Those Bones Are Not My Child (28 page)

Mac nodded, then ran his hand over his face. The phone rang again and he sighed, “Sorry,” though he looked relieved. As he answered he swiveled his chair toward the window.

Spence concentrated on his calluses, but out of the corner of his eye he could still see the carton on the floor by Mac’s desk. Only an edge of pale tissue paper was in his field of vision, but it bothered him anyway. Earlier, the first time the phone had interrupted their conversation, he’d had the urge to spring from his chair and tear into the box, for he’d spotted, beneath the throbbing reds and greens of a grasshopper kite and the bright orange shellac of a bamboo umbrella, a mask face down in the bottom of the box. It took all he had to keep himself in the chair, trying to break down the impulse to spring into an orderly succession of questions: What is that churning at the pit of your stomach about? And what makes you think the box has a false bottom? Why is the mask disturbing? What the hell is the matter with you? Now, pale as the tiny corner of tissue paper was, it was splitting his head open with the same incessant throbbing he’d left the screening room with, gotten up from bed with, only a fragment of the troubling dream lingering: walking across a prison yard under the eye of the tower guards who might shoot out of boredom. Back toward the lockup, the strip search, the guards instructing him to bend over and spread his cheeks, then massage his hair to show he carried no weapons in his bush, but mostly to spread the funk in his hair, the guards laughing as he moved into the corridor, the gates slam-locked behind him.

“This will only take a minute,” Mac assured him, swiveling around, one hand over the receiver. Spence stopped picking his calluses when he realized Mac was watching him. When he looked up, Mac selfconsciously looped the necklace of clips around the base of a Lucite cube of photographs. Mac’s children looked out at Spence, their smiles frozen in the block.

Speechless, he and Zala had gone from the screening room to pick up Kenti and Kofi. A boy’s face seemed to fill the frame of the windshield. A husband had broken while watching his wife being questioned. A mother had passed out when her children were ushered into the room by the interrogators. A ten-year-old boy was forced to watch his mother being hoisted up to the ceiling on a pole, forced to watch, forced to smile, prodded whenever his face muscles sagged or he attempted to look away or drop his eyes.

When they reached the schoolyard, Zala had jumped out while the car was still moving, grabbed the children, embraced them stiffly, her hands balled and turned out at the wrists. When they thought themselves released from her grip and headed for the limo, she’d grabbed them again. He’d had to step in, afraid to touch her.… At the house, he brushed up against her and both of them winced. She moved around the living room touching things but not him. She reached for pinking shears, the sewing box, and a fold of navy-blue cloth. And he’d thought, pulling himself together to deal with the present, that that was how best to deal with chaos—turn your back and get to work. He knew he couldn’t stay, shouldn’t be there, could best get himself together by leaving her alone and getting on with his own work, whatever that could be. Except he couldn’t leave. And when the phone rang, she’d dropped the tracing chalk. They’d both backed away, staring at it on the floor until Kenti, filling her fishbowl in the kitchen, had called out, wanting to know if they’d gone deaf.

“I concede,” Mac said, replacing the phone in its cradle, “that it’s premature for the investigators to establish a profile of the victims. As you say, it violates a scientific principle known even to readers of pulp. It does set limits. Dangerous, I suppose, most especially if, as you say, there are people on the scene in a position to gum up the works. But I’m not convinced that your procedure is a whit more sound, though of course I understand why you’re forcing the issue.” He lowered his eyes and looked uncomfortable for having voiced his doubts. He knuckled his lower lip and coughed.

“It’s not a matter of early or late, Mac. It’s not a matter of ‘premature’ or ‘unscientific.’ Don’t
you
think it’s suspicious? Can’t you see the possibility of what I’m proposing, or is it beyond you to imagine that police could be involved in kidnapping and murder?”

Mac leaned over and gathered up the tissue paper and gifts. “I can
understand why you insist on viewing things that way,” he said over the cover of the carton. “Too garish?” he laughed when he saw Spence frown at the articles. “My wife’s on a Fulbright. This papier-mâché mobile is from Bhutan, I think. Gifts for our girls. My wife hates to wrap worse than I do.” When Spence didn’t answer, he returned to the main topic. “Have you talked all this over with the detectives working with the parents’ organization?” He fastened the grasshopper to the lampshade rim, its wire talons puncturing the cellophaned silk.

“I thought it was a kite,” Spence said.

“Kite?” Mac examined the grasshopper. “From Indonesia, I think.” He opened and closed the umbrella a few times, then took out the mask and set it face-up by the lamp. “And this is from Japan, if I’m not mistaken.”

“I thought sure it was a kite,” Spence said again, then looked at the mask, the empty eyes, the expressionless face.

Mac settled back in his chair. “It reminds you of something?” He waited. “An army helicopter, perhaps?” He placed two fingers on the edge of the desk pad as if marking off the lengths of tape to be cut for the packaging. “What is it?” Mac listened, thinking Spence was hearing footsteps in the outer office, the secretary returned. He stared at the grasshopper that wasn’t a kite, hoping to see whatever it was that had arrested Spence’s attention. “Ghosts?” Mac looked from his top drawer, where he kept aspirin, to the Lucite cube, which Spence was now turning around on his desk.

“My wife, Charlotte,” Mac said, wondering what Spence was seeing.

Spence was seeing the Women of the Disappeared. Widows in veils, mothers in drab dresses, sisters and aunts and cousins chalking ghosts on government buildings, block-printing the names and dates of loved ones dragged from schools, from jobs, spirited away in the dead of night. Silent processions in the Greensboro public square. Chile, Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay. The still-unaccounted-for in Soweto township. The four films of yesterday afternoon merging into one.

“Spencer? You’re not equipped to maintain round-the-clock surveillance of either the mechanic or his attackers, to say nothing of keeping track of every police officer on the force. What are you going to do? And how can I help?” Mac reached in the drawer for the bottle of aspirin and set it down by the mask Spence was staring at. “I gather Teodescu’s involved in this now and intends to infiltrate an ultra-right group. Do
you think that’s wise?” He searched in the drawer, waiting for a response. “I gather you’re convinced that there’s a connection between the attack and your son. I don’t suppose I can talk you out of that.” His eyebrows made it a question.

“You don’t think there’s a connection?”

“What I think isn’t important, is it?”

“I’d like to hear it. But please don’t—” Spence added when Mac plopped a pad on the desk—“please don’t ask me if I’m sleeping well or if I want to see someone about having my subscription renewed.”

“I think you mean ‘prescription refilled.’ ”

“You think I’m the villain in the piece, or my wife is.”

“That’s not the term I would’ve used. I’d like to see your wife, by the way. How’s she holding up?”

Spence was seeing his wife: picking up the chalk, the phone still ringing, walking to the door without her bag, her keys, or her eyes focused. Where had she been going with the chalk, looking like a zombie, a duppy, a jumby? He’d knocked over the sewing box to break the spell. The phone had stopped ringing. She’d returned to the table and cut something wide. Wing sleeves for the minister, he’d thought, but navy blue? And she hadn’t been to church, choir rehearsals, or fellowship in weeks.

“Of course,” Mac was saying into the phone, two lights on the panel blinking. “Put him through. Thank God she’s back,” he muttered to Spence, meaning his secretary. “Please wait, Spencer.” He moved the bottle of aspirin within Spence’s reach, but Spence had already turned, heading for the door.

“Call you later, Max.”

“Mac.” He replaced the bottle in the drawer and took the call.

A
fluorescent light over the nurses’ station was sputtering and buzzing, getting on the nerves of the nurse Paulette had handed a record to. Both irritated, they spoke curtly to each other. Then Paulette turned on Zala.

“Routine, my ass! Go sit down somewhere and get out of my face.”

But when Zala headed for the elevator, Paulette came up behind her. “I’ve got to answer this page, Zala, but I’ll be right back. We’ll have coffee and you can run it by me again.”

Zala hung on to a vacant gurney someone had wheeled off the elevator. How could she concentrate and convince herself all over again that the test had been routine?

She listened to the disembodied voice paging staff. Any minute she would hear, “Young amnesia victim identified. Will Mrs. Spencer please report to pediatrics.” A boy can’t stay lost forever. She’d said just that over breakfast a few days ago, aimlessly turning pages of a fly-specked newspaper, trying to rev up her motor. She’d blown two CETA job interviews and fall registration at Georgia State, and Simmons was making no secret of the fact that he thought her unreliable.

“Like Peter Pan, Mama?” Kenti had reached for the syrup. “Peter and the Lost Boys?”

Zala had forked another piece of French toast onto Kofi’s plate and listened as Kenti chattered. Clap if you believe in Tinker Bell. Sonny a faggot? The psychological consultant to the Task Force had said, “We may be looking for a former child prodigy.” Peter the adventurer who didn’t want to grow up. “From a singular childhood to an unspectacular adulthood. Become ordinary, he seeks to recapture childhood through kidnapping and then cancel it out.” She had no contribution to make to the killer profile the detective and the psychologist were discussing,
only her list and the killers’ route that volunteer investigator Dettlinger had worked out.

“Peter the Pansy,” Kofi had snickered. Zala had had to participate in the breakfast conversation long enough to tell Kenti that her brother hadn’t meant flowers and to tell Kofi he had a backward attitude. Peter the Venus Flytrap. “Any adults in the neighborhood, Mrs. Spencer, who throw wild parties, use drugs, show dirty movies?” Peter the Pied Piper. Dave was on the trail of a man, maybe a minister, who frequented playgrounds around public housing apartments, telling kids that his church was setting up camps in the summer for the musically promising. The kids tagged him the Pied Piper.

The children off to school, Zala had set her second cup of coffee down on a book review she had no intention of reading. But the black type arranged itself around the edge of her mug. A book about the father of gynecology, a man who’d used captive African women as guinea pigs, conducting surgical experiments without anesthesia, one slave woman the subject of seventeen different operations. Zala had gotten up to rinse her cup, to rinse her mouth, when the doorbell rang. And with the plausibility of dreams she greeted Paulette before she’d even opened the door. Paulette surprised but she wasn’t. Though she was disappointed with the latest bulletin—that the one unidentified young John Doe patient traced through hospital services turned out to be Vietnamese. Sitting down while Zala put the kettle on again, Paulette began to read a pre-pub review of a book about the Tuskegee Study in Atlanta. “Aha,” Paulette had said, ripping it out. Zala was not surprised about its being there. Daytime was being overrun by nighttime logic. All she had to do was pay attention and read the signs. Something was about to connect, she was sure.

Between customers at the shop, she had flipped through old
Jet
magazines and heard Preener say that Otis the Silent had gone into the hospital on the twenty-fifth of July. Aha. Same day as the Richard Pryor Burn TV Telethon, and same day Reverend Carroll, one of STOP’s founders, had mentioned trying to do a telethon like Jerry Lewis’s annual muscular dystrophy fund-raiser to raise money for an independent STOP investigation. The twenty-fifth was also midway between the disappearance of Sonny and the disappearance of Earl Lee Terrell. She wrote it down, convinced that the puzzle was coming together.

The same day B. J. had reported that an investigative unit from St.
Louis specializing in cases of sexually exploited children was assisting the Task Force, Zala had found under her soak dish an article someone had left there for her, she’d never asked who. It was about the John Wayne Gacy case in Illinois, a fuzzy photo of Gacy’s yard where he’d buried his young victims in quicklime pits. And in the bathroom a customer had left a newspaper folded to an update on Vernon Jordan, gunned down in Fort Wayne, Indiana, by a sniper in May. “Special Agent Wayne G. Davis denies probe stall,” the paper said. She paid attention to numbers. The day Jordan announced he’d be back on the job as National Urban League head was September 14, the day Darron Glass disappeared. All she had to do was pay attention to those connections. A force was directing her, she was sure.

“Irrational,” was Delia’s diagnosis. “Paranoia,” said the media to Blacks pointing out connections. “No connection,” the FBI said in response to Black organizations all over the country dissatisfied with lackluster probes of the Jordan sniping, other snipings, slashings, cross burnings, and attacks on Black people by assailants unknown or known to be white; an avowed racist, member of an organization calling itself Defenders of the White Seed, was wanted in several states in connection with attacks and in connection with the Jordan case too. Might he be a kidnapper and killer of children as well? Zala’s notebook was bulging.

“There’s no such thing as nonsense. Pay attention to these promptings,” Mattie had urged, cracking a coconut open on Zala’s kitchen counter and catching the milk in a saucepan, then ordering Zala to drink the milk. “It’ll come clear,” she’d said, soaking the remainder up on a washcloth and laying it across Zala’s brow as she explained the clarifying properties of coconut. “It will come clear, if you just come clean,” handing her four pieces to chew, as if “come clean” wasn’t plenty to chew on.