Manhattan Mayhem: New Crime Stories From Mystery Writers of America Page 9

  He nodded.

  “Unfortunately, I had to send her back to her mother,” I told him bluntly, picking up the magnet and turning it slowly in my fingers. “She told lies,” I added. “She cheated on tests, or, at least, she tried to. She stole.” And that was not the worst of it, I thought.

  All this appeared to surprise Theo, so I suspected he’d been taken in by Maddox, fallen for whatever character she’d created in order to manipulate him. She’d tried to do the same with me, but by then I’d seen how dangerous she was and had acted accordingly.

  “And so I sent her back,” I said. “I’m sure that’s what she wanted all along.”

  Theo was silent for a moment before he said, “No, she wanted to stay.”

  Perhaps at the very end, Maddox truly had wanted to stay with us, I thought. But if so, that only meant she’d have done whatever she had to do to accomplish that goal. In fact, I decided, that might well have been the reason she’d done what she’d done that night in the subway station.

  “She was capable of anything,” I told Theo resolutely.

  At that point, I actually considered telling Theo the whole story, but then found that I couldn’t.

  After a moment, Theo nodded toward the refrigerator magnet. “Anyway,” he said, “It’s yours now.”

  “What are you supposed to do with it?” Janice asked when I showed her the Beauty and the Beast refrigerator magnet. She made her well-known and purposely exaggerated trembling notion. “It feels like some kind of … accusation.”

  Suddenly it all became clear. “It’s Maddox’s way of giving me the finger just one last time,” I said. “Making me feel guilty for sending her back. But she was the one who made it impossible for her to become a part of our family.” I shook my head vehemently. “So, I’m just going to stop thinking about her.”

  I wanted to do just that, but I couldn’t.

  Why? Because for me, it had never been “to be or not to be, that is the question.” It was what a human being learned or failed to learn while on this earth. For that reason, I couldn’t help but wonder if Maddox had ever acknowledged in the least what I’d hoped to do for her by bringing her into my family, or if she had accepted the slightest responsibility for the fact that I’d had to abandon that effort. With Maddox dead, how could I pursue such an inquiry? Where could I look for clues? The answer was bleak but simple, and so the very next day I took the train up to the Bronx.

  Maddox had lived in one of the older buildings on the Grand Concourse. I’d gotten the address from Detective O’Brien, who’d clearly had more important things on his mind, a girl who’d starved herself to death no longer of much note.

  Theo was in the courtyard when I arrived. He was clearly surprised to see me.

  “Have you rented out Maddox’s apartment yet?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Would you mind letting me see it?”

  “No,” Theo answered casually.

  He snapped a key from the dangling mass that hung on a metal ring from his belt. “They’re coming to clear out her stuff tomorrow.”

  “Did she have a diary, anything like that? Letters?”

  He shook his head. “Maddox didn’t have much of anything.”

  This was certainly true. She’d lived sparely, to say the least. In fact, from the drab hand-me-down nature of the furnishings, I gathered that she’d picked up most of what she owned from the street. In the kitchen I found chipped plates. In the bedroom I found a mattress without a bed, along with a sprawl of sheets and towels. When she’d lived with us, she’d been something of a slob, and I could see that nothing in that part of her personality had changed.

  “That day you told me about,” I said to Theo after my short visit to Maddox’s apartment, “the day we all went to see Beauty and the Beast. Did she say why she thought that was the happiest day of her life?”

  Theo shook his head. “No, but it was clear that it meant a great deal to her, that day.”

  I remembered “that day” very well, and on the subway back to Manhattan, I recalled it again and again.

  It wasn’t just that day that returned to me. I also recalled the many difficult weeks that had preceded it, causing a steady erosion in my earlier confidence that Maddox would adjust well to New York, that she would succeed at Falcon Academy and, from there, go on to a fine college, her road to a happy life as free of obstacles as Lana’s.

  At first, Maddox had been on her best behavior, though in ways that later struck me as transparently manipulative. She’d complimented Janice on her cooking, Lana on her hair, me on my skill at playing Monopoly. On the first day of school, she’d appeared eager to do well; she had even seemed proud of her uniform. “It makes me feel special,” she’d said that morning, and then she flashed her beaming smile, the one she used on all such occasions, as I was soon to learn, and that I’d taken to be genuine, though it wasn’t. But the dawning of this dark recognition had come slowly, and so, as I’d walked Maddox and Lana to their bus that first school day, then stood waving cheerfully as it pulled away, I’d felt certain that I now had two daughters, and that both of them were good.

  Janice was still at work when I returned home after making my bleak tour of Maddox’s apartment. I was already on the balcony with my glass of wine when she came through the door. By then the sun had set, and so she found me sitting in the dark.

  “I went up to the Bronx today,” I told her. “To Maddox’s apartment.”

  She looked at me with considerable sympathy. “You shouldn’t feel like you failed her, Jack,” she said quietly.

  With that, she turned and headed for the bedroom. From my place in the shadows, I could hear her undressing, kicking off her dressy heels, putting away her jewelry, and then the sound of her sandaled feet as she came back onto the balcony, now with her own glass of wine.

  “So, why did you go there?” she asked.

  I’d never told anyone about that day, and I saw no reason to do so now. “I was just curious, I suppose,” I said.

  “About what?”

  “About Maddox,” I answered, “Whether she ever …” I stopped because the words themselves seemed silly. Even so, I couldn’t find more precise ones. “… ever became a better person.”

  Janice looked puzzled. “Maddox was just a child when she left us, Jack,” she said. “It wasn’t like she was … formed.”

  But she hadn’t just “left us,” to use Janice’s words. I’d sent her back, and I couldn’t help but feel that Maddox must have known why, must have understood what had become so clear to me that day.

  It had come at the end of a harrowing eight months of difficulty, and even as I’d bought the tickets for Beauty and the Beast, I’d suspected that my options were becoming fewer and fewer with regard to Maddox staying with us.

  There’d been the continually escalating problems at Falcon Academy, where Maddox had repeatedly made excuses for the accusations hurled against her. She’d never intended to steal Mary Logan’s fancy Mont Blanc pen; she had simply picked it up to give it a closer look, then mistakenly dropped it into her own backpack, rather than into Mary’s. And, after all, didn’t those two bags look similar, and hadn’t they been lying side-by-side in the school cafeteria?

  Nor had she lied about how she’d gotten hold of Ms. Gilbreath’s answer sheet for an upcoming history test, because it really had fallen out of the teacher’s pocket, and she’d seen that happen and meant to give it back immediately, but she was already a long way down the hall, and so, well, wasn’t it only natural that she tucked it into the pocket of her skirt so that she could give it back to her at the end of the school day? And anyway …

  Maddox had manufactured explanations for everything that came her way, most of them vaguely plausible, as she must have realized, a fact that increasingly worked against her in my mind. It wasn’t just that she lied and stole and cheated; it was that she did it so cleverly that, in every case, the charge against her emerged with that fabled Scottish verdict: “
Not Proven.” For was it not possible that an answer sheet might fall from a teacher’s notebook … and all the rest? Listening to her exculpatory narratives, I began to feel like Gimpel the Fool in I. B. Singer’s famous story. Was I, like Gimpel, a man who endlessly could have the wool pulled over his eyes? In secret, did Maddox laugh at my credulity in the same cruel way that the villagers mocked Gimpel?

  I’d been in the throes of just that kind of searing analysis of Maddox’s character as I’d stood in line at the box office. But there was an added element as well. Maddox and Lana had lately begun to quarrel. A room that once seemed plenty big enough for two young girls to share had become, over the past few months, an increasingly heated cauldron of mutual discontent. There were arguments over where things, particularly underwear, were dropped or left to dangle. Crumbs were an issue, as were empty bottles; Lana the neatnik, Maddox the slob. I’d endured shouting and crying from Lana, sullenness from Maddox, but at each boiling over I’d refused to intervene. “Work it out, you two,” I’d snapped at one point, and I expected them to do exactly that.

  Then, suddenly, and for the first time, our home life was rocked by violence.

  It was a slap, and it occurred as the culminating act of a long period of building animosity between Lana and Maddox. The shouting matches had devolved into sinister whispered asides at the breakfast and dinner tables, little digs that I simply refused to acknowledge but that, over time, produced a steady white noise of nasty banter. Gone were the days when Maddox complimented Lana’s hair or when Lana even remotely pretended that she considered Maddox her sister.

  And yet, in many ways, as Janice sometimes pointed out, they were behaving exactly like a great many sisters do. My wife had never gotten along with her older sister, and I knew that the same could be said of countless other siblings. Still, I had wanted harmony in my household, and the fact that the relationship between Maddox and Lana had become anything but harmonious produced a steady ache in my mind. The truth is that, on that day, as I stood in line waiting to buy those tickets, I felt wounded, perhaps even a tad martyred by the conflict between Maddox and Lana. After all, was I not a man who had selflessly taken in another person’s child and who, rather than gaining a spiritual pat on the back for the effort, reaped a daily whirlwind that was tearing my home apart? And that, just the night before, had finally erupted in an act of violence?

  Had I not heard that slap, I might never have known that it happened. But as soon as did I hear it, all notion vanished of my no longer intervening in the disintegration of my family life.

  The door to their room was open. They were now sitting on their respective beds, Maddox with both feet on the floor, Lana lying facedown, her head pressed deep into her pillow.

  When she raised it, I saw the fiery red mark that Maddox’s hand had left on her cheek.

  “What happened?” I asked from my position in the doorway.

  Neither girl answered.

  “I won’t leave this room until I know what happened,” I said.

  I walked over to Lana’s bed, sat down on it, and lifted her face to see the mark more clearly.

  Then I stared hotly at Maddox. “We do not strike each other in this family,” I snapped. “Do you understand me?”

  Maddox nodded silently.

  “We do not!” I cried.

  Maddox whispered something I couldn’t understand. Her head was down. She wouldn’t look at me.

  “No matter what the reason,” I added angrily.

  She lifted her head. Her eyes were glistening. “I mess everything up,” she said softly.

  Suddenly, I found that I couldn’t buy one bit of it, neither her tears nor her weepy self-accusation, which, however vaguely, had the ring of an apology. No, I decided, you have fooled me all along, and with that grim realization, I abruptly believed that all the accusations against her were true, all her explanations false. She had played me as a con artist plays a mark. I was her pet fool.

  And yet, despite all that, I knew I would not send her back.

  No, there had to be a way to help Maddox.

  Besides, there was plenty of time.

  And so, in an effort to reset everything, I decided that we should all take a deep breath, give it another go, do something together, something that spoke of sweetness and kindness and the power of a human being to look beyond outward appearances.

  That was when I thought of Beauty and the Beast.

  Lana was already seated at a small corner table when I arrived at the restaurant. She was dressed to the nines, as usual, with every hair in place. Her life had gone very well. She had a good job and a good marriage, with two nice little boys who appeared to adore their parents. From childhood down to this very moment, I told myself as I sat down, she’d gotten everything she’d ever wanted.

  Except a sister.

  It was a thought that immediately brought me back to Maddox, to how right I’d been in removing her from the circle of our family.

  I brought up none of this latest news, of course, and we chatted about the usual topics during our dinner: how her work was going, how the boys were doing, upcoming plans of one sort or another. We’d already ordered our end-of-meal coffees when she said, “Mom told me you’ve been thinking about Maddox.”

  I nodded. “I suppose I have.”

  “Me, too,” Lana said. “Especially that day.”

  “The day we went to Beauty and the Beast?” I asked.

  Lana looked puzzled. “Why would that day be special?”

  I shrugged. “Okay, what day do you mean, then?”

  “The day Maddox hit me.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That day.”

  “The thing is, I provoked her,” Lana said. “I was just a kid, and kids can be cruel. I see it in the boys. The things they say to each other.” Tentatively, I asked, “What did you say to her?”

  “I told her that she was here because nobody wanted her,” Lana said. “Her mother didn’t want her. Her brother didn’t want her. I told her that even you didn’t want her.” She paused and then added, “That’s when she slapped me.” She lifted a slow, ghostly hand to that long vanished wound. “And I deserved it.”

  I wondered if Lana had come to blame herself for my decision to send back Maddox. If so, she couldn’t have been more wrong. It wasn’t anything Lana had done that decided the issue. The blame had always lain with Maddox.

  “Maddox had to go,” I said starkly, still too appalled by the evil I’d seen in the subway station to reveal what had truly convinced me to send Maddox back.

  The thing that struck me as most odd now, while Lana sipped nonchalantly at her coffee, was the sweetness that had preceded that terrible moment. Beauty and the Beast had come to its heartbreaking conclusion, and, along with the rest of the audience, we were on our way out of the theater, Lana on my right, Maddox on my left. As we approached the front doors, Lana suddenly bolted ahead to where items associated with the show were on sale. Maddox, however, remained at my side.

  “I liked it,” she said softly, and with those words, she took my hand in hers and held it tenderly. “Thank you.”

  I smiled. “You’re welcome,” I said as my heart softened toward her, and I once again harbored the hope that all would be well. Lifted by that desire, I stepped over to the counter and bought two refrigerator magnets. I gave one to Lana, who seemed much more interested in the T-shirts, and the other one to Maddox.

  “Thank you,” she said softly. “I will always keep it.”

  She turned toward a couple who were exiting the theater. They had a little girl in tow, each holding on to one of the child’s hands.

  “That’s what I want,” she said in that odd way she sometimes said things, looking off into the middle distance, speaking, as it seemed, only to herself. “I want to be an only child.”

  By then, Lana had made her way to the theater’s front door. “Can we go to Jake’s, Dad?” she asked when we reached her.

  Jake’s was a pizza place in the Village wher
e we tended to have dinner on those days that we found ourselves downtown and didn’t want to rush home to cook.

  I looked at Maddox.

  “Jake’s okay with you?” I asked happily.

  She smiled that sweet smile of hers. “Sure” was all she said.

  The subway was only a few blocks away. We walked to it amid the usual Times Square crowd, at that time a curious mixture of vaguely criminal low-life and dazzled tourists.

  On the train, I sat with Maddox on one side and Lana on the other, a formation that continued as we exited the train and made our way to the restaurant. During the meal, Lana spoke in a very animated way about Beauty and the Beast, while Maddox remained quiet, eating her slice of pizza slowly, sipping her drink slowly, her gaze curiously inward and intense, like one hatching a plot.

  We were done within half an hour. The restaurant was near Washington Square, and so, before returning home, we strolled briefly in the park. Lana glanced up as we passed under the arch, but Maddox stared straight ahead in the same inward and intense way I’d noticed at the restaurant.

  “You okay?” I asked as we left the park and headed for the subway.

  Again, she offered me her sweet smile. “I’m fine,” she said.

  We descended the stairs, then one by one we each went through the turnstiles and headed down the long ramp that led to the uptown trains. We were about halfway down when I heard the distant rumble of our train heading into the station. “Come on, girls,” I said and instinctively bolted ahead, moving more quickly than I thought, as I realized when I turned to look behind me.

  The train had not yet reached the station, but I could see its light as it emerged from the dark tunnel. On the platform, perhaps ten yards behind me, both Lana and Maddox were running. Lana was skirting the edge of the platform, with Maddox to her left, though only by a few inches. I looked at the train, then back at the girls, and suddenly I saw Maddox glance over her shoulder. She must have seen the train barreling out of the tunnel, for then she faced forward again and, at that instant, leaned to her left, bumping her shoulder against Lana’s so that Lana briefly stumbled toward the pit before regaining her footing, as if by miracle.