by Nancy Rue
“Geneveve? Gen?”
She moaned again.
With no idea what I was grabbing, I took hold of whatever I could get my hands around and crawled backward, dragging her with me.
“Desmond! Get my phone out of my pocket—call 911.”
He didn’t answer.
“Do it, Desmond!”
I gave Geneveve a final pull and fell back with her in my arms. I twisted to call to Desmond once more, but he was gone. Panic seized me.
“Okay, okay, Geneveve. Hang on. I’m calling for help.”
One arm holding her head against me, I groped in my pocket and yanked out the phone. It shot from my bloody hand like a bar of soap and skipped down the alley, out of my reach.
“Miss Angel?”
“Dear God, Geneveve …” I slid my other arm under her and cradled her. “Desmond went for help—your son went for help, okay? Just hang in there.”
Her lips parted, but I couldn’t hear the words she was trying to form. I pulled her face up to mine, and felt only a faint breath on my cheek.
“Don’t talk,” I said. “I’ve got you—”
A siren wailed from too far away.
“See? Help’s coming. Please, Geneveve, please, just hang on a little longer.”
But she was already going limp, and we were soaked in more blood than she could afford to lose. Her eyes began to stare.
I pulled her face into my neck so I couldn’t look into those eyes without the life in them. But I could feel her—feel her last breath against my skin, feel her slip away. I held on, to her and to the piece of myself she was taking with her. I held onto us both until I felt a pair of arms go around us.
“Chief,” I said. “Oh, dear God, Chief. He’s killed her.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
It was my turn in the red chair-and-a-half. My pain matched that of every woman I had tucked there before me, swaddled in blankets that couldn’t stop the shivering.
My sweet Geneveve was dead.
Mercedes and Jasmine and Sherry were nowhere to be found.
And Desmond. Desmond was even now on his way to FIP custody.
I’d made Chief explain that to me no less than ten times during the night.
“When the police found him, he was covered in blood. Once they saw that he wasn’t hurt, they assumed he’d been involved in a crime.”
“He was going for help,” I said, over and over. “Why didn’t they believe him when he told them what happened?”
Chief gave me the same answer every time. “He didn’t tell them. He was barely coherent.”
And I gave him the same response every time. “He’s so scared. I have to be with him—he’s so scared.”
That was the deepest pain of all, the part I didn’t make Chief repeat because it sent me over the edge. They wouldn’t release Desmond to me because I wasn’t his legal guardian. I was more his mother than any woman had ever been, but I didn’t have the piece of paper to prove it.
By five a.m. my voice was no more than a thread. Chief sat on the edge of the trunk coffee table, his face white with fatigue. “I’ll be in Liz Doyle’s office the minute it opens. I’ve already left a message on her voice mail.”
“It’s not going to do any good, is it?” I could feel my face crumpling. “Nothing changes except to get worse.”
“Isn’t this where your faith is supposed to kick in?” he said.
I couldn’t answer. I’d been waiting for that all night, from the moment they took Geneveve from me in the alley, but all I could feel was the ache in my arms from trying to hold onto her life. The longer I sat here, doing nothing, the more frightening the empty pain became.
I shoved the blankets from my shoulders and swung my still-swathed legs over the side of the ottoman.
“What can I get you?” Chief said.
“Nothing. I’m going to go look for them. Mercedes and Jasmine—”
“Not a good plan, Classic.”
“Do you have a better one?”
I kicked the blankets away and started blindly for the front door.
“Hey, Allison—no.”
“I have to bring them home—”
“We’ll find them at daylight.”
I whirled to face him, everything flailing—arms, hair, words. “Dead? Will we find them dead?”
“I don’t know. But if you go out that door now, I’m liable to find you dead.”
“I don’t care!”
“I do.”
I smothered my face in my hands. I didn’t know Chief was holding me until I smelled the leather.
“We’re going to see this through together, Classic,” he said. “One road at a time.”
I didn’t know how long I sobbed, or when Hank rose from the couch where she’d fallen asleep at three, or which one of them got me back into the chair. When I woke up, the sun was slanting through the blinds, and Chief was gone.
“He’ll be back,” Hank said before I even asked. “He went home to shower and shave so he won’t look like one of the Hell’s Angels when he goes to see the social worker.”
She handed me a cup of coffee and sat on the ottoman facing me.
“I’m going to fix you some breakfast as soon as you get that down.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I knew you’d say that, which is why I’ll spoon feed you if I have to. You have to keep up your strength for what you’ve got ahead of you.”
I looked bleakly into the mug. “What have I got ahead of me?”
“We don’t know. That’s why you need the strength. And the faith.”
“I’m not feeling it, Hank. There’s no Nudge. I feel like Geneveve took God with her. That’s so stupid, but …” I shook my head and handed her the mug. “All this time I’ve felt so led and now I think I’ve ended up nowhere after all.”
Hank set the mug on the trunk and folded her hands in the tidy way I’d seen her do so many times.
“You have an answer for me,” I said. “Tell me you have one.”
But she shook her head. “You’re dealing with things that, frankly, I don’t even think make sense to God himself.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?”
“What you always do, my precious prophet. Pray. Wait for an answer. And eat.”
“I don’t always eat.”
“That’s where I come in. What do you want? Anything sound good?”
“Eggs Dominic,” I said.
I wept in Hank’s arms until I fell asleep again.
Hank talked me into a shower at mid-morning, which woke me up too much. I checked my phone every ten minutes to make sure I hadn’t missed a call from Chief, and imagined every scenario from him bringing Desmond home with him to taking me to see him in some dank, smelly cell where there were no Oreos.
I was grateful I even had the phone, since the last time I’d seen it, it was skidding away from me down the alley. The police had given it to Chief when they decided it wasn’t evidence in the murder. As for my Harley, Rex had brought it home around midnight, at Chief’s request. The helmet was gone, but I didn’t care. If I got Desmond back, I’d buy a new one, and six for him. If he didn’t come home, I would never ride the bike again anyway.
When the phone finally rang at eleven o’clock, I was saying, “Hello? Chief?” before I even got it to my ear. But it was Bonner.
“Allison,” he said. “I am so, so sorry.”
“How did you know?” I said.
“Chief called me. What can I do for you? Anything you need—just ask.”
“There’s nothing. Not unless you can bring Desmond home or find Mercedes and Jasmine. Or Sherry.”
“I wish I could. You know I’d do it in a heartbeat. There must be someth
ing else—”
“Pray. Pray double. Because I’m having a hard time doing it myself.”
“I’m on it,” he said.
Hank poked her head out of the kitchen. “Chief’s back.”
I didn’t even say good-bye to Bonner, and I was out on the side porch before Chief could get up the steps. His face showed nothing—which was bad news in itself. The fact that he didn’t have Desmond with him was worse.
“Tell me,” I said.
He sank into the swing and patted the seat next to him.
“I can’t sit. Just tell me straight out. I’m dying here.”
“He’s not going to Juvie. The police are satisfied that he had nothing to do with his mother’s death.”
“Well I could have told them that!”
“And I got the judge to dismiss the charges against you for that deal in the park.”
He rubbed at his cheek and avoided my eyes.
“That’s the end of the good news, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Well, no—Liz Doyle is working on the vehicular assault thing. Evidently the charge was brought after you left here in eighty-six, but by the time you came back, the statute of limitations had run out on it, and no one pursued it.”
“That jackal.”
“Liz says if that were the only strike you had against you, you’d have Desmond with you right now. We’ve got the noise violation—I’m on that. And the fact that we don’t have Geneveve’s signature on this.”
“How could we get her signature when we didn’t even have the paperwork?” I made circles on my temples with my fingers but they continued to throb. “She was so close to being able to be his mom again—I was seeing it more all the time. Just last night I was even thinking that I wouldn’t need guardianship.”
“Parents die all the time without making arrangements for their kids and people who want them get custody of them. FIP’s biggest concern is that you left Desmond here unsupervised last night.”
“He wasn’t unsupervised! Hank was here—she’ll testify to that.”
“He was already gone when she got here,” Chief said. “She told me that this morning.”
“Then how did he get to the alley before I did?”
“He must have left before you.”
“When I was talking to her on the phone? Didn’t I check him again when I hung up? I can’t even remember—”
“Don’t tell the judge that.”
“What judge?”
“Liz is setting it up an interview with him.”
“And what happens to Desmond in the meantime?”
“He’s in a group home—right here in town—”
“He just found his mother murdered and stuffed in a hole! He needs to be with people who love him—not some bureaucratic … I can’t stand this, Chief. I can’t.”
He caught my hand and pulled me onto the swing. I folded in half beside him.
“What did we agree on?” he said. “One road at a time.”
“Which road are we on now?”
“We’re on the road to the police station.”
I straightened up. “Why?”
“Because there’s nothing you can do about Desmond until we see him this afternoon—”
“I’m going to see him?”
“Liz set that up for us too. Good call sticking up for her in high school, Classic. I think she’d give you a kidney if you needed one.”
“Okay, okay, good. I need to get some Oreos to take to him—and his drawing stuff—and his helmet. That’ll make him feel better.”
Chief’s eyes held a hint of the twinkle. “I’ll find out what we’re allowed to bring. But that’s not until three, and you’re going to freak out on me if I don’t find you something to do between now and then. I thought we’d tell the police everything you know about Sultan and his, what do you always call him, his ‘henchman’?”
“Opus,” I said. “I just remembered—his name is Opus Behr.”
“Good. We’ll take all of that to the police. And then we can take a cruise around and look for Sherry.”
“Won’t they look for her once we tell them all that?”
Chief’s face softened. He reached over and brushed a strand of hair away from my eyes.
“What?” I said.
“The cops aren’t going to look very hard for Geneveve’s killer. To them she was just another hooker.” He put his finger to my lips before I could open them. “I know. It’s going to take every bit of self-control you have not to rip into the first person who even implies it. But Desmond doesn’t need you locked up right now—again.” He twitched a smile. “And neither do I. You’ve already been enough trouble.”
“Don’t leave me, Chief,” I said. “Please—just walk me through this, okay?”
“That’s the plan, Classic. That’s the plan.”
It was a good thing Chief prepared me for the indifference we experienced at the police station, or I definitely would have plucked out a few nose hairs and ripped off a few lips. I did correct the detective every time he referred to Geneveve as “the victim.”
“Geneveve Sanborn,” I said, teeth gritted. “She was a mother and a sister and a friend, and she didn’t deserve to die like that.”
Nobody put handcuffs on me, and Chief told me I did okay.
The only encouraging thing we got out of the meeting was the detective’s nod when I mentioned Sultan.
“You know him?” Chief asked.
“Know of him. His real name is Jude Lowery. Big time dealer. Pimp. He’s been in and out of here, but we’ve never been able to make anything stick.”
“Then here’s your chance,” I said. “If you get him for murder, he’s gone for good.”
“Well, there’s that,” the detective said.
Chief squeezed my shoulder and I shut up, but only until we got outside the building.
“What does that mean—‘there’s that’?” I said. “They really don’t care, do they?”
“I don’t know,” Chief said. “It’s hard to care after you’ve been in that business for a while. Which is why we have to.” He glanced at his watch. “That took longer than I thought. Let’s grab some lunch and head on over to see Desmond.”
Needless to say, I couldn’t eat.
The group home I’d imagined was a cinder-block house among many, a village overgrown with kudzu and the grass worn down into sandy paths. The actual home was worse. I was right about the cinder block, but the whole thing was one big dormitory with multi-locked doors and common areas that had as much personality as a shower stall. I clutched my bag of Oreos and drawing paper and bit my lip to keep from screaming, “These are kids! It’s not their fault they’re in here!”
Liz Doyle led us to the east wing and got us settled in a common room identical to all the others. When she went to get Desmond, I stared at the endless list of rules that hung over the television and sucked in the odor of bleach and dirty tennis shoes.
“Desmond isn’t used to living like this,” I said. “He’ll die in here.”
Chief nodded. “Ironic, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“Three months ago this would’ve been a huge improvement over what he was used to.”
The bolt slid on the door to the hallway, and suddenly Desmond was there. I started toward him, but he flung himself across the room and into my chest. The long, lanky arms circled me and hung on, so tight I could feel his rickety ribs against mine. Coarse sobs ripped from his throat and cut straight into me. They went on and on, and I didn’t care. He could cry all he wanted, as long as I didn’t have to let go.
“I think y’all will be all right,” Liz whispered. “I’ll be back there in the office if you need me.”
When Desmond finally pulled away
, he saw Chief and hurled himself at him. Chief covered the back of Desmond’s head with his hand and pressed the boy’s face into his neck. It was an uncommon moment to realize that, for the first time, I was in love.
Chief let him go, and Desmond smeared his sleeve across his eyes. He was wearing a T-shirt I didn’t recognize and jeans that drooped from his waist and fell in limp folds over the tops of his shoes. I’d never seen those before either.
“They told you about your mama?” I said.
“They didn’t have to tell me.”
“I’m sorry, Desmond. She loved you. She was trying to get her life together so she could take care of you.”
If he heard me, he gave no indication, but pointed to the bag over my arm. “Whatcha got in there?”
“Oh, I brought you some things. Oreos—of course—can’t live without those, right? And a sketchpad so you can draw. They said they’d give you pencils, chalk, whatever.”
I didn’t tell him I wasn’t allowed to provide him with sharp instruments, or that they said the helmet would probably get stolen or trashed by some angry adolescent if I brought it in.
“I’ll bring you some clothes next time,” I said. “You want a couple of your Harley shirts?”
Desmond took a step back. His shoulders were already curving into his chest. “I ain’t goin’ home with you?”
My own chest caved. “Not today,” I said. “But we’re working on it.”
“We’ll get you home as soon as we can, buddy,” Chief said. “We have to talk to the judge, get some papers signed.”
“Why you gotta talk to a judge? I didn’t do nothin’ wrong—I swear.”
His eyes went wild, and I grabbed his sleeve.
“No, Desmond—you didn’t. They just have to make sure I’m the best person to take care of you now that your mom’s gone.”
“Whatchoo mean, now that she gone? Ain’t nobody ever took care of me but you.”
He backed away again until his spine hit the wall. He took a dog-eared poster down with him as he slid to the floor. Liz Doyle put her head out of the office door, but Chief waved her off. I knelt in front of Desmond.