Darktown: A Novel

by Thomas Mullen

  They waited to hear if there was more. There wasn’t.

  Smith asked, “Where’s your father’s truck?”

  Jimmy shrugged. “I ask Ma for us to ask the police about it, but she say not to. Say they only give us more trouble.”

  The futility was stifling. Boggs and Smith could never inspect the body. They couldn’t investigate the crime scene, even if they could find it. They had no authority to question witnesses. Even if they tried anyway, they would only be able to question the Negro witnesses—if there were any, and only if those witnesses were brave enough to talk to them. And why should they be? Boggs and Smith could offer them nothing: not protection, not justice. The only thing they might possibly offer was the remote chance of a future in which such events would not recur, though this, too, seemed so unlikely as to be absurd.

  Jimmy leaned forward then, elbows on knees, and sunk his head into his hands. The sound of his weeping was like a glimpse into a world Boggs never wanted to go anywhere near.

  Smith stepped out onto the porch. He needed air. He needed to be farther away from this family and their pain. He needed to think.

  He put on his sunglasses and gazed out at the front lawn, trying to imagine life out here. The town he’d been born in couldn’t be so different from this. If his father hadn’t been killed, perhaps Smith would call a place like this home. Maybe he’d be a blacksmith or a carpenter, hammering nails in the roof of a farmhouse as sweat poured from his body. Maybe a lawn like this would be his most prized possession, if he was lucky enough to own one.

  Cobwebs clung in the corners of the porch beneath the awning, tiny insect caskets suspended there. Dirt dauber nests dotted the front of the house.

  One of the hounds had followed Smith out and it approached him silently, the creature so tall its head was level with Smith’s belt buckle. Its tongue was hanging out and it was panting loudly. Smith placed a hand on its head and stroked it slowly, unable to muster the kind of assurances a dog might want to hear.

  Smith had been out there but two minutes when a tan Chevrolet slowly drove down the street. It stopped in front of the Ellsworths’ driveway.

  From the distance he could just barely see two figures in the front seat. White men. He stared at the car and willed it to drive away. After ten long seconds, it did.

  Inside, Boggs waited for Jimmy’s sobbing to at least slow down, or grow quieter. It took a while.

  “You said your family was going to Chicago?”

  “Yes, sir. Pa’s big plan. Try things up there.”

  “He had mentioned that to me, too. But I hadn’t realized it was coming so soon.”

  “About a week ago, he told us after dinner it would be in a couple of days. Caught us all by surprise. I mean, he’d already told my ma, I could tell that, but she didn’t seem too happy about it.”

  Boggs heard the sound of weary footsteps on old stairs.

  Then the front door opened and Smith walked back in. The darker hound leaped into action as if a new intruder had broken in, and the other hound darted in from the porch. Jimmy called out for them to hush. He stood; the dogs’ misbehavior had given him a purpose and returned him from the isolated place he’d curled into.

  “Let those dogs out, Jimmy,” a woman’s voice said.

  Boggs turned and saw Mrs. Ellsworth standing at the foot of the stairs, thin arms crossed before her as if bracing for the next blow. Her hair was pulled back and her jaw was set tight and lines were etched across her forehead. Everything about her looked like it was on the verge of snapping.

  She wore a blue housedress and the tips of her bare toes were startlingly white. But not the rest of her: Boggs had expected her to be light-skinned, yet she was as dark as her husband.

  Boggs introduced himself and his partner. “We’re very sorry for your loss.”

  “Why are you here? The police have already brought enough trouble.”

  She was eyeing them as if convinced they were complicit in the local cops’ crimes. Boggs tried to explain what he’d said to Jimmy, about their not having any power but wanting to find the truth nonetheless. It sounded even more pathetic the second time. So much worse was seeing those words glance harmlessly off a face that had already stared into more pain than most can imagine.

  “I don’t want you here. I know you’ve driven a long way, but you can’t help us. I’d like you to go now.”

  “I understand this is difficult, ma’am, but if we could ask you just a few things, it might help us in the investigation into what happened to your daughter.”

  “Investigation?”

  “We’ve been talking to people who knew her in the city,” Smith said. “People she lived with in the boardinghouses, other friends she made. Her old teacher, Mr. Hurst.”

  She scowled. “You tracked him down?”

  “He’s in Atlanta now, ma’am. Moved there just a few months before your daughter did. They got back in touch.”

  She waved as if at an invisible yellow jacket. “We don’t need to be talking about those things now.” She took a sudden step to the side and put a hand to the wall.

  Jimmy led her to a chair. “You haven’t eaten all day.”

  Boggs hated that he couldn’t just leave her alone to grieve in peace. But he and Smith would probably never make it out here again, so now was the time.

  “Ma’am, your husband told us Lily sent you some letters from when she’d been living in Atlanta. He’d told me he’d lend them to us, in case they might shed some light on someone who might have wanted to harm her. Would you mind if we took a look at them?”

  “You don’t need to read those.”

  “Anything at all might help, ma’am,” Smith said.

  “Mama,” Jimmy spoke up, “we should let them see whatever they need if they can—”

  “Boy, no one asked you your opinion. Now go get me some milk.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Jimmy hurried to the kitchen, the dogs happily following.

  “Ma’am,” Boggs said, “I give you my word I’ll treat those letters like gold. We don’t even need to take them with us—we can just read them here.”

  “There’s nothing in there that will help you.”

  “I do understand, ma’am, but I’d prefer if my partner and I could be the judges of that.”

  “Ma’am. You’re so polite. Raised right and proper, weren’t you?”

  “I suppose I was lucky. My father’s a preacher and he takes those things seriously. My mother even more so.”

  “I’m sorry. But I’m not changing my mind.”

  “Mrs. Ellsworth,” Smith said, “why didn’t you want your daughter to move to Atlanta?”

  “City ain’t a good place for young ladies. And I’d say I was proven right.”

  “It’s better out here?”

  “Can be. You do things the right way.”

  Jimmy returned with a glass of milk and a plate of honeyed toast. She told him she wasn’t hungry, but he insisted. She put the plate on her lap and took a bite.

  “Did her letters tell you much about her job at the congressman’s?” Boggs asked.

  She glanced up from the toast like she’d bitten into something sharp. But she took her time chewing and swallowing and washing it down.

  “She said she had a job there.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “She said he seemed nice but she didn’t get to meet him much. Mostly met his wife and son. Said they weren’t all that friendly but weren’t bad to work for neither.”

  “It must have been a little nerve-racking to be around important folks like that.”

  “Girl was good on her feet. Good manners. She was smart.” Her eyes started to well up, and she reached for the toast as if it might salve the pain.

  “Ma’am, I know the police here are saying your husband hurt her, but I don’t think that’s
true. Do you?”

  “Course not.” The pain shaded to anger.

  “They’re also saying he came into a lot of money that they seem to think he got through her somehow, though they aren’t very interested in figuring out how. Is it true that she sent you more money than you’d been expecting?”

  “What did you say your name was?”

  “Officer Lucius Boggs.”

  “Officer Boggs, I’ve worked hard to raise a good family.” She was almost whispering now, the only way to sneak any of her voice through the tightening walls of her throat. “I had that little girl before I was a wedded woman, my husband probably told you. And that’s not something I’m proud of, but I found a good man and we worked hard and we tried to make a good life.”

  She stared out the window, tried to compose herself. Jimmy put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Raised us a good family. I can tell you, I don’t know what happened to her. And I don’t know why anyone would have tried to hurt her. But that little girl did nothing wrong. Ever.”

  Minutes later, Boggs led Smith out of the house. He felt sick to his stomach. They were quiet as they approached the car, weighed down by a heaviness worse than the humidity that soaked their backs.

  “When I talked to Otis,” Boggs said as they reached the Buick, “he made it sound like the letters hadn’t mentioned anything at all about the job at the congressman’s. Yet she just said Lily talked about the Prescotts in them.”

  He opened his car door and got in. The seats were so hot through his clothes that he leaned forward as he turned the ignition. How people worked in fields on days like this was incomprehensible to him. Even the steering wheel hurt to touch, let alone a hoe or shovel.

  They’d never even met the other son, and barely had twenty minutes with Mrs. Ellsworth. This entire day was a failure. All he’d done was make their day even less bearable. Every time he’d tried to help that family, he cursed it.

  Boggs looked behind him so he could back out of the drive, and he was nearly back on the road when Smith stopped him.

  “Over there.”

  Out in the fields they could see a figure running toward them. The older Ellsworth brother, David. He was about Jimmy’s size, with a longer face that took more after Otis than his mother. Both of the Ellsworth boys were a good deal darker than their sister had been, Boggs noticed.

  David ran up to the car. He asked them nothing. In fact, he had come to give them some answers.

  Ten minutes later they were back on the road. Boggs wasn’t speeding, but he was anxious to get out of the sticks.

  “Makes a lot more sense now, doesn’t it?” Smith said.

  “Yeah.”

  “We’d both been thinking it without realizing it. Explains why the mother was so short with us.”

  “Come on. She had plenty reasons to be short with us.”

  “She did.” The nausea he’d felt earlier had faded, replaced by a quickened heartbeat, new connections forming in his mind. They had a long drive to plot out their next steps.

  Five minutes later, he checked the rearview and caught his breath. A few hundred yards away, a squad car was pursuing them, lights flashing.

  “Oh Jesus. We got the local cops.”

  Smith turned around. Boggs checked the rearview mirror and saw that a second car had accelerated to join the first. Boggs had driven through miles of farmland but now they were in the piney woods, the road narrow and straight, only a few gentle rises to the land.

  “I have to pull over.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “I can’t outrace them in this. If I even try, they’ll shoot us down.”

  “And what do you think they’ll do if we pull over?”

  The squad cars were rapidly making up the distance. Smith popped open the glove box, removing his revolver and sliding it into his pocket.

  “You just heard what they did to Ellsworth,” he said.

  Boggs smacked the steering wheel. Did Smith honestly want a shoot-out? Did he think they had any chance of surviving one? Did he just want revenge—for Ellsworth and his own father—and had Boggs stupidly let himself get drawn into something he’d never get out of ?

  “We’re just going to talk to them,” Boggs said.

  “If that’s all they do.” As Smith said that, he reached to the backseat for the rifle.

  Boggs said a silent prayer as he let his foot fall on the brake.

  31

  CUTTING VINES IN the midsummer heat was not Rake’s idea of a pleasant way to spend the morning. Or anyone’s idea. But he’d let things slide during the winter, when the work would have been the easiest, and in spring he’d been too busy with the new job. The previous owner clearly hadn’t tended the yard in years, possibly decades. Virginia creeper and English ivy and something that looked suspiciously like poison ivy had completely wrapped the trunks of the five largest trees in their backyard, coating them in green from the ground to about twenty feet up. He crouched in the backyard with shears and a serrated knife and eventually had to trade up to a hacksaw for the thicker vines, which were as wide as his forearms.

  To guard against the poison ivy, he was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, jeans, and work gloves. He used his sleeve on his forehead so he wouldn’t touch his face. The only reason he was doing this was because Cassie was deathly allergic to the stuff—family legend had it she’d nearly died from it twice, the second time her face puffing up and darkening like a bruised peach after some idiot neighbor burned a patch of land, including poison ivy, and the smoke cloud paid no heed to property lines. Odds were, Denny Jr. and the baby had inherited the allergy. Now that Denny Jr. was moving around more, Rake was doing his fatherly duty, protecting the clan by combating Southern vegetation in ninety-degree heat.

  The fact that he was doing this with one of his fingers in a splint made the work seem more like penance, which perhaps it was. The digit was swollen and he’d taken some aspirin—the doctor at the emergency room last night had offered him stronger stuff, but no thanks, Rake had seen what that did to plenty of men at the front—and in a way the brute exertion distracted the rest of his body from that one small damaged part.

  He’d finished three of the trees and was contemplating the merits of some rest versus charging ahead when Cassie told him his partner was here. She was just inside the house at the back door, then Dunlow emerged through it.

  “That looks like fun. Should have hired out one of my boys to do that, they could use the spending money.”

  A strange premonition took hold of Rake. While he crouched amid the scattered tools and piles of severed vines, partly obscured from the house thanks to the shrubbery, he folded the serrated knife into its handle and slipped it into his jeans pocket.

  “No thanks,” he said. “You’ve told me too much about your boys.”

  Cassie went back inside. Rake had invited Dunlow and his wife over for dinner once and had not repeated the gesture. Nor had it been reciprocated. Afterward Cassie had made some anodyne comments, too polite to criticize Dunlow’s language or manners or more likely just not wanting to get in the middle. But he could tell she, too, didn’t like him, and in the ensuing weeks he’d told her enough about Dunlow for her to want to give him the widest possible berth. And Rake had left out the bad stuff.

  “Why don’t you come take a break, talk at my place.” There was no question mark at the end of that.

  “I got two more to do. Maybe later.”

  Dunlow walked closer. Rake picked up a hint of liquor. “You and me need to have an overdue conversation and those vines can wait. If your pretty lady wasn’t in that house, I would be dragging you by the scruff of your goddamn neck right now. So shut your mouth with the complaints and get on.”

  Rake was too proud to let someone, even his partner, threaten him on his own property, but he didn’t want to get in a brawl in front of his wife and
kids. He was down a finger and he was hot and exhausted and in need of some water, so the calculations he was performing in his head were unbalanced and swayed by physical factors. If all the sneaking and scheming he had managed the past few weeks were going to come to a head, he didn’t want that to happen in his backyard.

  Dunlow wore only a white undershirt, hanging past the top of his dungarees, and Rake couldn’t quite tell if he had a piece on him. Small of his back, probably, but then again big fellows like this could hide pistols in their front pockets and hip holsters surprisingly well.

  Rake kept his eyes on his partner and took off his work gloves, slowly, to show he wasn’t going to be rushed or scared.

  Then he walked toward the house, calling to Cassie that he needed to see something at Lionel’s but would be back soon. She poked her head out the back door and looked surprised but not concerned, and he gave her a smile, nothing to be concerned about. Telling her he loved her would have set off alarms, so he kept his mouth shut.

  Dunlow’s house was only a few blocks away yet he was too lazy to make the walk. They drove back in Dunlow’s Ford, Rake keeping his right hand near his pocket in case he needed to go for the knife, though he knew it would be an awkward weapon in such quarters.

  “The nigger’s house,” Dunlow said as they passed Calvin’s new place. “Bringing their trouble to our shores.”

  As far as Rake knew, there had been no other incidents. “I haven’t heard of any trouble.”

  “Oh, you will soon enough. Don’t you worry ’bout that.”

  Dunlow’s low-slung bungalow was shaded by a monstrous white oak in the front yard, its massive boughs stretching the length of the yard. Dunlow parked in the driveway and said, “Out back.”

  Rake followed him as they walked through the door of a wooden fence that Dunlow himself had likely built. The yard sloped down and, true to Rake’s comment, it didn’t look like any teenagers had mown the lawn lately. Honeybees darted about as the men’s walk disturbed their purchase on dandelions. At the edge of Dunlow’s property was a wooded area that grew around a tiny creek, more like a very long and narrow puddle, but just before that an old work shed hid beneath a natural trellis of vines almost as completely as the main house hid beneath that oak.