“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.”
“No, I’m not. I went out the same time Sally did, more or less dressed the way she was dressed. I even took Dashiell with me. No cars stopped for me, but then I walked over to the meat market and it was a whole other story.”
“The long-distance truckers?”
I nodded.
“I could have gone to Kansas, Ohio, North Carolina. I had my pick. And Sally, well, Sally was twenty-three, blonde…”
“Unhappy.” He finally picked up his cup and took a sip. “Okay. Leon did something right. You’re good. But…”
“You don’t think she’s alive, do you?”
“In here,” pointing to his perfect slicked-back hair, “no. In here,” now pointing to his chest, “I hold out hope, but only once in a while, those times when I miss her the most.”
“You were close?”
“I don’t think Sally got close to anyone, but we might have had the closest thing to a friendship she ever had.”
“Why do you think that was?”
“I never asked anything of her she wasn’t capable of giving. I wasn’t her husband or her kid. I didn’t count on her emotionally. We just hung out sometimes. The truth is,” both of us leaning forward this time, “she came down here a lot, to be by herself.”
“When you weren’t home?”
“Either way. But even when I was home, we’d talk a little, then she’d pick up her book, wiggle it at me and go into the bedroom and close the door.”
“That seems…”
“Odd?”
He nodded. “You know how friendships are, Rachel. Whatever works you stick with. I liked having Sally around. Sally liked to read.”
“Because she was going to school?”
“The other way around. She went to school because she liked to read. It wasn’t possible upstairs. Leon wasn’t a problem. But Madison was a real chatterbox and Sally was always telling her to be quiet. It was just easier here.”
“Where did Leon think she was?”
“Oh, he knew.” He shrugged. “She had to study, and anyway, Leon would have done anything to make her happy. He just wasn’t able to.”
I opened my mouth but Ted continued.
“It’s not the usual story, that he was the wrong man, that she loved someone else. It wasn’t that at all. If anything, Leon was the right man for Sally, the perfect man. He adored her and he didn’t ask much of her.”
“Just that she stay.”
“Just that,” he said.
I finally picked up the tea. It was in a bone china cup like the kind my mother had collected.
“Perhaps she didn’t leave him,” he said. “At least not intentionally.”
“There’s always that.” I took a sip of tea. For a while neither of us spoke.
I could picture Sally here, curled up on the white couch or lying on Ted’s bed, using his apartment as a sanctuary whenever she could. I bet it happened quickly, their friendship, or, more accurately, their arrangement. Maybe it was because of his occupation and the easy intimacy of theater people. Whatever it was, it had worked for Sally. For both of them.
“What else did she like to do besides reading?” I asked.
“Not much. Not that I know of. Once she started school, she didn’t have much time for anything other than her studies and that,” pointing to the ceiling.
“She cooked?”
“Never. They ordered in. Or Leon made eggs. Or spaghetti with sauce from a jar,” grimacing at the thought.
“She cleaned?”
Ted blew some air out of his nose.
“She spent time with Madison?”
Ted rubbed his forehead. “Yes and no. She wasn’t much of a take-the-kid-to-the-zoo type of mom. But she’d do things for her and she worried about her. Before the…” He made an eye twitch. “She told me Madison seemed very tense. That’s when she painted her room like that.”
“Sally did that?”
“Sure. What? You thought maybe Leon did it?”
“I thought Madison had done it.”
Ted shook his head. “Sally thought it would relax Madison, all that blue, the fish, the coral. She thought it would make her feel better.”
“But it didn’t.”
“Not one little bit. She liked it. She was very excited by it. I can’t say how much of that was because it was so cool or how much of it was that her mother was doing something for her. But Madison needed more than fancy walls to fix what ailed her. She needed…” He stopped, picked up his cup, put it down again. “She needed more traditional parenting than she was getting.”
“What would you say she was getting?” I asked.
“Benign neglect.”
“I used to be a dog trainer,” I told him. “You could tell the whole story by the way someone touched their dog.”
“Or didn’t.”
“True, but very few didn’t touch them at all. Of the rest, the majority, only a few touched the dogs as if they were theirs.”
Ted stared at me for a moment before speaking. When he did speak, his voice was small, the opposite of a stage whisper. Even sitting this close, I could barely hear him. “You’re right. That’s what the story is upstairs. Leon keeps a camera between himself and the rest of the world.”
“Including his daughter?” I asked. But I already knew the answer. I’d seen the space between them the very first day, space I thought Sally used to fill or might fill again if I could find her. But maybe that wasn’t so. One way or another, Leon seemed to keep those he loved at bay. Perhaps that was why he’d wanted Roy. Dogs often filled the gaps between people, space they couldn’t bridge on their own. Perhaps Roy was supposed to be the mortar that held them all together.
“Leon’s not a toucher,” Ted said.
“And Sally? Was she?”
He shook his head. “Didn’t like it.”
“No hugs good-bye?”
He shook his head again. “Tough on the kid,” he said. “Tough on me, too.”
“I’ve always thought that we’re more like animals than we like to admit.”
“That people need physical contact, too?”
I nodded.
He took a sip of coffee.
“None of this tells us where Sally is,” I said, “if she’s alive or dead.”
“Nor if Madison killed her doctor?”
“You think?”
Ted rubbed his chin, his hand covering his mouth, then shook his head. “I’ve been wondering about the first question for five years, the second one since I heard. I can’t help you rule it out, Rachel. I wish I could.”
“You have helped me. You are helping me. You’re the first person I spoke to who gave me any kind of sense of Sally. But—”
He waved his hand in the air, as if to erase what I was about to say.
“I had a client once. She was engaged and living with her boyfriend, but he was reluctant to commit to a wedding date. She’d pick one, he’d agree, then he’d change his mind, suggest a later date. One day she says, �
�Harvey, I’m not getting enough love here. I’m getting a dog.’”
“You’re thinking Roy? But he was Leon’s dog, Rachel. Leon was the one who wanted Roy.”
“I know.”
Ted nodded. “He took him everywhere, starting from when he was this big.” He held his free hand a foot or so above the floor. “In the beginning, he carried him in his jacket when he went out to shoot. The last month or so, Roy would just follow him, sit and wait while he took pictures, get up and walk when Leon did. He was doing this series about the amount of filming done in New York, movies and TV. I had a small part in Law and Order at the time. I was the nosy, chatty next-door neighbor who told the detectives about the person who’d been killed, what a slut she was. I know what you’re thinking,” holding up one hand.
“I wasn’t thinking anything.”
“Right. Typecasting. Well, so what. It’s a living, meager, but a living.”
“You were telling me about Leon and Roy and the shoot he was doing.”
“The dog couldn’t have been five months old and Leon’s on the periphery of the set, kneeling down, climbing up on things, taking all these shots, and the pup, he was like a professional. He kept his yap shut. He watched Leon work, never took his eyes off him. Leon might have told him to stay sometimes because sometimes he trailed after him, but sometimes he waited. If Leon wanted someone to pay attention to him, Roy was his man, so to speak.”
“But Sally took him. Didn’t that strike you as weird?”
“Weird? You’ve met Leon and Madison and Emil/Emily and you think it was weird that Sally took Roy for a walk?”
“What do you think? An excuse to get out of the house?”
He shrugged.
“And then,” I lifted one hand, “poof.”
“One way or another,” he said. “I hear him sometimes when I’m up late.”
“Leon?”
He nodded. “He paces.”
I nodded. “I’d pace, too.”
“He needs to know what happened.”
“One way or another,” I said. “Thanks for the tea and sympathy. Mind if I come back again?”
I expected him to smile. Instead, his eyes teared up. For a moment, he couldn’t look at me.
“I should have known,” he said.
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