Authors: Margaret Fenton
Nona was proud of her African heritage
and wore flowing mudcloth dashikis and headwraps. I watched as Ashley’s face
sank into the soft folds of Nona’s earthy tunic. Nona knew how to handle
tragedy. She was no stranger to it herself. Raised in segregated Birmingham,
she dropped out of Parker High School when she was seventeen. Kicked out by her
tyrannical father, she began drinking and lived from flophouse to flophouse
until a priest found her and straightened her out. Father Clark ran St. Monica’s
until Nona took it over upon his death several years ago. Although there were a
number of good treatment facilities around, St. Monica’s was my first choice
because of Nona.
After several more minutes of “Hush,
baby,” Ashley’s tears ceased, and she dried her face on the tissue Nona handed
her from the box on her desk. “You and I are going to stay together tonight,”
Nona said to Ashley. “Why don’t you take them things up to my apartment?” The
third floor of the boardinghouse had been converted to a two-bedroom apartment
when Father Clark founded the home, and now Nona lived there. “Here,” she
flipped through a chunky ring of keys until she found the right one. “I’ll be
up in just a minute and make us something to eat, okay?” We watched Ashley
retreat to the staircase off the hall.
“How’d you find out?” I asked.
“Dazzle called me. Poor woman.”
Michael’s babysitter and Nona had known each other for years through the A.M.E.
Zion church. “She’s in a right state. The police are at her house.”
“I’m going over there now.”
“I wonder what in the world could’ve
happened to the poor child?”
“The coroner will do an autopsy,
probably tomorrow.”
“You think it was an accident?”
“God, I hope so.”
Nona walked me out to my car. On the
way, another one of my clients, Cheyenne, spotted me.
“Oh, shit. We didn’t have an appointment
today, did we?”
“No, I’m here on another matter.”
“Good.”
As Cheyenne stormed into the house, I
asked Nona how she was doing. “She’s angry. Arguing with the staff. Doesn’t
want to do her chores. Doesn’t want to be here.”
“She’s not going to make it, is she?”
“No, I wouldn’t think so. Not this
time.”
I sighed. It was sad for Cheyenne’s
three kids, who would go up for adoption.
I was halfway to Dazzle’s house when Mac
called my cell phone. He summoned me back to the office, stating that Dr. Pope
had cleared her schedule for the afternoon.
This was the meeting I was dreading. Dr.
Pope was relatively new in the position of director. She was the best one we’d
had in my five years with the agency and I had a lot of respect for her.
Despite the chaos that happened on a daily basis, she was always calm and
well-spoken. I’d never seen her get angry, and I hoped I wouldn’t now.
Chapter Three
On my way back to the office I called poor
frantic Dazzle to tell her I wouldn’t be over.
“Oh, Claire, what a mess. The police are
here, going over everything. Taking pictures and videos. What in God’s great
world could’ve happened to him?”
“I don’t know. Listen, I want to come
see you, but I’ve got to go meet with my supervisors. Can I stop by tomorrow?”
Probably best not to get in the cops’ way, either, I thought.
“You know you can. Lord have mercy,
you’re not in trouble over this, are you?”
“Too early to tell.” My stomach tensed
at the thought.
She wailed a long cry. “Oh Lord, what a
mess.”
I tuned through all my favorite radio
stations on the way to the office and in the end just shut it off. After
finally finding a parking space, I dumped my stuff in my cubicle where I ran
into Russell.
“Hey, I’m going out to get lunch,” he
said. “You want something?”
I didn’t, but I knew he’d harass me
about not eating if I didn’t order something. “Sure. Whatever.” I handed
Russell a ten out of my wallet and spent the next twenty minutes distractedly
canceling meetings and checking my voice mail. I picked at the sandwich Russell
delivered to my desk, then retrieved the Hennessy’s chart and went to find Mac.
He was in his office, on the phone, with
an empty Tupperware container at his elbow. He finished his call and asked,
“You ready?”
We made our way up to Dr. Pope’s
fourth-floor corner office, decorated in a serene fashion that suited her
personality. Soft taupe carpet and a large, cherry-finished desk and table.
Peaceful landscapes on the walls. Through the windows I could see the towering
glass and masonry buildings of the financial district.
Mac and I joined Dr. Pope and three men
at the round conference table. One of them, Brian Shoffner, I already knew.
Nice guy, and a competent lawyer. He’d been the attorney for the agency on the
Hennessy case. Dr. Pope introduced the other two suits, an attorney and a
representative from the state office in Montgomery.
Let the “cover your ass” begin, I
thought. As if Michael’s death alone wasn’t tragic enough, there was the
fallout at DHS. Right now, Michael’s death appeared to be an accident. But just
in case it wasn’t, my superiors were going to make damn sure I’d done
everything I was supposed to, from the moment I’d received the initial report
two years ago to the moment last night when Michael took his final breath. I’d
gone over the case in my head a million times already today, and I thought I’d
done everything right. Still, my palms were sweating. I wiped them subtly on my
pants.
For the next three and half hours the
team dissected the case. I felt like I was being interrogated; the only thing
missing was a bright spotlight shining in my eyes. Both attorneys took notes as
I answered question after question. They scrutinized every form, every
narrative, every court report, and every court order. We discussed the timeline
of the case, Michael’s birth and health history, and Ashley’s past. I’d missed
only two objectives during the years I’d worked with the family and everyone
agreed they were minor oversights. The representative from the state office
requested a copy of the entire chart.
When the meeting was over, Dr. Pope
concluded with, “I’ll be making a statement to the press that we don’t comment
on investigations. We’ll try to keep names out of it if we can. I can’t promise
that though. Claire, I don’t have to remind you that you’re not to comment on
this, either, right? No matter how ugly it gets.”
“I know.”
I had a pounding headache. It was four
thirty. Russell was out on a home visit. I picked up the phone, hung it up, and
called it a day.
Outside hunkered satellite vans from
both the FOX and ABC affiliates. Any death of a child would be picked up by the
press on the police scanners. From there it only took a phone call to a source
or one of the victim’s family members to find out whether DHS was involved. Our
cases were supposed to be kept confidential, but it didn’t always work that
way. If Michael’s death was an accident, we’d be the feature story tonight and
the whole thing would blow over. If my brewing fears were true and Ashley had a
role in Michael’s death, then this was only the beginning. If the slightest
hint existed that DHS could have prevented this, every news outlet was going to
play that angle. The public would demand that someone take the fall, and the
blame game was the media’s favorite sport. Too much bad press and I’d be gone
faster than a losing Alabama football coach. And maybe Mac too. Maybe even Dr.
Pope. I’d seen it happen before. DHS had been in the spotlight before for some
poorly handled cases, and it seemed like reporters were always waiting for us
to screw things up.
A familiar-looking reporter from FOX
bounced on the balls of his feet and swung his arms in impatience, waiting to
broadcast live for the five o’clock news. As I sneaked to my car, he spotted
me. I sped up, racing to my Honda and slamming the door in his face just as he
cried, “Hey!” I threw the car in reverse and backed up recklessly, speeding to
the exit of the lot.
My headache intensified. In crawling
traffic I made my way to the on-ramp of I-65, and for the next forty minutes
did what the locals called the sixty-five shuffle: the long, slow drive to the
suburban communities south of downtown.
I exited the interstate at the summit of
Shades Mountain and wound through serpentine streets to my neighborhood. I’d
bought a small house in Bluff Park only four months earlier, after years of
saving and months of searching for the right place. Built in 1953, it needed a
lot of updating. I spent every spare hour away from work fixing it up myself.
So far I’d peeled acres of stubborn wallpaper and polished the hardwood.
Tonight I planned to work on the small bedroom I was converting into an office,
painting it a soft yellow. Normally I relished the thought of changing into my
paint-splattered T-shirt and shorts and loading up the roller, but right now it
just seemed like work.
I pulled into my carport and sat there,
trying to force myself to go inside and watch the news. I didn’t want to hear
what they had to say. After a couple of minutes with my throbbing forehead on
the steering wheel, I backed out and drove toward Shades Crest Road. Within
five minutes I parked in the driveway of the sprawling red-brick, ranch-style
house where I’d grown up. This nut hadn’t fallen far from the tree.
My father’s Toyota hybrid was there,
covered in political bumper stickers and telling me he was home. A blast of
cool air greeted me as I opened the door. “Dad?”
“In here.”
I walked through the foyer to the living
room. Virtually nothing in the house had changed since I was a kid. An oil
portrait of my late grandfather hung above the fireplace. His Dutch features,
including his square jaw, fair skin, and summer sky blue eyes, had been
bequeathed to my father. And to me. And to my younger brother, Chris.
On this same green carpet I’d taken my
first steps and held slumber parties in junior high school. In this room lived
the memories of my mother before she died of breast cancer when I was thirteen.
Memories of me and my brother joking and roughhousing. It was a home built on
laughter and love. What all my clients should have had, but didn’t.
The furniture was still the same, too,
except now the tweed sofa and chair were shoved against a cream-colored wall so
my father could practice Tae Kwon Do. Dad was dressed in his
gi
, with
a yellow belt tied around his waist. His milk-blond ponytail was longer than
mine and touched with gray. He was flushed from the exercise, making the
crescent-shaped scar on his left cheekbone stand out white on his face. The
story behind the scar was one I’d heard frequently growing up, about how he and
the other Freedom Riders had been beaten and arrested in May of 1961, trying to
get to New Orleans to support the desegregation of the interstate bus system.
He’d been twenty years old and spent two months in jail.
Dad completed a front snap kick and a
couple of punches. He was in better shape than me.
“Hi. What’s up?” he asked.
“One of my clients died today.”
Dad stood up out of his stance. “Shit.”
“You’re not kidding. Do you have any
aspirin?”
“Sure. Hang on.” He walked down the hall
toward the bedrooms. I waited, massaging my temples, until he returned with two
Tylenol.
“Thanks.” I headed for the kitchen and
swallowed them with a sip of water.
Dad followed and asked, “What happened?”
“I don’t know yet. His mother found him
dead this morning on the kitchen floor. She just got him back two months ago.”
“You think she killed him?”
“There weren’t any immediate signs of
abuse. They’ll do an autopsy, then we’ll know more.”
“What’d Mac say?”
“We spent the whole afternoon going over
everything. All the policies were followed correctly.”
“So you didn’t do anything wrong?”
“I don’t think so. I need to watch the
news. They were already camped out at the office when I left.”
The den was a sunken room three steps
down from the kitchen, paneled in dark wood. A sliding glass door led to a
patio with a view of Oxmoor Valley and the Robert Trent Jones golf course
below. I sank into one of two enormous recliners and reached for the remote.
“Do you want a drink?” Dad asked as he
walked to the built-in bar in the corner.
“No, thanks. It’d probably make my
headache worse.”
He poured himself a shot of Gentleman
Jack over ice and joined me. We watched the last ten minutes of the national
news, the usual stuff about the economy and foreign policy, then I switched to
FOX for the six o’clock newscast.
We were the second story, right after a
homicide in north Birmingham. My jaw clenched as the pretty anchorwoman began
with, “Police were called to an apartment in Avondale today to investigate the
death of a two-year-old boy. Fox Six has learned that the child may have been
involved with the Department of Human Services. We go to Jeffrey Vale for the
story.”
The picture changed. In the background
was our office building, the windows reflecting the late afternoon sun. The
camera focused on the impatient young man I had escaped from earlier. In one
hand he held a microphone, in the other his notes. “Thank you, Kathleen. Fox
Six has indeed learned that Jefferson County DHS may have been involved with
this child’s family. However, County Director Dr. Teresa Pope issued a
statement earlier that they are unable to confirm or deny their role in this
case, or to comment on an ongoing police investigation.” He consulted his
notes. “Furthermore, a Birmingham Police Department spokesperson said that a
cause of death has yet to be determined and is still under investigation. An
autopsy scheduled for tomorrow will give the police more information about what
could have led to this terrible tragedy. Back to you, Kathleen.”