by Gwen Florio
Of course he had. Grace cursed her foolishness as she hurried toward the church. Marcus Simmons’s presence in Chateau marked a momentous coup for Bobby. He’d want to make sure nothing went wrong.
The voice floating through the open windows in the church hall told her she’d been right. She’d heard it before, tinny through a radio or a black-and-white television barely larger than a toaster, showing Simmons leading marches that filled the broad boulevards of cities whose size made a mockery of a backwater like Chateau; Simmons confronting a row of cops as they struggled – not terribly hard – to hold back German shepherds slavering for his flesh; Simmons, dazed, a hand to his head, blood dripping through his fingers on to his trademark army jacket as the cop beside him holstered his nightstick with a look of satisfaction.
She’d imagined that voice, when she finally heard it in person, would be thunderous, booming a righteous message to the world. But Simmons spoke barely above a whisper, his words nonetheless so insistent, so piercing, that the roomful of just-awakened young people sat at vibrating attention in a silence so absolute that Simmons’s message carried through the open windows to Grace, pressed against the wall, listening.
‘You all are soldiers, soldiers in the fight of our lives. Fighting to right the grievous wrongs done our parents, our grandparents, our ancestors. Fighting to ensure our children don’t suffer those same wrongs. When we march today, we march for them. And we don’t march alone. Our ancestors are beside us. Our children are just out of sight, in the future. We march toward them, through any obstacles in our way. Maybe because this town is small, out of the way, it doesn’t seem as if our cause here carries the same weight as it does elsewhere, in bigger places that get more attention. But that’s what makes this so important. Because the battle is not won until it’s won everywhere. Look at Ole Miss, integrated last year. Mississippi! And here you are, practically in the North, and white only going to school with white, black only with black.
‘I thank you all for bringing me here to help you change this. It was an honor to receive the invitation from Bobby Evans, and if he were here right now, standing beside me, I’d thank him in person – again.’
What?
Grace came away from the wall. She stood on tiptoe, but the church windows were too high off the ground. She ran around to the door at the back of the church hall and cracked it, peering in. Walter was there, off to one side, scribbling away in his notebook as Simmons spoke.
But no Bobby. Which couldn’t be right. She looked again, checking the corners of the room. She looked low – what if, for some reason, Bobby had seated himself on the floor, largely out of sight? He hadn’t.
She let go of the door, not caring that it banged shut, and sprinted back to the Driggs home, not bothering with alleys this time, not caring who saw a black woman in a Sunday dress running down the middle of the street, full skirt flaring as it caught the breeze, white patent-leather shoes tapping a terrified beat on the pavement.
She reached the house and ran up the front steps, pressing one hand to the pain knifing through her side and pounding the door with the other. ‘Miss Lydia! Miss Lydia!’
She nearly fell through the door as Miss Lydia flung it open.
‘Child, what in the world—’
‘My brother,’ she gasped. ‘Is he here?’
Miss Lydia turned her head so slowly from side to side that Grace wanted to shake her. ‘He sure isn’t. Left first thing this morning, must have. Gone before I could make him breakfast.’
‘Are you sure?’ Grace looked past her, willing Bobby to materialize from the small parlor, or bound down the narrow stairwell, taking the steps two at a time, laughing at her near hysteria. But no shadows wavered in the parlor. The stairwell remained stubbornly deserted.
‘Maybe he’s in his room. Let me just check.’ Grace pushed her way past Miss Lydia, even as the woman shook her head again, and ran up the stairs. The first bedroom was obviously the Driggses’, a double bed with a wedding band quilt in soft, faded colors bespeaking the fabric’s previous use as clothing. She pushed open the next door. Two single beds greeted her, one unmade, with a mess of skinny reporter’s notebooks on the nightstand and a pair of black wingtips to go with the gray and blue suits – Walter had been wearing a beige-striped suit with his brown shoes in the church – beneath the bed.
The covers on the other bed stretched so tightly across it Grace could have bounced pennies off its surface. She looked at it and her heart broke. Both she and her mother, with their years of experience getting paid to make other people’s beds, had tried to teach Bobby how to make his own bed neatly, if at all, but he’d mocked their house-proud ways. ‘What’s the use if I’m just going to get back in it and mess it up again?’
No matter what Miss Lydia thought and Grace devoutly wished, Bobby Evans had not slept in that bed the previous night.
THIRTY-ONE
‘Whenever I’m with you, it feels like we’re in some sort of time warp.’
Alden and Nora lounged at Electra’s dinette, drinking beer from bottles.
She’d been taking a stab at her book – circling ever closer to the moment when she’d have to write about the kidnapping itself – when a tap at the door rescued her.
‘Hey.’ Alden stood nearly invisible in the dusk. ‘I was on the river. Saw your light. Took a chance. OK if I come in?’
‘More than OK.’ She shut the laptop with relief.
Now, she clinked her bottle against his. ‘Here’s to time warps.’
It was, she told herself, time for a break – a break from the book, a break from her lingering questions about the shootings of Robert and Bobby, a break from her vow to push back against the unspoken rule about avoiding unpleasantness, a rule for which she increasingly felt nudges of sympathy. It was exhausting to hold people accountable and more exhausting still to turn that same uncompromising gaze upon oneself. For at least this moment in time, she was content to kick back over beers with an old friend.
They swapped only the most innocuous shared memories, of the year Alden’s steer won a blue ribbon at the state fair and he took Nora for a ride on the Ferris wheel to celebrate, whereupon she’d discovered her fear of heights. She’d screamed so that the operator was forced to stop the ride to let her off and then had to restrain Alden from punching the man who’d called her a chickenshit.
‘My hero.’ She laughed at the recollection.
‘First time I realized you might be scared of anything. Remember that time …’
With each tilt of the bottle, they strenuously ignored the fact that they couldn’t risk anything as innocent as a chance meeting on the street, or another coffee-shop conversation with the entire clientele reading God knows what into every innocuous word, snapping surreptitious photos with their cellphones and posting them seconds later with lurid captions.
But even as the beer relaxed Nora, it emboldened her, too. For all that she’d granted herself a break, a particular bit of unpleasantness had nagged at her ever since their dip in the ocean.
‘Where does Kyra think you are?’ She held her breath, awaiting the answer.
‘Probably down at the Beach. A few of us at the department would head there after we finished up back when I worked night shift. Safer drinking there than at a bar where everyone would be up in our business. And sometimes I row down there at night just to build a little fire and sit and think. These days, it’s the only way to get away from everything.’
‘She doesn’t mind?’ Not what she really wanted to know. But she got the answer she sought anyway.
‘Are you kidding? She and the elementary school principal have been going at it for years. It’s why she’s the PTA queen. Gives her the perfect excuse to be over at the school damn near twenty-four/seven. Word is they’ve done it in every nook and cranny in the whole school; that the reason the principal’s desk has such a nice high gloss is from Kyra’s back rubbing all over it.’
Nora felt a stab of envy even as she laughed beneath
her breath. At least Kyra and her principal had a way to be together in the open.
‘Everybody in town knows about it and everybody pretends not to because of the girls.’ Alden peered into the neck of his bottle as though seeking something within.
‘We’d already started the paperwork for the divorce, given that the twins will be heading off to college in just a few more weeks. But the lawyer said we can’t do it now; that it’ll look bad in the midst of all this. We have to’ – his fingers wiggled air quotes – ‘“present a united front.”’
Nora held her breath.
‘But when all this is over …’ He spoke so softly that she had to lean in to hear him. ‘Nora, I made a mistake all those years ago. She threw herself at me, and kept coming at me, even though I told her no. And you were away … and then I slipped, and I knew I could never face you again, that you’d take one look at me and just know. I’m so sorry. I know I can never make up for it. But I do know one thing.’
Nora’s heart jackhammered.
‘What’s that?’ she finally managed.
‘I didn’t wait for you back then. And I have no right to ask anything of you. So I won’t. I’ll just tell you that I hope you’ll be waiting for me on the other side of this. I surely do.’
She didn’t make any promises. Didn’t throw herself into his arms and weep in gratitude. Or even the converse – allow herself to luxuriate in the icy, bitter vindication of his admission of that long-ago mistake. But a few minutes later, when he handed her his empty bottle with a rueful shrug and closed the trailer door behind him, she watched from the window as he crossed the lawn, only pulling the shade down after he stepped into the boat.
She wondered if he’d go to the Beach, as he said he sometimes liked to do. She left the trailer and returned to a darkened Quail House. Michael Murphy lay on his bed in a corner of the kitchen. He lifted his head, ascertained that she was safely inside, then rose groaning to his feet and headed down the hall to Penelope’s room.
Nora stood a moment at the base of the stairs, listening for the tense silence that would indicate her mother lay awake on the other side of her bedroom door, likewise listening. But the house had the deep, peaceful stillness of slumber.
She climbed the stairs and fell into her own bed. But sleep remained elusive, her mind humming with unexpected possibilities. Could she and Alden really find a way forward again? Silly to hold on to the pain of abandonment after all these years – decades! – but with the recent anguish of Joe’s betrayal still scouring her psyche, it seemed just as silly to ignore it.
She remembered the promise she’d made the night she’d driven into Chateau, moments before Alden shot Robert Evans: that she was done running. But was ignoring the possibility of a future with Alden just another form of running, or – just as bad – of staying curled into the emotional fetal position she’d assumed when she’d left Joe?
What if, instead of running away, she ran toward, and damn the rest of the world and its judgment? Alden would be exonerated soon, and then …
Then …
A thought that propelled Nora Best out of bed and into her clothes and down the stairs and across the lawn at a dead run to the dock, where she untied the ancient rowboat and pushed off into the river, praying it hadn’t developed any leaks over the years, and if it had, that at least it wouldn’t sink before she got to the Beach.
THIRTY-TWO
1967
This march was different.
For one thing, it was bigger. The students staying in Salisbury had driven over before dawn, black marchers packed into cars driven by their white sympathizers, sardining themselves on to floorboards as the vehicles approached Chateau so as not to alert anyone to their presence.
And, of course, there was Marcus Simmons, his name known even – and especially – to white people. No preacher-dark suit for Simmons, no polite-but-firm discourse, no meeting people halfway, taking things slow. When the evening news showed him in his Army jacket and black beret and played sound bites from his fiery speeches, so full of words like ‘revolution’ and ‘burn’ and ‘power,’ white sphincters around the country clamped shut.
Somehow, despite all the precautions, word had gotten out. A provocateur, Grace thought. They’d infiltrated most civil rights groups around the country, often coerced into their roles with threats of outsize penalties for real or imagined crimes, and so when the demonstrators poured from the church hall on to the street, an exuberant party feel to those first few blocks as they quick-stepped with Simmons at the fore, a triple line of police in full riot gear awaited them.
Any minute, Grace had told herself as she trailed behind them, Bobby would emerge from an alley and join them – whether with good reason or stupid excuse for his whereabouts, she didn’t care. Then she saw the cops and hoped that wherever he was, he’d stay put.
The cops stood shoulder to shoulder across Commerce Street. At a signal from Simmons, the marchers lined up in similar formation. The cops had guns but the marchers had numbers, and Grace watched the two groups – only about fifty feet apart – size each other up and calculate the odds.
The few white people who’d been on the street, getting an early start on their weekend errands, vanished into stores and other businesses, standing among the mannequins in the windows of La Mode Better Dresses, putting down their silverware in the Wagon Wheel as their untouched coffee cooled.
Chief Smythe and Simmons each took a few steps forward.
The Chief’s voice held the same low menace Grace heard on the day he fired Bobby. ‘We don’t need any trouble here in Chateau. Haven’t had any yet, nothing serious, and we aren’t about to let it start now. You aren’t from here. Go on back where you came from.’
‘No trouble.’ As in the church, Simmons spoke quietly. Grace, even wrapped as she was in worry about Bobby, leaned in to listen. Across the street, she saw Walter doing the same, just a few feet away from a contingent of white reporters and photographers. Someone must have tipped them off, too.
‘No trouble,’ Simmons repeated. ‘When a man was lynched the next county over not ten years ago. When there’s not a single black face on your force, nor behind the counters in your banks and stores. When the only jobs for black people are picking crabs or picking crops.’ His voice rose steadily.
‘You say you don’t want trouble? You already got trouble. And you’re about to get more because we are here to Burn. This. System. Down!’
A full-throated cry burst from the crowd behind him at those last words, an inarticulate roar that coalesced into a chant. ‘Burn it down!’
The crowd surged forward.
The police raised their shields.
Simmons raised his hand.
But Chief Smythe had one more thing to say.
‘You’re the ones who’ve got trouble,’ he said. ‘You’ve already lost one of your own.’
The shouting subsided into a puzzled murmur. Even Marcus Simmons looked baffled.
Graze puzzled over the expression on the Chief’s face. Try as she might, she could only attribute it to a simple, searing emotion: satisfaction.
He puffed his chest out and raised his voice so that everyone on the street – the marchers, the cops, the press and the onlookers, now opening store doors, ready to slam them shut and throw deadbolts into place at the first sign of trouble – could hear.
‘We fished Bobby Evans out of the Lenape River first thing this morning. He’d been shot dead.’
THIRTY-THREE
The rowing soothed Nora – the rhythmic dip and splash, propelling the boat at barely beyond the speed of the current, following the dancing moonlit path toward the Beach. A breeze lifted her hair, wafting away the occasional keening mosquito.
She didn’t know what she was going to say to Alden. Maybe they didn’t need words. She could just sit with him, gaze into the fire, its glowing coals a symbol of the love that had burned quietly through the long years and the wrong marriages, needing only a puff of air to burst into
the flame it was always meant to be.
He’d said he and Kyra were postponing their divorce to lend the appearance of a united front during the investigation into Robert Evans’s death. Fine. Let Kyra do her fake-supportive act, even as Alden drew strength from the fact that she, Nora, would be waiting for him, as he phrased it, on the other side.
She caught an acrid whiff of smoke and smiled. The Beach was just ahead. He’d already built the fire she’d imagined.
But when the boat rounded the bend, she saw not the single flicker she’d expected but a roaring bonfire with at least a half-dozen people around it. Nora dug an oar into the water and the boat shot out of the klieg light laid down by the moon and into the shadows along the shore.
Alden must have gone home after all.
Nora tried to shrug away the thud of disappointment, telling herself the exertion of rowing back against the current would at least tire her to the point of easy sleep when she returned to bed. The boat bobbed aimlessly for a moment. She took up the oars again. At least the breeze would be with her on the way back. It carried the words of the partyers on the Beach, male voices, some inarticulate guffaws and curses, and then one raised above the rest.
‘Got her right where I want her.’
Which is when Nora realized Alden had gone to the Beach after all.
The Beach was the only spot of bare land along the riverbank until the Lenape reached the bay, and so Nora stayed in the boat, clutching at reeds uncertainly anchored in quaking marsh mud, hoping they wouldn’t pull loose and send the boat shooting into the middle of the river where Alden and all the other cops would be able to see her.
The combined glare of firelight and full moon revealed Brittingham, along with Lewis, the cop who’d been there when they’d shown her the photo lineup, while the others had the swaggery stance she associated with people equipped with guns and the power of arrest. They all held cans and, as the fire leapt higher, showering sparks, she saw cases of beer stacked to one side of the gathering.