She’d been found in the dilapidated Bronx apartment where she’d lived for the past seventeen months. It was a basement apartment and had only a couple small windows, but she’d made it darker still by drawing the curtains. It was so dim inside that the first cop to arrive had stumbled about, looking for a light switch. He’d finally found one only to discover that she’d unscrewed all the light bulbs, even the ones in the ceiling and the fluorescent ones on either side of the bathroom mirror. Neighbors later told police that they hadn’t seen a single sliver of light coming from her apartment for well over a month. It was as if the terrible capacity for destruction that I’d glimpsed in her so many years before had at last grown strong enough to consume her entirely.
A Detective O’Brien had related the grim details over the phone, the deteriorated condition of her body being the most graphic, the fact that the smell had alerted the neighbors. Then he’d asked me to meet him at the police station nearest my home. “Just following standard procedure,” he’d assured me, “Nothing to worry about.”
We’d agreed on a time and date, and so now here I was, dealing with Maddox again, just as I’d done so often before.
“So, tell me, what was your relationship with this young woman?” Detective O’Brien asked immediately after we’d exchanged greetings and I’d taken a seat in the metal chair beside his desk. His tone was casual enough, but there was an implication of something illicit in the word relationship.
“We took her in when she was a little girl,” I told him.
“How little?”
“She was ten when she came to live with us.”
That had been twenty-four years earlier. My family and I had lived in Hell’s Kitchen when there’d still been some hell left in it; sex shops and hot-sheet hotels, burnt-out prostitutes offering themselves on the corner of Forty-Sixth and Eighth. Now it was all theaters and restaurants, chartered buses unloading well-heeled senior citizens from Connecticut and New Jersey. Once it had been a neighborhood, bad though it was. Now it was an attraction.
“Us?” Detective O’Brien asked, still with a hint of probing for something unseemly. Had I abused this child? Is that why she’d embraced the darkness? Luckily, I knew that nothing could be further from the truth.
“With my wife and me, and our daughter Lana, who was just a year younger than Maddox,” I told him. “She stayed with us for almost a year. We’d planned for her to stay with us indefinitely. Lana had always wanted a sister. But as it turned out, we just weren’t prepared to keep a girl like that.”
“Like what?”
I avoided the word that occurred to me: dangerous.
“Difficult,” I said. “Very difficult.”
And so I’d sent her back to her single mother and her riotous older brother, hardly giving her a thought since. But now this bad penny had returned, spectacularly.
“How did she come to live with you in the first place?” O’Brien asked.
“Her mother was an old friend of ours,” I answered. “So was her father, but he died when Maddox was two years old. Anyway, her mother had lost her job. We were doing well, my wife and I, so we offered to bring Maddox to New York, pay for the private school our daughter also attended. The hope was to give her a better life.”
O’Brien’s expression said everything: But instead …
But instead, Maddox had ended up in the morgue.
“Did you know she was in New York?” the detective asked.
I shook my head. “Her mother remarried and moved to California. After that, we lost touch. The last I heard, Maddox was in the Midwest somewhere. After that, we had no idea where she was or what she was doing. What was she doing, by the way?”
“She’d been working as a cashier at a diner on Gun Hill Road,” O’Brien told me.
“Maddox was very smart,” I said. “She could have … done anything.”
The detective’s eyes told me that he’d heard a story like this one before; a smart kid who’d gotten a great chance but blown it.
I couldn’t keep from asking the question. “How did she die? On the phone, you just said her body had been found.”
“From the looks of it, malnutrition,” O’Brien answered. “No sign of drugs or any kind of violence.” He asked a few more questions, wanted to know if I’d heard from Maddox over the last few months, whether I knew the whereabouts of any family members, questions he called “routine.” I answered him truthfully, of course, and he appeared to accept my answers.
After a few minutes, he got to his feet. “Well, thanks for coming in, Mr. Gordon,” he said. “Like I said when I asked you to come down to the station, it’s just that your name came up during the course of the investigation.”