The Chalk Girl by Carol O'Connell

Author:Carol O'Connell [O'Connell, Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Mystery
Publisher: Berkley
Published: 2012-01-17T05:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-FIVE

We follow Toby Wilder inside the Ramble now. It was Phoebe’s dare. But we never get far before we lose sight of him. We get lost in there sometimes, and when that happens, we run, hearts a banging, screaming up and down the paths, looking for a way out. Everyone we see might be a crazed killer, or at least more dangerous than what trolls the halls at Driscol. Phoebe says this is good training. This is Monster School.

—Ernest Nadler

The ambulette was not Wilhelmina Fallon’s idea of luxury transport, and the driver was getting surly. She ordered him to pull over in front of what might be Toby Wilder’s apartment house, a redbrick building on a shady Greenwich Village street. This phonebook listing for Susan Wilder was the only lead she had not exhausted, but no one ever answered the phone.

The driver opened the vehicle’s rear door to engage the hydraulic platform for his wheelchair passenger. ‘Don’t bother,’ said Willy. She abandoned the chair and every pretense of a handicap. Stepping out on the sidewalk, she donned her sunglasses and reached into her purse for the brown sack of money. Her tip was lavish. The man’s eyes lit up at the sight of so much cash. And now he had surely forgotten how badly she had abused him and berated him for talking to those two cops.

‘Wait for me.’ Willy turned toward the apartment building. Behind her, wheels burned rubber as they peeled away from the curb, and she thought she heard the driver laughing as he sped off down the street.

Prick.

The vacated parking space was quickly filled by a police car. Willy retreated to the other side of the street, forgetting for a moment that the pills in her purse were legal prescription drugs from the hospital. She turned back to see a uniformed officer open the vehicle’s rear door. A man unfolded from the backseat, and, as he left the car, he was preceded by his large nose. A tall man, a rich man – nice suit. Nice body, too. A small red-haired girl scrambled out behind him. Strange pair – a giant with the eyes of a frog and a kid with a cartoon smile.

Willy foraged in her handbag and pulled out her cell phone. Playing the tourist, she snapped their picture. The police car rolled away, and she drifted back toward Toby’s apartment house, stopping in the middle of the street.

A great hulking thug in a bad suit emerged from the building to greet the other two freaks. This one had a menacing face even as he smiled and bowed down to delicately shake the child’s tiny hand. He was everybody’s idea of a mob hit man, not a typical babysitter even by New York standards – and yet the girl was left in his company as the tall frogman entered the building alone. Willy stepped onto the curb and heard the little girl call her new minder by name, Detective Janos.

Another damn cop.

Forgoing her plan

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