Past Prologue: Where are our Children (A Serial Novel) Episode 4 of 9

by Gary Sapp

biggest smile of satisfaction lighting up his dark face. Chris mirrored his look as well. “That was a wonderful composition wasn’t it, Bro?” I’m sure somebody out in that cafeteria has that track or the CD it came from on hand, how about doing me a big favor and getting me the name of the artist.” Xavier said, punched a cigarette out the pack, and thought the better of it for a dozens of good reasons. “I’ve been dreaming about Dad every night since I was released from Calhoun. Sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat. I never remember what the dreams are about but I know that he’s always in them and he’s… alive, Chris. He’s always alive and he’s trying to tell me something.” He lowered his eyes. “I have to admit the whole thing scares the hell out of me. I don’t know what it all means. I do know that if I die before you do I want to go listening to something as beautiful as what we just heard.”

  “Of course I would, Xavier, I just wonder what ways we’ll be listening to music on all those decades from now.” Chris said in a suggestive tone that Xavier caught immediately. “And I guess it’s comforting for me to know that some things don’t change with you like your love of instrumental music and your craving for the smokes.”

  “I know…they’ll kill me yet...the smokes I mean.”

  “Did I ever tell you thank you for saving my life all of those years ago when you saw me walking past our house?”

  “You tell me every chance you get, Chris.” Xavier matched his brother’s serious tone. “Perhaps you’ll get to return the favor someday…don’t be late.” Xavier began to slip out of the bathroom door into the hall that led the activity of the cafeteria. “I’ll see you around.”

  Xavier’s people get him out through a secret, looping, preordained matrix of a route. It is troubling, tiring, it is time consuming and by an hour’s end, completely successful.

  Another hour later he is standing at a location not of his choosing on the other side of town and finds himself lighting his third cigarette in the past 20 minutes. He exhales…and coughs. My God, these things will kill eventually kill me won’t they?

  Xavier Prince hoped to sleep dreamlessly tonight and die of lung cancer one day many years from now.

  Just let it be cancer, he thought, Chris will play that beautiful song for me at my funeral 30 years from now when I die of cancer.

  Seth

  Why won’t you answer my phone calls, Angel?

  Dr. Seth Dupree clicked his cell phone off, rubbed the fingers of his left hand over the tombstone of Denise Prince and searched the heavens above for answers. So far the power’s at be had refused to answer him at all.

  He’d waited patiently for Erica’s funeral procession to disband before he’d paid his own private respects to both women. He couldn’t run the risk of one of the triage center’s staff spotting him here and asking questions that he dared not respond to: When was the last time he had seen Denise alive? When was the last time he’d spoken to her? Besides he knew her ex-husband made his living off of being a professional investigator. He had attended both burials of course. So far the local papers were calling Denise’s death for what it really was—a suicide. But Seth knew that most figured that she was not alone when she threw herself out of that window. There was no need for him to chance any legal involvement in this.

  The Gray man exhaled a long breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. He was thankful for that blessing at least. The prevailing winds had carried the brushfire odors well away from the city this afternoon.

  “Your wife is responsible for all of this…and so much more, Doctor.”

  Seth darted around to put a face to the voice of the stranger who had walked up on him so mutely. “What was that? Do I know you, Miss?”

  Seth found himself quickly over being startled…and struggling not to stare at this stunningly beautiful woman. She was a darker skinned, curvy Latino who was wearing a short but tastefully cut black dress, stud earrings, pearl necklace, and a watch on her wrist. She wore her hair long and straight and Seth couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d met her somewhere before.

  “I know you,” She said, her accent only betraying the slightest hint of a Puerto Rican or Dominican ancestry. “Your name is Dr. Seth Dupree. You are one this region’s most renowned surgeons. You are very well respected by your professional colleagues and those who know you through your community. From time to time your friends have referred to you as ‘The Gray Man’ for your eye color, strands of gray in your hair and the attire you’ve worn over the years. I’m interesting in you for the reason your life is not so perfect—your marriage to another doctor, Angel Hicks-Dupree.”

  “What could you possibly want with me or my wife? Are you some kind of investigator? “

  “Yea, some kind…that describes me quite well actually.” She said and peered past a group of trees to their left. “I know that two funerals are taking place at this very moment over there for two separate teen aged boys who perished earlier this week from the injuries they suffered during the 411 attacks.”

  Seth shifted his weight and didn’t understand why. He and Angel were still in Macon when Pandora launched its offensive against targets here in the city. Seth was finding himself, despite this woman’s beauty, quickly tiring of her company and her monologue. “Sorry. I hadn’t scanned the local headlines this morning.”

  “No problem, Doctor, I thought that I would make you aware of the facts.” She looked downwards at Denise’s headstone. She kneeled long enough to mutter a prayer and crossed herself. When she opened her eyes again they appeared darker and more focused than they were even before she had closed them. “You’ve been preoccupied with other things—today it was the burial of Denise Prince and her daughter Erica Lovings.”

  “How do you know all of this?” Seth heard his own voice raising. Whether it was from anger or fear he could not say.

  “Are you absolutely sure you don’t know who I am, Doctor? Why don’t you take another look?”

  Seth does just that. And he takes a second…and third a look as well, until…

  “I do know you. You were sitting in a wrecked car downstate. You were parked near where Denise and I were outside of this hotel where Angel and Chris Prince were.” And then he remembered what the dead woman had told him before their next to last night together inside her apartment went to hell. The divorced couple had hired a private investigator—A Roxanne Sanchez to find Denise’s missing daughter.

  Seth told the woman standing next to Denise Prince’s grave his hypothesis.

  She said: “You are correct, Doctor. Now let me let you in on some things that you may not be aware of.”

  Roxanne Sanchez gave him the short version of her dealings with a fugitive from both Pandora and the FBI named Joseph Champion. She told him that this Champion fellow and Seth’s wife, Angel, were sleeping together the night before the FBI recruited her to join them here in Atlanta. She spoke as if every sentence was being recorded during a deposition. She had dismissed emotion from the equation and just presented the facts—at least as she saw them, to Seth. This mole—as Champion had referred to himself, possibly…quite possibly was involved in the murder of Erica Lovings. Roxanne Sanchez couldn’t answer why he would murder her but went on to say that Champion was far more mixed up in the overall scope of what was going on within the sphere of influence of Pandora as well.

  She then reminded him of Angel’s previous dealings and supposed therapy sessions with Louis Keaton. And if the Gray man wasn’t totally caught up with current events, Keaton was the monster that everyone in the free world believed was recently responsible for kidnappings of at least six Black children here in the city.

  As painfully as it was for Seth to admit, this woman knew far too many facts to making all of this up. “So are you going to base your next move simply on the word of a fugitive? I don’t quite understand all of this.”

  “It’s no mere coincidence that the FBI snagged you’re wife as soon as all of this went down. Whether you see it or not—whether she sees it or not, they suspect her
too to some degree or another. They were smart to keep her close. She’s involved at some level. I would bet my life on it.”

  “Why do you care so much?” He ran his hand along the gravel of Denise’s tombstone again. It was a fine piece of structural design. “You found Erica in Carver. You did as you promised Denise you would do. Your job is done here.”

  Roxanne got in his face. “Your wife is responsible for the death of my sister. She’s at least partly responsible for those two funerals over there that I pointed out to you a few minutes ago. Two more funerals for women who died during the Siege of the Fox Theatre will be held later on today as well.”

  “I’m no lawyer, Roxanne,” Seth offered cautiously. “But I see you basing a lot of what you think you know on a ton of circumstantial evidence at best.”

  “Call it what you will, Doctor.” Roxanne backed off just a little. “I do know for a fact that everything that your wife touches ends up in disaster. Lie to me and tell me that you haven’t thought once about what Angel said to Denise in that hotel room that finally pushed an already unstable woman over the edge.” Roxanne took her turn at caressing Denise’s tombstone. “Now I won’t lie. I didn’t know Denise very well or very long. I know enough to speculate that she was mentally and emotionally vulnerable to say the