Those Bones Are Not My Child (60 page)

“The second pack are guidelines and forms for filing under the Freedom of Information Act. The top sheet is a copy of title 5 of U.S. Code 552, which explains procedure. Be sure to spread the word. Do not reveal your source for the security papers, but do spread the word. And quickly,” Speaker added ominously, then sat down.

Zala slipped carbon between sheets of foolscap. It would probably have been better for Speaker to hold off until she’d completed the pledges for the members of the newly formed Community Committee of Inquiry to sign. But no one seemed uncomfortable about being in possession of security documents. Discussions were brief. Then everyone returned to the writing.

Renegades, Delia had called them—or so Gloria had reported. It wasn’t half off the mark, Zala was thinking, looking around the carriage house. Preener, for example, had defected from his neighborhood patrol when the police ambushed the Tech wood Homes Defense Squad. His
squadron got cold feet after the arrests and rescinded an earlier decision to arm themselves. Preener was sitting between ex-officer B. J. Greaves and Detective Dowell, who’d asked to be transferred from the Task Force because information was neither coordinated nor shared. “I knew more when I worked in my old unit,” he’d told the group.

Sitting between two fathers who’d complained loudly about the treatment families not on the list received from both the Task Force and STOP was a STOP office volunteer who could no longer stomach the squabbles between STOP and organizations raising funds in the name of the victims. The volunteer had walked out with Alice Moore, one of the mothers, who felt that STOP should charge city hall with theft and tampering with the mail. She carried in her handbag the sympathy cards she’d been called to City Hall to pick up. The envelopes, addressed to her, had been emptied of the “tokens of sympathy enclosed” that the notes on the cards referred to.

Next to the wood-burning stove set on a block covered with Mexican tile was a woman who’d worked in the SAFE office designing flyers. She’d thrown up her hands in defeat after being repeatedly discouraged from putting together fact sheets designed to inform residents right away of abductions in their neighborhoods rather than have them wait, ignorant and vulnerable, until the victim made the list or the media decided to grant coverage. “I thought safety education was the business of that office,” she had told the group. “Tell me about it,” the school-teacher had said in response. He was on suspension for organizing a PTA safety patrol in defiance of his principal’s order to “remain calm” in the face of daily reports of disappearances in early spring.

On the bench with Leah and Speaker were Paulette Foreman and two co-workers from Grady. Like Dave, who’d used up his sick time and annual leave to fly to La Crosse, Wisconsin, to visit his wife and son, Paulette was filing for reinstatement too, having overstayed her vacation in Miami doing refugee work with a girlfriend from nursing-school days. Dave and Paulette, disturbed by the erratic services set up for the stricken families, had organized a group of Grady workers with city youth workers to help lawyers, doctors, and psychologists volunteer their services to the families.

Zala wasn’t sure if Mattie’s new mode of dress represented defector status. Never a model of dress-for-success, the reverend, research lab aide, and metaphysical counselor was wearing dark-pink textured
tights under a dropped-waist, scooped-neck, striped dress. The bangles she customarily wore on her arms she now wore in her ears—three on each lobe. Her makeup was close to garish and hot-pink peau-de-soie heels capped legs crossed purposefully in the direction of Bible Man. Next to her was a woman dressed completely in white, with a double strand of myrrh beads tucked inside her dress. Bible Man and the two women had been working on the pierced-through passage of the Bible found by the search team back in January. “I was nowhere near Damascus,” Bible Man had told the group, “when I saw the light and went to look for this young man here,” hugging Speaker around the shoulder.

Behind them, the projectionist straddled a chair between a brother wearing a Gay Rights button and a brother in an Atlanta Street Academy jacket. The projectionist had been a mass-com intern at CNN when two of the STOP volunteer investigators appeared on a talk show. The show’s host had double-crossed Chet Dettlinger, who’d specifically requested that she not set him up to criticize the official investigators. The intern had wanted to work with the VIs, but instead hooked up with several community workers he met during the demonstration protesting the arrest of the Techwood Homes Defense Squad. For a while he’d filmed the activities of the Guardian Angels, the New York subway patrol that had been invited to Atlanta by a politico who preferred not to be interviewed. Then he’d met Preener on the march organized by Coretta King and SCLC. Zala had introduced him and Preener to Mason and Lafayette the day Spence brought the children home and cooked up a pot of gumbo.

Beside the Florida narc, lured from his own jurisdiction by Lee Gooch’s testimony and the fat Atlanta reward, sat a young reporter in the loosely knotted tie who kept turning up mud. Children reported seeing two men smear “mud” on the face of a boy they grabbed and threw in a yellow cab that drove off; “mud” was the neighborhood kids’ word for the substance in a can found in a corner of the house on Gray Street they had taken him to see for himself; it was “mud” that the boys reportedly sniffed to get high on before doing what they came to do, were paid to do, with the men in that infamous house that both his editor and the Task Force ignored, even after Dettlinger, pulled in for questioning, told them that several of the victims had frequently visited there.

“Anyone interested in hearing what we have?” The projectionist was going through the stacks of cases and canisters from Hot Spot.

“Not yet,” Zala said, passing out the pledges.

She had to smile. Spence’s drunken friend Claude Russell had turned out to be a fraud in one sense. Mercer’s insurance company reported that Claude Russell was a plumber in Oakland who’d never been to Atlanta and could prove it. Whoever the brother from California was, though, he had sent a shipment of film to Spence at Zala’s address. Spence had vowed to return the films in person to Hot Spot. She wondered where he planned to get the money to fly to the coast.

“I’d like to get you on film,” the projectionist was saying to the Street Academy brother, as Zala headed for the side door to check on the children.

“I’m ready any time you two are,” the young reporter said. He’d planned to say more, but the schoolteacher looked over his shoulder and frowned.

Zala walked through an area that had once been a stall and was now lined with sheet-music racks built into the corral walls. She stepped out into the sun and headed toward the front yard, composing.

How I Spent Our Anniversary. She wasn’t sure whether it would be an entry in her notebook or a letter to the Twins. Gerry was down in Epps with Mama Lovey. There’d been no further word from Maxwell since his wire from Frankfurt, Germany, while on the first leg of the trip from Lesotho.
Under each tree is a green pool of pollen
. She paused on “pool,” recalling how some members of the Committee of Inquiry reacted when Bible Man opened the meeting with a reading of Psalm 81. “Sheol” put them in mind of “Flat Shoals Road,” one of the marks on the map for Eric Middlebrooks. Mattie still maintained that the murders were the work of a cult and that bodies of water held the key.

The Bible passage Mattie and the others had been working on was from Isaiah, the most motley compilation of all the Old Testament books. Zala had never much thought about how many different Bibles there were besides the hotel Gideon and the family King James, but Bible Man and the woman in white had brought along the Dartmouth Bible and six other versions in an effort to break the code. A complete
Isaiah text, Zala had learned, was contained in The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered by several Bedouin boys in a cave in 1947. Mattie had been free-associating all morning: dead, boys, cave, sea; Pied Piper, Peter Pan, the Chattahoochee, Flat Shoals Road, Middlebrooks.

“Is it two o’clock yet?” Gloria was hobbling forward, a cardboard cylinder between her knees. The children ran through the flowerbed to hug Zala.

“My mom said to give this to you at two o’clock, when y’all married. But it’s a nuisance.”

“What is it?” Zala uncapped the cylinder.

“I hope you like it. It cost a fortune,” Gloria said, stepping back when Kofi crowded her to help Zala unroll the poster.

“The circus, Mama! Can we go?”

“It’s already gone,” Kofi said. “While we were at Nana’s.”

“That’s me.” Kenti reached across Zala’s hand to tap the cardboard. “I have an umbrella like that. It don’t have all that stuff on it, but it’s pink. Right?”

“That’s the poster you were talking about, isn’t it?” Gloria looked worried.

“Kiss your mother for me, Gloria.”

“Can we go to the playground? It’s just down the street.”

“This neighborhood is the pits,” Gloria said. “Round our way the creeps yell out nasty things. But around here they wave money at you.”

“Wave money?”

Gloria pulled one hand free from her sweatshirt pouch and gestured. “They wave dollar bills as they drive by. So I give them my look.” She leered, then chomp-chomped exposing her braces. Kofi and Kenti laughed.

“For a little while if you want,” Zala said, and the two raced down the front lawn toward the street. Gloria pushed her face close to Zala’s and showed off her braces again.

“Get on out of here, Gloria.”

Zala watched the three jump from the grass to the sidewalk, then cross the street toward what looked like a sculpture park. Large wooden and fired-clay structures were set in a five-pointed-star pattern in a field of wood chips. She supposed the children would find a way to turn the art to their advantage. She slid the brown-shellacked circus poster back into the roll and started back to the carriage house.

The former instructor from the Atlanta Street Academy was leaning against one of the half-opened doors talking to the projectionist and the reporter. He’d already told the group how he’d hung in long after undercover infiltrators backed by the Justice Department had staged a coup at the Academy and had several community organizers fired. While his account tended to be self-serving, with numerous ellipses leaving his motives for staying on board open to question, his story of the infiltrators had been of interest, particularly to Speaker, who continually reminded the group of the necessity to close ranks and bring no one into Inquiry who couldn’t be personally vouched for.

By the time the infiltrators hit the Street Academy, it was hurting for funds and suffering a split, one faction nervous about the Afrocentric philosophy another faction used to inform the Academy’s curriculum. The infiltrators moved in and, according to the ASA defector, began keeping dossiers.

“I started a few dossiers of my own,” the brother was saying. “Pretending concern about the children, they’re pulling in staff one by one now to question them about community workers, neighborhood hangouts, and other staff members. The day we heard that the STOP mothers were going to have a rally in D.C.,” the brother was saying as Zala came up, “they started asking about the mothers’ connections.”

“You can tell from the intelligence memos,” the young reporter interrupted, “that there are a great many things going down behind the so-called investigation that are not being reported.”

“That’s a fact.” Herman, the brother wearing the Gay Rights button, leaned out of the doorway and began cataloging the various abuses of civil rights suffered by the gay community as police raids on bars, antique shops, bathhouses, bookstores, coffeehouses, and cabarets stepped up in frequency and brutality. “All in the name of the investigation,” he said. “And the thing is, the silence about it corrupts everybody. You know what I mean?”

This is how we spent the first part of our anniversary
, Zala continued composing as she walked back into the carriage house. The Hot Spot film cases on the butcher block cart were stacked high.
P.S. Your cousin Gloria is wearing braces on her teeth these days
.

One minute’s worth of eavesdropping on the moving-company boss and his employees confirmed what Mrs. Webber had ascertained for herself: namely, that the guests, whose presence the judge had declined to explain, were part of the very affair that was routing them from their home. Hardly an enclave, not with the front doors hanging ajar, it was nonetheless a private meeting, closed even to her, their hostess—their unprepared, hence initially reluctant, hostess, but their hostess all the same, who’d wanted nothing more than an opportunity to place at their disposal whatever it was they might need. She was not without resources. The judge wasn’t the only Webber who could marshal human and material aid.

Merely irritated at first by their lack of civility, her gestures of hospitality and concern all but rebuffed, she’d been above all disappointed that they’d failed to recognize in her a person of good sense and good humor; moreover, of discretion. They apparently preferred, some of them at least, to view her as a paragon of aristocratic uselessness—such a deplorable cliché—and then to act accordingly. Persons of uncertain social status encountering someone like herself often adopted either a roughneck insolence or an ingratiating obsequiousness. The former she found exasperating; the latter thoroughly disgusted her. And so she’d behaved badly. Deliberately slow in setting up the silver service, she’d engaged in sardonic posturing as patently false as their self-important brio. Such a waste. And that hurt more than the effrontery. For what was life but relating?

Mrs. Webber leaned her cello case against the grandfather clock and looked in the glass. Under the towel her hair was hardening in the henna pack. Her face was tightening under the egg-white masque. She watched the pendulum swing across her reflection for a moment, saddened. What would her father have said of her performance out there in the carriage house? The throaty tick of the clock reminded her that the cleaners were due at three o’clock. She and the judge were expected at the Hyatt Regency for the bon voyage arranged in their honor at eight. Mrs. Webber headed toward the Dutch doors that led to the breezeway. She swung the top half open. The packers and the new housekeeper had their backs to her as they looked out over the patio.