“Sure,” she said. “That’s what keeps me going. What makes me love this job. I get up every morning and I know I’m going to spend my day trying to do something that matters, you know?”
“And this one—you think there’s any chance?”
“A kid this age, I doubt we’re going to have dental records to go on. And proving cause of death…?” She shook her head again.
“Where do you start?” I asked.
“We pull missing-persons reports. Hope we get a hit.”
“What are the odds of that?” I asked.
“Crappy,” she said. “There’s forty thousand sets of unidentified remains in the United States—Jane and John and Baby Does.”
“Forty thousand?” I tried to get my head around that number: a small city of, literally, lost souls.
“There’s no exact figure,” she continued. “Not like we’ve got any national database.”
“Even the feds?” I asked.
“Most cases,” said Skwarecki, “it’s local police. Hell, we’ve still got a lot of our Does filed on index cards, and we’ve got one of the bigger budgets in the country. Go back a few years, even here, and you gotta cross-check the reports by hand.”
“So is there any chance of finding out who this kid is?”
Bost stepped up beside me. “We’ve got one thing in our favor. The remains hadn’t been there very long. Six months, give or take.”
I couldn’t help picturing the species of urban fauna capable of reducing even so tiny a corpse clean down to the bone in half a year.
Rats. Ants. Roaches.
My stomach went sour and I closed my eyes for a second, which only made it worse.
Skwarecki touched my knee. “Hey, that’s good news. Best we could hope for.”
“Okay,” I said, still trying really hard not to give in to my urge to barf.
“What happens next?” asked Cate, taking the seat beside me.
“First,” said Skwarecki, “we pray the victim was local, and that we turn up something at the scene to help with identification—”
“Second,” cut in Bost, “we pray double someone cared enough to report this child missing.”
10
Cate and I didn’t have much to say as far as official statements went. We’d already told Skwarecki and Bost the times we’d arrived at the cemetery, respectively.
I described finding the bones, said I hadn’t actually touched them before I backed out of the bushes again and started yelling. We gave our addresses and our phone numbers, work and home.
We both asked to be kept in the loop on any further information they might turn up at the cemetery, and Cate asked if it would be all right if she continued work on the brush clearing once the police had finished with the scene.
“Maybe we can find something else,” she said. “Something to help with identification.”
Skwarecki agreed to that, but asked that Cate not return until she’d called with the official all clear.
“We’ve got a new group of volunteers scheduled for next Wednesday,” Cate said. “Do you think that would be enough time?”
“Probably,” said Skwarecki, “but wait until I let you know for certain, all right?”
“Absolutely,” said Cate. “I wouldn’t think of doing anything otherwise.”
Bost and Skwarecki gave both of us their business cards.
“If you find anything when you go back in,” said Skwarecki, “don’t touch it. I want you to call me from that pay phone immediately, day or night. My beeper number’s on there, okay?”
Cate and I assured her that we’d follow her instructions to the letter, and that we wouldn’t ever be in the cemetery at night anyway, especially now.
Bost still looked concerned. “Is the next group going to be from the high school as well?”
“No,” said Cate. “They’re members of a Quaker meeting in Matinecock. Mostly retirees. They come twice a year—wonderful people. I can promise you that they’ll be careful, respectful.”
Bost nodded. “I’m certainly fine with it, then. You strike me as a woman with good judgment.”
“Thank you,” said Cate.
“Cate,” I said, “I’d like to come back too, if that’s cool with you?”
She smiled. “Absolutely. I’d love it.”
The four of us stood up and shook one another’s hands.
Cate and I started to leave, but after a few steps she stopped. She turned back toward the other two women, so I did too.
“Prospect has come to mean a great deal to me,” she said. “Maddie and I have family there. I don’t know how else to describe it other than to say that for me, it’s a sacred place. And when I think—when I know—that a child suffered there… Well, I want to do the very utmost I’m capable of, to make up for it.”
Amen to that.
I followed her toward the door, wondering how the hell we were ever going to find our way back to the outside world through all those shiny green Lewis Carroll hallways.
The clock in Cate’s dashboard read 6:17 as we drove away from the precinct house.
“I can give you a ride back into the city,” she said, “if you’d like.”
“I’d hate to make you come all the way in then turn right around again to go home.”
“What time’s your dinner?”
“We’re supposed to meet up at eight,” I said. “Somewhere in Chinatown. I’d love to get home for a quick shower first.”
“My guilt is assuaged, then. This time of day the subway’s your best bet.”
“Sounds perfect,” I said.
After that we drove in silence for a minute, thinking our thoughts.
“I liked what you said back at the precinct,” I said finally. “I feel the same way, even though I don’t have anywhere near your connection with Prospect, you know?”
Cate nodded. “I can’t explain it, but I feel responsible.”
“I’m all about the guilt. God knows we killed enough Indians. Not to mention the slave graves.”
“Jesus,” said Cate, “we really are related!”
As the subway sped me back into Manhattan I pondered the events of the day.
Maybe it was a blessing the child had been killed and was no longer in pain? But that was a hideous solution. The worst possible.
I’d had too much experience, in my own life, of being powerless to help fellow children when it mattered most. The only thing that had changed was me being in a grown-up body now. I still felt like a kid inside, a fierce little tomboy who wanted to defend those preyed upon at the playground or at home with my fists and feet.
I’d grown up in a time and place that left children appallingly vulnerable to the predations of grown-ups: California in the late sixties and early seventies. The adults were so busy playing at Peter-Pan self-actualization that most of us kids would’ve fared better being raised in a cave by LSD-dropping wolves.
By third grade I’d built a sturdy fort in the woods near our house, just in case any of my friends needed to run away from home. I’d stocked it with charcoal and matches and a saucepan and five cans of shoplifted chili, all of it safe in a waterproof underground cache I’d copied from my garage-sale Girl Scout Handbook.
There were just too goddamn many bad stepfathers and mentally-absent-moms’ psycho boyfriends out there.
I’d wanted to be prepared for all of us.
I still did.
11
Dean was already dressed by the time I screeched into the apartment, out of breath.
He had on crisp khakis and a Brooks Brothers shirt, his hair still wet from the shower.
He took one look at me, all sweaty in my grass-stained jeans and grimy T-shirt, bandanna tied around my neck. “I feel so underdressed.”
I stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. “Shut it, tall boy. I bet you didn’t even leave me a clean towel.”
He tilted my chin up to kiss my mouth. “I left you two, folded up on the sink. Figured you’d be in a big fat hurr
y.”
“Thank you,” I said, racing past him.
I took the world’s shortest shower, then threw on makeup and clean jeans, followed by a white T-shirt, a string of fake pearls, and the least fucked-up pair of my dead great-grandmother’s Belgian shoes I could find in our closet, feeling the need to one-up Astrid’s ubiquitous Ferragamos.
My hair would probably dry on the way there.
I walked back out into the living room, earrings in hand.
“You know where we’re going?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said Dean. “Some Vietnamese place.”
“Subway or cabbing it?”
“Cab,” he said. “You know we’re both useless below Fourteenth.”
“Sue and Pagan?”
“At that Chino-Latino diner on Ninth. Might meet us later for drinks.”
“Cool,” I said. “Let’s hit it.”
We sprint-walked west on Sixteenth to grab a taxi on Seventh Avenue. Our neighborhood wasn’t much—sort of a no-man’s-land above the Village—but we were stuck with Barneys at that end of the block.
There was something about the multistoried emporium that annoyed me profusely, not least that it was the homeland of hundred-dollar socks and thirty-dollar bath soap. My mother always joked that she remembered old radio advertisements for it back when the original Barney had offered two pairs of pants with every cheap suit jacket.
It now drew in the sort of hideously snippy Eurotrash Poser- riche I’d spent the majority of my urban life avoiding: stringy little people like that bitch at the bakery.
On the bright side, the place was a magnet for taxis.
Dean hailed one, and we tumbled gratefully into a backseat reeking of artificial pine and stale cigars.
“So tell me about the cemetery,” said Dean when we’d rolled down the windows.
He lifted his arm so I could lean in against him, then wrapped his hand around my shoulder.
“They figure the kid was about three years old. Beaten to death,” I said.
“How could they tell?”
“Well, the rib cage was all smashed in.”
His hand tightened around my shoulder when I told him about the other fractures.
“A three-year-old,” said Dean, shaking his head slowly. “And you and Cate went down to the cop station?”
“We couldn’t tell them much, and it sounds like it’s going to be pretty near impossible to figure out who it was.”
I explained about the dental records and the 40,000 unidentified dead people and everything.
I stared at the yellow NO SMOKING—DRIVER ALLERGIC sticker on the scratched Plexiglas barrier between us and the front seat, just zoning out while I thought about all that.
“This is going to stick with you,” he said, “isn’t it?”
“You know me too well.”
“You don’t have to get involved with it. More than you are already.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Bunny…”
I looked up at him.
He wrapped his hand gently around the back of my head, then kissed me.
“They play hardball here,” he said. “And the cops know what they’re doing, okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
“So let them take the risks. I want you safe. Promise?”
“Promise.”
He kissed me again even though we both knew I was lying.
The cab pulled up to the curb in front of a grubby-looking building on Mott Street. Dean handed the driver ten bucks, asking for three back while I did my best to shake off the day’s morbid events and switch into cocktail-party-chatter mode.
This was not a transition I’d ever made easily without the dedicated consumption of numerous actual cocktails. Especially with the moneyed Euro crowd.
I looked at my watch again: eight-fifteen. Perfect.
“Please, God,” I said, steeling myself as I stepped out of the cab and clutched Dean’s arm, “let this place have a fucking bar.”
* * *
We descended half a floor from street level, down a curving set of steps with cheesy fake wrought-iron curlicues supporting its flimsy banisters. Coupled with the dining room’s flocked scarlet wallpaper, I figured some ill-advised past owner had meant to invoke Ye Olde Bourbon Street circa The Partridge Family.
The place had a promising Indochinese tang of anchovy and lime, but I wondered whether Astrid had suggested meeting here because the food was decent, or because it matched some quaint conception she’d formed concerning my piteously impoverished circumstances.
Darling, you’ll adore Madeline; she’s so very… bohemian.
Maybe I should have arrived wearing a beret while coughing blood gamely into some threadbare-but-impeccably-starched handkerchief edged in convent lace.
Then Astrid herself waved from across the room and gave me her old wicked grin and I was instantly only deeply glad to see my dear friend, no longer fearful that the grotty choice of restaurant had meant she wanted to avoid being seen with us.
And, as always, every pair of eyes in the suddenly quiet restaurant was drawn to her.
I could tell you that Astrid’s thick, straight curtain of hair had the sheen of french-polished mahogany, that her skin was heavy cream with a hint of coffee and her dark eyes compelling as a doe’s, that she possessed a heroic brow, a lush mouth, cheekbones to melt your heart—but it’s all beside the point.
Here’s what people remember about Astrid: She was the single most exquisite human being they’d ever seen.
I don’t mean merely beautiful, I mean that she was quite literally stunning, and that I’d watched strangers go pale and stumble in the street on catching sight of her.
It was my friend’s tragedy that she was also brilliant.
Had she been either plain or stupid, she might have had a chance of being happy.
Astrid and spouse stood up as we reached their table. She was wearing a diamond-quilted black velvet jacket with a big hood. Very Chanel.
She gave me a hug and said, “ Che bella, Madeline, I thought you’d never fucking get here.”
We shook hands all around and took our seats. The freshly minted husband pressed a cocktail menu on me and Dean, then miraculously caused a waitress to appear with our drinks.
I leaned back in my chair and felt—for the first time in a very long while—that all was right with the world.
A fist-sized cockroach climbed up over the baseboard, proceeding up onto the fuzzy red wallpaper.
“Charming little place,” I said. “You guys come here often?”
12
Christoph actually seemed like a decent guy, and interesting, both of which came as a surprise to me. He was probably twenty years older than us: slender, with the last of a summer tan warming his face and longish pale brown hair swept back to curl a bit just behind his ears.
The waitress placed a couple of plates of summer rolls on the table, their thin rice-paper wrapping aglow with the hues of shrimp and cilantro and chopped peanuts inside, and we were well into our second round of drinks.
“So we are importing these wonderful machines from Europe,” Christoph was saying to Dean, “but it is very difficult to teach the Americans to use them properly.”
My husband nodded, putting a roll on his plate. The rest of the food just sat there, more set decoration than sustenance.
Astrid, growing bored, laid a hand on her husband’s wrist.
“Darling,” she said, “Maddie’s a liberal.”
Christoph looked over at me with a wry smile, eyes crinkling up at the corners. “Really? How astonishing. You seem like such an intelligent woman.”
“Astrid has always considered my political worldview a sad flaw of moral fiber,” I said.
“I don’t think I’ve ever shared a meal with one of you before,” said Christoph. “Are you, in fact, one of these ‘Democrats’?”
“Quite so,” I assured him.
“This is remarkable! You must explain to me what this means.
Do you, for instance, run about and plot to blow things up?”
“Mostly the patriarchy,” I said.
He nodded to Dean, grinning. “And you allow this?”
My husband shrugged. “These days one finds it necessary to foster the illusion of free will in women.”
Christoph laughed. “You Americans, really—such an amusing
people.”
“And you Swiss,” I said, “so very… Swiss.”
“Cuckoo clocks and chocolate?” he asked.
“I was thinking more of the memorial in this little park in Saanen, near Gstaad—a cannon, with a plaque on it commemorating an uprising throughout the countryside in the thirteen hundreds protesting the fact that the government in Berne had grown too liberal.”
“You know Saanen?” Christoph asked, surprised.
“My sister and little brother went to school there,” I said. “Charming village.”
Okay, so I wasn’t above trying to claim a bit of Euro cred as protective coloring. Pagan and Trace had gotten to ski the Alps daily; I figured I should end up with something as a consolation prize.
Christoph turned to Astrid. “Really, my dear, you have the most remarkable friends.”
She touched her throat. “Of course.”
He nodded to Dean. “You must come out to New Jersey with me sometime, to see my little company.”
We all shared a cab uptown, Christoph and Dean chatting about scientific stuff while Astrid pressed me to continue on with them to some new nightclub.
“Sadly, I have work in the morning,” I said.
“You’re writing, of course?” asked Astrid. “Forging the uncreated conscience of your race in the smithy of your soul?”
“Actually, at the moment I’m answering phones.”
She shook her head, face stern. “Maddie, for God’s sake, you’re an artist. I insist that you stop indulging in such distractions.”
I shrugged. “And our landlord insists on the rent.”
“A peasant,” she said.
“ Bien sûr.”
Astrid gave my knee a consoling pat. “ Courage, my sweet… ne désespères pas.”
Invisible Boy Page 5
