The Chalk Girl

FORTY-SIX

These are my superpowers. I run like a rabbit. I shiver like a whippet. I can scream like a little girl. And I remain the dead wino’s witness.

—Ernest Nadler

More than a year had passed. Another summer was drawing to a close, and Coco was chasing lightning bugs in the far-off state of Illinois.

Following an anonymous tip, an assistant district attorney with a yellow bowtie was found to have a pattern of selling generous plea bargains to fund his futile election-year races. Cedrick Carlyle had recently left his office in handcuffs, and a messy loose end was tied up.

Mallory was a tidy detective.

Willy Fallon had lost an eye during a fight in the prison laundry, almost poetic in a biblical way – that forfeit eyeball in balance with the mutilation of a little boy.

In Mallory’s own twisted take on scripture, vengeance was hers, and she was not quite done. The young detective sat in the drawing room of the Upper West Side mansion, holding pen to paper, and she signed as a witness to the transaction between Grace Driscol-Bledsoe and Toby Wilder’s attorney, a blind man who had seen the light and learned to do as he was told.

By the terms of a probate agreement, restitution had come due following a sanity hearing held this afternoon. As promised, Mallory had not attended. She had done nothing to block the early release of Phoebe Bledsoe, a somewhat misguided murderess, now pronounced cured.

Yeah, right.

‘What a waste of money,’ said the former doyenne of New York charities. ‘That boy will die of a drug overdose before he turns thirty.’

‘Maybe,’ said Mallory, who had no faith in happy endings, but she believed in getting even. Humphrey’s millions now belonged to Toby Wilder, and the deal was done.

Almost done.

The lawyer left. The detective stayed.

Now that her daughter had been ransomed, Grace Driscol-Bledsoe waited for Mallory to leave – and she waited. And then, as a pointed invitation to get out, she said, ‘Our business is concluded.’

‘Not quite.’ The detective held in her hands a small book encased in a plastic bag and a tin box the size of a brick. She seemed to be weighing them, one against the other.

‘Hard feelings, my dear?’ Oh, it must be irksome to stand this close to a killer – one that the law could not touch. But must the detective stand so close? Grace stared at the box and the book. The younger woman handled them carefully – like treasures – or bombs. ‘You should be gone before my daughter—’

‘When Phoebe gets out, she’ll come straight to you.’

Grace tilted her head to one side. What now? Small talk was out of character for this unwanted guest. ‘You know damn well my supervision was a condition of her release.’ And Phoebe had nowhere else to go. Her little cottage had been rented out from under her during the yearlong absence in an asylum for the rich and criminally crazy. The rental income had been sorely needed in the wake of Mallory laying waste to a fortune.

The detective looked around the drawing room. ‘Where’s Hoffman? Oh, right, you can’t afford a full-time nurse anymore.’

‘No . . . I can’t.’ Life had been a bit harsh since the tax men had come to the door, citing cash expenditures beyond her means, seeking their share of that unreported income, and then confiscating the monthly rents on the cottage that was once her daughter’s home.

‘But you don’t need hired help . . . now that Phoebe’s going to live here.’

‘And I have you to thank for that.’ This was said with acrimony. There was much to thank Mallory for, but now there were no funds to hire some unspeakable act that would properly show her gratitude. Grace also lacked the influence to have the detective fired. The only remaining power card had been played as the single threat of scandal on a grand scale: If she stood trial for any crime, a great many politicians would keep her company in prison.

Grace’s eyes were drawn back to the detective’s belongings. A tiny clasp was now visible on the book. Could this be another one of Ernest Nadler’s diaries? And what was in the tin box?

‘What a comfort,’ said Mallory, ‘a loving child to look after you in your golden years.’

The younger woman’s tone was disturbing; no one else could make that platitude sound like a threat. ‘Yes, I’m sure we’ll be happy together, Phoebe and I.’ The socialite stalked out of the drawing room and into the entry hall, another hint that this visit was over. Behind her she heard no sound of following footsteps on the marble tiles. When she turned around, she sucked in her breath. There was Mallory. So close – striking distance. Grace’s hand went to the medallion on her breast – her panic button, and she instantly regretted this show of weakness. ‘Was there something else, Detective?’

‘You’re a lot braver than Willy’s and Aggy’s parents. They didn’t want anything to do with their killer kids. But those people aren’t in your league, Grace.’

‘You mean they’re not monsters . . . like me.’ Oh – was there too much pride in her voice? ‘My dear, if that’s your best shot—’

‘It isn’t.’ The detective snapped on a pair of latex gloves and then removed the leather-bound volume from its plastic bag. ‘Phoebe kept a journal. I found it last year – the day I brought her in.’ The tin box was lodged safely under one arm as Mallory opened the little book. One searching finger trailed along handwritten lines. ‘Here it is . . . Poor Allison.’ The detective looked up from her reading. ‘You remember her – a little red-haired girl? She was pushed off the school roof two years before the Nadler boy died.’

‘Allison Porter jumped! It was—’ Grace’s mouth went dry, and her voice cracked on the word, ‘—suicide.’

‘Murder,’ said Mallory. ‘I had a long talk with the school’s night watchman. Maybe you know Mr Polanski. He was the handyman in those days, and he saw Allison fall. Then he went to the roof to see if there were more kids up there. He found the little girl’s panties and brought them to the headmaster, the one who retired. I tracked him down, too. He told me those panties were collected by someone from the DA’s Office, a man with a yellow bowtie . . . and that’s how I know your son murdered her – that and the little girl’s red hair. Did Allison scream? Is that why Humphrey pushed her off the roof – to shut her up?’

‘You don’t know what you’re—’

‘Phoebe knows . . . She’s always known.’

Impossible.

‘Poor Allison,’ said Mallory. ‘I can’t find a case file on her – not even a police report. Was that your practice run for cleaning up the mess of Ernest Nadler? Here’s a creepy thought. Did you pay Cedrick Carlyle a little extra to put the underpants back on that little girl’s dead body?’

‘Old business, Detective. Don’t even think of—’

‘The chalk girl in the school garden.’ Mallory turned a page of the journal. ‘That’s an old tradition, right? It always appears on the first day of spring – a chalk outline of a little girl to mark the spot where Allison fell and died.’ The detective closed the book. ‘That must’ve driven you wild. Poor Allison just wouldn’t go away.’

‘Get out!’

‘Phoebe’s the one who drew the chalk girl on the garden flagstones – so no one could forget what happened, and she hardly knew Allison. But then you sicked those three brats on Ernie Nadler – Phoebe’s friend, her best friend. She loved him – even tried to rebuild him – a dead boy that can walk and talk.’

Grace turned away and retreated to the center of the great hall. ‘I won’t listen to any more of your—’ This time, she heard deliberate footsteps coming up behind her, coming for her, and now she could sense the younger woman’s heat at her back, and she could feel Mallory’s breath on her neck with every spoken word.

‘When Phoebe strung up Humphrey and his friends, I don’t think she cared if they lived or died. She was marking the Ramble, the place where they tortured Ernie . . . just another version of the chalk girl in the garden. Phoebe couldn’t let you get away with erasing her best friend. . . . It was making her crazy.’

‘Hoffman!’

‘Hoffman’s gone,’ said Mallory. ‘Did you forget? Maybe you had another stroke. Maybe you’re having one now.’

‘Enough!’ Grace whirled around to face the smiling detective. ‘You’ve already taken everything.’

‘Not quite.’

‘What more could you possibly—’

‘I want you to read this.’ Mallory held out the journal. ‘Just a few pages. The last entry was written the day of Phoebe’s arrest.’ And when Grace was slow to accept the book, the young woman thrust it into her hands. ‘Read it . . . before Phoebe comes home.’

Grace opened the journal, her eyes downcast to scan her daughter’s neat lines of script, and she found herself mentioned in every passage. Page after page regurgitated Phoebe’s past, a child’s hell on earth, where monsters and Mommy were interchangeable evil, pages of hurt and pages of hate. The last lines framed a new and brutal, certainly fatal, scheme of a long-range planner, a madwoman whose whole heart was set on one more kill. Matricide.

Mallory reached out and snatched the journal. Book and metal box in hand, she crossed the hall in long-legged strides, heading for the door and never looking back when she asked, ‘So, Grace . . . how fast can you run?’

A rhetorical question.

The door slammed.

And shock set in.

Grace’s legs would not carry her to a chair. Slowly she sank down to the cold marble floor. The medallion around her neck could summon help within minutes, policemen to defend her against her own child. And after they took Phoebe away, what then? Years might pass without a crippling stroke, solitary years of growing fear. Or her inheritance might come tomorrow, the massive stroke that awaited every Driscol, the one that would send her down a long passage of infirmity and drooling degradation – as a pauper in the hands of strangers – a hell that might last thirty years.

Canny Mallory had left her two grim options, though the detective would certainly have guessed the outcome, the least nightmarish choice.

Grace did not press the panic button, but her fingers curled around the medallion as if it were a crucifix, a conduit for prayer. ‘Let it be quick.’

Hours passed by with no drag of time, more like a flight of minutes only. Night fell, and she was sitting in the dark when she heard a hand try the knob on the front door. Now came the metallic sound of a key in the lock – Phoebe’s key.

Backlit by street lamps, her daughter was silhouetted in the open doorway, growing larger, moving closer. But Grace’s last thought was not of impending death. No, she was picturing the tin box in Mallory’s hands. Odd to be thinking of that. And now she would never know what was—

Mallory walked down the dimly lit corridor of wooden frames and chicken-wire walls to stop by the Nadlers’ storage cage. As she unlocked the door, things began to stir inside, a scramble of bugs and vermin. A mouse ran across the bare mattress on the boy’s bed, still running when it cleared the edge, its paws madly pedaling on the air.

The detective turned on a floor lamp.

In one hand, she held the remains of Ernest Nadler. It had taken a long time to find him, hunting through forged documents and the crematoriums of three states. Dr Kemper, the hospital administrator, had paid from his own pocket to have the boy’s body – the evidence – reduced to ashes, but no payment for an urn – only a nasty tin box with a child inside.

Mallory, in turn, had destroyed Dr Kemper.

With only this box in her hand and the threat of a public trial for conspiracy in the murder of a little boy, he had elected to go quietly to jail on a lesser charge. As for his partner in evidence tampering, the pathologist, Dr Woods, was dead of a drunk’s failed liver.

Big fish, little fish – all accounted for – almost done.

Just tidying up.

And toward that end, Phoebe’s journal – with her mother’s fingerprints on the binding, the proof of fair warning – was placed in the drawer of a nightstand. There it kept company with a murdered boy’s diary and the brief note his parents had left behind. Absent any mention of living heirs in the Nadlers’ will, and given the slow plodding way of city bureaucracy, many years might go by before anyone visited here again, and then no probate clerk would ever figure out what the detective had done.

In the squad-room mythology of Mallory the Machine, she had no shred of sentiment, neither empathy nor sympathy, and the young woman showed no emotion as she sat down amid the detritus of a small family’s life, her cold eyes passing over their belongings to focus on an orphan sock.

Mallory laid the box of ashes on the mattress. And now that she had put him to bed, she switched off the light. ‘Good night, Ernie.’

A child had made a stand, he had suffered and died. And then, though long gone, the little boy had snagged his unsentimental paladin with a kindred lament scrawled in a diary: I’m lost.