Neely Tucker - The Ways of the Dead

“It was a joy. For a long time. When she was four, I always said I wanted her to stay that age forever.”

“What was that date, when you came back from that overnight?”

“September third. A Friday.”

“Was she working anywhere when she went missing?”

“No. She’d worked at the Hunger Stopper up there on Georgia for a hot minute, worked at some place in Dupont Circle, then the drugstore over on Sixteenth. That was all in about two years. She got fired from each one. I don’t think anybody wanted to hire her after that.”

“So you got back that Saturday, what happened?”

“I got back about one in the afternoon. She wasn’t around, and like I say, that wasn’t unusual. She didn’t come home that night, and that wasn’t unusual, either. I tried her pager Sunday afternoon.”

“She didn’t call back?”

Williams shook his head and let one of his massive hands flutter off the table, a surprisingly delicate gesture. “Never again. I was home then-they let me take a paid week off to look for her, not even making me take vacation-but there was nothing. It was like she walked off the edge of the earth. I went down to the police station Tuesday, I think it was. They looked up her record-she’d been arrested once, for drugs-and I told them she had that problem. They said she hadn’t been picked up, but to try the homeless shelters and then try them back.”

Sully looked down at the flier he’d taken off the wall at the police station. “Hunh. This wasn’t posted until October 3, a few days ago. It lists September 13 as the date last seen.”

“I know. The police ain’t no damn good if you haven’t noticed. I went down there the first time, like I said, and they didn’t do nothing. I went down there again a week later, September 13, and that’s when they decided she was officially missing. It took them nearly three weeks to even produce that flier, and then they got the date wrong. That’s why I went to the meeting last night, to give them what for.”

“You’ve asked about Michelle ’round here, I take it?”

“Michelle’s been in this neighborhood all her life. If she was getting high over on Thirteenth Street, somebody would see her. And they’d tell me.”

“And your family, your ex, her friends, she didn’t touch base with any of them?”

Williams shook his head. “No boyfriend, either, far as I know. She’d gotten to where she’d go out with a guy, just one night, I suppose, they’d get high or whatever. She used to date a guy Kevin for a while, he ain’t worth shit but he wouldn’t hurt nobody. He works for the city, maintains school buildings. I went to see him, and he was surprised as I was. They hadn’t been seeing each other for two, three years anyhow.”

“Police didn’t do anything at all?”

“They checked at the morgue, here, Baltimore, Richmond. They put a note out to those kinds of places if an unidentified body turned up. Said there was no evidence of a crime. They asked me for her dental records.”

Sully stopped writing and looked at her picture. Williams told him he could have it, that he had plenty. He shuffled in his chair. Sully recognized the interview was over. He looked around the kitchen. It was small and neatly kept. There were no dishes in the sink. The countertops were clean. There was a box of Ritz crackers pushed to the back of the countertop.

“Did you ever remarry, Mr. Williams?”

“No.”

“Anybody-anybody at all-you know of want to do you or Michelle any harm?”

“Police asked that. No. Michelle and me, we didn’t bother nobody. We went to church every now and then when she was little. She played basketball at Cardozo. Her grades were pretty good. And then she just got to thinking that cocaine was the answer to everything.”

“Do you mind if I look at her room? Just so I can describe it for the story?”

Williams finally looked up from the table. “I’d rather you didn’t. I don’t see the purpose. I appreciate your interest in Michelle, I do. But I don’t know how me letting you into her room would help anyone find her.”

Sully nodded and stood up. He was looking for personal, touching detail, and the man wasn’t buying. “You mind if I ask around the neighborhood about her, show her picture around? I don’t want you to be startled, somebody telling you there’s some guy out there asking after Michelle.”

Williams shrugged. He checked his watch, walking Sully to the door. The gloom of the house seemed to close in on them in the hallway, and Sully realized only then that the kitchen light over the sink was the only one on in the house. Williams’s voice was low and somber in the dimness.

“Ask around, suit yourself. I don’t expect anyone to find her anymore. I think she’s dead, myself. But I jump when the phone rings. When I hear a girl laugh on the train. I figure that this is just how it’s going to be.”

He motioned to the door. Sully turned, opened it, and stepped out. He blinked at the light, sun slotting through the clouds. There was no reason to turn around to say good-bye because the door was already closing behind him.

So there were not three young women killed, dead, or missing on the same street in the past eighteen months all within two hundred yards of one another.

There were five. Five that he knew about.

There could be more, of course. There was no reason to think he knew about all of them. He had dozens of fliers he hadn’t gone through. Now, there was no way to say they were all homicides-sure, okay, Rebekah Bolin OD’d, maybe. It happened, like John Parker said, and it was just sad, not mysterious.

But crackheads don’t crawl under floorboards to die. Rebekah and Noel Pittman, dead in the flooring of houses, a block apart? Lana, strangled in the outfield in between? Sarah, her throat slit fifty feet from where Noel’s body was found? Michelle, maybe somewhere near, waiting to be found?

This could all be a combination of chance and dysfunction, yes-no reason to discount that. But he also let himself say it out loud, walking down the street, because if he couldn’t, then there was no way he could sell it in the newsroom.

“There is somebody out here,” he said out loud, “killing women.”

Before him, the old row houses, the brownstones, sat back from the street on their sagging foundations, mute and somehow menacing in their poverty and dilapidated meanness. They were all almost identical to the Williams place. Two stories with attics and little dormer windows, basements, the concrete patio. The city had planted saplings in front of every other house in the narrow strip of ground between the sidewalk and the street. They were supposed to provide shade and greenery, a little makeup on the neighborhood’s aging face. But they were so anemic, so poorly maintained, that they ended up adding to the sense of age, of breakdown.

He picked a door, went up, and knocked. Somewhere, behind one of these rotting doors, somebody knew more than they were telling.

By five, he had done better than he’d expected. Half a dozen places, people had answered the knock and had memories of Michelle. No one knew Lana, and only one or two recognized Noel.

Two of the older couples knew Curtis Williams from way back. They talked about seeing Michelle walking by since she was a kid, going to the corner store for a Push-Up in the summer, coming back from the swimming pool at the rec center. Two elderly women who talked to him through the door but gave their names and who remembered Michelle well said they had seen Noel once or twice. One young woman, who answered the door in a long shirt and apparently nothing else, said she had talked to Noel on the street, said hello, had seen her at one club or another. Sully conducted the interview in the doorway, not invited in and not inviting himself.