You Believers (2 page)

But then this little girl went missing from town, from downtown, where it’s bad. Word was her momma was a crack whore, so the cops, well, you know cops. So I called and met the grandmomma, who was the one really raising that girl, who took her to church, kept her clean, made sure she did her homework. The girl deserved a search. Her name was Keisha. That was the first thing I did, make sure the city knew a nine-year-old girl named Keisha Davis was missing and needed to be found. Given the momma’s way of living, I had a feeling Keisha wasn’t dead; she’d just been stolen for a while. Taken by somebody who’d seen her in her momma’s house, somebody who knew how to snatch a girl without a sound. And I knew with enough word on the street we’d find her. I told every little dealer, thief, and hooker I could get to listen to keep an eye out. Waved a fifty-dollar bill at ’em, then put it back in my pocket. Said, “You get me the word that finds that girl, you’ll get this fifty, and you’ll be my friend. And you never know when you’ll need a friend like me.” Maybe I do have a little Lillian Young in me ’cause I got their attention. But you gotta cover all the odds and work fast when it’s a child lost. So I raised a search crew from her grandmomma’s church. We put up flyers and started asking questions and searching that city, one alley, abandoned home, and Dumpster at a time. Then we stretched the search to the banks of the Cape Fear River, with me thinking if she had gotten in that river, she was gone. Turns out one of the hookers got the word, some guy told her about some girl locked up in a room, said it wasn’t right doing little girls like that. Turns out it was an uncle who had her. I don’t even want to count how many times it’s some uncle doing these things. He had her in a house three blocks away. Another crack house, another
uncle, another girl. You know the story. She was alive at least, but she was broken way past where anything could mend. I see a lot of this.

It’s a calling, really, what I do. The way some folks are called to the church. When someone goes missing, people do a lot of praying, and being from Suck Creek, I know a lot about praying and sitting around and more praying when something needs to be done. And, well, that bothers me. All that
she’s in God’s hands
and comforting talk and a whole lot of
it’ll be all rights
. There’s lots of times it won’t be all right. It’ll be hell, and my job is to get folks through it.

But don’t get me wrong, I think praying is a good thing. It’s a start. It gives some kind of comfort and a little bit of hope. But like my momma used to say, “You gotta put feet on your prayers if you want something done.” She said that was what Miss Young believed. And any woman who can knock two Suck Creek rednecks back from beating a boy, she’s got strength. When Momma packed me off to live here, she said, “You gotta get your prayers moving across the ground, Shelby Waters. You gotta set your prayers in motion instead of just letting them go floating out there in the air.”

I started my search for Keisha by raising money from the church where she went, then other churches, then just people. In time I started something that would make my momma, daddy, and Lillian Young proud. REV, I call it. Rescue Effort Volunteers. While lots around here are all about saving souls, I’d say my calling is saving lives, lives of the missing and the lives of those who get left behind. I’ve led those gatherings of searchers through fields, armed with guns, sticks, shovels, any kind of protection against the snakes that wait in weeds, the alligators lurking in marshes, where somewhere in miles of fields and woods and rivers and lakes a body can be found.

I always know when we’ll find them. My eyes tear up like from a chemical burn, my stomach heaves, and my head gets all thick and
swimmy, like my whole body is saying it doesn’t want to see. But I push on through the bad feelings, keep walking, keep using my stick to push back the weeds. And then: remains, skin matted with leaves baked by the sun to the bones, ribs riddled with spiders, beetles, centipedes. And there’s the shirt sometimes clinging, a watch, a ring, a shoe.

I step in between the police reports and camera crews when a family discovers a loved one is lost. I see what most don’t, the story behind statistics and the news. I’ve seen the mother vomiting in a hotel room in the city where her daughter was last seen alive. I’ve seen the father who cried because he lost a flashlight while looking for the body of his son at the county dump. He was a big man, collapsed on a pile of cinder block. He sobbed the words, “I just had it in my hands. I just had it.” I found his flashlight, gave him a bottle of cold water to soothe him a little. Kept moving on.

I’m trying to tell you the story, but to give you the story would be like giving you the churning blue sea one bucket at a time. You might taste the salt, feel the cold, but the weight and wave of so much water, well, it’s lost.

Like Katy.

Like the woman who once walked on that leg hacked off and tossed to rot in a stream.

Bodies.

Joggers find them in the bushes by well-traveled roads.

Bodies are tossed in ditches, woods, and fields. Some are left in Dumpsters in back alleys. Some are dropped in rivers and lakes, like fish caught, thrown back, not worth keeping. Floaters, they call them, when bodies fill with gases and rise to the surface of the dark water that consumed them. Something inside stirs, expands, causes them to rise.

A parent always knows whether the child is just missing or is
truly gone. And I can read it in the lines of their faces, the shadows, those sad, sad shadows in their eyes. But when I met Katy’s momma, I wasn’t so sure. I could see the sorrow of a child gone, but I could also see the life that comes with love, living love, hanging on. Which is another story. She’s from Suck Creek too. You gotta pay attention when you run to the end of the earth to get away from Suck Creek and a little piece of Suck Creek comes drifting up, swirling around your feet. I mean that was the feeling I had when I met Olivia Baines. I kind of recognized the accent and got to asking questions. And when she said she was from Suck Creek, I got this swimmy feeling, like it was pulling me back. So of course I felt the calling, said I’d do everything in my power to find her girl.

I picked the picture for Katy’s flyer, went through all those photos her fiancé had, picked the one of her smiling with this big, happy, tennis-pro kind of smile, thick dark hair unfurling in a breeze. She was looking at her fiancé, who held the camera. She was looking like a woman who had no idea just how beautiful she was. She was looking like a woman in love. And it took me back to my sister, Darly, who had that same kind of smile and wavy long hair. I wanted the whole town to fall in love with Katy Connor, to work to find her. Strangers gathered weekly for the search. Church groups, bikers, even some of the homeless climbed on the bus to help.

Katy Connor thought she was safe. She was supposed to be safe at three o’clock in the afternoon in the parking lot of a strip mall on one of the busiest streets in town. She did nothing wrong. She bought a bag of clothes and walked to her truck.

It can happen like that.

You think you’re going home. And some picture of your face ends up on a grainy black-and-white flyer tacked to a phone pole. Your image fades in sunlight. The thin paper sign of you tatters, fluttering in the breeze. Strangers pass by, study your face for something
familiar, think maybe they’ve seen you somewhere. But they haven’t. You are a stranger. You are lost.

Loved ones can find themselves composing you on a
MISSING
sign like this:

MISSING
from Wilmington, North Carolina:
Katherine (Katy) Connor.
5’10”, 130 lbs.
Blue eyes. Long brown hair.
Tattoo of a cross on her shoulder.
Last seen on June 22 at the Dollar Daze
store in Briarfield Plaza. Her blue Chevy truck
with Tennessee plates found 50 miles west of
Wilmington in Columbus County.
If you have any information, please . . .

Long ago they tattooed members of nomadic tribes to identify the body in case of death; the missing could be returned to the family for proper burial, to put the soul to rest. The system often worked, depending on time and the ways of weather.

Today they use a more reliable system of dental records.

But people will always go missing and prayers unanswered. Lost souls go wandering. We all know this, and bodies are calling to be found.

You could say this is a ghost story in some way. A crime story. A classic kind of tale. Biblical almost, but not quite.

Katy didn’t know that day would be a story. Katy didn’t know Jesse Hollowfield was watching for his chance. She didn’t know that at any moment the continental plates miles underground can shift, the earth crack apart, an unseen hand reach, grip, throttle the
street, sending it all tilting as someone gasps, someone screams, maybe, if there’s time to comprehend the darkness reaching up, maybe to yank a whole world down. No one is ready for it when something snaps, eclipses the sweet blue world. And no one stays the same after a thing like that.

It can happen, I tell you. Like this:

You Believers

Jesse Hollowfield and Mike Carter knew which cars had automatic locks. They sat waiting just behind the strip mall, patient as lions hunkered in the reeds, heads raised to sniff the humid air while watching gazelles herd, looking for the weak, the young, the one alone. The Datsun’s engine was running because when they shut it off, half the time the engine wouldn’t fire again, and it was hell to roll-start a car in the North Carolina flatlands when the sun can break your back with the heat.

Katy didn’t see them—she had a things-to-do list in her purse: gas station, the library to drop off books, the drug store to pick up birth-control pills. She had left a note for her fiancé on the refrigerator door: “Be back when I can.” But driving by the strip mall, she saw the Dollar Daze sign and got the impulse to buy something new for her trip back home. She pulled into the side lot, where the sun wasn’t directly bearing down.

Jesse gave a nod. “Check it out. That chick parked between the Dumpster and the ATM. That truck, what year is that thing? Looks old, but listen to that engine.”

Mike watched the truck. The girl was bobbing her head a little,
like she was singing. Mike leaned a little out his window, heard the sounds of a Bob Marley song coming from her truck. She had to be happy listening to that song. He said, “Maybe we don’t want an old truck. We need a good truck.”

Jesse shoved Mike’s shoulder. “Listen to that engine. It’s tuned. Somebody takes care of that thing.” He nodded, whispered, “She’ll ride all right.”

Katy sat in the truck, moving to the beat. Bob Marley’s music always made her think of beaches and beer.

“Come on,” Jesse whispered. “Get out of the fucking truck.”

Katy turned off the engine and stepped out into the sun.

Careless
, Jesse thought as she dropped the keys into her unzipped purse, dangling loosely from her arm. He leaned forward, his back straight, jaw tight, eyes fixed on the woman with nothing on her mind but where she thought she was going to go. He guessed her weight: 125-130. Tall but skinny. He’d take her truck and anything she had in that piece-of-shit fake-leather shoulder bag.

Katy walked toward the store, hoping to find something cute in the racks of five-dollar tops and twenty-dollar jeans. She didn’t have much cash, and her card was maxed out. But she wanted to look good for her trip. She wanted her mom to know she was doing something more than tending bar these days. She’d tell her she was learning how to hang wallpaper; she was practically an interior decorator. Her mother would want to talk about wedding plans. She would want to look at Katy’s hand, touch the engagement ring as if she needed to see it was still there, proof that yes, Katy was finally settling down.

Katy stopped, stood still in the heat. She’d be married in a month. To Billy. She was leaving the one she still wanted, Frank, behind. But she didn’t want to settle. And there was the new guy, Randy—Randy, who made her laugh; Randy, who’d get her high for free anytime she wanted. Randy had told her, “Sure, you go on and get
married, but you and me both know you’ll never really settle down. You’ll always come running to Randy when you get those little bad-girl needs.” No one knew anything about Randy. Billy thought his only problem was Frank back in Chattanooga. He suspected that when she went back home, it was more about seeing Frank than her mom.

“Let me take this one last trip,” she’d told Billy. She would party with old friends at the marina on Lake Chickamauga, the way they always did when she returned home. Frank would be there. “I need one more trip,” she had said. “One more trip back home, alone. I miss my mom.”

Billy had told her she could go, but he had a bad feeling.

“What?” she’d said. “Tell me your feeling; go on and say it.”

Billy had lit a joint, said, “Frank.” He’d looked straight at her. “I can tell when you’re lying, Katy.” Then he’d left her standing in the kitchen while he’d gone on to work with a joint in his hand. Just another fight, she’d told herself. She’d take a drive, let it go. She’d make lasagna for him when she got home. He liked it when she took the time to make a real meal. He called them good-wife meals, and he’d tease her, say he saw past her wild streak, saw the happy, peaceful, good wife she wanted to be. And he was right. Maybe. She hoped he was right.

She stared at the pavement and knew Billy had a right to be jealous. She knew she hurt him, but she just couldn’t resist the need sometimes to break a rule. To be a little bad. It gave her a rush, like leaping off a high dive. “I’m sorry,” she said out loud. She’d told Billy that a hundred times: “I’m sorry” for something; then she’d go on and keep doing what she wanted to do. She looked to the pavement and saw that her toenail was chipped; she’d get a pedicure before heading to Randy’s house. He noticed things like ragged nails. Billy didn’t give a shit, but Randy—and her mother—did. She looked up, saw the clerk
watching her from the window. Katy smiled, gave a little wave, and went in.