Archer Mayor - The Ragman's memory

I took a guess. “But by the time the second appointment came around, Shawna was gone.”

Instead of answering, Wilma Davis merely dug into her breast pocket for another cigarette, which she lit with trembling fingers.

“Why did she leave, Mrs. Davis?” I asked after a few moments.

Her voice had calmed. “Why do they all leave? I did. Everybody leaves, sooner or later.”

“You know where she went?”

“I was the last person she was going to tell. I came home one day, and she was gone. That was it.”

“When was that?”

“Late last April… What’d she do, anyway? Rob a bank?”

Nine months ago, I thought. I ignored her belated question for the time being, sensing she’d been anticipating the worst from the start. “Did she have any friends we could talk to? Someone she might’ve kept in touch with?”

She leaned forward in her seat, stabbing the cigarette in my direction, her question already moot in the misery clouding her mind. “I can sure as hell see you don’t have kids. They don’t talk to you; they don’t tell you their friends’ names; they don’t tell you shit. You watch their faces, looking for the child you knew, and all you see is they hate your guts. They bleed you dry, and then they drop you like shit.”

She rose and approached me, still talking as if her rage might stave off the pain we both knew was coming. I heard Ron shift slightly, returning to the defensive. “You want to know who her friends are? Go find them yourself. ’Cause when you do, she’ll probably be there, too, doing drugs and getting fucked by men who won’t look her in the face. That’s what happens to little children, mister. I know. But you can’t do anything about it. You can kick and scream all you want, but the more you do, the more they want to leave. You tell ’em the truth-as plain as the shit on your shoe-and they tell you you’re full of it.”

She had closed the gap between us, her face inches from mine, the cigarette forgotten in her hand. Her breath encircled my head. “You find her, policeman, you tell her I’m dead, just like she is. She won’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, but she’ll find out soon enough.”

In the twilight from the greasy windows, I could see the tears in her eyes-the shiny paths they left on her cheeks. “Will you do that? Will you tell her?”

I did look her in the face and chose not to lie. “We might’ve already found her, Wilma. And if I’m right, maybe you can bury some of your grief along with her. She’s not in pain any longer.”

She stared at me in silence for a moment and then burst out sobbing.

Gail took a bite of pizza and chewed thoughtfully for a minute. We were sitting at either end of the kitchen’s small serving island, late at night, enjoying the novelty of a shared meal, even if it was garnished, I noted wistfully, with vegetables only.

“What did you do then?”

“Asked to see Shawna’s room. There wasn’t anything useful-no letters or diaries-just posters and stuffed animals and what-have-you. But it was so dark and gloomy… And dirty. Tough way to live.”

“I thought maybe Wilma’s phone records might help-give us a clue to who Shawna was calling her last few weeks at home. ’Course, that was wishful thinking-I suppose I should’ve been happy she had a phone at all, much less a filing system. I’ve got Ron pestering the phone company for it instead. We should have something tomorrow. She did have a recent snapshot she let us have.”

I paused to eat a slice myself, watching Gail cross the kitchen to refill her glass with milk. It was during small moments like this that I was happiest we’d moved in together. Despite the crisis that had stimulated the decision, I found myself uncannily comfortable with the end result, wondering why we’d staved it off for so long.

“After that, we went to the local high school,” I continued. “Talked to teachers, advisors, administrators-basically anyone who’d known her-and finally we chased down a couple of her old friends. But we didn’t get much-she was a loner, a dreamer, someone easily influenced by a smile and a good line. Her grades were lousy, she had zero ambition, her social skills were inept. She was plain and insecure and dying to get away. They all said her relationship with her mother was the pits.”

“No ties to Brattleboro?”

I shook my head and spoke with a full mouth. “No ties anywhere except to her hometown. When we first came up with Shawna’s name, we did a complete computer search. Nothing came up. The joke would be if the bones aren’t hers at all.”

“You see today’s paper?” Gail asked after a brief pause. I gave her a dour look, feeling twinges of familiar dread. “No. What did they do?”

“Nothing bad. They screwed up a little on the details, saying the piece of jaw you found was from the mandible instead of the maxilla, and they pumped up what you found a bit, making it sound like you’d sent a small graveyard of bones to Waterbury, but it was basically okay. They toed the line on the possible cause of death, quoting you that there was no sign of foul play so far, and they kept the little girl’s name out of it. Still, it’s causing the expected ripple around town.”

Given her many political contacts in Brattleboro-she’d served on the board of selectmen for years, among other high-visibility organizations-I knew Gail wasn’t referring to local gossip. I also knew she hadn’t brought up the newspaper article to make idle conversation. “Who from?”

She shrugged vaguely. “Some of the church groups, the halfway house, a few mental health people-the last two worried their customers’ll be hassled by the PD for questioning. And the selectmen… I heard the town manager’s phone was ringing off the wall with all the official hand-wringing about more violence in our streets.”

She turned her attention back to her meal, but I’d caught her meaning. Any political heat was troublesome enough, even as a routine part of the process. The fact that it was building so fast, based on the discovery of a few small bone shards, was unusual. It gave me the queasy feeling there might be something stirring I knew nothing about.

The follow-up story on the “mystery bones” ran on the front page the next morning. I had called Christine Evans-Norah’s science teacher-the day before as promised, and she’d been more than happy to talk to Katz and his reporters. A photograph of her appeared beneath the headline, and she was heavily quoted throughout the article, expounding on the habits of scavengers and the aging of bones. I appreciated her keeping Norah’s name out of it, but my earlier affection for her was dampened by what I’d since discovered about Shawna Davis. That anyone should benefit from the remains of a girl so neglected in life was an irony I couldn’t appreciate.

Except that we still had only circumstantial evidence linking Shawna to our body-an ambiguity we needed to settle.

J.P. Tyler knocked on my open door as I was finishing the paper. “I got a fax from the lab early this morning and followed it up with a phone call.”

I waved him to the plastic guest chair by my desk.

He sat down gingerly, a sheaf of papers clutched in his hand. J.P. was not a “people person”-an inhibition that only worsened when he was faced with someone superior in rank, regardless of how accommodating they tried to be. Still, it made me extremely grateful that while our budget was as anemic as any other department’s in town, we could still afford to equip, train, and entertain Tyler enough to keep him with us.

“First off,” he began a little ponderously, “most of the bone tissue we sent them was human. What we thought came from animals, did. And the PCR DNA test they ran links the hair to the skull and the teeth. But that’s about as definitive as they want to get so far. They think the person was a young Caucasian female, but they stress that these are statistically-based findings and have a twenty percent or better chance of being wrong. It might’ve been better if we’d had more to give them, but even with the other skull fragments we excavated from under the doghouse, it wasn’t as much as they would’ve liked. They favor long bones and the pelvic girdle-that’s where most of the aging and sex studies they use for base data have concentrated.”