Lapeer County, October
Instead of driving home after my movie with Tyrese, I sat in the back corner of a McDonald’s parking lot with my phone, reading everything I could find on the shooting in Detroit. The more I read, the more I disagreed with that theater lobby commentator and his unsolicited opinions. Even if the kid had been hanging around unsavory characters, that didn’t make him a criminal. The incident seemed to fall into a disturbingly familiar pattern of tension and violence between the police and the inner-city black community—and this time in the very same neighborhoods that were set ablaze in 1967. How did this keep happening?
Depressed and disgusted, I dropped the phone on the passenger seat and pulled out of the parking lot. When I finally turned off the engine on the gravel driveway and dragged myself up to bed, sleep was slow in coming and poor in quality. When I looked at the clock and saw 3:42 a.m., I let out a desperate laugh and thought of all the times I had wondered how people like Judge Sharpe could sleep at night. The cop who had shot that kid—was he asleep?
Late the next morning, I stumbled down to the kitchen with a pounding headache and stared at my bowl of cereal until the flakes had expanded into a single goopy mass.
Nora took one look at me, poured me a cup of black coffee, and said in a very businesslike manner, “Elizabeth, I need you to do something for me.”
I tried to summon a smile. “Sure. What’s up?”
“I have a project I need to work on and it needs a lot of fabric. I’m finally going to be able to get some use out of all of the things people have brought me over the years. Well, not all of it. I can only use cottons. Nothing synthetic, nothing stretchy, no polyester or lycra or rayon. Just cotton. There’s a ton of it all over this house. I’m afraid I haven’t kept it very organized. So what I need you to do is look in all the closets and dressers and see what you can find that’s cotton.”
“How will I know it’s cotton?”
She looked at me as though I was being willfully ignorant.
“What color?”
“Any color. Lots of colors. Any pattern. Anything you see that you like. It doesn’t matter. As I said, this is a big project, so I’ll need lots of it. And the sooner the better. I’d like to get started on it Monday.”
“I can do that.” A new distraction was just what I needed now. “You know, I brought a lot of fabric up to the attic from my room when I first moved in. Should I look through that too?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Hey, remember when I asked you about the beds up there? You never did tell me the story.”
“Let’s talk about it over dinner tonight.”
Put off again. Eleanor Rich was indeed a stubborn woman as Barb had said. Or did she simply not remember that she’d said the exact same thing to me when I first asked about the mysterious cots?
Nora looked lost in thought. “Why were you up there?”
“I had to get all that fabric out of my room before I could put any of my clothes away; the armoire and the dresser were full of it. I didn’t want to mention it at first, because you’d said the room was all ready for me and it wasn’t.”
“I said that?”
“Yes, you said William had gotten it ready.”
“William? I told you William had gotten it ready?” She looked a little pale. “I can’t imagine why I would say that. William’s been gone for fifty years.”