Butchers Hill (8 page)

Tess waved good-bye, still grinning at the
idea of Feeney and his nieces bobbing through the Pirates of the
Caribbean, Feeney with the animatronic Lincoln, Feeney being accosted
by various Disney characters, who would be drawn like a magnet to his
surly countenance. If only she could obtain photographic evidence, the
extortion potential alone would allow her to retire.

The main office at Gwynn's Falls
Middle School was in a figurative and almost literal
meltdown—sweaty miscreants lined up outside the vice
principal's office, all the phone lines lit up, and the air
conditioner on the fritz. Tess, who had been called in by the vice
principal a time or two during her own middle school days, felt guilty
and paranoid just standing in the midst of this bedlam, as if the
unpunished sins of her youth might suddenly come to light.

"Can I help you?" The
harried secretary at the front desk didn't bother to make eye
contact with Tess and her clipped words made it clear that she hoped
she couldn't help.

"I'm trying to get some
information about one of your former students."

Tess was nonchalant, as if it were perfectly
routine for some stranger to request a student's record, but
the secretary was having none of it. A black woman with dyed blond
hair, grass-green eyes, and a crumpled linen dress of a tropical
pattern with glints of both colors, she stared at Tess as if trying to
match her to some of the faces she had seen on the wall during her last
trip to the post office.

"I take it you're not a
parent."

Tess considered lying, but decided she
wouldn't get away with it. She hadn't seen a single
white student in the office, nor in the school's gloomy
corridors. "No, I'm a private investigator
who's been hired to find this student."

"By a custodial parent?"
The secretary drew out the legal term, cu-sto-di-aaaaaaal, as if to
warn Tess she knew what was what.

"Um, no, but my client does have a
legitimate interest in finding this child."

"Really? How can
anyone—someone who's not a parent, probably not
even a relative—have a
legitimate
need to find one of our students? If it were the law, you'd
have a badge. If you were from Child Protective Services,
you'd have a state ID. If it's not the law, and
it's not the state, then you're not legitimate and
I don't want you in my school."

Tess decided to pull rank. "Look,
maybe you should just get the principal. This is a sensitive matter, it
requires someone who has authority, and the discretion to use
it."

"I
am
the principal, Missy, and you're the sensitive matter.
Strangers who walk in off the street are something we take real
seriously around here. Now clear these premises, and don't
come back. If I see you again, I'll have you arrested for
trespassing."

Tess left the way she had always left the
principal's office—head down, cheeks hot, certain
everyone she passed knew of her misdeeds.

Donnie Moore's mother
wasn't at the address Feeney had provided. The apartment had
been taken over by her sister, a spaced-out woman probably ten years
younger than Tess. She might have looked younger, too, if not for crack
cocaine, which had cooked her body down until it was nothing more than
a little skin stretched over some long, knobby bones. Or perhaps her
habit was heroin; she seemed in mid-nod when Tess knocked. Head swaying
dreamily, like one of those plastic dogs you still saw sometimes in the
back of souped-up Chevies, she leaned against the door frame and
directed Tess to a rowhouse on Washington Street.

"Near the hospital?"

"No, farther south." In
her drug-soft mouth, the phrase came out: "Farver
sauf."

"But that's practically
back in Butchers Hill." Tess felt as if she had been driving
all morning, only to find that what she wanted was a few blocks from
her own office.

"Yeah, that's where
Keisha's new house is. Her baby's fahver helped
find it for her." The sister faded out for a second, closing
her eyes. Then her eyes popped open again. "He treats her
good
?"

"Her boyfriend?"

"Her baby's
fahver," she corrected. An important distinction, apparently.
"Say hey to her for me, will you? Tell her Tonya says
hey."

"Donna?" Her words were
virtually without consonants, almost impossible to understand.

"Uh-uh. Tone-ya. Like Toni
Braxton, you know, 'cept different. Hey, you know my cousin
know a girl who know one of her sisters, down in Severna Park, where
she's from?"

"A girl knows your
sister?"

"No, she know Toni Braxton. She
says she's really nice, not at all stuck-up. She say she
comes home and sings in the backyard, and they have chicken. They gonna
call me next time she visits." Tonya closed her eyes and
hugged herself, thinking of her private backyard barbecue with Toni
Braxton.

A rat waddled down the sidewalk in front of
Keisha Moore's rowhouse. The house looked neat, but dark, its
windows shut and curtains drawn against the bright sunlight. It had the
feel of a place where everyone was fast asleep, although it was now
almost noon. Tess knocked several times and was about to leave when she
heard footsteps on the stairs.

"What you want?" The
woman who flung open the door wore nothing but a bra and a pair of
baggy athletic shorts. At least, the shorts had been designed to hang
loosely. Her substantial frame filled every fold. She wasn't
fat, really, but big and solid in a way Tess imagined was probably
appealing to most men. Certainly, this wasn't the wasted
frame of an addict.

"Are you Keisha Moore?"

"You from Social
Services?"

"No—" Tess
fumbled with her knapsack, trying to find her wallet and her
P.I.'s license.

"Because I
told
you, there's no man living here."

"No, really, I'm a
detective."

Poor word choice. "I
ain't done nothing. What the cops want with me? I
ain' done nothing and Lavon ain't done nothing. Why
you got to be hassling us all the time?"

"I'm a
private
investigator
, not a cop." Tess found
the license at last and thrust it at Keisha. "All I want is
to ask you a few questions about your son, Donnie Moore."

The woman's face seemed to go dead
at the mention of Donnie's name. She sucked on her lower lip,
looking at Tess's license.

"That was a long time
ago," she said softly. "Why you coming around
now?"

"Can we talk inside?
It's awfully warm out here in the sun."

But the rowhouse was far hotter, stifling
and close. In the small front room, two small children slept on two old
sofas, which had been set up like church pews, facing the altar of a
brass wall unit with a television set and VCR. The children looked
tired in their sleep, if such a thing was possible.

"My nephews," Keisha
said, stopping for a second to look at them. "They was up
late last night."

"They belong to your sister, the
one I met in your apartment?"

"Tonya told you how to find me?
She never did have good sense. No, these are my brother's
children. I'm watching them for my sister-in-law while
she's at DSS, trying to straighten out her food stamps.
They's trying to cut her off because of one of those new
rules, but she don't even know which one she broke."

"Where's your
brother?"

"Gone," Keisha said, and
something in her voice kept Tess from asking for more details.

Somewhere above them, a baby began to cry.
Keisha ran upstairs, her cloth bedroom slippers slapping on the
uncarpeted stairs, and returned a few minutes later with a fat,
copper-colored baby in a diaper. She had taken the time to throw a
plaid cotton shirt over her bra, although she hadn't bothered
to button it.

"She needs a change,"
she said, leading Tess into the middle room. This would have been the
formal dining room when the house was built, but now it was empty,
except for an old-fashioned deep freezer against one wall. Keisha used
this as a changing table and while her movements were lovingly
efficient and competent, it made Tess nervous to see the baby lolling
on the slick, hard surface.

"She's
pretty," she said tentatively, not sure if that was the
appropriate word. More puckish, really, making a fish mouth that
reminded Tess of Harpo Marx, but what mother wanted to hear that?

"You got any?"

"Uh-uh," Tess said
politely, trying to project the kind of longing she knew mothers
expected of nonmothers. She didn't have much of a baby jones.
Still, there was something appealing about this chubby girl, a
life-of-the-party light in her eyes, a way of churning her arms and
legs as if ready to dance.

"This is Laylah," Keisha
said, making the baby wave a tiny hand at Tess.

"Lay-lay-lay-lah," Tess
sang a little riff to the baby, then felt embarrassed. "I
guess people do that all the time."

Keisha looked puzzled.
"There's a song with my baby's name?
Isn't that something? I'd sure like to hear that
sometime."

"Yeah, Derek and the
Dominoes." Keisha looked blank. "You know, Eric
Clapton."

"Oh yeah, that guitar player. The
one whose little boy fell out the window. The one who did the song with
Baby-face."

Funny, the different contexts people brought
to the world. Then again, Tess hadn't known Toni Braxton was
from Severna Park. "How old are you, if I may ask?"

"Just turned thirty-one this past
April."

"So when you had Donnie you
were"—Tess stopped, in part to do the math, in part
because the math made her feel rude.

"Fifteen. Yes'm. But
what do you want to know about Donnie for? Sure was a long time
ago."

"I'm trying to find the
other children who were with him at the Nelsons', and I
thought you might know where they were."

"Why? I mean, why do you want to
find them?"

"Because someone asked me
to." That sounded a little sinister, so she added,
"There may be some money coming to them, because of what
happened."

"Money for them, but not for
Donnie?"

"No, I'm afraid
not." She didn't owe Keisha any further
explanation, but decided to make one up, in case Keisha was distracted
by her own grievances. "Because of your lawsuit, I guess.
Double jeopardy and all that."

"Oh," Keisha said. The
baby's diaper was the kind with tape, and Laylah
wasn't a squirmer, but it still took Keisha quite a bit of
time to fasten the sides. "Well, I don't know where
they are. I never even met 'em."

"What about the trial?
Weren't you at the trial?"

"Uh-huh."

"They were there, too,
weren't they? I know they were called as witnesses."

"Oh I s'pose we might
have spoke, once or twice. But we didn't meet in any real
way."

Keisha reminded Tess of the weight you had
to pick up from the bottom of the pool to pass Junior Lifesaving.
Sometimes, if you didn't come at it just right, you had to
surface, take a breath, and make another pass. "Why was
Donnie in foster care?"

"I don't
s'pose that's anyone's business now, is
it? It wasn't right, I'll tell you that much. It
was all a stupid mix-up. They took my boy from me for no reason and
they got him killed, and they didn't have to pay."

"They put him in foster care just
like that, with no hearing?"

Keisha hugged Laylah to her, dropping her
head so she could sniff the back of her daughter's neck. She
smiled, as if the baby's scent was a kind of aromatherapy.
Tess wondered if you had to be a mother to smell it, or if
babies' necks smelled good to everyone.

"Look, that was all a long time
ago, and I don't remember much about it. I don't
want to remember much. I got Laylah and I'm a good mother
now, a real good mother, and my baby's father is good to me.
What's it to me, you do something for those other
chil'ren?"

In the front room, one of the sleeping
nephews whimpered like a puppy. Keisha Moore didn't move,
just stood in the shadowy dining room, rocking Laylah in her arms.

Tess put her card on the freezer/changing
table. "Just in case," she said. "For
what it's worth, Laylah really is a cutie."

When she passed through the front room, the
two little boys slept on, their cheeks patterned by the rough weave of
the old sofas, their clothes twisted and wrinkled on their skinny,
compact bodies. She hadn't noticed before that they were
wearing their shoes, high-top athletic shoes with Velcro fasteners at
the ankles, shoes that had cost someone dearly. They had probably been
too tired to take their sneakers off when they went to sleep. But why
hadn't Keisha or her sister-in-law followed behind, undoing
the straps and sliding the shoes gently down their ankles so as not to
wake them?

Tess remembered running barefoot through her
summer days, careless and free, a stubbed toe or a dropped jar of
fireflies her biggest fears. On Washington Street, the children
couldn't even afford the luxury of running barefoot through
their own dreams.

A
lmost
a decade had passed since Gramma Weinstein had given up her big old
house in Windsor Hills and moved into a cramped apartment in the
suburbs northwest of Baltimore. "So urban," she had
said, and the family had been pleased at this uncharacteristic
rhetorical restraint on Gramma's part. But in the end, the
changing neighborhood was less important to her than the cost of
maintaining the house, a rambling wreck of a place with rotting wooden
shingles and a weed-choked yard. "I am a woman of reduced
circumstances," she liked to tell her children and
grandchildren. "You know, Poppa didn't leave me
that well fixed." They knew, they knew.