His eyes dropped to his hands. “Sister Isabel confided in me. She told me that she was being abused. I wasn’t shocked by the allegations per se—the church, unfortunately, is filled with forgotten women, women who’ve never once been treated right or treated with dignity. No, I was shocked once she told me about who had abused her. Her boyfriend, a doctor. She told me that he had forced her to deny her blackness, too, and even worse than that, he threatened to kill her. She told me that no one would ever believe her if she spoke up. And then she told me that all of this was her fault.”
The teacup in his hands was shaking. “And then she lifted her shirt and she showed me a bruise, here…” He touched his left rib cage. “Said that he’d slammed her into the dresser. And then she showed me finger-shaped bruises on her left bicep. When she was showing me this, there was this … look on her face. Defiance. Pride.”
Gray wanted to drop her head, which was heavy now with memories of bruises that had discolored her own body. She remembered the shame as nurses had iced her injuries and stitched the bloody, raggedy parts of her back together again. She’d never felt proud in those moments. Or defiant. Not ever. Not even now, years later.
What was there to be proud of? That she’d survived? Roaches would survive a nuclear war—they certainly didn’t deserve a parade.
Cancer. Tsunamis. Plane crashes. That shit came out of nowhere, and those people, they survived. She’d known that Sean was a vicious asshole with quick hands and a heart filled with mercury. Danger, danger, danger had always sparked off him, and once upon a time, that had made her wet and willing. And stupid—she’d been so fucking stupid. And to avoid her culpability, to keep from thinking about her stupidity and his violence and her fetish for his violence, she drank. And she stayed drinking. Maybe not drunk. Not all the time. But always drinking. All the time.
She didn’t sense those sparks with Ian O’Donnell, not that she was the ultimate Abuse Hunter. Still … not a single spark?
“Did she ask you to do anything?” Gray now asked Pastor Dunlop. Like help her with the big secret, the one that would destroy Ian O’Donnell?
“I asked her if she’d told the authorities. She said that they’d never take her word over a doctor’s. She didn’t want a restraining order, either—we all know that TROs and police can exacerbate the problem.”
“So?”
“So, I prayed with her, asked the Lord to protect her. I wanted to do more than that, but she stopped coming to church at the end of May, and Tea stopped coming about two weeks ago.” Pastor Dunlop’s shaky hand covered his mouth, and those warm eyes filled with tears.
Gray touched his arm. “She’s okay. I’ve been texting with her. I’m thinking that she left to avoid the worst. But I’m hoping for the best, too, okay? You keep praying. You stay faithful.”
Because some women did make it out alive. Some women did successfully escape. Yeah, they survived. And despite Gray’s reluctance, despite her disdain to consider herself as such, she—they—were survivors.
20
It was now moments away from eleven o’clock and Dulan’s had not opened yet. So Gray returned to the Camry and to Oleta Adams pressing her to just get there if she could.
Back at Isabel’s condo, filled trash cans still lined the curbs, and a black, late-model Chevy Malibu was parked where Gray had parked yesterday. The only other spot available was on the condo side of the street, in front of a beat-up Saab with Arizona plates.
Kevin Tompkins, the good soldier, exited the security gates. Today he wore blue jeans and a butter-yellow polo. He looked up and down Don Lorenzo Drive and then jogged to a gray Honda SUV parked behind the black Chevy. He lifted the rear gate, grabbed a Target bag from the cargo space, then wandered up the block. He stopped at a trio of trash bins in front of the next condo development over. He threw cautious glances up and down the street again, then opened the lid of the middle bin and shoved the Target bag deep into its mouth.
Nonchalant now, Kevin Tompkins strolled, la-di-da, back toward the entry gate shared by Isabel Lincoln and his mother.
“What’s in the bag?” Gray wondered aloud.
Blood rushed like fizzy water through her veins. This was unrelated to Isabel Lincoln’s case, but who didn’t like a good mystery? She’d always been the nosy kid, the Negro Nancy Drew. Maybe not asking Why?, but always wondering, always suspicious, always finding out … Like “finding out” that Mom Twyla and Auntie Charlene were girlfriends in the romantic way, kissing and hugging when they thought no one was around. Like “always wondering” why she’d been abandoned by the two people who’d created her. Like “always suspicious” of every person she’d ever met, including Nick, including herself, including Faye and Victor, who had finally adopted her and had saved her from the system.
What is in that freakin’ bag?
Her curiosity was jonesing to solve this mystery. But then she heard the worst sound in the world. A sound that heralded the beginning of the end as soon as you needed to retrieve something from a trash bin that’s about to be emptied. That’s the sound she heard several blocks behind her—and a glimpse in the Camry’s mirrors confirmed: a blue and white trash truck on its way down the hill.
Kevin Tompkins smiled as the truck slowly made its way down Don Lorenzo Drive.
What the hell did he toss in the bin?
Whatever it was, he needed it gone. And he now stood in front of the entry gate, waiting for it to disappear.
Not yet. The truck had two more stops, and it growled as its metal claw snatched a bin from the curbside.
That Target bag can’t be good. Cuz why is he waiting for that truck?
A gun? A bloody knife? Arsenic? Counterfeit dollar bills?
The security gate opened. Mrs. Tompkins, wearing a pink and purple floral housecoat said, “Kevin, if you ain’t gonna do it—”
“Mom,” he snapped, turning away from the trash truck. “I told you—”
“And I told you,” she said, wagging her finger at him. “It’s broken and I’m missing my show cuz you don’t wanna stop what you doing.”
“Can I get five minutes? Just five minutes?” He glanced back to the truck.
The truck wasn’t moving. The trash guys were shooting the breeze with an old man wearing a one-piece jumpsuit.
“You’re being an asshole right now,” the old lady warned. “Actin’ just like your daddy.”
Kevin Tompkins didn’t move from his spot.
“Boy, don’t make me ask you again.”
“Mom.” He threw another glance in the truck’s direction—the truck was growling again. “Fine.” He stomped back through the gates.
Gray could see the soldier lingering in the walkway.
The truck was now at the end of the block.
Mrs. Tompkins’s front door slammed shut. Kevin had gone inside.
Gray opened the door and slipped out to the curb. She peeked over the trunk of her car.
Kevin and his mother were no longer outside, but it wouldn’t take long for the soldier to fix the television.
Crouching, Gray darted from the Saab to the 4Runner, the Volvo to the Fury. It was hot—ninety degrees already—but the anxious scooting from car to car was the culprit behind her sweaty armpits and the chilled trickles of perspiration down her backbone.
The trash truck was so close that she could smell the old meat, the spilled beer, the rotten diapers. She jammed to the middle bin just as the truck pulled to a stop in front of it.
“Lemme guess,” the trash guy said to her. “Accidentally threw something away?”
Gray flushed. “My daughter threw out a bag that…” She winced as she touched the middle bin’s handle and dug in deep to pluck out the Target bag.
Nauseous, she backed away as the truck’s metal claw grabbed the bin from the curb.
The contents in the Target bag shifted. Papers? Magazines? What could be inside? Whatever it was belonged to her now—that was the law. She didn’t head back to her car, didn’t want Ke
vin to see her with his trash. Instead, on feet she could no longer feel, she tromped up the block and rounded the corner.
She needed to wash her hands.
She needed to peek into the bag.
Dueling directives kept her mind racing as she happened upon a pocket park, one of those swatches of green frequented by seniors doing tai chi and new moms blowing bubbles at their gurgling babies. And those things were happening now, as Gray slid onto a bench. She took a deep breath and opened the bag.
On first glance, she saw nothing special. In context, Kevin had guarded this bag as though it had been the last black market kidney in a world filled with deathbed diabetics.
A closer look: two pairs of silk panties, a tube of lavender and eucalyptus lotion, a black hair scrunchie. There also were crumpled papers that had been torn from a spiral-bound notebook and filled with words written in blue ink.
You are beautiful and you have a beautiful spirit. I love you. That sounds creepy coming from someone you barely know but I can’t stop thinking
Thinking what? The author hadn’t finished the sentence or the sentiment.
The second note, this one in green ink, read:
Isabel why haven’t you responded to my letters?????
The third note, block print, black ink:
DEAR ISABELLE, TIME IS RUNNING OUT. YOUR SILENCE BRINGS ME SO MUCH PAIN. I WILL DIE FOR YOU. THESE ARE NOT IDLE WORDS. IF YOU KEEP IGNORING ME I DON’T KNOW WHAT I WILL DO TO YOU OR TO ME.
YOURS TRULY,
K.
Gray’s hands were shaking, and she’d stopped breathing. And now the sun was too bright, and now the new mothers were ghosts and the slow-moving seniors were wisps of moving air.
Was Kevin Tompkins stalking Isabel?
Were these silk panties hers?
More important than that, how had he left Isabel when he last saw her?
Germy and weak-kneed, she tromped back to Don Lorenzo Drive.
Kevin Tompkins’s Honda SUV was gone—he had probably left thinking that his cache of scary shit was now on its way to a landfill, gone forever.
He didn’t know, though.
A ghost had found his cache of scary shit and his problems were only beginning.
21
The day had been full of unsettling surprises—Sean’s text message, then unsettling surprises one through six—and it wasn’t even noon yet. That’s what Gray was thinking as she plodded back to Isabel Lincoln’s condominium. That, and then, Who the hell…?
A white guy was now banging on Isabel’s front door with one meaty fist while the other fist hung at his waist like a rump roast. He was an English bulldog come to life, stuck in an ill-fitting blue suit. He looked moist and sticky, like he smelled of beer and bananas.
Gray crept past the gate, tiptoed to the end of the block, and slipped back into the Camry.
If Bulldog didn’t exit from the security gate, that meant he’d been let in. But by whom?
If he did leave, well, why had he come here in the first place?
She stowed the Target bag beneath the front passenger seat, then checked her phone’s charge—80 percent. She aimed the camera lens at the gate, being sure this time to press the red Record button. She stated the time, the date, and all that she’d observed up to this point on this, the twelfth day of July. Then she shut up and waited to see what Bulldog would do next.
Fortunately, she didn’t have to wait long. The man stomped out of the gate with a phone to his ear. He tromped across the street, then climbed into the black Chevy Malibu. Still talking on the phone, he started the car’s engine, but he didn’t drive away.
As he sat there, Gray scribbled down his license plate number, then called Clarissa.
“Hey,” the younger woman chirped, “I’m about to find the Omar number—”
“Awesome. I’m doing surveillance and I need you to run this plate for me right now.”
Seconds later, Clarissa said, “2008 Chevy Malibu … registered to … Stuart Ardizzone.”
“Can you run that name through, please?”
“Run it where?”
“I don’t know—whichever database tells you shit.”
“Umm…”
“Lady’s choice. I’ll be in the office in a couple of hours.”
“Oh! I made reservations at that French restaurant? Bardot Brasserie at the Aria? We can go there for my bachelorette—”
“Sounds good. Gotta go. See you soon.”
The Malibu made a three-point turn in the middle of Don Lorenzo Drive, then sped past Gray’s Camry. He didn’t even look in her direction.
But she saw more of him—his unfortunate underbite and a cauliflower ear that looked as meaty as his hands. With that ear, he could’ve been a cop or a boxer. He may not have been Stuart Ardizzone—could be just driving the man’s Malibu. Whoever he was, he obviously didn’t know that Isabel Lincoln hadn’t entered or exited that condo since May 27.
Should I follow him, or … She sat there, clutching the steering wheel, not sure what to do next. She’d had a plan, but now, with Bulldog’s arrival … More than a minute passed while she sat there, wondering. And then the question of whether to follow the mysterious man no longer mattered—he was long gone.
Mrs. Tompkins didn’t like the looks of the man at all. The old woman had come out to the breezeway as soon as Gray closed the security gate.
“You see that guy who just left?” Gray asked her.
Mrs. Tompkins nodded. “He kept banging on the door like she would be off in there.”
“Izzy would never hang out with a guy like that. You ever see him before?”
“Once. Week before the Fourth of July. I ain’t like the looks of him then and I don’t like the looks of him now.”
“Have you noticed any other strange people dropping by?”
“Oh…” The old woman rubbed her chin. “There’s the girl with purple braids—she used to stay with Isabel from time to time.”
Noelle Lawrence had purple locks.
“She came ringing my doorbell after she tried to get into Isabel’s condo. I ain’t open my door, not with her looking all crazy, with them things stuck in her lips and her nose and all them tattoos … Ugh.” Mrs. Tompkins frowned. “She could’ve come in here and stabbed me. Nuh-uh.”
Was Noelle supposed to claim the mail Mrs. Tompkins had kept for Isabel?
The old woman was shaking her head. “I can’t even understand how Isabel had her living off in the Gardners’ place anyway. They used to argue, too, and Isabel kicked her out.”
“When was the last time the purple braids lady come by?”
“Maybe a week or two after Isabel left. Looking crazy like always.”
“Anyone else?”
“I already told you about the other man. The big, black, rough-looking one. He knew better than to knock on my door.” She sucked her teeth. “All of a sudden, I’m seeing all these shady-looking people around here.”
“And when was that? When the big black dude stopped by?”
“A week after the purple-haired girl came round.”
Had that been Noelle’s thug boyfriend?
“Anyone else?” Gray asked.
“Nah. I try to stay outta people’s business.”
Gray offered an apologetic smile. “I hate to be a bother, but could you let me in? I—”
“Of course, Maya.” She reached into her housecoat and plucked out two wrapped cough drops, a neatly folded handkerchief, and that pink ribbon holding three keys. “Just give ’em back to me later. One of those is the mailbox key, another one is the house key, and the third one … I don’t know what the third one’s for. Anyway, don’t lose ’em. I’d hate for her to think that she can’t trust me. Oh. Before I forget.” The old woman ducked back into her condo.
Gray stood in the doorway.
A talk show blared on the television.
Mrs. Tompkins pushed the Mute button on the television’s remote control. “Kevin just fixed it for me right before yo
u came, so I don’t wanna turn it off. He’s a good son.”
A good son and a pervert.
“That was nice of him to do. He come by whenever he’s in town?”
Mrs. Tompkins pawed through a sideboard drawer. “Oh, he ain’t posted anywhere right now. I’m glad, cuz he can take care of me, like sons are supposed to take care of their mothers. Them ex-wives of his ain’t never understood that. But he knows—his momma always comes first. That’s how nice boys are. Where is that … It’s in here somewhere…”
Nice boys. Boys who would never hurt a fly. Boys who were always misunderstood, who fell head over heels for the wrong tramp, the slut after his money, the whore who attacked his manhood. Nice guys—like Ian O’Donnell—who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and bam! That Jezebel made him hit her, made him steal or kill or …
That’s what Sean’s mom had thought. Sean could do no wrong in Loni Dixon’s eyes. Bruises had been a result of thin skin; cuts came from moving away at a strange angle; threats were just words. Stop being so sensitive. Be lucky. You got a nice car, a nice house, and he comes home at night. You don’t even have to work a job. Don’t call me again with that nonsense.
And so it was with Mrs. Tompkins and her nice boy Kevin.
“They never liked us,” the old lady sniffed. “The ex-wives, that’s who I’m talking about. Jesmyn, his first wife, was an awful, awful woman. Drank a lot. And the other one … Oh, what’s her name? Kelly, Kelsey … That one worked. That was always her excuse. ‘I’m working, Kevin. I’m tired, Kevin.’ She was lousy is what she was. She stopped speaking to me and Arnie back when he was alive. That was fine with me.” She lifted her chin and poked out her bottom lip.
“So, is Kevin single now?” Gray asked.
The old lady stopped her search and smiled. “Why? You interested?”
Gray shrugged, played coy.
“You ain’t like them at all. See, Jesmyn, she was only with him for his military benefits, and the other one, she kept nagging him about how come he ain’t been promoted. She never gave him a chance. And she was jealous of me.”
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