by Gwen Florio
‘What happened?’
‘That’s what we’re working on, Grace. It looks as though he was shot and dumped – left – at the Beach. Under the circumstances, we don’t have much to go on. No murder weapon, no witnesses.’
‘Where was she?’
The Chief’s voice took on an edge. ‘I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘I’m sure you do.’ No wobble in her knees now, nor her voice. ‘I need to know who killed my brother.’
The Chief shook his head. ‘It could be a long investigation. You go on home to your family. They’ll need you.’
‘I ain’t going nowhere. Not till I find out what happened. Although …’ She thought a minute. Made her voice as hard as his. ‘You know I work for the Afro now.’
‘The Afro?’
‘The Baltimore Afro-American. It’s a newspaper. They’re down here covering this, just like the white papers. Looking for a story those papers won’t have. Something nobody else has.’
Putting it out there, letting it hang in the air between them.
‘I’m staying here,’ she said before he could reply. ‘Until I find out what happened to my brother, I’ll be on this doorstep every damn day.’
The Chief shifted. ‘Well, now. That would make things difficult for everyone.’
‘Difficult? My brother lying somewhere shot dead and you talking difficult?’
‘Quite right.’
She stiffened. What was he up to?
‘So you’re staying in Chateau,’ he mused.
‘Yes, I am.’ She’d figure out the details later.
But he got to them now. ‘How are you going to live? Where are you going to work?’
She had a little money saved. It wouldn’t last long. He didn’t need to know that.
He took a step toward her. ‘I could help you with that.’
She started at his silky, confiding tone, on full alert now. She’d made a demand. He was making an offer. What could it possibly be? Whatever it was, she straightened, her rage distilling into something cold, purposeful.
She had power – not the sexual power that every woman possessed and, no matter her best intentions, sometimes found wielding it the easier path. This sort of power was different. Grace rolled it around like an unexpected delicacy, tasting it, savoring its bitter tang.
‘What you got in mind?’
‘You’ve announced your intention to stay in Chateau.’
Lord help her if he didn’t sound just like his wife then, same prissy phrasing, using a whole mouthful of words when two – ‘You’re staying?’ – would do.
Maybe he was going to try to talk her out of it.
‘Yes, I’m staying.’
The Chief rubbed his long jaw. ‘We haven’t had good household help since you left.’
Grace’s mouth dropped open. He couldn’t possibly be saying what she thought he was.
The sinewy clout she’d felt just seconds earlier dissolved into a furious sort of despair. Sooner or later – and it was almost always sooner – white people got around to insulting you, even – and especially – when it was in the guise of offering help.
He hurried on before she could speak. ‘Of course, things have changed.’
Damn straight they have. My brother’s dead.
‘Wages have gone up. The canning factory barely turns a profit. Look at me, with a town job.’
Grace gaped at him. What was he talking about? All the First Families in Chateau had town jobs, either on the town council or the police force or some make-work city job. It’s how they made sure everything worked to their advantage. ‘This whole town is nothing but one big plantation,’ her mother had complained more than once. ‘All they did was plant flowers on top of the manure pile. They breathe perfume and leave us the stink.’
‘We’d offer you double what you made before.’
She blinked at him, desperately willing her voice to work.
‘You … you want me to come work in this house. After you killed my brother.’
He relaxed so visibly it startled her.
‘I didn’t kill your brother, Grace.’
Oh, he had the upper hand again, and he knew it, that paternal, condescending tone.
But someone in this house knows. With the thought, an idea. She tasted it again, stronger now, astringent, bracing.
‘I been …’ She stopped and started again. ‘I’ve been making Baltimore wages these past years. Good money. Saving for college.’ He didn’t need to know that at the rate she was saving she’d be in her thirties before she had enough money.
She looked him right in the eye and was gratified beyond all measure when his gaze slid away.
His lips tightened. ‘Triple. Couple of years making that kind of money and you could pay tuition at Harvard. It’s the least we can do for your family under these tragic circumstances.’
How stupid did he think she was? Harvard didn’t accept women, and she’d never heard of a black man studying there. And his reference to a couple of years – he probably thought that by then all the fuss would’ve died down. They’d do their investigation, turn up nothing, and Bobby would still be dead.
Unless somebody else turned up something. Somebody watching them every day. Waiting for the inevitable slip.
‘Triple, you say.’
She nodded, calculations ticking in her brain. Triple her old pay; a yearly amount more than anything she could ever hope to earn even with a college degree. She wondered if, with this offer, his entire salary as Chief would be going to her family. Then she reconsidered: People who lived in places like Quail House probably had all sorts of money stashed away. Must be nice.
He withdrew a money clip from his pocket and counted out four fifties. ‘With a bonus.’ He held out the bills.
Grace snatched them away.
‘So we’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘You’ll see me after the funeral.’
She stalked away.
Smoke from the burning buildings in town rose high, turning the sky the angry red of her own emotions.
With each step, the money rustled in the pocket of her shirtwaist, and a plan took shape.
THIRTY-SEVEN
A black sedan with the white tags of a government vehicle awaited Nora in the circular driveway of Quail House when she returned from her morning run.
She stopped a few feet away. Two people got out of the car, one a tall, slender woman in a white shirt so beautifully smooth Nora could only imagine that she existed within an air-conditioned cocoon, slipping so quickly from house to car, from car to office, and so on throughout her day that the relentless humidity had no time to seep into the cotton fibers and wilt them into wrinkles against which even generous applications of starch were no defense. She’d twisted skinny dreadlocks away from her face into a knot so tight it tugged at the skin around her eyes.
The white man with her was dressed identically in white shirt and dark pants. They could have been a pair of Mormon missionaries, although something about their bearing, a certain set to the jaw, an unbending rigidity, screamed cop.
Close.
‘George Satterline.’ He introduced himself first. Establishing dominance? Although, thought Nora, the woman with him didn’t look as if she let anyone or anything dominate. ‘This is Brenda Holiday. We’re from the Attorney General’s Office.’
She’d waited a whole day for a return call to her voicemail. It never came, and by day’s end, she’d decided it was just as well. She’d brought trouble enough on herself. Maybe best to just leave. (And go where? Do what? Thoughts she resolutely pushed away for about the fiftieth time.)
‘Do you have some kind of identification?’ It just slipped out. Something about them, their officious air, their presumption that they could pull into the driveway in their ostentatiously clean government car and stand before her in their formal clothes as she shifted from one foot to another, sweaty and disheveled from her run.
‘Of course.’ The
woman’s voice was low, soothing. ‘You’re smart to ask. We were just sitting here a moment admiring your beautiful home.’
Trying to disarm her with reassurance and a compliment, Nora thought. Not to mention angling for an invitation inside. Which they weren’t going to get.
Satterline and Holiday exchanged glances. They were about the same age; in their forties, Nora guessed. Old enough to have graduated from law school, worked their way through various prosecutors’ offices in the smaller counties and up to the big time in a place like Baltimore or Montgomery County, before making the jump to state government.
Smart of the AG’s office to send a black woman and a white man to look into something like this, she thought. The cops would talk to him, black people to her. Maybe.
‘You told the Chateau police you saw it. Now tell us.’
‘I didn’t exactly see it.’
Nora fought an impulse to invite them in after all. She could make herself coffee, think straighter, give herself something to do with her hands, which kept creeping toward each other, as Satterline and Holiday stared in heavy-lidded expectation, waiting for her to elaborate. Nora knew this part. They’d stand silent until she offered up something.
‘I drove past a car that had been pulled over. I didn’t see much. It was almost dark.’
‘What time was it?’ Satterline. He had small eyes in a large blank face. Nora wondered if they taught them that utter lack of emotion in whatever academy they went to.
‘A little before eight.’ She remembered the dashboard clock glowing its green warning that it was far too late for coffee. ‘I passed the coffee kiosk outside town at seven forty-seven. I looked at the time because I wanted coffee, but figured if I got some, I’d be awake all night. So it would have been maybe a mile after that.’
Dammit. It had worked, their silence, had set her to babbling like an idiot. On the other hand, her answer had been as innocuous as his question.
Holiday had her phone out, typing into it with great concentration. She stopped, nodded at whatever was on the screen and looked up.
‘Sunset isn’t until about eight fifteen. So it wouldn’t have been dark then.’
‘It felt dark.’
So much for the straight faces. Holiday arched a precisely plucked eyebrow. Satterline pursed his lips.
Nora fumbled for a recovery. ‘I’d been driving for a long time, going on four days. I was really tired. Hence, wanting that coffee.’
‘Do you typically suffer from impaired vision when you’re tired? And drive anyway?’ Holiday’s expression was all professional concern.
‘My vision wasn’t impaired. It was late in the evening, starting to feel dark. You know how it does?’
No, their faces suggested. They did not. Nora was almost glad when Satterline blinked his little eyes and refocused on the matter at hand. ‘Can you please describe exactly what you saw?’
Nora shrugged. ‘I saw the lights first – a cop car. Then, when I drove by, a cop standing next to the car he’d pulled over.’
‘What kind of car?’
‘A green Kia.’
‘You sure about that? Given your tired eyes?’ Holiday this time.
Oh, give it a rest, Nora wanted to say, but limited her answer to, ‘Yes, I’m sure.’
‘The car that nearly forced you off the road.’
‘That’s a bit of an exaggeration. I swerved.’
‘Do you always exaggerate?’
‘No.’ Nora folded her arms across her chest. She, too, could play the waiting game.
‘But you told the Chateau police you feared for your life. Described it as road rage.’
‘Their words, not mine.’
‘And what would your words be’ – a beat – ‘now?’
‘He passed me. Hit his horn and cut around me so close he almost clipped me. Startled me.’
‘Startled is a long way from scared for your life.’
‘Yes.’
‘And yet you didn’t contradict their account.’
‘I am now.’
Satterline blinked again, slow, reptilian.
‘And his attitude?’
She shrugged and smiled, imitating Robert Evans’s own gesture. ‘Like that.’
‘I can see why you’d be scared for your life.’ Holiday didn’t bother to hide the sarcasm.
‘I just said those were their words.’
‘And the ID in the photo lineup? Was that theirs, too?’
In a way it was. The way they’d directed her to Number Four. Another way she’d let herself be played.
‘I told them I wasn’t sure. I made that clear.’
‘And yet you initialed it.’
‘I said it could have been him.’
‘And then you signed off on it.’
I just wanted to get out of that room. A realization nudged her: Running away again. How’s that working out for you, Nora?
She rubbed at her forehead, wiping away sweat and introspection.
‘Yes.’
Their eyes flicked toward each other.
‘When you saw the car again, what was happening?’
‘Nothing. The car was stopped, the cop standing by it. I passed by it in the blink of an eye.’ She braced herself for another comment from Holiday about her tired and presumably unreliable eyes. But Holiday merely shut the leather folder that enclosed her phone.
‘And your relationship with Alden Tydings?’
‘You’ve read the papers. We dated in high school.’
‘And now?’
‘Nothing.’ Which, as of a few hours earlier, was true.
She and Satterline held out business cards. ‘If you think of anything else, anything helpful.’
She wasn’t imagining the emphasis Holiday put on helpful.
She climbed the stoop as they drove away. The front door was cracked open a few inches. She must not have pulled it closed when she’d left on her run. She pushed through it and leapt backward in surprise, nearly tumbling from the stoop.
‘Mother!’
Penelope stood just inside, nearly invisible in the shadows.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Nora, who were those people?’ Penelope’s voice quavered.
‘They were from the Attorney General’s Office. They’re investigating the shooting.’
‘But you already talked to the police. Why did they come here?’
Because I no longer trust the police. But that would trigger a raft of questions that would make Satterline and Holiday look like amateurs.
‘Because I called them.’
Penelope’s hands left the walker and flew to her face. Nora put out a hand to steady her. Penelope trembled beneath her touch.
‘Oh, Nora,’ she managed. ‘What have you done?’
THIRTY-EIGHT
1967
Grace walked past tanks – tanks! – on her way to work every morning.
At that hour they sat silent, but by the time she trudged home in the evening, they’d be clanking into action, their turrets swerving toward the crowds of young people that seemed to grow larger every night, black people streaming in from cities up and down the East Coast – Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore, Washington – and even some of the smaller towns – Dover, Salisbury, Chestertown – places like Chateau, where hope had been crushed so many decades ago that an opportunity to grasp at it was not to be missed.
To Grace, hope tasted like the ashes stirred up by the determined efforts of white business owners to rebuild the business district under the protective eye of the National Guard. But every afternoon the young people marched, timing their actions – under the direction of the seasoned organizers who hurried in from those larger cities after Bobby’s death and Simmons’s beating – to ensure footage on the evening news. They held news conferences for the gaggle of reporters, wrote op-eds for newspapers both black and white, and harangued the U.S. Justice Department to open a federal investigation. Above all, they demanded an arrest in Bobby�
�s killing.
‘Wasting your time,’ Grace muttered as she stalked past.
Her first day back at work, she surveyed Quail House with a sinking feeling. So many rooms. So many things with drawers – dressers and secretaries and highboys and the hulking rolltop desk in the room the Chief used as an office – to search. So many blanket chests, closets, storerooms. The pantry and every container in it. The kitchen alone – all those canisters and little-used pots. The root cellar, with its damp dirt floor that turned to mud when water bubbled up from below during heavy rainstorms. The outbuildings. And who knew what lay beneath the birdbaths and benches in the gardens?
It didn’t matter, she told herself. I’ve got months. Years, if need be. To hell with her job at the Afro. To hell with college. She’d find out what happened to Bobby if it took the rest of her life.
THIRTY-NINE
What had she done?
Nothing, apparently. Nora waited for a follow-up call from investigators in the Attorney General’s Office. An email, or even a letter, something with the state’s seal stamped atop the paper, informing her that … what?
That she’d helped prove Alden guilty? Or, even not guilty, which, while it wouldn’t satisfy the small, mean desire to see him punished for his perfidy, at least would let her put the whole mess behind her.
Robert Evans’s parents continued to push for answers, giving interviews to every reporter who would talk to them, although the number dwindled as the days passed, the stories moving from the front page of the newspapers to deep within, or down toward the bottom of webpages.
‘Find the phone,’ Kwame told the Sun. ‘He was like every other young person alive, face in his phone every waking minute. Where is it?’
Brittingham had a ready answer when the reporter called him for a response.
‘It’s common practice for drug dealers to either use burner phones or switch out their regular phones. For all we know, that phone is sitting at the bottom of the Inner Harbor in Baltimore. If he was smart, he ditched it before he headed down here.’
The reporter hadn’t gone back to Kwame for a response to Brittingham’s explanation, but Kwame had seen it and exploded in anger in an exclusive interview with the Afro. He was not, he proclaimed, talking to the big dailies anymore, ‘not after that trash they printed.’