At the End of the Road (14 page)

“Don’t I know it.”

“You work here most days?”

“Every day, I reckon,” the woman said and took a long drag off her cigarette.

“Yesterday?”

The woman nodded, her expression communicating that she had just said as much.

Dana pulled a Polaroid photo from her uniform pocket. Melodie Godwin’s mother had given it to her. In the photo, Melodie was smiling at something off camera. It was a bright, genuine smile, not the put-on smile people use for photographs. “Have you ever seen this girl? Yesterday maybe?”

The woman didn’t take the Polaroid even though Dana was holding it out, offering it to her. “Her mama’s done been in here. She’s a right pretty girl. I told her I ain’t never seen her.”

Dana took out her notepad and wrote her name and number on a piece of paper. “If she ever does show up, or you remember seeing her later, call me. Would you do that?”

“’Course I would. Right pretty girl. I hope nothing bad happened to her.”

side the bait shop and drank her Dr. Pepper. It was delicious. Dana thought about the long, hot walk back to her patrol car on Falls River Drive. She was tempted to call her colleague, Senior Deputy Ben Hughes, to come down here and pick her up, but she knew doing that wouldn’t get her any closer to finding Melodie. Deputy Turpin took out the Polaroid and studied Melodie’s face. She really was pretty, and you could tell that whoever had taken the picture had really captured the essence of the girl. This made her think about Melodie’s boyfriend and how his hands wanted to curl into fists. Dana pulled out the small plastic bag with the pieces of safety glass rolling around inside. She held the bag in one hand and the Polaroid in the other, as though comparing and contrasting them. She put them both away, stood up, stretched, noted no pain in her shoulder, and started walking back the way she had come.

dock, there were houses again. It was later now, and more folks were back home from church. She showed the photo and asked her questions, but nothing came of it—as she more or less expected. But at least she was getting people to thinking about Melodie, looking out for her.

From that direction, all of the houses were on the left side of the road, with just one house on the right. It was the brick ranch at the end of the long gravel driveway where she had seen the boy. It was the house closest to where she had found the glass. When she knocked, a woman came to the door. The woman was skinny and looked pale and unhealthy with dark circles under her eyes. She looked like someone who had recently lost a lot of weight. Maybe to cancer. While the woman studied the photo, Dana peered over the woman’s shoulder into the house. The family was still in their Sunday clothes eating dinner at a redwood picnic table. Everyone at the table was looking up from their dinner, looking at Dana to see what was going on. Except the father, he kept his back to the door. There were three boys and a cute little girl.

“No, ma’am, I’m sorry. I’ve never seen that girl,” Louise Edwards said.

“I see you folks are eating supper, so I won’t bother you anymore, but do you think you could tell me, do you ever remember a car wreck up yonder above your driveway?”

“No. Never one that I can remember.” Louise turned back to the kitchen and said, “Boyd, do you ever remember anybody getting in a wreck up on the road?”

Boyd shook his head and stayed intent on his supper. Dana didn’t like the way the man never turned around to look at her. Most men wouldn’t let their wives answer the door to talk to the sheriff’s department without getting themselves involved some kind of way. But it took all kinds. Dana also didn’t like the look on the face of the youngest boy. As her daddy used to say, the boy looked as nervous as a whore in church. She made eye contact with him, but the boy looked away almost immediately. She saw fear in his eyes. Of course, lots of people were scared of the police. Especially kids. Didn’t mean anything. Probably just like his daddy.

Godwin had disappeared without a trace. The case was officially still open, but Dana’s superiors had asked her not to devote any more of her time into investigating it. There was no indication of foul play, and the auto glass from the drainage ditch had no real relevance. As her sergeant had put it, he could walk down the street right now and find a handful of glass bits in the gutter. It meant nothing. In light of the domestic disturbance call last year, the assumption was that Melodie had gotten herself out of an abusive relationship by simply disappearing. She got in her car, started driving, and decided not to stop. Women did it every day. Dana had argued that even if that were true, there was no reason Melodie would fail to maintain contact with her mother or sisters. The sergeant had said that she might be too embarrassed, then he shrugged and said you just couldn’t tell about some people.

But Dana still looked into it in her spare time, paying for day care or a sitter to watch her daughter. Mrs. Godwin called her almost every day. She felt that something bad had happened to her daughter, and no one would help her. Sometimes Mrs. Godwin would be waiting at the station house when Dana came in off her rotation. Dana could barely stand to look the woman in the eye.

So she tried. Whenever there was a spare moment, she would do something to nudge the case along. To try and push it just a little bit forward. Dana wanted to be able to look Mrs. Godwin in the eye and say she had done some little something to try and find her daughter. Sometimes she parked above George Hicks’s house and just watched to see who came and who went, but nothing unusual ever happened. She still didn’t like George Hicks, but her heart said the answer lay elsewhere.

She monitored Melodie’s checking account for activity. There was none. This was usually considered a strong indication that the missing person had come to harm—a person can’t survive without money. But Melodie only had forty-three dollars in her account. Not enough to bother with if she was simply fleeing an abusive relationship. And she had no credit cards.

Dana couldn’t help but to keep coming back to Eden Road, and the boy who wouldn’t meet her eyes. The other day, she had walked the road three times so that she could accidentally meet up with the boy. Even though she’d heard about the fire, she was still shocked when she saw that the side of the road that had held the vast expanse of woods and horse trails was a blackened blight. Burned to the ground. All the way to the reservoir.

On her third pass along the dirt road, Dana spotted movement on the porch of the house with the wheelchair ramp. She recognized the boy and decided to hang back and observe him for a moment. He was talking to a man in a wheelchair. It looked to Dana like the man was holding the boy’s wrist, but she was too far away to be sure. She wished that she had brought her binoculars, but it had never crossed her mind that she might need them. The boy looked like he was trying to pull away from the older man, and Dana started moving forward. The sight had awakened something maternal in her. She didn’t necessarily think the boy was in any kind of danger, but she felt that whatever was going on needed to be witnessed. The boy’s sister emerged from the corn on the other side of the road and yelled something up to the porch. A few seconds later, the boy stumbled backward and fell on his rear end. He got to his feet, ran down the porch, and disappeared with his sister into the rows of corn.

By the time she made it to the house of the man in the wheelchair, the porch was empty, everything quiet. She studied the house. It was run-down with faded, peeling paint and shingles missing from the roof. Except for the wheelchair ramp, which stood out in sharp contrast with its newness. Dana turned and walked into the corn.

She tramped off through the stalks, but quickly realized that the rows were a kind of maze. The pun of
maze
/
maize
made her smile. All she could do was move forward and listen. After a while, the corn ended at the edge of a cow pasture. She caught sight of the boy and girl off to the left, moving across the sloping green field. Dana straddled the barbed wire fence and carefully maneuvered herself over it, but still managed to rip her pants at the inner thigh. She inspected the damage and saw that the barb had pierced her skin as well, though it didn’t hurt. She made a mental note to check her personnel file for the date of her last tetanus shot—they were good for ten years.

Dana scanned the pasture but didn’t see the boy and girl. There was a stand of weeping willows off to the right, so she headed in that direction. She circled around the stand and came at it from behind. She was able to approach without being seen. She could hear the children’s voices. Her plan had been to walk right up and introduce herself and see if there was any way to gain the boy’s trust, but she held back. The willow branches encircled the area like a green curtain, and Dana stood hidden in it, watching.

The boy was hanging upside down from a pendulous limb, swinging over a nasty-looking stagnant pond. He was trying to reach something in the green water, but it was just out of his grasp. The girl was pushing him so that he would swing out over the water. Dana smiled at the flag-colored cape the little girl was wearing. She recognized what it was immediately. Wonder Woman seemed to be everywhere that year. Along with Angie Dickinson as Sergeant “Pepper” Anderson and Lindsay Wagner as the Bionic Woman, powerful women were taking over television, and Dana watched all of those shows religiously. In fact, she had bought her daughter the same Wonder Woman costume from Zayre last Halloween. It wasn’t really a Wonder Woman costume, but a cheap made-in-China “patriotic girl” outfit. Her daughter also had a doll version with the red calf-high boots, puffy black hair, and exaggerated bustline of the character as played by Lynda Carter.

Dana didn’t think of herself as a women’s libber, but she was only the fourth female sheriff’s deputy officer in Douglas County, and the first black female deputy. She felt it every day. The stigma of being different. She made a conscious decision not to wallow in it, but she was certainly aware of it. It was there. So these silly little shows featuring women with superhuman strength, saving men, saving children, saving the day—they just delighted her. She knew that as important as it was for her to get out there and be visible, be competent, and not make mistakes, it was just as important the way these TV shows changed people’s perceptions of women in general. She loved it. Now if they could just get some black folks on TV with a little more class than Sanford and Son.

The boy asked his sister to not push so hard and slow him down. It worked. Dana smiled when the boy plucked whatever it was that he was after from out of the water, but she realized even before the boy did, that he had gotten himself into a jam. He was stranded, upside down, over the water. The boy only had two options—up or down. Dana smiled again when the boy chose up and managed to right his body and began to scurry up the tapered branch like a monkey. She heard the leaves popping off the branch and saw the avalanche effect. The boy plunged into the water. It felt to Dana like he was down a long time. She had already taken two steps forward when the boy emerged, covered in green slime and algae.

The girl took off her play cape and gave it to the boy so that he could use it to wipe off the green slime.
That cape’s ruined now
, Dana thought. Then the boy inspected what he had retrieved from the water. It was wrapped up in thread and it took a while to get it all unrolled. There was a silver dollar inside. The boy admired it for a while, and then he leaned over and hugged his sister. The boy turned away from her, and Dana could tell that he was crying. The girl started crying too.

Dana watched them a long time and knew that she would not speak to the boy on this day. She would not intrude. And it was only after she wiped the wetness from her cheek that Deputy Officer Dana Turpin realized that she had been crying too. And like Kyle and Grace, she didn’t know why.

night or not, so Kyle just laid there for a good long time after everybody went to bed, and he could hear Mama and Daddy snoring. Grace had tried to stay up with him, but she was asleep too. He crept out of bed and got himself dressed. It being a single level ranch-style house, Kyle just opened the bedroom window and crawled on out.

It was a long walk down the gravel driveway. Lonesome. There were shrill insect sounds, and the skin on his arms looked funny to him in the moonlight. There were odd sounds in the corn, and Kyle thought that he could hear someone moving around in there. That got him to thinking about Soap Sally. Mama said that when Soap Sally grabbed little kids, those needle-fingers would poke them over and over again like getting a thousand shots at the doctor’s office. He started walking a little bit faster. When he got to the road, he could see a dim light seeping through the paralyzed man’s front window. To Kyle, the light looked greenish, like a witch-light.