Chapter 11

Rachel Barlow sat in her kitchen, which was bright and airy and had nice white lace curtains on the windows. Plants hung from the space over the sink, where they’d be sure to get plenty of light and moisture. The wallpaper was a subdued pattern of milk pails and straw piles. The floor was ceramic tile. The chairs and table were country oak. There was absolutely nothing out of place. It was like being in the Museum of Suburban Kitchens.

Rachel herself, every inch the political candidate, subsection: female, was in a very sensible skirt and blouse, not showing anything above the knee or below the shoulder blades. Thank goodness, or my uncontrollable male urges might have moved me to throw her down on the center island and have my way with her. She was tall and blonde, and looked like she really wished she could wear a beehive hairdo, because it would have made her more comfortable.

“Can I get you some coffee?” she asked in a voice that sounded very much like that of a Barbie doll who had grown up and gotten her MBA. “We have regular and decaf.”

“No, that’s okay,” I said. “I think we should just get going on this.”

I know. I had just told Mahoney I wasn’t going to talk to Rachel Barlow, and here I was, talking to Rachel Barlow. Well, there were good reasons for changing my mind. For one, I had already checked with Dutton, who had nothing on Madlyn’s credit cards, but expected word back on my telephone records by that afternoon. And I had talked to two of Madlyn and Gary’s friends (actually, Madlyn’s), both of whom reported no problems in the marriage and absolutely nothing unusual of late. I had decided, also, that my petty feelings about Gary shouldn’t impede the investigation, so I shouldn’t exclude a whole avenue of inquiry just because it came from him. Besides, I didn’t have any other ideas.

Rachel Barlow had decided to run for mayor, I found out through Harrington’s clip morgue, because she felt it was time for “a new voice” in Midland Heights. Seeing as how the old voice, Mayor Sam Olszowy, had been in office for more than fifteen years at the time, it was a safe bet that the town liked hearing the voice it had now.

But Olszowy had made several potentially critical errors. He had seriously underestimated Rachel Barlow, dismissing her out of hand as a credible threat in the Democratic primary. There are no more than 200 registered Republicans in town, so the Democratic primary, assuming Hitler isn’t nominated, will pretty much decide the general election.

In office and in his campaign, Olszowy was ignoring the town’s changing demographics, too. He continued to cater to the senior citizens, who didn’t want the school budget passed, and weren’t interested in bringing more businesses to the downtown, either. But ignoring young parents in Midland Heights is like running for office in New York and announcing that you’re a big Atlanta Braves fan.

Next thing you know, Rachel Barlow, with her “we’ll set up a committee and investigate it” platform, and her strong advocacy of a healthy school budget, despite having no children of her own, was running close to even with Olszowy in the polls (assuming one can take accurate polls in an election this insignificant). Who the mayor of Midland Park might turn out to be would have as much an impact on my life as what brand of liquid soap they chose to put in the men’s room at New Jersey Turnpike rest stops. Maybe less.

“What is it you want to know?” Rachel asked, her hands folded in her lap, like the last contestant at a fifth-grade spelling bee waiting for the word “extraneous” to be called out.

“Well, to start, how well do you know Madlyn Beckwirth?”

Rachel shifted gears to that of a beauty pageant contestant asked how bikini waxing could actually help end hunger in Third World countries. Her eyes rolled up in their sockets, looking for an answer lodged tightly in her left frontal lobe.

“Madlyn is my campaign manager. We moved to town just about when she and Gary did, five years ago. I asked her to manage my campaign because she’s my best friend, and I trust her. Also because she brings an impeccable record to public service, having been a past president of the PTO at Roosevelt School and treasurer of the Boy Scout troop her son used to belong to.” Rachel rolled her eyes back down to look into mine, with all the charm of a department store mannequin.

“That’s fine,” I said, in my best reporter style, “but I’m really not looking for her resumé, and I’m not asking essay questions, either. This isn’t a shadow-debate with Mayor Olszowy. Just relax and talk to me.”

“I thought that was what I was doing.” Rachel’s eyes bored in just a bit, and widened maybe a millimeter. There was a side of her that you didn’t want to cross. She was hiding it, but not well.

“You are, but you need to relax. We’re just having a conversation. You’re not being questioned by the grand jury.” I was trying my best to smile, but the cold front that had drifted over the kitchen table was hard to get past. I was pretty sure I could see my breath. “Now. Have you noticed Madlyn acting unusual lately?”

“Unusual?” Rachel said the word like it would be visible coming out of her mouth, and would be ugly and hairy. Anything that wasn’t usual clearly wouldn’t be welcome in this kitchen.

“Not ordinary,” I said. “Something she wouldn’t do under normal circumstances.”

“I know what ‘unusual’ means.” Rachel didn’t exactly spit the words out at me, but she would have liked to. Only her terrific political instincts prevented a harsh, adversarial tone from kicking in. Great warming up the source, Tucker. The Pulitzer committee will no doubt reward your interviewing techniques someday. “No,” added the mayoral hopeful. I waited.

“That’s it? No?”

“No. I didn’t see anything unusual in the way Madlyn’s been acting lately.”

“She didn’t seem at all anxious or nervous?”

“No.”

“Excited about something?”

“No.”

“Worried about anything?”

“No.”

“Mention anything to you about trouble in her marriage?”

“Good lord, no.”

I stood up. “Well,” I said, reaching for my denim jacket, “I’m sorry to have taken your time.”

Rachel looked surprised. “That’s it? You’re not going to ask me about my campaign?”

“That’s not what this interview is about, Rachel. I thought Milt explained that I’m looking into Madlyn’s disappearance.”

“But the campaign is the reason for Madlyn’s disappearance,” said the I-wanna-be-the-mayor.

I stopped, midway through shrugging the jacket onto my shoulders. “You know that for sure?”

“Absolutely. Madlyn said she’d been getting phone calls, anonymous ones, threatening her if she kept managing my campaign. She didn’t take them seriously at first, but when they started coming every night, she got upset.”

I sat back down. “Did she call the police?”

“No. Gary doesn’t trust Chief Dutton. He believes the town police force is guilty of racial profiling.”

“Has Gary ever met Chief Dutton?”

Rachel smiled tolerantly. She was dealing with a mental midget, and she knew it. But one must keep up appearances, especially if one wants to gain high elected office. “Just because the chief is an African-American doesn’t mean he wouldn’t tolerate, even encourage, racial profiling if he thought his arrest rate would go up and his reputation would be enhanced.”

It occurred to me to point out that racial profiling was something done to ferret out drug dealers, operating under the racist assumption that non-whites are more likely than whites to be drug dealers. But the police in Midland Heights spend roughly 98 percent of their time giving out speeding tickets in a town whose speed limit never exceeds twenty-five miles per hour. As far as I knew, even the Grand Wizard of the KKK didn’t believe that being a member of a minority group made one more likely to drive forty miles per hour.

Still, I needed information from this woman, and engaging in a debate probably wouldn’t help me get it. “So she didn’t call the cops. Did Madlyn do anything else about the phone calls?”

“Well, she tried to ‘star-sixty-nine’ them, you know, but it was always out of the coverage area. And Gary wanted her to buy a gun, but she said they scared her.”

“You think whoever made those calls is responsible for Madlyn’s disappearance?”

Tears began to form in the corners of Rachel Barlow’s eyes. They appeared to be real. “I think they killed her,” she said softly.