by C. J. Lyons
Then the photographer hopped down and plugged her camera into a laptop Madsen had set up on a folding table. TK had her own laptop in her messenger bag, but no sense in adding to the crowded conditions—everything was being stored in the cloud where she and Wash, back at Beacon Falls, could access it remotely. She did grab her phone to make sure Wash was on line, watching the uploads, but before she could dial him, he called her.
“Are you seeing this?” he asked in a breathless tone. She could hear his keyboard clicking furiously in the background. “This is incredible.”
She squinted at the images on the screen before her then turned back to the vehicle. Madsen had set up a ring of halogen work lights around the edge of the flatbed, but the images were still dark, their secrets waiting to be uncovered as they were processed and enhanced.
“I’m not seeing much of anything.” Except the backs of the students gingerly climbing around the car’s exterior.
TK itched with curiosity, wanting to jump up and just open the damn car doors, see what was inside, but she understood the need to move slowly and methodically. Didn’t mean she liked it. Without the water to buoy it up, the skeleton inside the car had slid down out of sight. Not that you could see much beyond the silt-streaked windows.
“Take a look at this one that I just enhanced,” Wash said.
TK opened her own laptop and turned it on. A few moments later her screen filled with a photo that now revealed actual detail. It had been shot through the driver’s side window, aiming across the front seat.
She made out a steering wheel—big, old-fashioned, it looked like something to wrestle. On the far side of it the light reflected from a glistening mound of greasy yellowish material covering what could only be a rib cage and skull.
“Is that what I think it is?” Wash asked. “On the far side, near the door handle.”
TK zoomed in on the area. “You might want to see this,” she called to Madsen who was busy directing the students and waved her hand in a “be right there” gesture. TK turned to look for Karlan; he’d definitely need to see. The detective caught her eye and sauntered over. “Look there.”
He lowered his head until his nose almost touched the screen then leaned back again. TK couldn’t restrain herself any longer. She grabbed a pair of the nitrile gloves and hopped up onto the platform. The student nearest her looked up as if TK had just trespassed on sacred ground. “Dr. Madsen?”
Madsen and Karlan crossed over from the table. “It’s okay.” She nodded to TK. “Go ahead. Open it. Slowly. Peter, keep filming this.”
TK pulled at the passenger door. She was expecting resistance, imagined that an almost seventy-year-old car dragged up from the bottom of a quarry would be rusted shut. But the door practically fell open at her touch. As if it had been waiting for this exact moment, as if it wanted to unveil its secrets.
She allowed it to open only an inch or two, just far enough to confirm what the camera had seen.
“Looks like just the one occupant,” Karlan narrated from behind her. The videographer gestured for him to get out of the way and he moved aside.
“We definitely have a crime scene here,” TK finished for him.
She stepped back so Madsen could see for herself what Wash had glimpsed in the photo. The camera flashed, and there was no mistaking the hard glint as the light sparked from the steel handcuff fastened around what remained of the victim’s arm, a few frayed dark threads all that remained of the skeleton’s clothing. The other end of the handcuff was locked to the door handle.
“Our corpse wasn’t the driver,” TK continued. “He was a prisoner. With no hope of escape.”
Chapter Eight
May 17, 1954
* * *
The police car stank of piss and throw-up and blood. Winnie ignored all that as she crouched on the floor, her body pinned between the back of the driver’s seat and the seat Henry lay on. His breathing wasn’t right, and his face was smushed in. At least what she could see of his face through the blood.
All because of her. “I told you not to.”
His eyes fluttered open and his lips tried to make words. She leaned closer.
“You…right?”
“I’m fine. Philip Greer and his bullies weren’t whaling on me.”
“No. Your…pa…hurt you?” His question lingered in the air as Officer Thomson climbed into the car and began to drive.
Winnie leaned down until her lips were at Henry’s ear. “Pa never can hurt me. Not for real.”
Her words surprised her. It was as if she’d just now figured out something she should have known all along, something she should have learned on her own. But it’d taken seeing a colored boy willing to stand up for her; someone not even her blood who thought she was worth something in this world.
And that was everything.
“You two all right back there?” Officer Thomson called over his shoulder as the car lurched over the railroad tracks and headed away from the river toward the town center.
“Henry’s bleeding real bad,” Winnie answered, not sure what to do about the split above Henry’s one eye that kept spurting blood.
Her father said Negro blood was different, tainted, but it looked and smelled just like her own whenever he slapped her hard enough to make her nose gush. Smelled better than his when he got drunk and throwed up blood mixed with whiskey, missing the toilet so she had to clean it up by hand.
“That colored man was a doctor. He’s going to patch Henry up, take him to Altoona to the hospital.”
“Before Philip Greer and those boys come back with their fathers?”
“That’s the plan.”
“He didn’t touch me. Henry was trying to protect me.”
Officer Thomson made a noise that sounded like he already knew that. “Your father? Again?”
“Wasn’t fast enough,” she admitted. “Should have seen it coming.”
“I need to know, Winnie. What exactly happened?”
She turned her head far enough to stare at him in the rearview mirror. “Why? No one ever does anything about it. Except Henry and his mom and aunt.”
“I meant, what did Henry do.”
She grit her teeth in anger. So typical. The only people she could count on when things got bad and now this hopeless, helpless policeman wanted her to get them in trouble. Then where would she run? “I told you. Nothing. Not that anyone cares. Just because Henry’s colored doesn’t make him bad. And just because others are white doesn’t make them good. Why can’t anyone see that?”
Officer Thomson looked away, his eyes pinched tight like she’d said something that smelled like road kill.
He turned down the alley between the police department and the Woolworth’s, slowed the car and pulled up to the metal door with the heavy hinges and massive lock—the one they used for prisoners since the town’s only jail cell was back there. It was the door other kids’ mothers used to scare them, hauling them down by their ears, telling them to take a good look at their future.
Winnie’s mother had long ago run off to find her own future so it was usually her meeting her pa here out in the alley, bringing him a coat with his bottle in one pocket and his cigarettes in the other, once he sobered up enough for the police to let him go.
Most times she’d wait, ignoring the police officers’ stares—always filled with pity but never actually doing anything to fix her father or stop him. Except Officer Thomson. More than once she’d seen him through the bars on the window arguing with her father; a few times he’d even come outside to check on her, ask her if she was all right.
Today was the first time she’d ever had the courage to look him in the eye and answer. Funny, she thought finally telling the truth would change things. But it didn’t; people didn’t change because of mere words. Heck, if seeing her own blood on his hands didn’t change her dad, nothing would.
Officer Thomson opened the rear door of the police car. Henry’s hand had gone limp and his breathing was raspier.
<
br /> “Maybe we shouldn’t move him?” she said as she scrambled out to give him room. “Not until the doctor’s here?”
Hard to believe that Negro was a doctor but she’d heard of things like that in the cities. Nowhere around here. Big places like Pittsburgh or Philadelphia. Still, a Negro doctor was better than no doctor at all.
Unless her dad or any of the men he drank and played cards with found out. Even worse—if Philip Greer made good on his threat and got his father. More than the mayor, Mr. Greer owned everything and everyone in town. If he got involved, there’d be hell to pay—for Henry and the colored doctor.
She didn’t understand why most of the men around here, the white ones at any rate, seemed so angry all the time. Lashing out at the colored, the Italians and Hungarians, anyone who wasn’t just like them. As if being different meant coming to steal what little anyone else had in this world.
Winnie couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to come steal anything her dad had. Empty bottles of whiskey and beer, a house about ready to fall apart with roofing shingles patching holes in the siding, a daughter he barely seemed to know was alive except when he was looking for someone to scream at or something to hit.
Henry’s parents were Negroes, but they never shouted or hit or stole or got drunk, not that she could see. They’d been their next-door neighbors since before her mom ran off, and if it weren’t for Henry’s mom and aunt, there were winters when Winnie might have frozen to death or gone hungry while her dad was off on one of his trips to find better work. Somehow, he never made it farther than Altoona and always came home drunk, broke, and smelling of cheap perfume.
The Rawlings were good people, always there for her when Winnie needed shelter. And yet white boys like Philip Greer and his no-account friends jumped all over Henry for being colored and helping her get away from her dad.
No one jumped all over her dad for being white and hurting his daughter. His friends laughed and pounded him on the shoulder like they were proud every time they came over and saw her with a black eye or new bruise. “Gotta keep ’em in line. Can’t let her grow up wild like her momma,” they’d say.
Winnie wished she’d just for once find a way to hit back. Lately, when her dad got that deep drunk, sleeping like the dead, she’d stand over him, watch him breathe. She would go to hell, she knew she would, but she couldn’t help sometimes praying to Jesus to make him just not take another breath. Just to never wake up. But he always did.
Officer Thomson reached inside the car, trying to rouse Henry, when another car pulled into the alley. A pretty robin’s egg blue sedan. Nicer than any car around here—except the fancy black ones the Greers had, but they always had someone else drive them while they sat in the back seat.
The colored man from before drove the blue car. A lady wearing the nicest go-to-church suit Winnie had ever seen and it wasn’t even Sunday sat in the passenger seat. Between them was a little girl in braids and a gingham dress. The man and woman were obviously in the middle of a serious discussion, their heads bobbing back and forth as their mouths moved, but just then Henry’s breathing turned into a shrill gasp, and she knew he couldn’t wait any longer.
She ran to the sedan and pounded on the driver’s door, then leaned her weight back, yanking it open. “He can’t breathe! You need to come now. Help him. Please.”
The man climbed out of the car, striding past her to where Officer Thomson had pulled Henry from the back of the squad car and stood cradling him in his arms. The colored man didn’t need more than a blink to see what was going on.
“Get him inside, onto a flat surface. A table or the like,” he ordered Officer Thomson. He turned to the woman. She was already out of their car and at the trunk. “Bring my bag. Quickly.”
Within moments, they’d all rushed inside the police station. Officer Thomson bundled Henry into his chest, Henry’s long arms and legs hanging limp. He hesitated when they passed the jail cell but kept on going down the narrow hallway into a room that had a big table in the middle, a kitchen sink, hot plate, and set of cabinets. There, he gently lowered Henry onto the table.
The woman ran to the doctor, handing him his bag. He was already shrugging free of his suit jacket then reaching into the black bag for a stethoscope. Henry wasn’t making any noise, none at all.
“Is he dead?” the little girl whispered to Winnie as she crept into the doorway, following her parents at a distance.
“No,” Winnie said in an authoritarian voice even though she had no idea of the truth. Henry sure looked dead. She took the little girl’s hand in hers and squeezed it. “He’s gonna be okay.”
The little girl beamed up at her and patted her arm. “Of course he is. My daddy’s the best doctor in all of Washington. Maybe the whole country. He can fix anything.”
A heavyset woman appeared in the hall, coming from the front of the police station. Mabel Parker, the town’s phone operator and police dispatcher. Nosyparker was what the kids called her behind her back.
“What’s going on here?” she yelled. “Little girl, you can’t be in here. Winnie, what on earth are you doing bringing a colored girl here?”
Then she drew close enough to see Henry sprawled out on the table. The doctor held a shiny scalpel, about to slice into Henry’s chest. “Stop it! Archie Thomson, what in darnation are you doing? Get that colored boy off our break room table!”
“He’s hurt, Mabel.” Officer Thomson was busy holding the boy still as the doctor got into position.
“I don’t care. We eat off that table.”
“He has a tension pneumothorax,” the doctor explained as his wife poured alcohol over Henry’s bare chest. “A collapsed lung. He’ll die if I don’t release the pressure.”
Before Mabel had a chance to respond, the doctor sliced into Henry’s chest with one hand, the other sliding a metal tube though the slit he cut. A whoosh sounded through the room and Henry gasped, his chest heaving up and down. Breathing. That was good.
“I’m calling the chief,” Mabel said, strutting back toward the front where her desk at the switchboard was. “We’ll just see about this.”
The doctor ignored her, instead held a hand, palm up, out to his wife. “4-0 silk.”
The wife rummaged in his bag and had what he needed in his hand before he finished speaking.
“See?” The little girl squeezed Winnie’s hand. “I told you my daddy could help him.”
“Is your mom a nurse?” Winnie wanted to be a nurse when she grew up. Wanted to help people like Henry’s mom and aunt had helped her time and again.
“No. But she learned. There’s always hurt people coming to our house middle of the night.” The little girl let go of Winnie’s hand and turned to face her. “Almost forgot my manners. I’m Maybelle Mann.”
Winnie nodded, her gaze still hooked by the misery that was Henry’s battered body. All her fault. “Winifred Neal.”
“Most pleased to meet you, Winifred.” The little girl actually curtsied.
Winnie clamped both hands over her mouth, strangling her laughter. Henry’s blood dribbled over the edge of the table and dripped onto the white linoleum.
“He gonna be all right?” Officer Thomson asked, relaxing his grip on Henry’s shoulders as the boy stopped struggling and began to breathe easier.
“Once we get him to a hospital.” The doctor tied a complicated knot around the metal tube, fastening it to Henry’s chest wall.
Officer Thomson jumped up as Mabel shouted something from the front of the building. He ran past Winnie and the girl and out to the front of the building.
“Where is he, Archie?” came a man’s voice.
Its whiskey-fueled rage about curdled Winnie’s blood. Her father.
“Where’s that Negro who attacked my baby girl? I’m gonna kill that bastard.”
Chapter Nine
Despite the drama of their initial find, Madsen kept her students in check. TK watched as she reminded them of the need for confidentiality, including any social m
edia, and the solemn responsibility they owed the victim and their family. “No matter how long he or she has been dead, it is our duty to help them reclaim their lives and achieve justice. Remember that.”
The students nodded and continued their work, more subdued than before. As they explored the passenger compartment of the car, carefully lifting anything they could find onto sterile sheets to be sifted and sorted and documented, Madsen herself took over removal of the human remains. TK and Karlan watched, Karlan acting as videographer, while TK assisted the coroner.
“Here, see here?” Madsen lowered TK’s hand to cradle three pieces of bone wrapped inside the waxy gray-beige decomposed tissue Madsen called adipocere.
TK was glad she was breathing through a mask although it felt as if the sickly-sweet smell might be absorbed into her own flesh. Two of the bone fragments had sharp edges, and she realized, once she oriented the anatomy, that she was looking at a broken forearm bone running alongside an intact one.
“He fractured his wrist trying to get free?” TK asked the anthropologist. “This is about where someone trapped by a pair of handcuffs would try to yank the door handle off if they were panicked.” She demonstrated the motion with her free hand.
“No.” Madsen shook her head sternly. “We can only observe and document. We can’t draw conclusions—it’s too easy to misinterpret. Tell me what you see, not what you think happened.” Madsen rolled the two sharp edges of the broken bone so they fit together in her gloved palm.
“They’re sharp, the cut or break is clean,” TK tried again.
“Not cut. No kerf marks from a tool. Definite break. How close to death did it occur?”
“Very close. No signs of healing, right?” TK wished Tommy Worth were here. The former pediatric ER doctor would be much more in his element—she was barely treading water.