Without a Word by Carol Lea Benjamin Read Free Book Online

confessed to the crime, everyone would think she was telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, even her own father.
    Was that why I was so concerned about this angry, uncommunicative little girl, because in the end she might have no one else on her side? I hadn’t even been hired to solve the crime she’d been thought to have committed. I’d only been hired to try to find Sally.
    Sally.
    Had she planned to disappear, wouldn’t she have left when Leon was out working and Madison was in school? She could have taken some things then, some clothes, some money. She could have left a note.
    But that’s not what had happened. She’d gone out to walk Roy. And then what? Had someone snatched her off the street? Had her body floated to the surface somewhere like the one that had turned up near LaGuardia Airport? Was Sally dead and gone, buried in potter’s field or in some woods in New Jersey, her bones, perhaps, dug up and carried away by animals, one or two at a time?
    Or was it something else entirely, a lover, say, closer to her own age, someone she’d met quite by accident at the supermarket or in the drugstore, someone she’d been seeing and couldn’t find a way to tell Leon about?
    Or had she just wanted some air? And once outside, once she’d started putting distance between herself and the life she’d been living, she found she couldn’t go back. Who hasn’t imagined that scenario, I thought, walking out of the house one night, letting the door close behind you, nevergoing back. You wouldn’t necessarily know where you were headed. That wasn’t the point. You’d only know where you had been, and that it was a place you didn’t want to be, a place you couldn’t be, not ever again.

CHAPTER 5
    After a swim at the Y, I stopped at home to drop off my wet swimsuit, make a couple of phone calls and pick up Dashiell, heading back where we’d been the night before, to Dr. Bechman’s office. It seemed that Dr. Bechman wasn’t the only one who didn’t have hours on Friday morning. According to the two recordings I’d just listened to, the entire office would be closed Friday morning. Dr. Willet’s recording said that in case of an emergency, he could be reached at St. Vincent’s Hospital. His pager number was repeated twice. Dr. Edelstein had hours from one to four on Fridays, the same as the late Dr. Bechman. It was still early and no one answered the bell. I crossed the street and leaned against the park fence to wait.
    An hour earlier, floating in the pool after doing laps, letting my mind wander along with my body, I thought not about Madison Spector or her missing mother. I thought about my sister Lillian, on the day her son was born. My brother-in-law, Ted, had called to give me the news and I’d gone straight to the hospital to see the newborn Zachery, his tiny dimpled hands in fists he held to his face, like a boxer protecting a glass chin. The moment I picked him up, I felt a lurching in my chest, something opening to embrace him,to make room for this small being in my heart. It was difficult to take my eyes off him, but when I did, I saw my sister watching him, too, the expression on her face one I’d never seen before.
    â€œIt’s as if the whole world was in black and white,” she whispered, “and now, all at once, it’s in color.”
    I was sitting on the edge of her bed, the baby’s head against one arm, his almost weightless body on my lap, watching his lips work, practicing for his first big meal.
    â€œI saw him being born,” she said. “And the strangest thing happened.” My sister pale, her hair still damp against her brow, her hand on my arm, the backs of her long fingers against the baby’s head. “It was as if I was finally ready to start my life. No one ever told me,” she said, taking her hand away, reaching for the cup of water on her