No Place Safe

by Kim Reid

  “You have to eat a piece of corn and a little coleslaw. You can’t make a meal of just chicken and biscuits. And slow down, the food isn’t going anywhere.”

  After we’d taken the first bites of chicken and sips of soda, I became Bridgette’s sister again, and told her all about the screaming woman who had to be taken away in the paddy wagon.

  *

  The boy last seen selling the car deodorizer at the Stewart-Lakewood Shopping Center had been missing nearly a week. On the fifth day, the sheriff of Rockdale County—officially considered part of the metro area but what I considered the country, namely because I’d never been there before—got a call from an unidentified white man claiming responsibility for all the murders and giving a location on Sigman Road where the latest boy could be found. The man sounded believable enough for the Task Force to conduct a search, although at that point, the Task Force was following up on leads that sounded implausible too, no one wanting to be the detective that missed the lead that would turn out to be the lead. The amount of wasted time and work generated by tips provided by the well-meaning, the crazy, and the just plain evil were enough to make even a cop with the patience of Job a little upset.

  Ma didn’t have anywhere near the patience of Job, so when she got the call to go on another search the following day, she said, “I don’t know how much longer I can do this —having hope, losing hope, looking for alive kids and finding them dead.” But she went anyway because she had no choice; no one did until the killer was found.

  She told me that evening, after the day had worn her down and she’d come home to sleep it off, that the Task Force decided to concentrate its search in the area where the boy was last seen, and amassed a search team of nearly 275 patrol officers, detectives, and FBI agents. They were still feeling the sting of being called inept after the girl was found dead by a citizen search party, and the Task Force wanted to make certain there would be no repeat. Nearly everyone in town who wasn’t working the case, and therefore didn’t know any better, had an opinion on whether the Task Force knew what they were doing.

  On a Friday morning that was a bit cooler than usual, and felt cooler still because the humidity always hangs in the Georgia air regardless of the temperature, an army of cops fanned out across the search area lined up like ants, backtracking one another’s paths so as not to miss a clue. Ma was one of them, her feet crunching over dry leaves and pine needles the color of brown paper bags, searching for something she hoped and hoped not to find.

  After four hours of searching, they found the skeletal remains of a small child in a wooded area off Redwine Road. The search team then began a tighter search, combing the area for clues as to how and when the child was killed. They were surprised to find a second set of bones. Neither set was the child they were looking for, who had been missing only six days while the two bodies found had been out there a long time. Ma said the thing that stayed in her mind the most when she saw each of the bodies was how their size made it clear that they were only children. Everyone knew right away, and after they had their own private moment of grief like cops do sometimes, so quick the rest of us wouldn’t even notice it, they became hardened detectives again and got to work on the crime scene.

  It was clear that a killer was using the area as a dumping ground, much like he had around Niskey Lake when the murders began. The area around Redwine Road where the latest two bodies had been found was also where the third victim was found back in November of 1979. The discovery of these bodies only cemented the belief that the seventeen murders committed to this point were for the most part committed by the same killer, or someone was copying the first killer’s MO, leaving bodies in places the original killer left bodies a year and a half earlier.

  The following day, the search continued because the victim they’d set out to find had not been found. As of early January, there were five children on the list still considered missing, including the boy who was trying to make a little change selling car deodorizers. A week later, the medical examiner would identify the two bodies: one was Christopher Richardson, the first of three kids to go missing in June 1980; and the other was Earl Terrell, who had disappeared at the end of the following month.

  Chapter Twenty

  Early on, the police had lost much of the community’s trust when they refused to acknowledge a serial killer was behind the first murders. It made them even less popular when they treated victims’ families like possible suspects, but Ma and Sid continued to watch, interview, and check the stories of the parents in the Wilson case. They were still convinced that the MO on the case was too dissimilar from the others. The night the girl disappeared, a neighbor corroborated the parents’ story, saying she’d seen a man come out of the window holding the limp and sleeping girl in his arms, accompanied by another man. Both men were black. But another neighbor said she’d seen the victim and her brothers and sister go in and out of the same window that night. The neighbor said the kids used the window as a door all the time, and that she’d spoken to the mother several times about it, but was ignored. According to the neighbor, the children were often left alone while the parents went out at night, and her son had told her he’d heard screams coming from the apartment in the early morning hours before the girl was reported missing. So the parents were still suspects.

  Ma repeatedly read her notes from her interview with the parents of what happened that night, hoping to find some inconsistency: The parents and the girls spend the afternoon at the West End Mall. Get back home around 8:00 P.M. and have tuna sandwiches for dinner. Mother’s cousin had two of her boys for the day, and was surprised he hadn’t brought them home yet since it was now 8:30 P.M. Mother wants to go downtown to the Rialto to see a movie; father isn’t interested. Father drives mother to the MARTA station around 9:00 P.M., taking the girls along for the ride, and she gets on the train alone. She left the movie at 12:15 A.M.; husband meets her at the train station for a ride home. Oldest boy is outside playing—why is a child outside playing at one in the morning?—she checks on the other kids and finds the two younger boys and the two girls are asleep in their beds. Parents go to sleep about 1:30. Mother wakes up at 6:00 A.M. and finds the girl missing. Somewhere in here I’m going to find inconsistencies.

  In an interview taken five months after the girl disappeared, Ma asked the mother about the movies again, and why the husband didn’t go.

  Mother: What I had planned to do was get [my oldest son] to keep all the kids while [my husband] went to the movies with me. I don’t think he wanted to go to the movies anyway, because he was tired. He had worked all week, he was saying. I said I sure do want to go and see the movies. I just be wanting to get out of the house some. I don’t go to places very much. I don’t care for clubs. Only place that I go mostly is to the movies. If I do go to the club me and my husband go together.

  Ma: Wasn’t it your birthday? Did you just have a birthday?

  Mother: That Sunday when my daughter was missing it was my birthday.

  Ma: You wanted [your husband] to go with you to celebrate your birthday?

  Mother: Yes. That Sunday. We were going to go out that Sunday, my birthday wasn’t until that Sunday. I had been wanting to go out for a good little while and I said that Sunday he was going to take me out to get a drink. I don’t really drink. Just go out every once and a while to have a mixed drink. When I got up, she was missing. I didn’t even get a chance to celebrate my birthday.

  Ma: Hers was that Monday.

  Mother: Didn’t get a chance to celebrate hers either. I had planned to take her down to the Omni so that she could play in the game room, eat a ice cream cone, eat at McDonald’s and do different things. I was planning on taking them all to the Omni…

  All Ma’s hard work, and the work of everyone on the Task Force, still didn’t keep the killer from killing. The third week of January saw the murder of a boy who was just a couple of months older than I. Last time anyone saw Terry Pue, he was getting off a bus on his way to watch a basketbal
l game. His mother didn’t report him missing until she heard the description on the radio of a dead child who had been found the following day in Rockdale County off Sigman Road. The boy’s body lay just a mile from where the unidentified white male caller had told the sheriff where Lubie Geter could be found. Police didn’t find that boy when the first search was done, and didn’t find him when the latest discovery prompted another search of the area. But now the Task Force had good reason to believe the unidentified caller wasn’t just another crazy person claiming responsibility.

  The boy’s mother must have wondered whether it was her child since he was found in a county that was nearly all white and twenty-five miles from where he lived. But when she heard the description of the dead child’s clothing, she knew it was her son. He was wearing a blue jacket with the word KIM on the back. Because I was Ma’s child and was forever looking for signs in everything, I wondered what KIM was—a designer, a girlfriend, an acronym—and whether it was an omen I should heed.

  It was strange to me that his mother waited until she heard the radio news before she reported him missing. How could it be that after a year and a half of murders, parents would still wait to report a missing child? My friends knew they couldn’t be late getting home from anywhere, and if they were going to be, they’d better call home and let someone know about it, because parents were ready to call the Task Force if a child was just a few minutes late showing up wherever they were meant to be. If a parent couldn’t escort a child personally, they’d take him as close to the destination as possible, then arrange for their child or some adult on the other end to confirm that he’d arrived.

  So when I heard that this mother had waited until the following day to report her child missing, and then only after she heard his description on the radio, I wondered what could make her wait so long. When I found out she had eleven other children at home, I thought maybe it was just too hard to keep up with them since Ma had a hard time trying to spread herself around with just two. Maybe she thought it wouldn’t happen to her kids even while she watched some mother on the evening news saying, “Why? Why my child?” as if they too believed it could never happen to them. I also wondered if the grief in that family’s home, with so many people to mourn for the dead boy, was more than their house could hold.

  *

  “Didn’t Ma say she didn’t want you messing around with that?”

  “She won’t know if she isn’t here to see it, and if you don’t tell. You owe me one, remember.”

  I was heating wax on the stove, getting ready to batik some cloth, a craft I learned during a Cleveland summer. The last time I batiked, I got hot wax everywhere, melted crayons and paraffin that hardened on the countertops and floor that took forever to clean up. After that, Ma told me not to do it again. Most times I did what she told me unless I was absolutely certain I could get away with it. It was early morning when she left for work, and I knew she wouldn’t be back until late, giving me plenty of cleanup time. Besides, as much as she was away lately, I felt like I ran the house.

  I left the wax heating on the stove to go dig through my closet for the cloth I planned to use, which must have taken longer than I’d expected because I still hadn’t found it when I heard Bridgette scream my name. I ran to the kitchen to find the pot of hot wax on fire. Bridgette was holding a pot of water and before I could stop her, she threw it on the flames, which only angered them.

  “Get out, get out,” I yelled at Bridgette.

  “Call the fire department!”

  “Just get out, in the yard.” I gagged on the smoke that yelling at Bridgette made me inhale in gulps.

  The flames were still contained over the stove, and I was afraid to call for help, afraid Ma would kill me if she found out a fire truck had been to the house. I threw dish towels over the flames, then ran to the pantry where we kept big boxes of baking soda, our poor man’s substitute for raising alkalinity in the pool water. I ripped open box after box of soda and threw it at the fire, certain it would never work before I ran out of soda, and that I’d have to call the operator. But I started getting the better of it by the second box, and had put it out by the fifth.

  I realized then that Bridgette had never gone into the yard as I’d told her, and had watched me from the front door.

  “Why didn’t you leave?” I yelled, my fear and frustration misdirected.

  “You might have needed my help.”

  I looked at the mess on the stove—the ruined pot, the blackened hood and singed cabinets—and I began to cry. The tears were probably long overdue from so many other things, but there was something fresh in them, too. Fresh guilt because I was the responsible one and could have killed Bridgette and burned down the house. Fresh fear because although Ma hadn’t whipped me in a long time, I remembered well when she did, could feel the sting on my thighs and the red warmth spread across my skin. And I never knew what mood she’d be in anymore, it didn’t take much for Ma to get mad lately. So I cried while I filled a cardboard box with the ruined pot and wax pens, and while I buried the box at the bottom of the Herbie Curbie trash can. I was still crying, low and quiet, while Bridgette swept baking soda from the floor and I opened every window in the house, trying to get rid of the smell.

  We worked for hours to scrape up hardened wax, but there was nothing to be done about the stove hood and cabinets. When I heard Ma’s car pull in to the driveway, I readied myself to take whatever came. Bridgette waited in the kitchen with me, and together we listened to her key turn in the lock, the door open, her first words.

  “What the hell…”

  Before I could say anything, Bridgette ran to her. “Don’t be mad, Ma. All I tried to do was cook some fries and the grease caught on fire.”

  “Are you all right?” Ma’s anger abated to worry.

  “I’m okay. I remembered what you said about putting baking soda on a fire.”

  “That was smart.” She turned to me. “And where were you? You know better than to let this girl near hot grease. Why didn’t you cook the fries?”

  I was about to explain that there weren’t any fries, but Bridgette stopped me. “She was studying in her room, so she didn’t know until the fire started.”

  Ma went into cop mode then, beginning to question the story. She looked at the singed cabinets, opening them as if the truth lay inside. Would she notice the oil can still full or the unopened bag of fries in the freezer? But those clues would be useless to her because she hadn’t cooked much lately. Could she smell burned wax in the air?

  “All this from a little grease fire? The flames must have gone pretty high. Why didn’t you call the fire department? And how long did it take you to realize the house was damn near on fire?” These questions were for me.

  “I threw water on it before I remembered about the baking soda,” Bridgette said.

  “Good Lord. Can I not leave y’all here alone anymore? Isn’t it enough I have to worry whether you made it home okay, now I got to worry about you once you get home? Kim, I’m holding you responsible for this. You’re the oldest.”

  Usually I hated hearing that line, but in this case, she was right. I deserved whatever I’d get, and I knew how bad it would have been if not for Bridgette taking the rap.

  Ma took a beer from the refrigerator. “If it’s not one thing, its another. I’ll think of something good for you, but for now, you don’t leave this house except for school and work. And don’t think you’re getting off, either, Miss Bridgette. You know better, too.”

  When she left the kitchen to put away her gun and change out of her clothes, I knew the worst of it was over. She wasn’t going to resurrect the whipping belt.

  “Why’d you do that?” I asked Bridgette, grateful for once that she was still treated like the baby.

  “Because she would have given you the belt. And I owed you. Now I’m paid up for a long time.”

  A few days later, Ma told us she’d quit night school. She said it was so she could be home one more evening a week, giv
ing us fewer opportunities to burn down the house and more together time. But I knew that extra evening would just be spent looking at case files. She was letting go of her old life, the person she was before the Task Force, a piece at a time.

  *

  Ma told me about an interview she had with a boy who was trying to thumb a ride the summer before. Someone stopped for him, and the boy got into the car because he recognized the man behind the wheel as a gypsy taxi driver who hung around the A&P in the West End. The boy sometimes delivered groceries to cars for tips at the same A&P, as did the victim in Ma’s first case. When the boy reached the place he wanted to go, he asked the man to let him out, but the driver wouldn’t stop the car. The kid asked again and again to be let out, but the driver wouldn’t say so much as boo to him, and kept right on driving. The boy got scared and jumped from the car when it slowed down enough. He was afraid the man would come back for him, but he never did.

  Ma went to check out the boy’s story with the manager of the A&P and confirmed what she could, the part about the gypsy taxi driver. In the summer of 1980, sure enough he’d hung out in the parking lot selling rides to people loaded down with groceries looking for a lift home. The manager didn’t know the man’s name, but he hadn’t seen him since last summer because he’d had to run him off for stealing groceries from his store. The manager didn’t remember much about the driver, other than him being a little strange, soft spoken, and mild-mannered. And black.

  This last description was the one that stuck with me. I knew that Ma and the cops were looking at everyone, had to look at everyone, but like so many other black folks in town, I believed in my heart it was a white man doing the killing. Especially after the Sigman Road caller. Even without all the scientific talk I’d overheard at the Task Force and on the news about most serial killers being white men, it just never really flew with me that a black person would do this to so many of his own, especially children.