No Place Safe (13 page)

There were boxes full of reports and interviews, maps with little dots of ink drawn on them. I’d seen these things before, on other cases Ma had worked, which I’d sneak a look at when she wasn’t watching. Until then, it seemed like something from TV, especially the hard copy interviews between Ma and the suspects. When I’d read the words following Ma’s name and a colon mark, I didn’t believe she actually said them. They belonged to the other woman, the hard-assed cop who didn’t really care whether the bad guy was scared, high, or belligerent, he’d damn well better provide some answers. Just like TV.

Seeing the stories of the dead kids who’d become a part of my world, kids I hadn’t given much consideration to a year ago but who were now, and suddenly,
too close,
it no longer seemed like TV. Ma was going to touch these kids—through hearing about their last known actions, by talking to their still-grieving-like-it-was-yesterday parents. And through her, I’d be touched by them, even more than before. I wasn’t sure it was something I wanted, not that I could keep it from happening. I moved aside some of the papers Ma had scattered on the table, not looking for anything particular but hoping for something, and saw a photograph. It was of one of the eleven kids, I don’t remember which. He was dead—not looking anything like a child ever should. The sight caught me, held me there too long before I let the picture fall back onto the table.

When Ma came to the door of the bathroom to see about the retching noises I was making, I blamed it on bad cramps.

When Ma was officially on the case, I expected the kidnappings to stop. There was no logic to this thinking, other than I was a fourteen-year-old child who had that much faith in my mother’s ability to make things right. But they didn’t stop. At the end of July, Earl Terrell
went missing
.
Like the last three, he was young enough for me to call him young, only eleven. He must have loved to read because he had seven books checked out from the library when he went missing. The last time anyone saw him alive, he was being thrown out of the pool at South Bend Park for misbehaving. South Bend Park was just three miles from my house.

The day after Earl went missing from the pool, his aunt told the Task Force she got a call from a white man (she said she was sure about this) saying he had the boy in Alabama and would set him free for a couple hundred dollars. That little bit of money was enough to make your heart break. No amount of money can equal a soul, but to take a child away, to make his family ache for the hole his taking leaves, for two hundred dollars was just plain meanness. In my mind, this could only be someone who saw no value in the life of that child and wanted to make sure the world knew it, the way diners who’ve received bad service will leave a penny instead of no tip at all, to make sure the waiter gets the point.

No one knows how legitimate this ransom call was, but his body still hadn’t been found going into August. The immediate affect his abduction had on the investigation was getting the FBI involved. Since there was a possibility he’d been taken across the state line, it was now a federal crime, and the FBI, which had long been reluctant to join the case despite pleas made by the mayor, didn’t have any option but to get involved, though minimally. It wasn’t until later that local cops began to wonder if it wasn’t a mixed blessing.

*

Ma was working at the dining room table again. Even though it had always been reserved for Sunday dinner, we never ate there anymore. It was where she kept all her information on the case, where she worked long after Bridgette and I had gone to sleep, and where I’d find her when I woke up in the morning. Sometimes I stopped in to check on her, see if she needed some water or iced tea, but mostly I hoped to remind her that Bridgette and I were still in the house and among the living. On this evening when I checked in, Ma showed me a picture of one of the kids and asked if I’d ever seen him.

“Why would I have seen him before?” I asked before I paid the photo any real attention.

“I spent all day riding his bus route between downtown and home.”

“Which route number?”

When she told me, I understood why she had asked. His bus left from the same starting point, the same corner, as mine.

“No, I don’t remember ever seeing him. Even if I had, what information could I have that would help?”

“If you’d seen him before, you could tell me if you ever noticed him talking to someone regularly at the bus stop, or if you ever saw him get into it with someone. Maybe another rider was ticked off with him or something.”

I took the picture from Ma and stared hard at it, wishing I could remember something, trying to will myself to recall some bit of information but nothing came to me. I knew if I spent more time on it, my mind would likely conjure something up, that I’d eventually believe it to be true, and provide well-intended but false and misleading information like so many witnesses did. I gave it up and told Ma I’d never seen him.

Even though I couldn’t remember the boy’s face, I didn’t doubt that at some point, we’d stood on that corner together. The odds were good that we had; both kids in school with similar commuting hours, both standing at that bus stop on the weekends waiting for a bus home after a day of movies at the Rialto or hanging around the Omni Center, people-watching and meeting up with friends. It wasn’t at all unlikely. I wondered why I hadn’t noticed him. Certainly if he was my type, I’d have remembered him. If he was the loud and rowdy sort of kid who’d make a run for the back of the bus, I’d have noticed him, too.

That made me think he was quiet, probably kept to himself and didn’t make fun of the homeless people who hung around our stop like the kids who ran in packs did. He probably just minded his business like me, just trying to get home without much drama involved. I wondered if he had a favorite seat on the bus, too, where he could stay out of trouble but also not look like too much of a sissy. When I took a last look at his picture, I felt regret that we never met. He probably would have been a good person to talk to, passing time until one of our buses arrived.

Ma turned back to the papers on the table, signaling that she was done with me. She shouldn’t have asked about the boy on the bus because all it did was make me hope she had something, even a germ of a theory, when it was obvious she didn’t. Instead of leaving her to her work, I took a chair and asked questions because up until that point, I’d asked so few.

“Don’t you have any leads yet?”

“You sound like my boss.” She laughed a little when she said it, so I knew she didn’t mind me interrupting her work.

“We thought we had something yesterday, a
person of interest
the city had contracted to paint project apartments. Some of the kids lived in some of the apartments he’d painted.”

“That sounds like a good lead.”

“The tip came from a man who’d been inside the painter’s house and thought his décor was a little strange. So Sid and I drove fifty miles into the country to visit this man. He’s got the
White Lightning
, a Klan newspaper, lining the walls of his living room like wallpaper, with headlines about how white people need to seek vindication for all the whites that had ever been killed by blacks.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Not as crazy as the black dolls he had sitting on top of doilies on every furniture surface of the house. Some dolls weren’t black, but white dolls he’d painted black. In some cases, he’d ripped the heads off the dolls, so only the heads sat on the doilies.”

“So you don’t think he did it?” Surely this was a clue.

“Being crazy doesn’t make you a suspect. If it did, the jails couldn’t hold all the people. We’re still keeping an eye on him, but his alibis check out. I think he’s just a crazy Klansman.”

“Aren’t they all?”

*

One more boy was found dead before the school year started, making him the thirteenth child abducted or killed. Clifford Jones was thirteen and not even from Atlanta, but in town visiting relatives when he was taken. The last time his family saw him, he was walking home from the grocery store with them when he broke away to search for aluminum cans. Like so many of the kids who would end up being abducted, he was just trying to earn a few dollars when he was abducted. He told his family he’d see them at home, but he never made it. Clifford’s body was found the following day, left next to a garbage can behind a strip mall.

The only solace I could imagine for the families of the kids who were found quickly was that they didn’t have to wonder where their child was for very long. They didn’t have to see their hope dry up into despair. This wasn’t any silver lining—there rarely is one when people die unless they were in terrible pain or very old and just plain tired of living—but I imagined that if I had a loved one missing, I’d rather know they were no longer in misery. There were still four kids of the thirteen unaccounted for, and I couldn’t imagine the hurt their families were feeling.

People were relieved to see the start of school, hoping fewer kids on the street meant fewer opportunities for the killer to strike. When school had ended in June, I was certain the killer would have been found before it started again. To a teenager, three months seems a long time, more than enough to figure out who the killer was, especially with Ma working the case, I thought. But I was starting my second year of high school, riding buses in the dark again, and I was afraid.

*

In some ways, I took comfort in the rich school. The economics of it made it safer to be in that part of town. I knew even then that crime didn’t come from the color of your skin, it came from need, and in the neighborhoods where I lived and traveled, there was a lot of need. In Ashford-Dunwoody, I didn’t see people running through the streets like they had stolen something because usually they had, as I did in downtown. I didn’t hear people arguing over money on street corners, because in Ashford-Dunwoody, the two-car garages held two cars and housewives paid someone else to clean their houses. Most everyone had enough.

Most likely the killer would stay away from there, because the kids he’d gotten so far had one thing in common: need. They needed to hustle a dollar to help their mothers with the rent. Maybe they needed a few bills to buy a Member’s Only jacket because it was the style and even though they were poor, they wanted to be part of what other kids were doing, and what’s wrong with that? They needed to find an honest way to make a little cash because the alternative might mean jail time. Their need made them easy prey for a killer who knew the need existed and knew where to find it—and that was nowhere near perennially green and professionally manicured Ashford-Dunwoody.

In other ways, the school brought me nothing but bad feeling. One thing that didn’t change in the new school year was the fact that there were no black teachers, administrators, or office staff out of more than sixty people. The only time I saw a black face older than mine at school was behind the counter of the cafeteria deli or on a riding lawnmower. At my old school, the teachers were black and white, mostly white with all the Catholic nuns that taught there. But they weren’t like the white teachers at the rich school. The nuns taught us pride in who we were, told us what we could achieve. They were as much for us succeeding as the black teachers.

Going to the new school made me question all that I knew up to that point: that I was valued, that I was equal. It was my first experience being a minority. Up to that point, I knew that I was but it hadn’t really mattered. Now it mattered. Even if it wasn’t intentional (but I suspected then that it was), the message sent to me by the new school was that black folks were only good enough to cook the rich kids’ food, not good enough to educate them in the classrooms, accept their parents’ hefty tuition payments in the office, or coach them on the fields and courts. I was glad I’d spent three years with the teachers from my old school first, the years when kids start deciding how they’ll think as adults, because if the rich school was all I’d known, I would have believed the world was full of white people who didn’t really give any thought to me at all, even the ones who were paid to.

*

I was lucky enough to get to the downtown stop just before the bus pulled in five minutes early, which meant I’d have my choice of seats. There was a psychology to selecting a seat on the bus. In the very front sat the old and infirm, or the people nervous about being on the bus in the first place. The middle of the bus was, appropriately, the middle ground—not as dangerous as the back, not as pathetic as the front. The back was the domain of juvenile delinquents or future inmates, hustling card players, and folks who normally wouldn’t sit back there but are forced to when there are no other seats left. Depending on the route, I would see people stand rather than go to the back. I was never that pitiful.

My preference was somewhere between the front and back doors on the route from downtown to home. On the route from the suburbs to downtown, I always sat as far back as possible, figuring I was as tough as any of the riders on that route – mostly older black women who worked in rich white folks’ homes, or immigrant laborers working on all the construction that was going on in north Atlanta who made it a point to blend in and stay quiet. The back of the bus was where the kids from the high schools along the route liked to hang out, along with the kids who got off the bus in front of the projects, so I tried to stay as clear of them as possible.

About halfway through my first year at school, they finally tired of commenting on the crested navy blazer and plaid skirt of my school uniform. More than once, I’d considered changing into regular clothes before I left school, but as chicken-shit as I was, I still wouldn’t go that far. It’s true what they say about bullies—once they know they have you, you’ll be gotten good. Sitting midway between the front and back doors meant I wasn’t such a chicken-shit that I needed to sit up front near the bus driver for protection, but it gave me enough distance for the project kids to miss my existence.