Pleasantville

by Attica Locke

  On TV Wolcott is saying, “You should ask Mr. Hathorne how he plans to pay for this ‘revamp’ of the police department, or any city services, when he’s proposing a diversion of tax revenue into risky development ventures.”

  “Which was my next question, actually,” the moderator says. “Mr. Hathorne, the Houston Chronicle has uncovered a political flyer circulating in neighborhoods to the northeast, a flyer that suggests your enthusiastic support for a development project along Buffalo Bayou, something one of your political allies, Cynthia Maddox, tried during her tenure in office. It didn’t work then. What makes you think now is the right time to pick up the failed project, and what kind of commitment are you prepared to make in terms of spending the city’s limited resources on private development?” Wolcott turns at the lectern, awaiting her opponent’s answer. From the satisfied look on her face, Jay feels certain her camp leaked news of the flyer. Parker, he thinks. The shit stirrer.

  “Let me be clear,” Axel begins, leaning over the lectern and pointing his right index finger, the universal gesture of shady politicians everywhere. He should have spent a few more hours in rehearsals, Jay thinks. “The bayou development project is not now, nor has it ever been, a part of my platform.”

  “What then do you make of the appearance of these flyers?”

  Axel looks down at the lectern, as if he might divine a right answer in the grain of its faux-wood veneer. He has his suspicions, but does he have the balls to make an accusation on live TV? “I think there may have been some confusion at a few candidate forums about my priorities,” he says, stumbling over the words. On camera, it plays as evasion at best, outright fudging of the truth at worst. And then the candidates are instructed to move on to their closing statements. Axel goes first, then Wolcott gets the last word, reciting her belief in the need for “smart growth,” lest a few poor decisions in city hall undermine the city’s stability once again, something she believes Mr. Hathorne does not fully understand. It’s smart of Wolcott to pick at this tiny pill of perceived difference between the two law-and-order candidates. On paper they are nearly identical, but saddling Axel with the cumbersome and expensive bayou project makes him appear unsophisticated about issues beyond crime.

  Jay crosses the room to the armchair. He picks up his suit jacket from the day before, fishing through the pockets, inside and out. By the time he finds what he’s looking for–the copy of the campaign’s schedule for Tuesday, November fifth–the debate is over. The candidates are already shaking hands. Channel 13 cuts away from the debate to a promo for the nightly news broadcast, and the first image that pops up on-screen is Sandy Wolcott with her arm around Maxine Robicheaux, the lead story for the ten o’clock news: Mayoral Candidate Reaches Out to Missing Girl’s Family. It’s as if Reese Parker hand-scripted the day’s narrative: the leaked question about the bayou project during the debate and then the footage of Wolcott providing succor to the weeping mother on the nightly news. No wonder Neal hates Parker. She’s better at this than he is. Jay turns his attention to the campaign’s Election Day schedule, searching through the messy grid for Neal’s name or initials.

  Some of it looks familiar.

  Neal mentioned much of it in the car today.

  Tuesday, he was scheduled at GOTV (“get out the vote”) events in Westchase and Sharpstown; a media event in the parking lot of the Windsor Village megachurch; and visits to polling places, union halls, and community centers, among others, with time penciled in for several stops back at campaign headquarters. And of course there was the planned gathering at the home of a major donor, where the Hathorne family had plans to watch the returns with VIPs (not in Pleasantville as Sam had told their supporters). What is not here is any indication of Neal’s whereabouts from his last GOTV stop, at a rally with volunteers at a satellite campaign office on the west side, to the time he was due at the viewing party, a window from about seven fifteen to nine thirty, which Jay finds highly odd. Neal simply drops from the schedule, right around the time Alicia was last seen. According to this, Axel’s campaign manager could have been anywhere. Detective Moore probably had this information the whole time Jay and Neal were holed up in that interrogation room: Neal has no alibi.

  Jay walks his TV tray and dirty dishes back to the kitchen, leaving the whole mess for tomorrow, Neal, all of it. He kisses his son good night, and puts himself to bed. He’s undressed and knocked out cold by eight o’clock.

  A few hours later, he hears a crash outside his bedroom window, a banging sound that so startles him he reaches for his wife’s hand across the sheets–something he hasn’t done in months. He sits up, feeling in the dark for his glasses, the ones he started wearing at night when he crossed forty. He’s supposed to keep a pair in his car for night driving, but has only the one, which he never seems to remember he needs. They are resting on the nightstand. He slides them on and turns on the lamp beside the bed. The room is exactly as he remembers, lushly furnished, but spare of heart, the only sign of life his clothes left across the back of the armchair. The clock on top of the bureau puts the time past twelve. The house is completely still, save for the soft rumble of Ben’s perpetually stuffed sinuses, which Jay can hear through their thin shared wall. The house is so still in fact that the fuzzy lamplight takes on a dreamlike quality, reminding Jay of those nights right after Bernie died, before she was in the ground even, when he would wake up not remembering any of it, when he wandered the rooms of his house, looking for his wife. He wonders if it was grief that woke him, tapping on his shoulder, demanding to be attended to.

  But then he hears the sound again.

  Trash cans, he realizes, the ones lined up along the side of the house.

  Someone must have knocked them over.

  The motion sensors in the backyard are going off, lighting up the garage and the back patio. Someone is creeping along the back of the house, setting them off, one by one. The black mastiff in his neighbor’s yard is barking loudly.

  Jay goes for the .38 in his sock drawer.

  The bullets have scattered everywhere, some slipping to the bottom of the drawer. He feels around for them, feeling the time tick past, counting seconds by the beat of his own heart drumming in his ear. He slides two copper-tipped bullets, the only two he can find, into the cylinder, before slamming it back into place. Barefoot, he slips out of the bedroom and down the main hall and through the den to the sliding glass door leading to the patio and the backyard. There are two ADT consoles in the house, one by the back door and one in Jay’s bedroom. He turns off the alarm so he won’t wake his kids. Then, slowly, he unlocks the sliding door. It squeaks when opened all the way, has since they first moved in, and Jay is careful to give himself no more than a foot of space to squeeze through as he starts into the yard in cotton pajama pants and no shirt. The air outside is so damp it fogs his eyeglasses, momentarily blinding him, causing him to stab at the air with the nose of his pistol. When his lenses clear, he sees the side door to the garage is wide open. Someone picked the lock and let himself in. Jay starts toward it, and as soon as he crosses the threshold, he’s hit by a burned singe in the air, the familiar smell of marijuana. He remembers the break-in at his office, just as he remembers the Nissan Z idling outside his house two nights ago. He imagines the kid with the red eyes and the taunting smile waiting for him inside the darkened garage.

  He raises the .38 in his hand, flips the light switch, and takes aim.

  The door to Bernie’s car is standing open on the driver’s side. Someone popped the trunk too. Jay stands staring at it, the bones of his rib cage rising and falling as he struggles to steady his breathing, the gun shaking at the end of his outstretched hand. He has a brief out-of-body feeling, a moment outside time itself, as if the dream he’s been in for the past twelve months has come to an abrupt, heart-shaking stop, and his wife has finally come home, about to step out of the car at any moment, to ask for a hand with the groceries, could Jay bring in the soda and the charcoal. He actually whispers her name. But
he’s alone in here. There’s no thief, no intruder, and Jay worries that he’s finally cracked, that he imagined the whole thing. But then he sees the cardboard boxes strewn across the floor of the garage, each opened and overturned, picked over and picked through: boxes of stationery from his old office; some of Bernie’s work papers; a video camera; and duplicates of some videocassettes that Jay recorded for his biggest cases, including the first images he took of the crude oil bubbling up in Erman Ainsley’s backyard, the first interviews with Ainsley and his neighbors, as he prepared for the civil case against Cole Oil. Someone went through it all.

  The girl, Lori, is standing in the kitchen when Jay stumbles in, confused by the sight of a child not his own. In a loose T-shirt and plaid boxer shorts, she is studying the contents of his refrigerator. She turns at the sound of his bare feet slapping on the stone tiles and drops the open bottle of apple juice in her hand. It bounces, but doesn’t break, spilling juice in tiny waves across the floor. She is staring at the gun in his hand. “I was just getting something to drink,” she says, eyes darting between Jay, Ellie’s mild-mannered dad, and the .38, unable to put the two together. Lori is half Filipina and half white; her parents were high school sweethearts. She has black hair, stick straight, save for an unexpected and girlish curl at the edges. She backs into the refrigerator’s open door, bumping against a ketchup bottle and a jar of Del-Dixie pickles. Jay sets the pistol on a nearby countertop, raising his hands a little to show he’s harmless. “I thought I heard something outside,” he says, trying to explain. “It’s nothing. You should go back to bed.” He walks to the laundry room, pulling out a string mop and a bucket. Lori leaps on her toes across the spilled juice, skittering out of the kitchen as fast as she can . . . until Jay calls her back. “Lori,” he whispers.

  When she turns, he’s holding a fresh bottle of Mott’s apple juice for her. Bernie, he remembers, used to get up in the night, both times she was pregnant with the kids. “You get hungry,” he says, “take anything you want.”

  She grabs the juice and then hustles back to Ellie’s room.

  At the sink, Jay fills the plastic bucket with warm water.

  He actually works up a sweat, mopping every inch of the kitchen, even past the place where the juice spilled, because it’s Saturday, and he’s sure no one’s touched it in at least a week. Later, the bucket put away and the mop drying in the laundry room, he walks down the hall to his bedroom, trying to think what to do next, what calling the police would do at this hour besides frighten his children. To say nothing of the fact that this recent incident, like the one at his office on Tuesday, feels outside the bounds of what HPD is actually good at–solving crimes with the bluntest, basest of motives, lust and greed, hunger and hatred, cases put together as simply as stacking a child’s set of building blocks.

  This was no theft, Jay thinks.

  Not in any conventional sense, at least.

  Someone sent that kid here, he’s sure of it, just as he’s sure that the kid didn’t stumble into his office by accident or opportunity. He was looking for something, something to do with Jay’s old cases. Jay remembers finding the business card of Jon K. Lee in his office, a day after the break-in, and the car bearing Lee’s license plate idling at the curb in front of his house. He remembers Lee’s connection to Cole Oil and curses that family’s name. It just barely crosses the threshold of coincidence, none of it proven. But it’s late and his wife is still dead and so this is where it gets tucked in for the night, his unanchored rage. Somewhere, Thomas Cole is laughing at him. Plotting against him, as he did years ago, the first time he put a dangerous man on Jay’s tail. No, Jay thinks. No cops. He called the police Tuesday night, and what good had it done him? He slides the loaded .38 across his wrinkled sheets, tucking it beneath his pillow. He throws himself across the bed, exhausted. It’s after one in the morning by now. He stares at the ceiling, asking sleep to have mercy on him, trying to push out thoughts of yet another pregnancy under his roof, and all it stirs up for him.

  Bernie thought she was expecting, that’s how it started. The fatigue, the nausea, and the familiar, peculiar sensation below her navel, like lightning, she said, a sure sign of something growing inside her. They’d been down this road before, but Bernie was strangely ambivalent this time, thinking about her work at the school district, what a baby at thirty-eight would do to her newfound career, never mind her body. She waited a week or so for her period, lining her panties with Kotex, before finally giving in to the idea, going so far as to check the boxes in the garage for new-life inventory. They’d need a new crib and car seat, but they were covered for clothes, boy or girl. She took three drugstore tests before she finally made an appointment to see her doctor, who did an ultrasound right there in her office and then referred her to a specialist. Bernie tacked the doctor’s business card on the memo board in the kitchen, the word ONCOLOGY printed clearly in black ink, the writing literally on the wall, a message Jay had missed on his many weekend jaunts home from Arkansas and the Chemlyne trial, whole hours swallowed up spending time with his kids, driving Ellie to the mall, and taking Ben to the movies, or catching up on his other cases. He hadn’t noticed anything was wrong, hadn’t noticed when the boxes of baby clothes went back into the garage, and Bernie never said a word. She went alone to Dr. Klotsky, on a day when Jay was at the courthouse in Little Rock and the kids were in school. Days later, it was Evelyn who drove her to and from the biopsy, sworn to secrecy. “Mama and Daddy will just worry,” Bernie had said, never mentioning her husband, and Evelyn, she told Jay months later, had assumed that he knew, had even cursed him for not walking off the trial and coming home.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” he says now, rolling over in bed to look at his wife. She tells him plainly, “It wouldn’t have made more time.” The woman next to him, it’s Bernie as he first met her, at twenty-three, her hair in twin French braids. She looks tired, though, and uncomfortable, lifting her head every few seconds to find a cool spot on her pillow. Her forehead is damp, and her lips are chapped, as if she’s been laboring at some task that has no end, not yet. He keeps thinking he should get up and get her a glass of water. But will she be here when he gets back? Will she wait for him? “It wouldn’t have changed a thing, except throw away a case you worked years for, men and women bound to end up like me if they couldn’t get to the right doctors. They needed you.”

  “You needed me.”

  “Oh, Jay,” she says, sighing, reaching to touch his face.

  He tries to put his hand over hers, but feels only his own stubble, the feverish skin beneath it. “Bernie,” he says softly. “I’m worried about Cole.”

  “You did the right thing,” she says. She closes her eyes, wincing slightly. She licks her dry, cracked lips. He worries she’s in pain, a wave of it hitting her.

  “Bernie?”

  “I’m okay. It’s you I don’t know about.”

  “I’m going to be fine. I got a plan,” he says, hot tears stinging his eyes, sliding down the sides of his face, pooling in the hollow of his neck. “I can just lie here and wait. I can wait it out, B, long as it takes. I can wait till I get to you. It’s this I can’t do.”

  “But you got to.”

  He hears the clang of a bell, a shriek and a command at once, like the ones that used to ring through the hallways of his junior high school, calling an end to the day. He turns when he realizes the sound is coming from his bedside phone. It’s nearly shaking with the vibration of whatever is coming through the line. He goes to answer it, but Bernie grabs his arm. This he feels through to his bones.

  “The girl, Jay,” she says.

  It takes him a minute to understand what she’s saying. “Alicia?”

  “The news, it’s not good.”

  When he opens his eyes, Ellie is standing in the doorway to his bedroom, holding the cordless phone from her room, shivering in a nightgown. Through his window, pale blue light pours across the thick carpet, the first breath of dawn blowing in. Jay loo
ks at the tangled sheets on his bed, touching the cold, empty place beside him. He doesn’t remember falling asleep. “Dad,” Ellie says, her voice quivering, on the verge of tears. Unable to say more, she simply holds out the phone. It’s Lonnie on the line. Jay sinks back onto the bed at the sound of her voice at this hour. The news, it’s not good. “They found her,” Lon says.

  Part Two

  CHAPTER 11

  Jay is dressed by seven o’clock, in a suit and tie. He wakes Ben and tells him and his sister to do the same. “Church clothes, please.” But not Lori, he says. Lori is going home. The doorbell rings at quarter to eight. Ellie doesn’t seem to believe he actually called Lori’s mother until Mrs. King is standing in their foyer, literally wringing her hands. “Let’s go,” she says sternly, as Lori shuffles in her direction. Her mother grabs her oversize bag and kisses the top of her daughter’s head. As the two leave, Mrs. King mumbles a thank-you to Jay. He closes and locks the front door, turning then to see Ellie standing across the room, pointedly still in her nightgown, her arms crossed in righteous anger. Behind her, Ben is in a navy sports coat and tan slacks, his big-boy uniform. He’s nibbling the edge of a Pop-Tart. “What’s going on?” he says, looking between his sister and his dad. Jay doesn’t answer, instead asking Ellie if she wants toast and eggs. “I can’t believe you just did that,” she says.

  “Get dressed.”

  “You promised you wouldn’t say anything.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  She glares at her father. “I will never trust you again.”

  “You told me because you trust me, because you wanted me to know, because, deep down, you wanted my help. Lori can hate me all she wants.”