Elementary, My Dear Watkins (10 page)

She passed two of the part-time maids in the hallway, but they were chatting with each other and barely noticed her. Alexa kept going. She still had to get all the way upstairs and down the hall without running into Consuela, the full-time cook and housekeeper. Consuela was nice and all, but she was always too much in Alexa’s business, always asking how she felt and if she missed her mother.

“Señoritas need their mamacitas,” Consuela liked to say. “They belong together.”

Alexa had overheard a conversation once between Consuela and the physical therapist, Yasmine. Consuela kept saying how wrong it was to remove a girl from her mother’s home and plunk her down in a mansion without any parents at all, even if it was for the sake of science. Yasmine just parroted Dr. Stebbins, saying that Alexa was a “medical miracle” and an “astounding prodigy” and that living here gave her opportunities far beyond anything her mother could ever provide.

“Don’t kid yourself,” Consuela had responded sharply, taking her anger out on Yasmine, even though she had nothing to do with it. “I think Mrs. Bosworth is getting a lot more than she’s giving with this arrangement. Or at least she will once Dr. Stebbins brings home his Nobel prize.”

Alexa had slipped away at that point, choosing not to hear the rest of their conversation. She didn’t like it when people talked about her that way—as though she was the sum of all those tests and examinations they were always doing, rather than a real person with feelings. Consuela’s intentions were good, but she had been wrong about one thing: Taking Alexa out of her mother’s home and plunking her down
anywhere
was the nicest thing anyone could have done for her. At least now Alexa didn’t lie awake at night worrying that her mother’s freebasing would catch the house on fire, or wake up the next morning to find yet another “uncle” in her kitchen, making breakfast. To be honest, her mom had never been much of a mother.

Sometimes, Alexa didn’t even miss her.

Now, she made it to her bedroom without incident and then pushed open the door, stepped inside, and then closed it behind her, exhaling slowly. She had done it.

Alexa locked the door behind her and then she set about finding a hiding place for the map, one that wouldn’t be discovered by the maids if they decided to change her sheets or gather up her dirty laundry. It was nice having people to clean up after her, but in a way it was one more invasion of her privacy.

Alexa quickly scanned the bedroom and the closet, finally spotting a jacket that hung near the back with its tags still on, the uncool one with the stupid removable liner the old lady had given her for her birthday. She grabbed it from the rack, carried it out to the bed, and unzipped one side. Carefully, she slid the folded paper between the nylon of the jacket and the fleece of the liner. Then she zipped it shut again.

Perfect.

She hung the jacket back in the closet and left, making her way through the house, out the back door, and across the beautiful lawn to the studio. It was going to be a long evening, she knew, trying to keep her very intuitive art teacher, Nicole, from sensing her excitement, and then killing time until she could get a taste of freedom tonight.

Alexa couldn’t wait to escape and make her way back to the Grave Cave.

“Water?”

Jo snapped up to see a policewoman holding out a bottle of water. It was dripping with condensation, and suddenly Jo was thirstier than she’d ever been in her life. She took it and drank a long sip. When she was finished, she tried to find her voice.

“Thank you,” she croaked.

“No problem. Do you feel up to answering a few questions?”

Jo shook her head, trying to get her bearings. Where was Bradford? Why had they taken him away?

“Is Bradford okay?” she asked, not wanting to hear the answer.

“The fellow that got hit by the train? He’s hurt pretty bad,” the cop replied, pulling a notebook from her pocket, “but he’s hanging in there. They’re taking him to the hospital on Lexington. You can go there once you’re finished here.”

“Okay,” Jo whispered, standing. “Sure.”

The woman began her questions starting with the basic facts: names, next of kin, what time she and Bradford got there, where they had been standing. Once they got through that, she asked Jo to describe what happened.

Closing her eyes, Jo tried to walk back through the whole incident as best she could. She described the press of the crowd, the hand on her back, the push that propelled her forward. When Jo opened her eyes, she was surprised to see the cop looking at her skeptically.

“You’re trying to tell me that someone intentionally pushed you onto the tracks of an oncoming train?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. Somebody tried to kill me.”

Jo told how she had started to fall when Bradford seemed to sense her movements and did what he could to pull her back to safety.

“This station gets busy at rush hour,” the cop replied, closing her notepad and tucking it into a pocket. “A lot of tourists might feel all those folks pressing in on them and think they were pushed. Doesn’t mean somebody was trying to kill you.”

“But they were. And I’m not a tourist. I grew up in this city.”

That wasn’t exactly true. Jo had grown up in different places all over the world, dragged along on each new business assignment of her father’s. But throughout her childhood her family had maintained an apartment in Manhattan, and she had lived there, on and off, for months at a time. Not counting her grandparents’ house in Mulberry Glen, New York City was as much “home” as anywhere else had been.

“Well, if you grew up here, then you know what it’s like. We got a lot of people all stuffed together on this one little island. Accidents happen.”

Jo studied the woman’s face, wondering why she was being so skeptical. Then the woman closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose, and Jo realized she was just an exhausted transit cop, overworked and probably underpaid, who really thought Jo was just paranoid.

Reluctantly, Jo went on to explain how the situation was more complicated than it seemed, that in fact Bradford had been warning her for the past hour that she was in danger.

“There’s even more to it than that,” Jo added, wishing she hadn’t given the printouts of the anonymous e-mails over to her grandmother. “This isn’t the first time today I had to talk with the police.”

Jo explained about the e-mails and her visit to Kreston, and the cop seemed to grow more convinced, especially when she realized that Jo was
the
Jo Tulip, of Tips from Tulip fame.

“Oh!” the cop cried suddenly. “Get out! You’re Tips from Tulip?”

“Yes.”

That seemed to change everything. The cop whipped out her notebook and asked Jo to repeat her story. This time through, however, Jo’s word was valid and all that she was claiming was absolute truth. As the cop enthusiastically began asking more questions, Jo was relieved. Sometimes a little celebrity came in handy.

The cop took thorough notes and asked good questions, but when she asked Jo if she knew
why
she was in danger, or from whom, Jo was reluctant to answer. If this had to do with her family and the family company, she knew it would be best to keep her mouth shut for now. Who knew what can of worms awaited her there, or what problems she might create for them, all based on the desperate whispers of a man who might or might not have been telling the full truth? Better to keep the authorities out of that part of it for the time being, at least until she’d had a chance to talk to her father.

“Bradford was going to explain once we got on the train,” Jo hedged. “Now I might never know.”

The cop nodded, again tucking away her notebook.

“Well, you sit tight for a few,” she said. “The detective will need for you to repeat everything you’ve told me and then some.” She gestured toward a man who was talking to someone else nearby. “He’ll probably be getting to you next. Don’t go anywhere.”

“Don’t worry,” Jo said emphatically. “I won’t.”

A
lexa dipped her brush into the light blue paint and then hesitated in front of the easel that awaited her. Slowly, reaching out with the brush, she painted a small circle in the center of the empty white canvas.

Once the circle was done, she thought about it for a moment, rinsed her brush, and then dipped it into the red, using it to paint a ring all the way around the blue. After red, she added a ring of yellow, then green, then black. As she painted, her concerns about hiding her excitement from her art teacher melted away. She was lost in the moment, so focused on capturing the image on the canvas that tonight’s escape was the furthest thing from her mind.

“There,” Alexa announced, looking up at her art teacher. “I’m done.”

Nicole Stebbins walked behind the easel and stood there for a long moment, obviously studying the display. She always wore soft, fluttery clothes, and today’s outfit was no exception. Her shirt looked as though it were made of pastel scarves, the sleeves hanging down in elegant points at her wrists. With the bright art room lights shining on her wavy blond hair and through her gauzy sleeves, she looked kind of like an angel. A really colorful angel.

“Interesting,” Nicole said finally. “Tell me about it.”

“You wanted me to paint an abstract of my mother,” Alexa answered, shrugging. “That’s her.”

Nicole pointed to the center of the multihued ball.

“That’s a pretty color,” she said. “You began with light blue. Why?”

Alexa hesitated, not knowing how to explain—or if she even wanted to. When she was young, her favorite blanket had been that exact soft shade of blue. She thought maybe mothers were supposed to feel like that color—when they loved you, at least.

“I guess that’s the ‘mom’ stuff. You know, like being nice. Playing dolls. Putting on Band-Aids. I think she used to do that sort of thing when I was a kid. Sometimes.”

“But it’s been a while?”

“I’m fourteen,” Alexa answered, rolling her eyes. “What do you think?”

Nicole looked at her with a strange expression, sadness mixed with pity, her vivid blue eyes piercing through to Alexa’s heart.

“I think even fourteen-year-olds need the mom stuff sometimes.”

Alexa swallowed hard. Why was Nicole always so insightful? It was creepy, as though she could crawl inside of Alexa’s head and read what was in there.

“And the red?” Nicole prodded, pointing toward the canvas.

“Her temper,” Alexa answered quickly, glancing away. “It doesn’t always show, but it’s there.”

The next ring, the yellow one, was even bigger than the red. The yellow was her mother’s
energy
, which was kind of intense and volatile, because it would come and go and always make trouble whenever it got too yellow. Alexa hated her mother’s energy. But she didn’t feel like explaining that. She didn’t want to talk about this stuff at all.

“Okay,” Nicole told her. “How about the yellow?”

“I don’t know,” Alexa said, trying to describe it and then quickly moving on to the next. “The green is money.”

“Money?”

“It’s a big part of who she is. Not that we ever had any. But she’s always thinking about it, always scheming to get it, always hoping for more of it.”

“That must seem odd, in a way, for money to be such a major focus that it becomes a part of who she is.”

Alexa didn’t respond. It didn’t seem odd to her, because that’s how it had always been. What did Nicole know about it anyway? She was a rich doctor’s wife who lived in Greenhaven and probably hadn’t had to worry about money since the day she got married. Life was different in a dumpy little apartment in a dumpy little town across the river in New Jersey: hand-to-mouth, paycheck-to-paycheck. That’s just how it was.

“I mean, earning and handling and spending money are necessary parts of life,” Nicole added, “but sometimes our priorities get a bit askew.”

Understatement of the year. Everything about my mother is askew
.

“Okay, well, tell me why you chose to finish in black,” Nicole added after a moment.

Alexa was quiet. How could she explain the black? That’s what the money was for, mostly, the addiction. The drugs.

“Black swallows all the rest,” Alexa said softly, “so that’s all anyone can see anymore.”

At that, she dipped her brush in more black paint and smeared it across the colorful ball, wiping back and forth in an attempt to obliterate it. She wished it were that easy to wipe out everything—everything that had come before, everything that had changed.

“Does it feel good to do that?” Nicole asked.

“It feels real,” Alexa replied, swirling the brush with even more vigor. “That’s what she is these days, just one big globby mess.”

Finally, she tossed the brush into the water and wiped her hands on the towel.

“I’m tired. I want to quit,” Alexa said, feeling inexplicably angry. Sometimes, she wondered why her art lessons with Nicole always seemed to stir up her feelings. She padded across the studio and sat on the floor, pulling on her sneakers and tying them. She was ready to be done for the hour, even though they were just getting started.

“Funny, isn’t it,” Nicole said, still standing in front of the easel, studying the canvas, “that even with all that black, the light blue still peeks through here and there. As do the other colors.”