Free The Chalk Girl by Carol O'Connell Page A

Allison.’
    ‘The jumper?’
    And Phoebe says, ‘Maybe the girl thought she could fly.’
    —Ernest Nadler
     
     
    Privileged New Yorkers had high windows in the tallest buildings facing Central Park. Those who were still awake could see trees lighting up in a moving line, a glow worm slowly rolling across the Ramble as policemen in tight formation shined their flashlights up into the leaves. Cadaver dogs had proved useless for bodies in the sky. A sergeant called out to his officers, calling them back to the station house to wait for daylight.
    High above a group of retreating searchers, Wilhelmina Fallon, not yet a cadaver, awakened stone blind. Thirsty, so thirsty. Hungry, too. And all the way crazy, she strained to hear.
    Silence only.
    Muscles weakened, she gave up the struggle against her bonds. The panic ebbed away, and so did the cramps in her belly. Dehydrated and disoriented, she made friends with delusion, and in her waking dream, she drank great tumblers of ice water. In the real world, her body was consuming itself in a ruthless effort to survive. Life was everything. Life was all.
    It was morning in her mind, where an imagined table was laden with food, glorious food.
    The aroma of fresh-brewed coffee was heady. An old-fashioned percolator bubbled on the front burner, and batter sizzled in the frying pan.
    Mallory made an odd picture of domesticity, flipping pancakes while wearing a large gun in her shoulder holster. Cooking was a skill she had learned from her foster mother, Helen Markowitz, and kitchens were her favorite rooms. This one was large, with warm ocher walls and a high ceiling. Charles Butler’s appliances only looked a hundred years old; they were custom-made to blend with an era where the Luddite felt more at home. It was a peaceful place where even New Yorkers lost their cautious edge; and this was why Mallory favored kitchens over interrogation rooms.
    The door in the hall closed. Charles Butler was gone. And now the detectives could begin.
    Coco had finished breakfast, and she idly ran one finger around her empty plate. ‘Rats like fruit and vegetables, but pancakes – not so much.’ She went on to explain why hungry rats were attracted to the faces of sleeping infants. ‘Babies smell like milk, and the skin around their mouths
tastes
like milk. If you wash a baby before you put it in the crib, it won’t get eaten.’
    ‘Good to know,’ said Riker, not even slightly put off his feed.Between bites, he smiled at the little girl. ‘Tell us about Uncle Red.’
    The child drew up her legs, hugged her knees and rocked herself. ‘He had red hair like mine. He said it ran in the family.’ She stood up to take a short walk around the table for the third time this morning.
    If Charles Butler had been present, this would have been the signal to stop. He would not permit questions that agitated her. And so the psychologist had been sent outside on the errand of buying newspapers that Mallory could have easily retrieved from her laptop computer.
    The detective filled the child’s glass with more orange juice to lure her back to the table. When Coco returned to light on the chair, she perched there on the edge – a tentative visitor.
    ‘So Uncle Red’s hair turned from red to brown,’ said Mallory. ‘When did that happen?’ She rephrased this for a child with a skewed sense of time. ‘After you got into Uncle Red’s car, did you stop anywhere on the way to his place?’
    ‘We stopped for food.’ Coco went on to describe the giant statue of a clown that greeted junk-food customers at a rest stop on the road. He was as tall as a mountain, she told them, and then she gave the statue lines of dialogue. But now she stopped mid-sentence, reading impatience in Mallory’s face.
    ‘So tell me,’ said Riker, whose patience with children was endless, ‘was that when Uncle Red dyed his hair? At the restaurant? Maybe he did it in the men’s room?’
    ‘No, his hair was still red when we