P. Parrish - An Unquiet Grave

“But that is why I asked you to come here,” Phillip said. “I didn’t expect you to get involved in another case.”

Louis closed his eyes, his chest so tight he couldn’t breathe. He didn’t want to fight with Phillip. He didn’t want to fight with anyone.

“If you want to quit all this, I understand,” Phillip said.

“I don’t want to quit.”

“You sound like it.”

Louis started stirring the cereal in slow circles.

“If you want to talk, Louis,” Phillip said, “we can go down to the basement. Grab a beer, eat some nuts. You know. We can talk, like we used to do.”

And the words were on his lips before he thought about them, and he heard them come out, but he couldn’t believe they were his.

“We never talked, Phillip,” Louis said.

“That’s not true,” he said. “I remember. .”

Louis faced him. “I got lots of fatherly advice. I got nice clothes. And a damn good education. But we never talked.”

Phillip’s shoulders drew stiff, hurt coloring his face. It was a look Louis had never seen before. But it didn’t stop the rush of emotion, and before he could stop himself, he was talking again.

“Did it ever occur to you why that coach in high school wanted me on the basketball team?” Louis asked.

“Well, I-”

“Or why I didn’t go to the prom?”

Phillip was just staring.

“Or why I ran away so many times? Or what I might have wanted to eat at Christmas?”

“Louis-”

“Did it ever occur to you that I might want something like greens or hot skillet corn bread or smoked turkey legs or anything that might be southern?” Louis stopped for a moment, trying to even his voice. “Or black?”

Now Phillip knew what he was talking about and his expression changed from confusion to indignation. Louis saw something else there-pity.

“I thought it was best for you to forget what happened to you before you came here,” Phillip said.

“ Forget? ” Louis asked.

“Yes.”

“Forget what happened to me, Phil, or forget what I was?”

“You talk like I tried to make you white,” Phillip said.

“Maybe you did.”

Phillip took a step back, and Louis thought he was going to leave the kitchen, but he didn’t.

“When they brought you here, Louis, you were eight years old,” Phillip said. “You had marks and bruises. And I didn’t care what color of skin those marks were on. I only wanted to make them go away.”

Louis could feel the pounding of his heart. But he had no words now. His throat was too tight and the emotions suddenly too strong. He knew none of this was meant for Phillip. It was something else. And it was about someone else. A different white man in a straw hat, and a face that no matter how hard Louis tried to bring into focus, remained a blur.

Suddenly Phillip was gone and Louis was alone in the kitchen. And for almost a full minute, he didn’t move. Then he sank into a chair at the table and put his head in his hands. He needed to apologize and he would. In a minute. But right now he didn’t want to move. Right now, it was all he could do to control the waterfall of images and memories. Keep them inside and steady. And God, he needed to be steady right now.

Phillip came back into the kitchen and Louis forced himself to look up. Phillip was holding something out to him. Photographs.

“These were taken the night before you arrived here. Do you want to see them?” Phillip asked. “Do you want to see what I saw?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Phillip set them on the table. They were Polaroids. Three of them. Probably taken by Children’s Service.

The first. His scrawny light brown back, splotched with the kind of bruises that came from being smacked.

The second. His butt. The skin colored a deep, bronzy red, some of the welts so big they looked like giant, bloody blisters. And on his upper thighs, ragged lacerations from where the buckle of the belt had sliced into his skin.

He sifted to the third picture. His face. Small, dirty, the lip split, his black hair uncombed and speckled with dirt.

But it was the eyes that pulled at his heart. A strange shade of smoky gray, wide with a beseeching stare. Desperate eyes in a tiny face, like something, someone, trapped behind a mask fighting to get out.

Louis stared at the writing on the wide white border. Louis W. Kincaid. Age 8. December 1967. Detroit, Michigan.

He remembered that December. And that house he had been in before coming here. He remembered Moe. And the man before Moe. But what he couldn’t remember anymore was his first seven years in Mississippi. He used to be able to grab a few images. His mother in a blue dress. His older sister and her bright red lipstick. His brother. . doing something near a river. And they were the good images.

But even those were fading.

His eyes drifted back to the photographs. God, he didn’t want these to be the only things left.

“I’m losing it,” he whispered. He looked up at Phillip.

“The good part of my past. I’m losing it and I don’t know how to stop it.”

Phillip lowered himself into a chair. He reached over and put a hand around the back of Louis’s neck and pulled him closer.

Delp called late the next day. He had tracked down the four men from Dr. Seraphin’s patient files. He was able to confirm that Earl Moos was living with his brother and hadn’t left California for the last ten years. Stanley Veemer was doing time in an Ohio prison for man-slaughter. And Michael Boyd had died of a drug overdose five years ago.

Louis picked up a file. That left only Buddy Ives.

Delp hadn’t been able to find out much about the guy, just that he had been in and out of jail and worked a series of menial jobs since being discharged from Hidden Lake seventeen years ago. Delp was able to offer up one lead: Ives’s last known address in Detroit, compliments of a parole officer.

Louis opened Ives’s file to refresh his memory. Ives had sexually assaulted, then killed his grandmother, with whom he had been living at the time. Dr. Seraphin had explained to Louis that under Michigan law at the time, the prosecution had to prove Ives wasn’t insane. They failed, and instead of rotting in prison, Ives was sent to Hidden Lake.

Ives had been eighteen when he went in. He was thirty-two when he was released in 1973. That made him forty-eight now. Still young enough to have raped and murdered Rebecca Gruber and Sharon Stottlemyer.

Louis pulled a small picture out of the file. It showed a twenty-something man with messy sparse hair over a high forehead, eyes the color of dirty winter ice, and a cold sliver-moon mouth hiding in a bank of whiskers.

Louis closed the file. It was time to go find Buddy Ives.

The address turned out to be in northwest Detroit on Mansfield, a street hard by the CXS tracks. As Louis got out of the Impala, he could hear the tire-hum of the Jeffries Freeway nearby.

In its day it had been a nice house, with a big wraparound porch, the kind where people sat in swings, swatting mosquitoes and nodding to neighbors. Now there were trash cans on the porch, towers of yellowed newspapers, and a mud-caked blue recycling bin filled with beer bottles. There were five rusting mailboxes nailed near the door.

The doorbell looked broken, so Louis opened the sagging screen door and pounded on the door. Nothing. He pounded again, then stepped to the window, trying to see something between the iron security bars and the dirt smears. There was a faded red sign in the lower corner: ROOM FOR RENT. SEE MAURY APT. 1.

Then the door opened with a loud scrape and a man poked his head out. Louis immediately saw the look-that mix of fear and false bravado that surfaced on the faces of older white guys when they saw a strange black man.