Karin Slaughter - Triptych

The mother grabbed the letter like it was a lifeline. Tears fell down her cheeks as she stared at the words. She must have read it a dozen times before she murmured, “The pariah.”

“Can you tell me what she was talking about?”

Miriam held the letter in her lap, her hands trembling. “There was this house across the street-three doors down and a world away.” She stared out the window as if she could see it. “We were the only black family in the neighborhood back then. Tobias and I laughed about people saying, ”There goes the neighborhood‘ when they already had the devil living in their own backyard.“

“Does the family still live there?”

She shook her head. “There’s been about ten different families in that house since the Carsons moved out. It’s been added onto, turned into some kind of palace, but back then, it was just this little house where bad things happened. Every neighborhood has that, don’t they? That one bad house with that one bad kid?” Yes, ma am.

She looked back out the window. “Parties every weekend. Cars racing up and down the road. That boy was poison to everybody he came into contact with. We called him the Pariah of Paisley Street.”

Will thought of the letter, the way Aleesha had referred to herself as a pariah.

Miriam continued, “His mother was never home. She was a lawyer, if you can believe that.” She turned back to Will. “I suppose I could blame her until I was blue in the face, but the fact was that she was just as incapable of controlling her child as we were.”

“Aleesha ran off with this boy?”

“No,” the woman said. “She ran off with a thirty-nine-year-old man named Marcus Keith. He was one of the advisors in her treatment program. We found out later he had already served time for interfering with a minor.” She gave a humorless laugh. “They might as well put a revolving door on every prison in America.”

Will tried to tread carefully. “In the letter, she seems to be blaming you for something.”

Miriam gave a tight smile. “When Aleesha was eleven years old, I left my family. There was a man. Like mother, like child, I suppose.” She held up the letter. “Or, ”the sins of the parent,“ as my daughter so eloquently put it.”

“Obviously, you came back.”

“Tobias and I worked it out, but things were very rocky for a long while. Aleesha got lost in the shuffle, and then she fell in with that boy up the street.” She put her hand to her collar, pulling at a small cross that hung from a gold chain around her neck.

Will reached into his pocket and took out the cross from Aleesha’s letter. “We found this, too.”

Miriam looked at the cross but did not take it. “All my children have one.

He did not want to tell her that Aleesha had sent it back. The letter was bad enough. Still, he had to ask, “Is there any significance to the cross?

“Tobias bought them when I returned home. We all gathered around the table and he passed them out one by one. It signified our unity, our faith that we could be a family again.”

Will put the cross in her hand and folded her fingers around it. “I’m sure she’d want you to have this.”

He left her alone in the room, walking down the hall, past the artwork, the photographs, everything Miriam and Tobias Monroe had accumulated over the years to turn their house into a home. There was a tall table by the door, and Will was leaving her one of his cards when he heard her speaking in the other room. Her tone was muffled by distance and grief. She was obviously on the telephone.

“It’s Mama,” she told one of her many children. “I need you.”

Angie was dead tired by the time she finished her shift. Thanks to her hard work, a pair of visiting propane salesmen, a truck driver and an unemployed father of three were sitting in jail right now, trying to figure out how they were going to explain to their wives that they had been arrested for soliciting a prostitute. If their explanations were anything like the ones they gave Angie- My wife doesn’t understand me… I get lonely on the road… my kids hate me -they were looking at a long night in a cold cell.

In the scheme of things, Angie figured what she did every day was a pointless endeavor. The Johns still kept coming back, the girls still kept going out. No one was interested in getting to the root of the problem. Angie had spent the last six years getting to know these women. They all had the same stories of sexual abuse and neglect in their pasts; they all had run away from something. It didn’t take a Harvard economist to figure out that it’d be a hell of a lot cheaper spending money on helping keep kids safe when they were younger than it was to put them in jail when they were older. That was the American way, though. Spend a million dollars rescuing some kid who’s fallen down a well, but God forbid you spend a hundred bucks up front to cap the well so the kid never falls down it in the first place.

Jasmine Allison was probably one of those lost kids who would never be found. She’d end up on the street with a new name, new attitude, new addictions that a pimp could use to control her. Angie could tell from the way Will talked about the girl that he was worried. He had good reason, considering Jasmine had been paid to make that phone call the night Aleesha was murdered. Angie also knew that there could have been a million other little things that chased the girl from her home. Still, she’d called a couple of guys downtown and asked them to look into the case.

Angie looked at the directions she’d scrawled on the page she’d torn from the phone book. Ken Wozniak was living at a nursing home on Lawrenceville Highway. The charge nurse who had given Angie directions had sounded excited to hear the man was going to have a visitor. Angie had only met Ken a couple of times. She doubted he would even remember her.

Visiting hours were over at ten. Judging from the empty parking lot, Ken wasn’t the only person who didn’t get many guests. The lobby was sparse but clean, with the usual white tiles and fluorescent lights. Some fake flowers were on a table in the small waiting area and a water cooler burped as she walked to the receptionist’s desk.

The man leaned back in his chair, a knowing smile on his face as he looked Angie up and down, taking in every inch of her whore’s outfit with the kind of sneer that said he knew exactly what she was and how much she should cost. He laced his fingers behind his head, making his shirt ride up so that she could see his bloated, hairy belly.

He licked his lips, asked, “How much?”

Angie reached into her purse and pulled out her badge.

The guy literally fell out of his chair. He scrambled to stand back up, mumbling, “I was just-”

“I’m here to see Ken Wozniak.”

“Oh, God.” His voice shook as he tried to right the chair. “I need this job.”

She wondered if he needed it so he could diddle the old ladies while they slept in their beds. “Take a pill, Cletus, I’m not here to bang you up.”

“I just-”

“Wozniak,” she repeated. “Where is he?”

His hands trembled as he tapped something into the computer keyboard. “Up the hall and to the left. Room three-ten. Jesus, lady, I’m sorry, okay? I’ve never done this before.”

“Yeah, right. Me, either.”

Angie’s spiked heels clicked as she walked up the hallway. She could still see the way the prick receptionist had leered at her when she walked in the front door. That knowing look on his face like she was just a hole he was going to fuck. By the time she got to room three-ten, she felt about two feet tall.

“Hello?” she called, knocking on the door. Over the blare of the television, she heard a pleasant kind of grunt that she took as an invitation to come in.