No Place Safe (12 page)

 “I’ll be working more hours, so you’ll have to do more around here.” She said this while standing outside the fence that surrounded our pool, watching me drag a net on a long metal pole across the water’s surface. Ma had a serious fear of water, perhaps the only thing I remember her being truly afraid of, at least before the child murders began. She rarely came inside the fence, and when she did, she’d walk alongside it, holding on to the chain-link and being careful to stay away from the pool’s edge. Now she was standing outside of it watching me, fingers of both hands wrapped around the metal, making me think of an anxious child.

“More of what?” Even now, I was working as the pool man we couldn’t afford to hire. What more did I have to do?

“Whatever I need you to do to help.” She sounded tired and worn out already and it was only her first day officially on the case, but I didn’t care. I was already tired, too.

“I’m working nearly full-time now and all my money goes into the bank or to you. I cook dinners most nights, Bridgette and I do most of the housework. I have to watch Bridgette on my off-days, or take her everywhere I go. When do I get to have some fun this summer?”

“Those dead kids won’t ever have any fun.” It was a silencing blow, a tactic similar to the “kids are dying in Africa” ploy used to encourage the cleaning of dinner plates, but this one actually had teeth. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m just frustrated. You do so much already, I know that, and I appreciate it. I know it’s hard sometimes, but it’ll have to be a little harder for a while. Working this case means I can’t take any side jobs, so money will be tight for a few months. Just a while until we can catch the son-of-a-bitch.”

Ma didn’t cuss much around me unless she was mad or driving, so I knew she was angry, but at what I wasn’t certain. Was it at the killer, or at the circumstances that forced her to ask her child to grow up sooner than later? I figured it was some of both.

*

We had just finished the five-hour drive from Atlanta to Hilton Head
,
South Carolina. The island was where well-off people from Atlanta and beyond escaped the city for long weekends of golf and tennis, or shopping at boutiques where you had to ask the price of things because they weren’t always labeled, and dined in restaurants that took reservations. We didn’t go into those boutiques more than once because they’d follow us around, and Ma said there was nothing we needed that got its allure just from being overpriced, anyway.

It was a trip we would make for the next three summers, renting a condo at the Hilton Head Beach and Tennis Resort. I think it made Ma feel richer to say we vacationed in Hilton Head, the way her fox coat and new car made her feel, despite the fact that we were just two or three paychecks from poor. As my mother’s daughter, I looked forward to conversations about summer vacations when I went back to school. I’d leave out the part about standing over hot grease and bagging fries and burgers for most of the summer. I’d make it sound like we owned the condo in Hilton Head instead of renting it by the night.

Bridgette and I left Ma making some lunch from the groceries we bought on the mainland where the prices were cheaper—enough food for the whole weekend—while we checked out the beach. We’d spent vacations on the Georgia and South Carolina coasts near Savannah before, so we were no longer surprised that the water wasn’t blue like it was on travel brochures. But the first time we found out, it was a disappointment. Now I was only willing to let the murky brown water touch my feet and no more, but Bridgette was still young enough not to suspect anything, and she went in boldly, letting the waves knock her down onto the beach while I watched from the shore. I envied her fearlessness, the way she’d try anything once without considering the drawbacks or weighing the danger.

“I wish we remembered to bring a towel,” she said when she walked to where I was sitting and dropped to the sand.

“We weren’t expecting to get wet. Ma’ll have a fit you going into the water wearing your new shorts and T-shirt.”

“We’ll stay out here until the wind dries me.”

Some birds were flying low over the water, dipping in occasionally searching for dinner. I thought it was a pretty scene, but I couldn’t help thinking about acid rain and whether the fish swimming in the dirty water were at all connected to the fish in the grocery store. I hoped not.

“I bet soon as Ma starts on the Task Force, she’ll find the killer in a couple of days,” Bridgette said.

“She doesn’t think so. She’ll be busy working on the case and won’t have much time for us. That’s why she brought us out here, sort of like an ‘I’m sorry’ present to make up for something she hasn’t done yet.”

“That’s not why.”

“I’m just saying you shouldn’t expect her to find the killer right away.” I didn’t admit that I also thought Ma would make all the difference on the case, but my rational self tried to believe otherwise. Low expectations meant less disappointment.

A warm breeze kicked up the odor of rotting fish. If Bridgette noticed it, she didn’t say anything, just kept shoveling sand into a pile as if she’d lost something and was trying to find it. Not building a sand castle or searching for shells, just absent-minded digging. She stopped when she reached packed wet sand.

“Well, I hope you’re wrong. I’m tired of being worried about the killer.”

“You worry about the killer?”

“Who doesn’t? When that one boy disappeared from just down the street from the school, we all got scared, all my friends and me. It was near that gym where y’all practiced basketball after school, where we caught the number ten bus home sometimes, that gas station is where he went missing from.”

“I remember.”

“It could have been one of Mrs. Ingram’s boys—they just live down the street. Even if they’re all the time getting on my nerves, I wouldn’t want them to get snatched.” She looked down at the hole she’d created in the sand and began refilling it. “It could’ve been me, for all I know.”

I knew Ma couldn’t afford to send Bridgette to private school anymore, but she hadn’t told her yet. So I only suggested the possibility of change. “Maybe you won’t have to go to school in the West End next year. Maybe Ma will take you out of the school because of the boy disappearing over there. Don’t worry about it anymore.”

Bridgette looked as though I’d just walked in from the moon. “Don’t you know the killer can be anywhere?”

*

Later that night after Bridgette had fallen asleep watching
The Love Boat
, Ma said, “I haven’t seen Kevin around much lately.”

“That’s because he broke up with me a couple of days ago.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? Is that why you’ve been moping around the house? You want to talk about it?” Ma rarely asked single questions, they usually came in twos or threes, and rarely with a space between for an answer. All the answers had to come at the end. I figured it was her way after making a living out of interrogating people, so I didn’t mind.

“He dumped me for the girl across the street. I guess he got tired of begging when she was more than willing, from what I hear. That’s probably where he is right now.”

Ma wasn’t surprised by what I’d said, and made a sound that was full of disgust. “That’s why I don’t date cops. Not anymore.”

 “Kevin’s father is the cop, not him.”

“Same thing. Some things just rub off.”

Like us
, I thought.
It works that way with female cops and their daughters, too.

“I thought you loved cops.”

“To watch my back, not to give my heart. They’re too messed up, got too many problems.”

I wondered whether she included herself in this appraisal, or if she was only referring to the men. Either way, it was one of those mother lessons that stuck with me well into womanhood. When my husband, who spent ten years in civilian management on a police force, suggested he might want to be a cop, I didn’t need to consider my response. It didn’t matter that ours was a happy marriage, there was no way I’d live with a cop again. Once was enough.

It wasn’t so much my mother’s long-ago warning about cops as lovers, though I was certain she was right. How could cops see the craziness and sadness that was a part of their job every day and not be a little off? What terrified me was the thought of going through nights of worry if he was half an hour late getting home. Afraid to answer a late night phone call if he was working the graveyard shift. Having my heart jump if a patrol car pulled in to my driveway and he wasn’t driving it. The prayer in the morning when we’d part that I’d see him again that night. The hardness he would learn to wear, necessary to survive the job but difficult to remove at the end of the day, even with those who love him. I wasn’t willing to do it, though I felt guilty, and still do, about preventing him from trying.

It wasn’t that I’d sought to bring another cop into my life intentionally. When I met my husband in college, he was a die-hard pacifist. When we moved in together, he asked me to return my .38 to my mother, her housewarming present when I left home and got my own apartment, along with my first set of crystal wine glasses, because “two things a woman needs to know how to do is protect herself and entertain well.”

When I returned the gun, Ma said, “I don’t see why you need to move in with any man when you’re only twenty-four, unless he’s planning on putting a ring on your finger.”

 “Whatever. Here’s your gun.” I handed it to her holding it by the barrel, the way she’d shown me so many years before.

“So can he protect you better than a .38 will?”

“Don’t worry about me. I’m your child, I know how to take care of myself.”

Back then, before my husband had ideas about becoming a cop, he had refused to live anywhere near a gun. Years later, I refused to live anywhere near a cop. I figured we were even.

A week before the Task Force was created, the eleventh child, nine-year-old Anthony Carter, had gone missing while playing a late-night game of hide-and-go-seek in his West End neighborhood. He was found dead the next day behind a warehouse less than a mile from home. The tired line that the mayor and the police department were sticking to—that the murders were not serial—had begun to work the city’s last collective nerve. Parents called the police inept, and cops fired back with questions like
Why is a nine-year-old playing hide-and-go-seek on city streets at midnight? Where are the parents?
It was becoming a cops-versus-parents battle, when both sides really wanted the same thing.

One group of parents in particular was most vocal, led by Camille Bell, mother of  nine-year-old Yusef, who was found in November 1979. As early as her son’s disappearance, she’d raised the possibility that the murders were related. In April 1980, she and a few other mothers had joined forces with some local church leaders to create a group called the Committee to Stop Children’s Murders (called STOP for short) with support from some religious leaders. By mid-July, they had forced the mayor to action.

Despite the grassroots spread-the-word campaign launched by STOP,
despite the announcement of the formation of the Task Force in mid-July, despite the murder of the eleventh child just a week before that announcement, there was still scant media coverage. I recall thirty-second spots, maybe they were a minute, on the evening news, but not much else. When I compare this to the media madness surrounding the murder of JonBenét Ramsey, the six-year-old beauty queen from Colorado, I find it hard to reconcile.

In the early summer of 1997, I turned in to the parking lot of the Boulder Police Department to pick up my husband for a lunch date. I couldn’t find an empty space because they were all taken by sports utility vehicles painted with logos of local and national news shows. The street was lined with television trucks sprouting satellite dishes and antennas. All of this to cover the investigation of a child who had been murdered six months earlier, a crime that, despite what the girl’s parents said, the police felt was not random and had announced long ago there was no reason for parents to fear for their children’s safety.

Even though the investigation hadn’t generated any more than scraps of information in months, the media still covered the story as though it had broken that morning. I ended up parking two blocks away and walking back to the police department. When any officer above the rank of patrolman came through the glass doors, the media people swarmed from trucks and cars like kids freed from school on a warm Friday afternoon.

“Did something happen today?” I asked my husband as we walked to the car.

“Nothing new has broken in a month, but they keep waiting for something. And when there’s nothing, they report on that, too.”

*

Ma had been going through case files on the dining room table, getting herself acquainted with the investigation. She had left the room for some reason, but didn’t bother to put away her work because Bridgette and I had been told the dining room was off-limits. I found the
Kidnapped Child Bulletin
on Ma’s stack of papers. It showed a picture of the still missing seven-year-old girl, probably a school picture that came in assorted sizes meant for displaying proudly in a grandmother’s living room and passing out to family for keeping in wallets. It had that look. She still looked more like a baby than a child, rounded cheeks still full with baby fat. The bulletin read, “
SHE
SUCKS
HER
THUMB
AND
HAS
SLIGHTLY
PROTRUDING
TEETH
.” I couldn’t tell this from the photo. All I saw was a little girl who looked so happy the day the picture was taken that the photographer probably didn’t have to tell her to smile. I stared at the picture wishing for some sign, praying that she would send me a vision of where she was, who had her. No sign came. She just kept smiling at me from the photo, looking more like a baby than a child.