Kathy Reichs: Bare Bones

I surveyed the snapshots closest to me. Christmas mornings. Birthday parties. Athletic teams. Each memory was preserved in a dime-store frame.

Slidell picked up a throw pillow, raised his brows, set it back between us. God is Love, embroidered in blue and green. Melba’s handiwork?

The sadness I’d been feeling all morning intensified as I thought of six children losing their mother. Of Tamela’s doomed infant.

The pillow. The photos. The school and team memorabilia. Save for the portrait of a black Jesus hanging above the archway, I could have been sitting in my childhood home in Beverly, on the south side of Chicago. Beverly was shade trees, and PTA bake sales, and morning papers lying on the porch. Our tiny brick bungalow was my Green Gables, my Ponderosa, my starship Enterprise until the age of seven. Until despair over her infant son’s death propelled my mother back to her beloved Carolina, husband and daughters following in her mournful wake.

I loved that house, felt loved and protected in it. I sensed those same feelings clinging to this place.

Slidell pulled out his hanky and mopped his face.

“Hope the old man scores the air-conditioned bedroom.” Spoken through one side of his mouth. “With six kids, I suppose he’d be lucky just to score a bedroom.”

I ignored him.

Heat magnified the smells inside the tiny house. Onions. Cooking oil. Wood polish. Whatever was used to scrub the linoleum.

Who scrubbed it? I wondered. Tamela? Geneva? Banks himself?

I studied the black Jesus. Same robe, same thorny crown, same open palms. Only the Afro and skin tones differed from the one that had hung over my mother’s bed.

Slidell sighed audibly, hooked his collar with a finger, and pulled it from his neck.

I looked at the linoleum. A pebble pattern, gray and white.

Like the bones and ash from the woodstove.

What will I say?

At that moment a door opened. A gospel group singing “Going On in the Name of the Lord.” The swish of padded soles on linoleum.

Gideon Banks looked smaller than I remembered, all bone and sinew. That was wrong, somehow. Backward. He should have seemed larger in his own space. King of the realm. Paterfamilias. Was my recall incorrect? Had age shriveled him? Or worry?

Banks hesitated in the archway, and his lids crimped behind their heavy lenses. Then he straightened, crossed to the recliner, and lowered himself, gnarled hands gripping the armrests.

Slidell leaned forward. I cut him off.

“Thank you for seeing us, Mr. Banks.”

Banks nodded. He was wearing Hush Puppies slippers, gray work pants, and an orange bowling shirt. His arms looked like twigs sprouting from the sleeves.

“Your home is lovely.”

“Thank you.”

“Have you lived here long?”

“Forty-seven years come November.”

“I couldn’t help noticing your pictures.” I indicated the photo collection. “You have a beautiful family.”

“It’s jus’ Geneva and me here now. Geneva my second oldest. She hep me out. Tamela my youngest. She lef’ a couple months ago.”

In the corner of my eye I noticed Geneva move into the archway.

“I think you know why we’re here, Mr. Banks.” I was flailing about for a way to begin.

“Yes’m, I do. You lookin’ for Tamela.”

Slidell did some “get on with it” throat clearing.

“I’m very sorry to have to tell you, Mr. Banks, but material recovered from Tamela’s living room stove—”

“Weren’t Tamela’s place,” Banks broke in.

“The property was rented to one Darryl Tyree,” Slidell said. “According to witnesses, your daughter’d been living with Mr. Tyree for approximately four months.”

Banks’s eyes never left my face. Eyes filled with pain.

“Weren’t Tamela’s place,” Banks repeated. His tone wasn’t angry or argumentative, more that of a man wanting the record correct.

My shirt felt sticky against my back, the cheap upholstery scratchy under my forearms. I took a deep breath, started again.

“Material recovered from the stove in that house included fragments of bone from a newborn baby.”

My words seemed to catch him off guard. I heard a sharp intake of breath, and noticed his chin cock up a fraction.

“Tamela only seventeen. She a good girl.”

“Yes, sir.”

“She weren’t with child.”

“Yes, sir, she was.”

“Who say that?”

“We have that information from more than one source.” Slidell.

Banks considered a moment. Then, “Why you go looking in someone’s stove?”

“An informant stated that an infant had been burned at that address. We investigate such reports.”

Slidell didn’t point out that the tip came from Harrison “Sonny” Pounder, a street-corner dopeman bargaining for favor after his recent bust.

“Who say that?”

“That’s not important.” Irritation sharpened Slidell’s tone. “We need to know Tamela’s whereabouts.”

Banks pushed to his feet and shuffled to the nearest bookshelf. Easing back into the recliner, he handed me a photo.

I looked at the girl in the picture, acutely conscious of Banks’s eyes on my face. And of his second oldest looming in the archway.

Tamela wore a short-skirted gold jumper with a black W on the front panel. She sat with one knee bent, one leg straight out behind her, hands on her hips, surrounded by a circle of gold and white pom-poms. Her smile was enormous, her eyes bright with happiness. Two barrettes sparkled in her short, curly hair.

“Your daughter was a cheerleader,” I said.

“Yes’m.”

“My daughter tried cheerleading when she was seven,” I said. “Pop Warner football, for the little kids. Decided she preferred playing on the team to cheering.”

“They all have their own mine, I guess.”

“Yes, sir. They do.”

Banks handed me a second photo, this one a Polaroid.

“That Mr. Darryl Tyree,” Banks said.

Tamela stood beside a tall, thin man wearing gold chains around his neck and a black do-rag on his head. One spidery arm was draped over Tamela’s shoulders. Though the girl was smiling, the fire was gone from her eyes. Her face looked drawn, her whole body tense.

I handed the photos back.

“Do you know where Tamela is, Mr. Banks?” I asked softly.

“Tamela a grown girl now. She say I can’t axe.”

Silence.

“If we can just talk to her, perhaps there’s an explanation for all this.”

More silence, longer this time.

“Are you acquainted with Mr. Tyree?” Slidell asked.

“Tamela gonna finish high school, same’s Reggie, ’n’ Harley, ’n’ Jonah, ’n’ Sammy. Din’t have no problem with drugs or boys.”

We let that hang a moment. When Banks didn’t continue Slidell prodded.

“And then?”

“Then Darryl Tyree come along.” Banks practically spit the name, the first sign of anger I’d seen. “’Fore long she forget her books, spend all her time moonin’ over Tyree, worryin’ when he gonna show up.”

Banks looked from Slidell to me.

“She think I don’t know, but I heard about Darryl Tyree. I tole her he weren’t no fit company, tole her he weren’t to be comin’ round here no more.”

“Is that when she moved out?” I asked.

Banks nodded.

“When did that happen?”

“Roun’ Easter time. ’Bout four months back.”

Banks’s eyes glistened.

“I knew she had somethin’ on her mine. I thought it was jus’ Tyree. Sweet Jesus, I din’t know she was with child.”

“Did you know she was living with Mr. Tyree?”

“I didn’t axe, Lord forgive me. But I figured she’d went over to his place.”

“Do you have any idea why your daughter might have wanted to harm her baby?”