Rachel Alexander 09 - Without a Word

pregnant. I wondered if that were so. I wondered if it might be possible to find someone who had gone to school with Sally Bruce, someone with a good memory and a loose tongue. I took out the little pad and made some more notes, then I transferred my questions to three-by-five cards and tacked them up to the bulletin board over the desk.
    Sally’s classmates, one note said. I was sure Leon would put the yearbook in with the papers he was going to collect for me. But the one with her picture in it wouldn’t help. What I needed was the yearbook from Sally’s old school. That’s where her friends had been and that’s where, if there had been any rumors, they would have been. I bet the school library kept all the yearbooks. I added, “Name of high school where Leon taught and Sally went?” to the card.
    After she’d married Leon, Sally didn’t make new friends. Or so Leon said. I’d have to check that out, too. And find out what she liked, what she did, who she was, all of which seemed to have changed when she got pregnant. And wasn’t that the case when I was in high school, too? Plans to go to college, hanging out with friends, senior trips, after-school clubs, all became a thing of the past. Suddenly everything was about the baby, the baby you didn’t plan for, the baby you didn’t want in the first place.
    Leon hadn’t said what kind of dog Roy was and there were no pictures of him hanging over Leon’s desk, over the dining room table, on those stark white living room walls. Had Madison tom up the pictures of Roy, too?
    I’d been hired-to find Sally. In order to do that, I’d need to know more about whom she chose to take with her and whom she’d left behind. If there was a chance in the world she could be found in the first place.
    I went downstairs to fix Dashiell’s dinner and think about my own, whether to order in a salad with some grilled chicken from Pepe Verde or a pizza. The Times was sitting unopened on the small table outside the kitchen where I’d dropped it after Dashiell had brought it in from where the delivery lady slid it through the curlicues in the fence. I got a card from her every Christmas. “Season’s Greetings from Estella Gonzalez, your New York Times delivery person,” it said, my reminder that a tip would be appreciated. I took the paper over to the couch and began to page through the depressing news, one page of it after another, stopping to read an article with the headline “Body Found at LaGuardia.”
    “A headless body,” it said, “and a head, floated to the surface of the East River near a runway at LaGuardia Airport yesterday morning, the authorities said, but it was unclear whether they were from the same person.”
    Who was I kidding, I thought, or more accurately, who was Leon kidding, hiring me to find his missing wife? Sooner or later, most missing people turn up dead like the poor chap who was found in the East River just yesterday. The body, the article said, was male, apparently a young man in his twenties. “No details about the head,” it said, “were available yesterday.”
    What if it turned out that Sally Bruce Spector wasn’t alive and well in, say, San Francisco? What if it turned out that she was dead? Then what? Sure, I would have done my job, but what about Madison?
    I dropped the paper and went back upstairs to my office, first looking in the phone book for a Dr. Eric Bechman and writing down his address. Then I did an Internet search to see what was out there, what if anything I could learn about the man Madison had supposedly killed.

CHAPTER 4

    Everything was on the Internet now, instructions for making bombs, herbs guaranteed to enlarge your penis, sites listing the side effects of drugs, people’s family albums. No more little black comers needed to affix your precious photos in a real-life album. Now you could use a virtual one. Instead of baby books, infants had their own Web sites starting with their sonograms, scanned and put online as baby’s first picture.
    Eric Bechman had no Web site, which wasn’t surprising, but something useful did come up when I searched, a two-paragraph article that had been in the Times two days after the murder. The article said that Eric Bechman, fifty-one, a pediatrician, had died suddenly and that the police suspected foul play. They were “following some leads,” an unnamed spokesperson for the department was quoted as saying, and the case was “under investigation.” There was, I was