Those Bones Are Not My Child (16 page)

“What!” she exploded just as he bumped against the limo fender.
“That’s what they want? That’s what the detective you met that time on Campbellton told you?” She moved closer to his face. The muscles were lax except around the eyes. He didn’t look like himself.

“Take it easy,” he said.

The music roared up again on the loudspeaker and then cut off. The wheeze and crank of rusty ratchets and unyielding sockets traveled up from the lot and over the traffic along Cascade Road. It could well have been her heartworks, or his, she was thinking. She leaned against the limo and watched cars cruise by, slowing down while passengers craned their necks to see the kiddie rides and food stands.

“Has Dave been around since Sonny disappeared?” He ran a finger across his distorted reflection on the fender. Then he sprawled across the hood. Slowly the heat seared through his jacket and shirt. But he didn’t move.

“Dave’s been by the shop once or twice,” she said. “He calls, keeps in touch. Been talking with the kids down at detention, trying to help out. Came by the Neighborhood Art Center yesterday to bring me lunch. But no news.” She looked at him sideways, but he was standing now, looking over her head in the direction of Burger King. Kids were racing from the food joint across Cascade to the mall. It seemed impossible that there could be so many children about and not one of them be Sonny.

“Don’t you think it’s odd, Zala, his not coming by the house since Sonny took off?”

“Took off,” she said. They looked at each other. Neither would confirm or deny. “Wasn’t like Dave was all the time over my house, Spence.” She waited for him to explain. He was probing the tire with the toe of his shoe. “They plan to question Dave? That’s what you were doing down there at the Task Force, throwing suspicion on our friends?” She waited to hear if he’d amend “our friends.”

“Mostly we talked about Sonny,” he said. “Height, weight, build. They made much of the fact that Sonny’s not slight as the others were.” He jumped his shoulders up and down to remind her of that, then flexed one arm slightly, just enough to crease his sleeve and disturb the symmetry of his jacket balanced on both sides by the even distribution of billfold, Sonny’s medical and dental charts, and the pistol he’d been moving from the glove compartment to his nightstand to a pocket in his clothes. “Most of the boys were slight,” he mumbled. She knew that.
He wanted to say that they were tiny, spindly, wanted to increase the difference and thereby increase the distance, putting their son at a safe remove. He couldn’t summon the energy. Besides, she would hear the subterfuge.

“Most,” she said. Their eyes met for a moment, then she looked away. What did “most” mean? At the Wheat Street Baptist Church meeting, there’d been two lists circulating. The one drawn up by the STOP committee had five names in common with the list compiled by the Task Force, but each list had additional names that didn’t match. And neither was as lengthy as the one B. J. Greaves, with the help of colleagues at MPYD, MP, and Homicide, had assembled. Perhaps B. J.’s request for assignment to the Task Force had gone through at last and she’d been able to get the lists combined and to note a pattern—slight of build in young male victims.

“They’re going to send over a squad car to help us search,” he said. He jutted his chin in the direction of the barbershop. “When do you get off?” He was no clearer now about her work schedule than he’d been in the past. He wanted to know who was minding Kenti and Kofi, but was sure that would start an argument.

“I can leave now,” she said, shrugging her smock off. “Where are we going to be searching? Do they have some ideas?”

“Your place. My place.” He shrugged. Youngsters were moving into the mall from the three bordering streets. Some of the bigger boys helped the carnival workers to drag cables; others waited their turn to bark orders and horse around with the bullhorn. He watched a work gang of five raise a newly painted Ferris wheel, the strain of their heaving visible in the shirtless backs and sweaty arms.

“I see,” she said after a while. “Then Dave’s place, I suppose. Paulette’s. Right?”

He cleared his throat and said nothing more. It had seemed a good move when the Task Force detective first suggested it. Many members of STOP, as well as supporters who dropped by the Campbellton office, seemed convinced that someone close was the culprit, someone right in their midst watching them perform treadmill hysterics. Committee members had been photographing those attending the funerals and had asked the Task Force to review the photographs taken by professionals as well. But now, hearing Zala’s voice dripping with sarcasm, the suggestion sounded less than scientific.

“Me and Kofi been all up in the fiberglass stuffing under the roof,” she said, touching her face as though it still stung with tiny cuts. “We’ve been down on all fours in the basement, lighting matches behind the boiler, shining the flashlight all over the unexcavated places in case we missed seeing an opening, a hole, where …” He heard the catch in her throat.

“What did you tell him you were looking for?” He regretted it the minute she beamed her hot eyes his way.

“A dead body, stupid. Naturally I told my eight-year-old son that we were on a treasure hunt for bones and skulls.”

“I only meant …” He tried to touch her shoulder but she pulled away.

“I told him we were looking for clues. Sonny’s keys …” She’d been looking in particular for a cigar box or the metal cash box his grandaddy Wesley had given him years before, a private stash of some sort that might contain an address book or a diary. She bundled the smock up and jammed it between her stomach and the hot fender.

Instinctively, he reached for her face with both hands when she closed her eyes and hunched her shoulders. Like his, her left ear was swollen from incessant phoning. She didn’t pull away when he turned her face from side to side. He wanted to lean down and kiss her ears, but she felt so feverish and jumpy. He took his hands away slowly.

“Lots of places to search,” they both said at the same time. Another luminous flare burst over their heads. He fought the impulse to duck.

“The woods again, I guess,” he said.

And your mama’s, she did not say. Her own mama, Lovey, had been shocked by the suspicion. But she’d worked around to asking Spence if they should visit both sets of parents, leave no stone unturned. Maybe Sonny had made up a horror story and been given asylum. Spence had given her a withering look: did she actually believe their families capable of tormenting them?

“So,” she said, bumping against the balled-up smock, “we’re the prime suspects, is that it? A lie-detector test and a search of our premises. Wonderful.”

“Take it easy,” he said. He kicked the tire and wondered which one of them would say it. It kept coming up. At the TF, at STOP, at MYPD, at the Travelers Aid Society, the shelters, the hospitals, the crisis
centers, the agencies recommended by the National Youth Services. Grandparents. He ghosted a smile remembering a session he’d had with the kids over Sonny’s homework one night years ago: theme. Kofi had done well with “Jack and the Beanstalk,” saying “I guess the theme of the story is that sometimes beans are more important than money.” Sonny had tackled some of the Sunday School parables for examples of them. Then Kenti piped up with the “theme” of “Little Red Riding Hood”—“Don’t never trust your grandmother.” Spence could feel wetness at the corner of his eyes and wrenched himself back to what they’d been told by the professionals. An infant disappears—first search the maternity-ward records for the mother of a recent stillborn, then visit both sets of grandparents. A child missing from school—examine custody battles in the parents’ history, then visit the grandparents on the noncustody side, usually paternal. An older child missing—if the child’s not well off, then write him off as a runaway. Like Mrs. Camille Bell of STOP had emphasized, “It’s a class thing.” No search party was mobilized to find a poor kid. A poor kid’s supposed to run. Bon voyage. Case closed.

“Shut up,” he said, and kicked the tire when he tuned in to what she was saying, that he’d been an ass to let the detective suggest a lie-detector test to his face, that he wasn’t tough enough with the police, that he hadn’t been tough enough or attentive enough with his son. He didn’t know how she’d gotten onto that track so suddenly. They’d promised not to. He’d have to listen more closely and head her off the minute her voice rose. McClintock, the VA counselor, had asked if she shouldn’t be sedated.

Cherry bombs blasted somewhere near the Ferris wheel. Fireworks shot out from the far end of the mall and burst yellow, then red, then orange over the roof of Popeye’s Chicken, fountaining down on the sidewalk near the bus kiosk. A comet of blue came sizzling across the lanes of cars along Cascade, then fanned out like a peacock two feet from the limo. They both leaned away, though the sparkles vanished in a puff before reaching them.

“You think, then, that he’s a runaway.” She ducked under his arm and stood close.

“That’s what they keep saying. But they don’t say who’s chasing him.” He wrapped his arms around her and pressed against the fender.

Runaway. How heroic it had sounded in her daddy’s mouth, in Spence’s bedtime stories. The folks of old fleeing captivity and setting up bases in the woods, the swamps, the hills, and in the camps of the Seminoles. Runaway. The word figured too in Mama Lovey’s family tales, in Grandaddy Wesley’s chronicles of the Spencers. Uncle Thad, M’Dear Selestine, and the stalwart patriarch Spence had been named after, running off from slavery, from migrant camps, tramping along on foot with the North Star by night and the moss growing on the north side of the trees by day. Hopping boxcars, running north to make a way for those who would come later, who’d leave stoop labor and cramped quarters and the bow-bent life spent under the weight of billy clubs, whips, and guns. Runaways who made a place to stand up straight in. How soured “runaway” had become of late in the mouths of strangers who would not budge from swivel chairs and air-conditioned offices. But in the face of the heart-stopping anguish of parents whose children had been murdered, how it glowed again with hope. Runaway. Not snatched, not choked, not dumped, but run away. Run away, Sonny. Rail line, hot line, steal away home.

“Baby, don’t cry.” He rocked her. Music was on again, not the sassy sisters of the sixties, but the corny grind of a calliope, an old-timey tune he couldn’t batten down, not with the front of his chest dampening and her back shuddering against his palms. A tune that would go round and round in his head demanding to be named when he was stark staring awake in the middle of night. Two youths were winding cable around their upper arms and shoulders, walking along the edge of the mall across the street. He’d heard that youth workers often got jobs for delinquents with outfits like these. Perhaps, traveling around neighborhoods, they’d picked up information.

“I’d like to talk with Dave,” Spence said. He felt her stiffen. He loosened his arms.

“Then go see him. But if you want to be suspicious about someone, why don’t you tail that creepy friend of yours up at the EOA Center.” She slid away and left him standing awkwardly off-balance.

“Mac?” He laughed. “McClintock’s about as capable of doing harm as …” As I am, he did not say. Despite all the blabbering he had done in the encounter group, he had never talked about it, and she’d never asked. He had killed. He had killed children. Others hadn’t asked, either,
they simply said it: “Killed babies, hunh?” One My Lai per serviceman. His arms hanging at his sides, mouth dry, no muscle energy to resist it, Spence drifted closer to the memory.

The thudding of mortar rounds that night had given him ample cover to zigzag noisily across the open terrain lobbing grenades at anything that moved. Then his foot struck a sandbag and he pitched himself sideways into the bunker, his helmet crashing down around his ears so he couldn’t hear what he was hearing and denying, that the screams weren’t those of grown men. And when morning came, the bodies hanging on the wire weren’t full-grown, but he didn’t draw that detail, so he hadn’t had to inspect more closely. Even from squinting distance, his eyes level with the top of a sandbag, his boots sinking into the mud, he’d summoned his defenses, marshaled together all the firsthand and secondhand stories of preadolescents asking for gum, then rolling grenades into the PX or into the barracks.

“Why don’t you take off your jacket?”

Sweat trickled down the backs of his legs. He felt woozy. Had he survived the mayhem of war thousands of miles from home only to return to Atlanta to be punished? He let her help him out of his jacket and took it from her the minute she began lifting it up and down, frowning at its weight.

“I only meant,” she said, “and I’m serious, that Mac’s right up there on Verbena Street not five minutes away from the Wilson home, where the little girl was kidnapped. Don’t tell me you haven’t thought of it, Spence. Don’t tell me you haven’t looked at the list and wondered how many vets are in those families, how many of those fathers and uncles and so forth might know Mac.”

“I’ve thought of it,” he said slowly. LaTonya Wilson had been removed from her bed on the eve of her seventh birthday. He didn’t have information as to whether the children sleeping in the same room, in the same bed, recognized the child thief stepping in the window. But a neighbor of the Wilsons reported seeing two men standing near the apartment in the early morning hours on June 23, and one was carrying the sleeping child. Could one of them have been Mac?

“And?”

He pictured Mac at his desk tamping down tobacco in the bowl of his pipe, the children seated in a semicircle around the desk, bound and
gagged in their chairs, as Mac, sucking and puffing, said, “As POWs in this undeclared war of age against youth …” He could get no further.

“Zala, that’s off the wall. What about that weird witchy woman? Revun Whatsherface? She lives over there by Anderson Park, not ten minutes away from the Wilson home. Comes out of nowhere, attaches herself to you, invites you over for a séance or whatever it is they do. You don’t find her a little peculiar, offering to hypnotize you?”