Old Bones

by Trudy Nan Boyce

  But the long day was getting to Salt; cold setting in made worse by a penetrating damp seeping up from the creek nearby. She walked up the hill, then down to the edge of the water and back, moving to keep warm. Fatigue began its ache under the cold. The beam of her flashlight flared across the bare branches and limbs of leafless hardwoods swaying in the night wind high above. Evergreens, loblolly, and slash pines wailed in unison with groans from the weathered timbers of the trestle above, until it increased to grumbling at the distant approach of a train. The ground beneath Salt’s feet began to tremble. Then the train, a slow freight of mostly sand cars, rumbled and clacked overhead, sending bits of debris raining into the creek.

  HEAT

  The unit was full of uniform-wearing detectives and supervisors in their blues. Commanders in white-shirt uniforms came and went. Violence had attached to the demonstrations; everyone had been ordered to suit up for a show of force, a presence. Salt’s uniform felt irritatingly tight, especially the pants, which edged into sensitive crevices and seemed to no longer fit right. She did have on thermals beneath the navy gabardine, but still she hadn’t remembered the uniform being this uncomfortable.

  “Do these pants make my butt look big?” In an unusual display of affectation Felton stood in the aisle beside Salt’s desk poised with his hands on his hips looking back over one shoulder, eyelashes fluttering.

  “Perhaps this will devastate you, but I hadn’t previously considered the size of your posterior.” Salt dumped her gear belt and vest in the chair. “But as you now have brought your butt to my attention, yes.”

  “Really?” Felton’s eyes widened as did his gleeful grin.

  “Is it hot in here?”

  “Steam’s on the fritz again.” Felton, sans uniform shirt, pulled at the neck of his V-neck white tee.

  Now the old building was all but empty, just the squad left and city workers tasked with sorting what was worth the city’s effort to keep and what to dump. Repairs were therefore not going to be done and nothing worked consistently: water, lights, heat, or AC. It was certain that the vast unoccupied floors and vacant warehouse spaces of the behemoth were being wastefully heated, some areas overheated, as was the case in the Homicide office.

  “Jesus fucking Christ.” Huff walked spraddle-legged toward them, tugging at his shirt neck with one hand while pulling at the seat of his pants with the other. He wiped his forehead with the clip-on uniform tie hanging from his unbuttoned collar. “You,” he pointed at Salt, “report to the academy at eight a.m. and stand by to stand by. They’re gearing up for a detail for the demonstrations.”

  “Sarge.”

  “Don’t call me Sarge.” He waddled on, delivering bad news to the rest of the squad.

  The Things slumped by. “Why wouldn’t someone have recognized the truck by now? I don’t get it. It’s been all over the news.” Thing One, Daniels, asked the question everyone was asking. Over and over the media played the video of the suspect’s truck, repeating the plea from the PD for someone to come forward. The Confederate flag and the gun rights bumper sticker revealed in the video should have made the truck easily recognizable.

  “God knows they’re heating this entire building.” Felton sat down at the empty desk across from her. “I heard you got a possible ID on your bones from the other day.” He nodded at the new file on her desk.

  “Yep, and now I need your help. I need a quick interview with the probable victim’s grandmother. I have a history with this family. I knew the girl.” Mary had also been the reporting party on her mother, dead in a closet, having bled out from a gunshot through the heart. Mary’s pink shirt and tight braids were distinct in Salt’s memory of that day.

  “You usually like to do your own interviews.”

  “This grandmother and I also have a history. She’ll be a whole lot more likely to talk to you.”

  • • •

  On the corner of the block just north of Mrs. McCloud’s house affixed to the street sign was a makeshift memorial of plastic carnations and a molting teddy bear beneath a crude cross. RIP PEANUT was printed in marker on the horizontal bar. The Homes, the 306, Atlanta’s most densely populated housing project, was Salt’s beat for ten years prior to her promotion to detective. Most of the beat was The Homes plus some areas of low-income apartments and single-family houses on the project’s periphery, crumbling three-story Victorians and shabby post-bellum cottages that dotted the streets and sat adjacent to vacant lots grown high with trash, weeds, and nuisance trees. Corrugated twelve-foot-high security fences topped with razor wire surrounded some small, legitimate industries, the profitability of which was hard to determine partly because of the fences.

  Mrs. McCloud lived in one of the older houses, wood frame painted white with matte-black shutters. Along with the houses on either side, it sat on a bank above the street, each house having ten or so steps to a small yard and more steps to a concrete front porch. Felton parked across the street so that from the front door Mary’s grandmother could not see the passenger side of the car where Salt waited. Felton got out. She canted her head to look up when she heard his voice and caught a glimpse of Mrs. McCloud’s dress at the door, the same purple-black dress she’d worn the last time Salt had been here. She pressed her fingers into her knees, remembering the feel of the old woman’s hard corset when she’d placed her hand out to stop her advance on Mary, daughter of her daughter. How could Juvenile have released Mary back to that?

  Ten minutes later, Felton opened the driver’s door and sank behind the wheel. “Whew!” He puffed out his cheeks and exhaled. “That woman is a piece of work!”

  “Why did it take her so long to report Mary missing? If it is Mary.”

  “Oh, I think it’s Mary,” Felton said. “Something is very wrong with that woman. She didn’t seem to either care or be very shocked about the possibility that her granddaughter might be dead.”

  “Will she do the DNA?”

  “Eager, she seemed eager, asking for the details and how soon could she go to the lab. Tomorrow is what she said.”

  “DNA is good, given that she tried to deny that Big D was Mary’s father. It can’t hurt to confirm that Mary and Lil D are siblings by the same father and mother. She have any recent photos?”

  “Said she’d look. That was also odd. Most families, even ones in this neighborhood, have boxes and albums they grab immediately and go through while you’re there. They cry.” He looked down at his hands gripping the wheel, knuckles white. “She said it serves you right. That Mary’s death is your fault. That must be some history.”

  Salt’s cheeks began to heat. Jaws tight, she said, “She’s one to call the kettle black. Good at offering her own daughter and granddaughter judgment without hope of forgiveness.”

  “And that house—she’s some kind of neat freak, control freak. Plastic covering everything. Not a speck of dust.”

  “She make you take your shoes off?”

  “She didn’t invite me farther than the hall.” Felton looked up at the house. “That’s it, then.” He turned back to Salt. “You gotta go quell a riot, dear.” Felton turned the wheel and headed them back to the office. Tomorrow she reported for twelve-hour street assignments.

  A DAY LIKE ANY OTHER

  Lil D woke in the dark to the warm funk, yeasty and sweet, of their three bodies. Danny T, his and Latonya’s three-year-old, had wedged himself between them. Lil D always woke up wanting Latonya’s skinny body, but he never broke her sleep, especially not with the boy there. Instead he rolled over and tried to think about some way to make her happy. But his thinking got tangled in all the twists to their problems: how they would manage being together after she was forced to move, the housing authority sending her to the east side, his business being here, not that he was making any kind of money, his car a shitty beater, The Homes and everything they knew being torn down.

  He faced the bedroom wall of painted
concrete on which Latonya had taped a poster about books, a stack of them. “Climb up,” it said. The only books Danny T had left were dirty and torn ABC baby books, and Lil D was tired of reading the same ones to him over and over.

  The boy woke crying. Lil D turned to find the bed wet where the boy’s diaper had soaked through and leaked onto sheets already overdue for the laundromat. I could do that. Latonya’s curled lashes fluttered open. She rolled out of bed in one smooth move, bent to slip into her sneakers, and stood straightening her sweats. The empty box of disposable diapers tumbled to the floor as she grabbed the last one and flipped Danny T on his back to change him. She was quiet in the mornings, sniffing and staying to herself, easing into their struggles. She picked the boy up and shuffled, sneakers untied, out of the bedroom. She could do with some new sneaks. Sometimes she’d get that slanted smile when she opened a present. He couldn’t think how he was going to fix getting a place for them all three to live. He went back to thinking of her opening a box of bright shoes, maybe neon green or blue glow.

  KINDLING

  When she’d arrived, Dr. Marshall’s daughter didn’t seem to recognize her. “You’ve got the wrong address, Officer. Nobody here called the police. You can’t even come in without a warrant. I know my rights.” She came from behind the receptionist’s desk, her body rigid, arms stiff by her sides, fists balled.

  “Um, I have an appointment. Sarah Alt? I was here last week?”

  “Oh.” The young woman frowned. “You look different,” she’d said, her tone accusatory.

  Half an hour late, Dr. Marshall came out of his office. “Aha! Sarah, you’re here.”

  “In all my glory.” Salt spread her hands down and out from her attire.

  “So I see. Come on back. I apologize for the delay. The client before you was in crisis. It happens.”

  “I didn’t recognize her with the uniform,” said his daughter.

  “It’s okay,” he said quietly to the girl as he waved Salt down the hall in front of him.

  Sitting down, Salt said, “Sorry about the gun again, but you know our off days have been cancelled and we’re on twelve-hour shifts. I’m on my way to a long day.”

  “Terrible about what happened to those students. Is there any progress on the case?” Marshall asked.

  Salt thought back to the hospital chapel, the strained voices of the victims’ families, Hamm shifting from side to side in shoes split on the sides to accommodate her wide, swelling feet. And to Mary. She felt a tightening in her throat but managed to answer. “No. Not really.” Out of Marshall’s window an earthmover rolled across the parking lot at the rear of a business.

  “Is that the scar?”

  Salt dropped her hand from the rippled-silk ribbon of skin at her hairline.

  “Last time you said the dreams began soon after you received that injury.” He motioned a finger at her head.

  “Look,” Salt leaned forward, rested her forearms on her thighs, and clasped her hands. “I don’t mind the dreams. Well, I do mind them, but in a different way. They’ve helped.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You’re going to think this is crazy. Uh-oh.” She winced.

  “Go on,” he said, mocking the trope, smiling, hands clasped under his chin.

  “A couple of those dreams, it was like they removed a veil, took down some barrier. I’m not sure what’s the right way to describe what they do . . . did.”

  “Go on,” he said. They both smiled, acknowledging his clichéd response.

  “Connections. I dreamed about connections in both those cases.”

  “Your unconscious.”

  “What do you mean? I was a psych major. I know about our unconscious, dreams theoretically revealing what we’ve forgotten. But these gave me answers to how to find a perp—” She stopped short.

  “You majored in psychology, yet you became a cop?”

  “My father, you know.”

  “Yes. I guess the sooner we get to that, his suicide, the better? Hmm?”

  “It’s not complicated or a mystery. He had depression. I understand that now; the books he read on it line a shelf in our library. He had the classic symptoms. I’ve done a lot of reading about it.”

  Marshall leaned back in his swivel chair, fingers meshed together, pointer fingers steepled. “Yeah, but how about your experience? You were what? Ten?”

  “My tenth birthday.”

  An old steam radiator under Marshall’s window popped. Mourning doves cooed just outside from the eaves. Out of view, from down the block, some kind of machinery roared.

  “Do you think about that? Why on your birthday?”

  The radiator pinged and clanked.

  Salt checked her watch. “You’re good, Doc. I’ll give you that.” She tapped the watch face. “But speaking of crises, I’ve got a riot to go to. You hit on the big question, though, the one that I kept avoiding for a long time, to be truthful. Now it’s the one I think about most. Not why anymore, but why on my birthday?” She quickly stood and straightened her pant legs, pulling at the front creases.

  Marshall got up from behind his desk, his face somber. “You come to these sessions armed in more ways than one.”

  “Locked and loaded.” She grinned, relieved to have an excuse to get out of there. “Kidding. See you next time.”

  • • •

  “Stand by to stand by,” said one of the nearby cops, leaning against the cinder-block gym wall.

  “Quoting Tolstoy again, are we?” Pepper replied. He pushed off the wall, sat down on one of the wrestling mats they’d finally brought out, and began pulling at the laces on his boots.

  They were lousy with inaction, especially the young cops and the ones like Salt, used to daily workouts, street action, and adrenaline highs. Their bodies reacted with lethargy to being on hold. All around the gym floor wrestling mats had been pulled out, on which the cops, in their undershirts and navy uniform pants, now sprawled, bored and grumbling. Reminders of the coming deployment, a phalanx of gear stood like sentinels in careful rows and precise order on the bleachers and against the wall: batons leaning against shields draped with navy uniform shirts, behind which were helmets and visors and the officers’ vests, gear belts, and gas mask packs.

  Salt sat down beside Pep on a mat.

  He leaned close. “You cannot have kept track of all the kids we took into custody. In the Homes we took kids into custody at least once a month, more likely once a week. At the minimum that would be over a hundred kids.”

  “Yeah, but Mary . . .” She began jerking at her laces.

  • • •

  “Listen up, people.” The major shouted from the podium at the front of the gym. “We’re being deployed as a precaution only. We do not expect to engage in any confrontations.” He adjusted the neck of the microphone. “We’ve got the press, national and local, watching every breath we take. Keep your language clean and your opinions to yourself.”

  One of the old guys sitting in front of Salt said, “Oh, shit,” adjusting the Velcro on his vest. “Same thing they said before the last riot I was in.”

  “Our mission,” continued the major, “is to”—he looked down and began to read—“prevent the destruction of property and to protect citizens. Spelman College lost a member of their community. Eleven more young women are in the hospital, several critical. There’s a legitimate concern for the safety of those marching, most of whom are peacefully exercising their rights. The suspects were white and had a Confederate flag sticker on their truck. There’ve been rumblings from at least one of the supremacist groups headquartered near the city. And some of the supremacists are trying to get their fifteen minutes, claiming they’re being harassed, their rights violated. Only in Atlanta.” He shook his head. “Lieutenant . . .” and stepped aside.

  “Gear up,” said the lieutenant.

  “What
’s up with the ‘up’?” asked one of the guys as they began moving. “Why do we always gear up, listen up? We do stand by, but never do we—”

  “We stand down,” interrupted another.

  “I never was told to stand down.” They mumbled back and forth, heading for the bleachers, strapping vests over T-shirts, buttoning and tucking the dark shirts in, buckling belts, and loading themselves with the rest of their gear, and then they tromped out to the PAL van. The sky was beginning to darken over the city as Pepper drove the squad of twelve, taking the expressway toward downtown. They pulled into the parking lot of a church that had been conscripted as a staging area and where other police vehicles, department buses, patrol cars, and PD motorcycles, engines revving, were also arriving.

  Sergeant Fellows from SVU trotted to their packed van, squad still inside, grabbing up gear. She opened the side door. “Hey, guys,” she said panting slightly. “I was just told to meet you. I’ll be your squad sergeant for this, ah, disturbance. Your original sergeant was reassigned. They”—she tapped the radio mic on her shoulder—“gave me the order and I’m supposed to make sure we’re where we’re supposed to be.” She unfolded a sheet of paper, checking it as they alighted from the van. “As far as I’m concerned my job will be to try to make sure we stay together, that we’re safe, and that we try to keep other folks safe.” She folded the paper and put it in her jacket pocket. The older guys leaned against the van looking at the ground. “I’ve never done this before,” Fellows said, twirling a ring on her right hand. “I’m new at this. Some of you were in the Rodney King disturbances and know more than I do. But, like I said”—she lifted the mic—“somebody has to be the point of contact. We’ll be on frequency three, channel four. Radio check.”

  They pulled the radios from their belts and began turning the knobs to the assigned frequency. “Send an ambulance to Peachtree . . .” “Block south . . .” “Unit Forty to all units, stand by, you’re stepping on each other . . .” “Hold radio traffic unless you have an emergency . . .” Unit Forty, the detail commander, sounded harried. Radio traffic filled the frequency. The squad looked at one another, silent.