return it to him, though she was loathe to part with this memento – and he might remember that he had dropped it in the Ramble all those years ago.
‘He looks like a sleepwalker,’ said the dead boy.
She stared at the real and solid young man. Were Toby Wilder’s eyes less blue, less bright? No, but they lacked focus. When he looked out the window, he was blind to the jumpy foot traffic of tourists jamming the sidewalk – blind even to the waitress who handed him a menu – deaf to the girl when she asked what he wanted for lunch. And there was one other difference between Toby the child and his grown-up self: He had found a way to be still. His feet did not tap, and there was no tabletop drumming of the fingertips.
He had lost his music.
ELEVEN
Phoebe thinks Willy Fallon’s body looks like the exoskeleton of an ant. And Willy is quick like a bug, but I say no. I see her as Spider Girl. I see Willy in my dreams, a pinhead atop eight long legs, scuttling across my bedroom floor in the dark of night. And this image of her stays with me all through the day. Every day.
—Ernest Nadler
CSU investigators worked in the deep green shade of the Ramble, policing the ground around one of the hanging trees. They placed small yellow cones to mark the sites of found gum wrappers and cigarette butts. They had already removed a slew of rats shot dead by police officers. Every bullet spent had required a ballistics test and paperwork.
‘Damn cops,’ said a CSI, who concentrated on the holes in the bark of a tree, the only holes not made by gun-happy rat killers.
They all looked up from their work when a park ranger called out to them, ‘We found another one!’ The team of men and women followed him across Tupelo Meadow and into the woods. The ranger stopped and pointed upward. ‘Wait till the wind comes up.’ And now a mass of leaves waved aside to expose a green sack hanging from a high tree branch, well hidden from the flashlights of last night’s searchers. It was a rare thing to arrive ahead of police and rescue workers, who contaminated every crime scene.
All eyes were on the team’s newest member, CSI John Pollard, a small, well-muscled young man, who spent his free time mountain climbing. A tree should be easy. It was. Within a few minutes, he had made his way up through the leafy boughs and clouds of gnats to reach the burlap sack and its bulging load. On the ground, other CSIs gathered round the trunk, waiting for him to release the victim into their hands. But first, a nature photograph – click – a pristine shot of the branch untouched by ham-handed detectives. His fingers explored the outside of the sack. Its contents were stiff, unyielding.
No sign of life. No need to hurry.
He used a screwdriver to leverage the rope along the bough by a bare inch for one more shot. Click. There were no ruts or burns in the bark. The bagged victim had not been hauled up here by this rope. He found the loose end of it neatly coiled in a fork of the tree. Before he let the coil fall down to unravel into waiting hands – click – a picture of the slipknot that held the sack in place.
The rope dropped, and two CSIs pulled on it. The slipknot came loose, and the sack was quickly lowered through the tree limbs. As John Pollard climbed down, his eyes turned toward the ground, where his teammates were cutting into the burlap to preserve the rope’s closing knot, and he had a glimpse of jet-black hair and naked flesh – a woman.
Wilhelmina Fallon stirred after she felt the hands probing her. She came awake to pain in every joint of her body. Then came the elevator sensation of going down and down. Finally, she lay on solid ground and felt a breeze blow across her bare body as the rough material was pulled away. Pairs of hands worked on the ropes at her wrists and ankles, then wadding was plucked from her ears, and a stranger’s voice said, ‘It looks like wax.’ Another voice said, ‘Bag it.’