No Place Safe (15 page)

I decided to make the best of my sophomore year. Besides, Ma had warned me that I’d better not have a bad thing to say about the school since I had a chance to get out and didn’t. Especially since it was costing us good money when I could be getting the education that her tax dollars were already paying for. There was a school dance at the end of September, and I figured it was an opportunity to call my truce with the place I couldn’t stand being but was too afraid to leave. Ma agreed to drive me out to the school and pick me up afterwards. I didn’t concern myself with how she’d spend the two hours in between, which provided too little time to go home and come back. She only said, “I’ll be here at ten,” and I just assumed she had somewhere to go.

As my first year at the school went on, I’d tried to fit in, not because I wanted to but because I thought it would make things easier. I was more careful with my grammar, though the cadence of my words still echoed with the voice of a black girl raised in the south by black folks who once lived in the north. At home, my record collection was still disco, funk, and R&B, but at school I pretended to like Queen, though I’d never go as far as feigning any love for the southern rock that my classmates seemed to think was the end all, be all of music. And though I’d toned down my fashion sense a bit, I figured when it came to parties, I still knew what was going on in the world of style.

That’s why I was so surprised at the reaction I got when I walked into one of the gyms wearing an outfit I’d bought just for the party: a cotton blouse in hot pink woven through with silver thread; a wide leather belt in the same shade of pink but with a metallic finish, and skintight BonJour jeans. Across my body, I’d slung a purse that was hot in those days—a disco bag, a leather pouch made to hold only the essentials so it didn’t get in the way of dancing. It matched the belt, and when I went shopping for it downtown with some of my friends from my other life, they said it would be the piece that would set off the whole outfit.

I wished those friends were the people at the party because all I got for my coordinating efforts were questions about where could I
possibly have found that outfit
from girls wearing plaid blouses with bow ties and matching vests. Or below-the-knee plaid skirts with cowl-neck sweaters. The boys wore jeans topped with plaid shirts. Didn’t they get enough of wearing plaid during the school day?
None of my school friends were there either, because they were the studious kids who didn’t go to school dances. My efforts in trying to talk Dana into coming had been met with opposition: “I don’t like to dance. Who wants to hang out with those kids anyway? I don’t want to ask my dad to drive me.” In response to the last argument, I’d offered for us to pick her up and drop her back at home, but she couldn’t be persuaded.

Now I was thinking she was the one with good sense. I wanted to run from the place that I was clearly not meant to be, but where would I go? Ma wouldn’t be back for two hours. So I stayed there and danced with the cute blond who, during my first year at the school, had grabbed my ass when we were alone in the art supply closet but who I was certain by the second year was gay but in denial. It wasn’t until later that year that I finally figured out that his attraction to me wasn’t sexual or platonic—it was safe. He was a rich white boy who would one day inherit his family’s construction empire and would never actually bring home a black girl from the Southside. His flirtation with me was for show.

After a few dances, he went back to join the group that I’d never be a part of, nor wanted to be. The other kids said something to my dance partner when he rejoined them, laughing and making me wonder if he’d asked me to dance on some kind of dare. But he’d always been nice to me, and I was sure he understood being the outsider even though he was popular, so I figured it was something else. A few months later when Ma gave me a rabbit jacket for Christmas, the kind with a patchwork of different color fur, I wore it proudly until I overheard some girls say it looked cheap. The following week, the rich boy’s younger sister arrived at school in the same jacket. I liked to think of it as his way of defending me, though it was more likely I had not figured at all in the purchase. All I knew was they were one of the richest families at school, and could have afforded mink if they wanted.

The DJ put on Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust,” bringing kids to the dance floor, and all I could think was how the tune was ripped off from Chic’s “Good Times,” anthem of the disco they all hated. I found a chair in a quiet corner when I grew tired of pretending I belonged there. My feet hurt from standing for hours in my Candie’s knock-offs, reminding me I had to work the next day. I wondered how many kids at the dance would wake at five on a Saturday morning and be reconstituting dried onions and brewing coffee in a Bunn-o-Matic an hour later.

When the two hours finally ended, I went outside hoping Ma wasn’t late like usual, and was surprised to see the car parked in the same place it was when I got out. She was asleep, head against the window and mouth open, as though she’d been in that position for a long time. I knocked on the glass softly so I wouldn’t startle her because I knew never to surprise a cop, then opened the door.

“Am I late?” I asked, knowing that I wasn’t.

“What time is it? No, it’s a few minutes before ten. I guess I fell asleep.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Go?” Ma looked as if I’d spoken some language she didn’t know. “I’ve been here. Where would I go?”

It was only then that I noticed the little cooler on the backseat that she took to work on long days of watching some suspect’s house, and the paperback on the dashboard spread spine side up to hold the page. I wanted to thank her, and say I wished I’d known because I was having a hateful time in there with the construction company heir and the music that was never meant to be danced to. But I realized her effort in making sure I got to that dance had been a gift; time away from the case had become so precious since she’d joined the Task Force. So I spent the whole ride home telling her about the fun I had.

*

“He was found this morning in a trailer park.”

One of my coworkers was talking about the latest child to be found dead, twelve-year-old Charles Stephens, who had disappeared the day before. It was a Friday night, slow in the restaurant once the after-work-trying-to-get-home crowd had come and gone, and there was nothing to do but talk. I leaned against the counter watching for signs of the manager coming out of his office so I could run a wet cloth across the counter in feigned industry if he appeared. He was always threatening to fire anyone caught slacking off.

“That makes, what, the fourteenth?”

“No, fifteen,” I said. Since I’d finally let on that my mother was a cop, my coworkers looked to me for the most recent developments and statistics. I only told them what they could have found in the newspaper, and ignored their repeated requests for more.

“I hate that I have to catch the bus home now, not that I felt so safe before,” said the other cashier, a girl who seemed to be always scratching her scalp then studying her nails for content. I wondered why the supervisor never made her wear her cap, and I never got into her line to purchase my half-price meal during my dinner break. I liked her despite her questionable grooming, mostly because she was sixteen, had a baby, and worked full-time and still managed to stay in school. I admired her for that, and she made it hard for me to complain about anything.

“You’re lucky your mother comes to get you,” the girl said.

“She has to. My bus stops running at seven.”

“Still, you’re lucky you get a ride.”

It was true. If I had to ride the bus home at 11:30 at night, it would mean not having a job and not going to the private school. For my fellow cashier, it meant not being able to pay the rent. As if reading my mind and to calm her own fears, she said, “At least the killer doesn’t want girls. Not much, anyway.”

I wanted to tell her what Ma told me, that the dead girl and the missing girl shouldn’t have been included on the official list, but that was one of the things I couldn’t discuss outside the house. Instead, I just agreed with her and hoped Ma was right.

*

Ma was assigned a second case, another missing person report that turned into a homicide.  A search team gathered in Northwest, near the Hightower rail station and not far from the daycare center where an explosion killed four children and a teacher earlier in the week. It reminded people of the Klansman who put a bomb under a pew in a black Birmingham church in 1963 that killed four girls, and made us wonder if the murderer had decided to kill on a bigger scale. That memory was still warm because the Klansman, who originally had been fined a hundred dollars and six months in jail for possessing dynamite, had finally been brought to trial and convicted of murder just a year and a half before children began dying in Atlanta.

That was on people’s minds when the search team set out that morning looking for the body of seven-year-old Latonya Wilson, whose picture I thought looked more baby than child. She’d gone missing in June when someone, according to her parents and one witness, snuck into her home through a window, found her sleeping in her bed, and carried her away through the back door. People in her neighborhood were frustrated that four months had passed since her disappearance and she still hadn’t been found. They held out hope that she might still be alive, but not much. In the four months since she'd gone missing, five children had been found dead. The city councilman who had sponsored the search team, and the people he represented in his district, didn’t feel the police had done enough to locate the girl’s body.

A small group broke away from the rest of the search party, two teenagers and an adult, and walked along the railroad tracks that led into the rail station. Where Sewanee Avenue and Verbena Street met, one of the children crawled through a hole that had been cut into a chain-link fence, crossed into an open wooded area, and found what appeared to be human bones. One of the children ran to the main search group and radioed for the police. The detective first on the scene was certain they were a child’s bones, and two days later, the medical examiner confirmed it was the body of the seven-year-old girl the search party had set out to find. The parents were brought in to identity what they could—the elastic hair tie with green plastic balls and the white full-length slip she was last seen in. After four months, there was little else.

“People must be relieved they found the girl,” I said to Ma. To myself, I wondered if the parents regretted that instead of having a final memory of their little girl being alive and happy that night before she went missing, they’d now have to remember her from a tattered hair tie and a muddied slip.

“Only for a minute. Now they’re back to questioning the police, demanding to know why it took a bunch of frustrated parents and fearful teenagers a few hours to do what the police couldn’t in four months. I can’t say I blame them.”

Whenever Ma said “the police” instead of “us,” I knew those were the places in the investigation that she didn’t agree with what was going on. She’d never admit to doubting the Blue in public, and when people from the outside asked what went wrong, Ma ran through a list of things that could have hindered the search:

“It was so hot on the June day that the search began, the dogs couldn’t pick up a scent.”

“The mounted police doing the search were probably too far from the ground to see beneath the underbrush...”

“There were so many tips coming in from concerned citizens that the detectives on the case were overwhelmed. Remember, the Task Force wasn’t formed until a month after the girl went missing.”

It was no lie about the number of tips received, and all had to be checked out. Some were of the crazy and futile variety—seers and dreamers telling of visions they had over that morning’s bowl of cereal. But there were also the tips that made enough sense to give the detectives a bit of hope in the early days of the girl’s disappearance. A father who reported that the morning before the girl was abducted, a black man had entered his own child’s bedroom window just a few miles away, but had been frightened off by the man’s wife. A woman who called in with a partial license plate of a car she thought she saw the girl riding in on the same day. Three days after the little girl’s disappearance, a MARTA police officer stopped a man carrying a young girl in his arms at the Hightower rail station. Like the other tips, this one didn’t lead to anything, either. It turned out the man and his daughter had run out of gas on the freeway, and were taking the train home.

It wasn’t as if the city didn’t try. Five days after her disappearance, the police department even enlisted the help of the civil defense team to assist in the search, but their search area didn’t go out wide enough apparently, or the girl wasn’t dead yet, or hadn’t been placed in that location at that point. Either way, it was clear that the body had been there for some time, and it still should have been found.

Everybody who knew Ma was a cop demanded an explanation—neighbors, family, the carpenter who was turning our garage into a rec room because Ma’s work had spilled off the dining room table and was threatening to take over the living room. She had ready explanations for them, snapped out with a hostility that belied her usual cool. In private, she had as many questions as the rest of us. People had decided the police were either inept or just didn’t give a damn, but either way, this discovery only widened the gap between community and police, two groups that needed each other more than ever if there was any hope of solving the crimes. Ma was thrown right into the middle of this battleground, inheriting the anger and resentment that came along with the boxes of case files.

“Now I’m responsible for figuring out who killed Victim Two and Victim Nine.”