Keller’s eyebrows were penciled in, her head swathed in a royal-blue scarf knotted low at the nape of her neck. The bailiff took the helm of her slender green oxygen tank, walking beside her chair.
If Skwarecki hadn’t said they were both forty-three, I would’ve presumed this was a woman at least twice the detective’s age. She was hunched over, her narrow body swimming in a long-sleeved dress.
The guard backed Keller’s chair into place beside the witness stand and set its brake.
“Ms. Keller,” said Bost, “I want to thank you for coming here today. I know it can’t have been easy for you.”
Keller spoke in a soft but clear voice. “I felt it was important. Teddy Underhill was a very sweet little boy.”
“Can you tell us when you first became concerned that he might be a victim of abuse?”
“Shortly after Teddy and his mother moved into Albert Williams’s apartment, in my building. I would say within the space of a week.”
“And when was this?”
“August before last,” said Keller.
“Where were your two apartments, in relationship to one another?”
“I lived directly beneath them.”
“And what was it that first made you concerned for Teddy’s welfare?”
“Both apartments had windows on the street, and side windows opening onto an air shaft towards the rear. When it’s nice out, you can’t help but learn a great deal about the neighbors. I’d seen Teddy in the stairwell with his mother often enough. We spoke occasionally. I knew his name, how old he was.”
“And what was Teddy’s age at that time?”
“He was a few months past two,” said Keller. “That’s one reason I worried when I heard him getting screamed at within the space of a week or so.”
“Could you tell who was screaming at him?”
“Certainly. Albert Williams.”
It was Galloway who objected this time. Hetzler didn’t so much as twitch.
“Your Honor,” said Galloway, “I’m not sure how Ms. Keller could have distinguished one voice from another in the general din of a crowded air shaft.”
Keller couldn’t see the judge from where she was sitting, so she addressed Bost. “May I answer that?”
“Please do,” said Bost.
Keller turned toward Galloway. “I recognized Albert Williams’s voice for two reasons: he has a slight lisp, and among the residents of all five apartments in our building, there was no one else named Teddy.”
“It wasn’t just screaming that worried you, though, was it?” asked Bost.
“I worked as an emergency-room nurse for twenty years, Ms. Bost. I had a good idea what I was hearing, sadly.”
“As a nurse, were you expected to act as what’s known as a mandated reporter?”
Keller said she was, and they discussed further reporting details.
“Can you tell us what, exactly, you told the hotline?”
Keller pulled a small notebook from the side pocket of her dress. “I’d like to refer to this for specific dates, if I may?”
“Please,” said Bost. “By all means.”
Keller opened the little book and held it up before her face. “On August twenty-third, I heard Albert Underhill berating the child for not finishing his dinner. I heard the sound of several slaps, and I believe he then smashed Teddy’s plate against a wall in the kitchen.”
She turned the page. “Two weeks later—September sixth—
Williams was upset because Teddy had left a toy on the floor. The child had a black eye the following morning. His mother told me that he’d run into a corner of the couch.”
She looked up at Bost. “I’m sorry to say that I was gone from the building for the next two weeks after that. When I returned, I saw Teddy and his mother in the front entry. The boy was limping, trying to walk on a swollen ankle.”
A broken ankle. Bone grinding on bone.
My stomach lurched and contracted. I climbed over Cate and burst out the door for the hallway, hoping like hell I’d make it to the ladies’ room in time.
52
The ladies’ room was less stuffy than the courtroom and my nausea went away, but I still felt light-headed and dizzy, with little dark flea-spots crowding in at the edge of my vision.
I had to be coming down with something. Stephanie Keller’s testimony had hardly been uplifting, but I’d heard worse details from Skwarecki and the pathologist.
I looked into the mirror above the row of sinks, noting the dark puffiness beneath my eyes, my winter-greenish pale skin. If hardly Astrid’s equal in looks, I matched her on all the earmarks of sheer exhaustion.
The room smelled of damp paper towels and cheap pink liquid soap, and for a moment I wished it actually were a “restroom,” with a chaise longue or even an army cot I could’ve curled up on for a few minutes. The trial would be breaking for lunch soon, but the thought of food made me queasy.
Grinding bones.
The phrase roiled my stomach further. I didn’t want to go back into the courtroom, but I had to find someplace to sit down. I left the bathroom and shuffled slowly down the hallway, but didn’t see anywhere to sit except for some benches downstairs, in the front lobby.
I chose one alongside a wall so I’d see Cate when they broke for lunch.
I closed my eyes and leaned back, hot and flushed now, my upper lip damp.
Great. Probably flu.
I stayed like that for maybe ten minutes, listening to footsteps and voices moving past me, feeling the occasional blast of cold air as people came inside with a breath of winter as chaser.
“Miss Dare? Are you all right?” A woman’s voice. “I saw you through the window.”
I felt a light touch on one shoulder, and fluttered my eyes open.
Mrs. Underhill stood before me, her forehead wrinkled with concern.
She was sitting beside me on the bench now, holding the back of one hand against my cheek. “You don’t have a fever, dear. How’s your stomach?”
“Not so good,” I said.
“Have you eaten anything this morning?”
I shook my head.
She reached into her purse and gave me a peppermint. “This will help.”
She was right—it did.
And now that she was sitting beside me, I didn’t want to confess that I’d been calling her dozens of times a night for the last few days, like a smitten stalker.
“Are you testifying today?” I asked.
“Not yet. I came with some things for Angela, to leave next door.”
At the jail.
“Can I get you a cup of water, dear?” she asked.
“No, thank you.”
We were quiet for a minute, but it wasn’t quite a companionable silence. I watched her fiddle with the clasp on her purse, then stop. She seemed to be trying to work up her nerve toward something.
“Is everything all right?” I asked.
She gripped the purse tighter.
Making up her mind.
“Miss Dare,” she said at last.
“Please,” I said, “call me Madeline.”
“This might not be the time, but there’s something I’ve been wanting to talk with you about.”
“The trial?”
“In a way, I suppose,” she said. “Nothing to do with your testimony, of course.”
“I’ve already finished with that.”
“And I don’t need to know anything you said. It’s just…”
I waited.
“I so want to do the right thing, Miss Dare. And I’m not sure what that is.”
Cate was walking across the lobby, toward us.
“Would it help to talk about it?” I asked.
“It would,” said Mrs. Underhill. “I was hoping that you might come by to visit again. When you’re feeling better.”
Maybe it was the peppermint, or just getting some fresher air, outside the courtroom’s stale closeness, but my queasiness had passed.
And may
be Cate could give us a ride.
“How about right now?” I asked.
We pulled into a parking spot right out front, chez Underhill. The noon sky was phlegm-colored, with tracer-bullets of sleet zipping down at a hard slant. We got out and Cate opened the front gate, holding her arm out for Mrs. Underhill to grip as they picked their way along the icy front walk, chatting about recent doctor’s appointments they’d had.
I followed along behind them, considering again the block’s bizarre aesthetic, each split dwelling a study in Manichaean duality.
If you’d picked the fifty most disparate houses on the planet, chainsawed them in half clean down the middle, and shaken them all up like ginormous Yahtzee dice, you still couldn’t have jammed the pieces back together this randomly without the aid of blindfolds and secret-CIA-mind-control-experiment-quality hallucinogens.
To me, the discordance acted as a mild nauseant, but each whitened yard was neat, every house in good repair, and Mrs. Underhill knew her neighbors. Here was community, and pride of ownership, while I was but an hourly-wage transient in a rental apartment riding the coattails of someone else’s lease.
I ducked my head against the sleet, bits of cold wet grit sliding down to melt between the collar of my overcoat and the back of my neck. Ten paces ahead was a haven of sustenance and sympathy—the exact things for which I’d spent a lifetime yearning—and I wondered if Teddy hadn’t felt the same every time he came up this walk.
It was a long way from here to a welfare motel, but I didn’t wonder how his mother got there.
Entropy nips at all of our heels, and my own family’s descent had been no less spectacular, or rapid. The same forces that pulled Angela’s toward LaGuardia took my mother from deb parties to the verge of food stamps, my father from the floor of the Stock Exchange to a VW camper behind the Chevron station in Malibu.
The thesis-statement lyric of our family anthem: Papa was a rolling stone; wherever he parked his van was his home.
Any difference between me and Teddy was one of degree, not substance. The margin for error was thinner here, and he didn’t get a scholarship to his mother’s boarding school.
I flipped up my overcoat’s collar, shivering at the foot of the stoop as Mrs. Underhill’s keys jangled against her front door.
When the neighbor boys’ curtains twitched apart for surveillance, I smiled, raising my unbroken arm to wave hello.
Mrs. Underhill got the door open, and I followed her and Cate into the front hallway once I’d stomped the sleet off my shoes and wiped them clean on the doormat.
“Well, dear, I’m lucky,” I heard Mrs. Underhill saying, as she and Cate moved into the kitchen after hanging up their coats. “Dr. Wilson gave me a clean bill of health again just last week. Now my friends, they all have cholesterol pills and heart pills and who knows what-all for their blood pressure. The only medicine in this house is aspirin and Band-Aids, but I don’t even use those more than once a year.”
I found a free hanger for my overcoat in the hall closet, picturing my own Prozac, Excedrin, Advil, and Alka-Seltzer Plus stockpiles back on Sixteenth Street—not to mention the boatload of painkillers I’d happily scarfed down for my busted arm, and the communal bong—feeling like a total wuss.
I’d probably blow every penny I ever earned on over-the-counter crap from Duane Reade and die young anyway.
I looked out the kitchen window, past the frilly white net curtains. The sleet had turned to snow, falling thick and fast. I decided I should tell Cate to go on home before the roads got too bad, but now she and Mrs. Underhill were exchanging notes on home remedies for stomachaches.
Before there was a pause in conversation, the feisty old lady turned to me. “Now you said back at the courthouse you hadn’t eaten anything, speaking of digestion. I’m going to fix you a sandwich, unless you’d rather have some soup? I have tomato or chicken noodle.”
“That’s okay, Mrs. Underhill,” I said. “I’m really not that hungry. Thank you anyway.”
She crossed her arms and shook her head. “Hungry or not, you look downright peaked. And it’s wintertime.”
“I don’t want to put you to any trouble,” I said.
“Don’t be silly—it won’t take me but a minute. I made the chicken soup yesterday, and the pot’s in the Frigidaire. I just have to heat it up. We’ll all three have a nice bowl, with some crackers.”
“That sounds lovely,” said Cate. “May we help you with anything?”
“Why don’t you both just sit down right here and keep me company?” said Mrs. Underhill, motioning toward her kitchen table and chairs.
The old red wall-phone rang as she was putting the soup pot on the stove. She lit the burner and then asked us to excuse her for a moment so she could take the call. “Hello?”
I turned to Cate, worried that maybe Mrs. Underhill wanted to talk to me in private. “I don’t want to keep you. It looks like that snow’s getting pretty bad. I’m fine getting the train home.”
“This is she,” said our hostess, into the phone.
Cate said, “I wouldn’t mind a little soup. Unless you need privacy?”
“Hello?” Mrs. Underhill jiggled the phone’s hook twice, then replaced the receiver. “Must be the storm.”
I suddenly had to pee, desperately. “May I use the bathroom?”
The doorbell rang.
“Grand Central Station,” said Mrs. Underhill, smiling at us. She asked Cate to mind the soup, pointing me toward the staircase in the front hall. “First door on your right, dear.”
I jogged upward, footsteps muffled by the shag carpeting. I turned right past the open door of her bedroom, catching a glimpse of a neatly made four-poster.
The door’s chimes went off again and Mrs. Underhill’s muttered “Goodness’ sakes, hold your horses!” echoed up the stairwell as I reached the landing.
I heard her say, “I’m sorry, Donald, but I have company right now,” as I closed the door behind me.
The bathroom was all powder-blue and frilly, with a bowl of apple-pie-smelling potpourri on the windowsill. I peed for like, forever—which was weird as I’d only had a glass of water since my morning coffee—then tried to figure out how to wash my hands without mucking up the perfectly folded little hand towels, or the flower-shaped guest soaps displayed in a curvy glass jar beside the sink.
I rinsed my left hand in hot water, then waved it around.
Maybe a little air-dry, over the heating vent?
I walked toward the room’s small, high window, hoping for a blast of warmth from the register beneath it, and glanced outside at the backyard below.
There was a triangular trail of bootprints along the whitened ground, each dark oval already blurring under fresh snowfall. Someone had walked from the neighbors’ side of the house to a sagging old garage at the lot’s rear, then back to the house directly below me.
The outbuilding’s door wasn’t closed all the way, and a burst of wind pushed it wider, in a swirl of snowflakes.
I gripped the windowsill, damp knuckles of my left hand going white. Before the door had swung closed again, I’d caught a flash of dull gold: the prow of a huge old American sedan, front bumper hanging crooked, chrome grille smashed in. The car’s roof was white vinyl.
My right arm gave a twinge of recognition inside its cast.
No tire tracks. Why would someone go out to the garage in a blizzard, and what did they want with this side of the house afterwards?
I leaned my forehead against the cold glass, trying to peer straight down Mrs. Underhill’s brick siding.
The window’s outer sill blocked my line of sight down the wall itself, but there was something on the ground about a foot away from the house: a twist of colored wire, lying bright against the snow.
The toilet cistern finished refilling, its ball-cock float rising to shut off the flow of water. The echoing tiled room went quiet.
I exhaled, then pushed gently off the windowsill with my left hand to stand up straight a
gain, careful not to shift my weight too suddenly.
My breath had fogged the glass, but I didn’t need to see anything else.
The guy wearing those boots had cut the phone line.
And if the murmur of voices I could hear through the floor was any indication, he was now directly below me, inside the kitchen with Mrs. Underhill and Cate.
I crept along the edge of the tub toward the bathroom door, weight on the balls of my feet so I wouldn’t make the floor creak.
It seemed like an hour before I was close enough to reach for the door handle, holding my breath and listening for another long moment before twisting it slowly open.
I tried to picture the view up the stairwell from the hallway below.
Will he see this door moving if I open it?
No, Mrs. Underhill’s bedroom was at the top of the stairs. I was safely down the hallway, out of sight.
The voices got a little louder.
And he’s definitely in the kitchen. Straight down.
I eased the door outward a few inches, willing it not to squeak.
The murmurs became voices, distinct.
“Donald, I’ve told you there’s no one else here.” Mrs. Underhill. “Miss Ludlam drove me home today, after I went to see Angela.”
“Angela’s in court.”
A man’s voice. One I knew.
Might want to lock that door, you know? Keep the boogeyman away.
“Yes, that’s right.” Mrs. Underhill again.
The man said, “You can’t go in yet. Not your turn to testify.”
“I took some vitamins to the jail so she’ll have them tonight. For the baby.”
I opened the door farther and slipped out into the hallway, my back to the wall beside the staircase.
“There’s three of you in this house,” said Donald.
Had she told me the names of the neighbor boys? Was he wearing boots?
“Donald, you’re scaring me now,” she said, voice quavering. “My heart…”
“Where’s the other one?” he asked.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. And I need my medicine.”
“The one with the busted arm, she was out front with you before,” he said.
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