Chapter 5
January 21
The phone call comes at four thirty in the afternoon on Friday, a week later. Mom and I are on the couch in our living room, watching a mindless movie about robots.
Usually I don’t pay attention to my mother’s phone conversations, especially the business ones: blah blah blah, mortgage rates, blah blah blah, property on Horicon Street. She’s a real estate agent.
But this call is different. She stands and nervously paces into the kitchen, closing the swinging door behind her.
I try to follow. Sadie, our cat-who-may-be-an-evil-overlord-in-disguise, heads me off. Leaping in front of the kitchen door, she arches her back in a ripple of fur and hisses.
Sadie is the ugliest cat I have ever seen. She has white, fluffy hair that looks like it’s been shocked with electricity in all the wrong places, unpleasant green eyes, and a flat face, as if someone dropped an iron on her when she was little. A face only my parents love.
I nudge her gently with my hand, a signal to move or be moved. She claws my arm. “Ow!” I shout, hopping back and rubbing the scratched skin. The movement is enough to scare her off. She runs into my father’s office, mewing pathetic cries as if I’m the one who just caused her physical pain. I hear my dad make some cooing baby noises at her. Like I said: pure evil.
Mom shoots me a glare as I barge into the kitchen and prop myself up on the counter. “Yes, Chief Williams,” she says into the phone, “my husband mentioned you. We’re doing well, thank you. What’s that? Today? Well, it’s almost dinnertime. Hmm, I see. All right, tomorrow morning it is. Yes. See you then.”
She hangs up. “Edmund, when I come into the kitchen, it means it’s a private conversation. You know that.” She smooths her hair off her forehead the way she does when she’s upset, and leaves without further comment.
“The police called? What did they want? Are we going in again? What’s going on?” I’m a spazzy Chihuahua jumping out the door after her.
Ignoring me, she sits down on the edge of the couch, her back rigid. “Who was on the phone?” Dad asks, watching her from the office doorway with curious eyes, no doubt smelling the scent of Mom Angst as it drifts through the room.
“Chief Williams,” she replies. “The police want to see you again. Tomorrow at ten. Both of you. All of us.”
My father strides across the carpet to join her on the couch. I stay by the wall, hoping that if they forget I’m in the room, they’ll speak more freely.
“Probably caught the guy and want us to identify him,” Dad says.
Mom shrugs and chews on her lower lip. She’s still angry that my father went down the alley in the first place. Of course, he left out most of the details about the fight, making it sound as if he didn’t use physical contact to separate the two men, as if his mere presence parted them the way Moses parted the sea. She didn’t buy the story last week and she doesn’t now. She squints at both of us with a weird expression of worry and suspicion, wrinkling her nose and crinkling her eyebrows like she may need to use the bathroom in a hurry.
Dad puts a gentle arm around her shoulders. “Don’t worry, my beautiful Nile rose. It’s just standard procedure. If you witness a crime, you have to answer a lot of questions. Say, do they grow roses in Egypt? I’ll have to look it up.” He grabs his laptop from the coffee table and settles in to the cushion beside her for an hour of geeking out on North African flora and fauna. Mom takes the bait and rests her head on his shoulder, forgetting momentarily about the phone call.
I roll my eyes and start down the hallway to my bedroom.
Mom and Dad did a special genetic testing thing last year to discover their long-lost African ancestry. It’s all the rage in their group of friends. Dad’s genes were mostly linked to the area in Nigeria where the Hausa tribes live, while Mom’s seemed to match the northern parts of Africa, Egypt especially. I guess that explains the coffee-with-cream skin she’s got.
Anyway, ever since the test results came back it’s been Egyptian-goddess-this and Hausa-warrior-that and things have reached an extreme barf level around here.