On Monday morning, I played sick. Even though I began building my case Friday night, complaining that something I ate at the party didn’t sit well with me, on Saturday blaming it on cramps, and by Sunday turning it into a stomach virus, Ma didn’t buy any of it. But I was smart enough to wait until the last minute to tell her, when she was already running late and needed to get Bridgette to school and herself downtown, so she let it go.
At the dining room table, I finished the homework I’d put off over the weekend, giving me an excuse to look at Ma’s files. There was no one in the house to catch me, only my guilt. Ma would likely kill me if she knew I was snooping around her papers, but by now, I felt like I was as much a part of the investigation as she. It was my helping around the house, watching Bridgette, taking over the budget and bill paying (which I had to do after Ma got so caught up in work that she forgot to pay the light bill the month before) that made it possible for her to spend nearly every waking hour on the investigation. She was working more closely with the FBI now on the Wilson case, using their hypnotist and victim profiles to help with the traditional police work she and the Task Force were used to doing. I read her notes from an interview with the hypnotized neighbor boy who said he’d heard screaming coming from the girl’s apartment in the early morning hours that she had been allegedly abducted.
The boy had brought his date home to watch some TV a little before midnight. Before going into his home, he saw two males and a female leaving the girl’s apartment. He thought the female might have been a young girl. They disappeared from his sight. He saw what might have been an ice cream truck in the driveway. The boy then went into his apartment with his date. He heard what he thought was the sound of someone getting a whipping. The boy thought he heard the victim’s sister yell out “Stop,” after which he heard no more sounds.
At about one in the morning, the boy left his apartment to walk his date home, and saw the victim’s mother sitting on her porch. He greeted her but she ignored him, which was strange because she was usually friendly. The boy thought the mother seemed upset. He noticed the victim’s younger brother playing in the front yard.
The end of the report was missing, and I had to use my imagination to fill in the rest.
*
Going back to school on Tuesday wasn’t as bad as I’d expected. I realized I’d given myself too much credit as far as the impact I had on my classmates. Three days had passed and they’d forgotten about my call for a more complete literature lesson, and they’d probably forgotten it the minute they hit the door Friday afternoon. My teacher was smug as usual, more so since he’d won this particular battle and I now had only twenty demerits remaining of the thirty allotted per school year before being expelled.
After school, Grandma was waiting for me in the pick-up circle out front. Ma had convinced her to take some time off for a couple of weeks in January to come back to Atlanta to help around the house and look out for Bridgette and me. Two weeks into her visit, she decided to make her temporary stay permanent, and quit her job while my grandfather stayed in Cleveland another two years to finish out his time with Ohio Bell so he could collect his entire pension. Grandma moved into my aunt’s house, left empty when she joined the Air Force, and immediately found a job cleaning the house of a rich white man who had no kids or wife. She’d had the job for a week before we discovered how close her employer lived to my school. We planned that on Tuesdays and Thursdays she’d give me a ride home and save me an hour off my commute. I was especially grateful that Grandma had started her job in cold and dark January.
We still get a laugh from the fact that I increased our trip by twenty minutes because I only knew the way into downtown Atlanta by following the bus route, unnecessarily making Grandma go down side streets, do switchbacks (Why are you sending me in a circle, girl?), and travel through residential neighborhoods when the on-ramp for I-285 was just a couple of miles from the school. But the bus route was all I knew, and I didn’t discover how far out of the way the route took us until long after Grandma had quit that job.
I’d been to the man’s house a couple of times in the first few weeks she worked there. When she didn’t get everything done before it was time to pick me up from school, we’d go back to the house so she could finish up. Being in the man’s house gave me a glimpse into how my classmates must have lived. I usually referred to them as classmates more often than friends—our connection lasted only as long as the school day. I’d never been invited into any of their homes, I was told little about their lives outside of school, though their questions about how I lived (really, how all black folks lived through my single interpretation) seemed never-ending.
So I had to piece together what their worlds must be like when they weren’t at school. Since the man’s house was only a couple of miles from the school, I imagined many of the kids lived in neighborhoods and houses much like his—huge plantation-style houses full of columns and hanging ferns out front, azalea bushes manicured by professionals, grass that seemed to stay green straight through winter. And always the older black women walking the mile from the bus stop into the neighborhoods where their day’s work lie. They made me grateful Grandma had a car, and once she got to know some of them, she’d offer a ride instead of just passing by.
Grandma let me raid the rich man’s refrigerator, justifying it by saying the food would just go bad anyway since the man traveled and was never home, causing her more work by having to clean out the refrigerator. Besides, it was sort of like her food since she was the one who ran around to the three different gourmet stores that he specified, scrutinizing shelves looking for the foods on his list, many of which she couldn’t pronounce and had never heard of, despite her having been a school cook for fifteen years and a housekeeper for a rich woman in Cleveland. The doublewide refrigerator was always stocked with things I wished we had at home but never did. A shelf full of different flavors of soda. New York–style cheesecake bought from a bakery, not from the Winn Dixie and thawed from frozen. All kinds of deli meats and cheeses that didn’t require the removal of red plastic from around the meat or clear cellophane from the cheese. I’d make a big sandwich and eat it while marveling at the size of the man’s kitchen.
The kitchen, like everything else in the house, was just too much, though I could imagine living this way if I ever had the money. There were two ovens, one on top of the other, which seemed extravagant except during Thanksgiving maybe, when it might come in handy. Ice and water were dispensed through the refrigerator door, and shiny, expensive copper pots hung from the ceiling. There wasn’t a single cast iron skillet, well-seasoned by generations of cooks. No aluminum cookie sheet gone black with age and use, despite careful scrubbing. I got the biggest thrill out of the microwave oven—something I knew about but never used. It blew my mind that I could warm through cold pasta in only seconds. We’d gotten a dishwasher only a couple of years earlier, so it didn’t take much in the way of appliances to get me excited.
His bedroom alone was bigger than the three bedrooms in our house combined. It had two fireplaces. I’d never seen a fireplace in a bedroom, and two just seemed greedy. It was my first look at a jetted tub. Each time I went there, I wondered what made a man with no wife or children, who was rarely in town, buy such a house. Eventually I realized it was because he could, the reason rich folks do many of the things they do. Each trip to his home distanced me further from my classmates, whose homes I imagined were just as excessive, making it difficult to see any connection between their lives and mine.
*
On the first Thursday of February, when the air was still cool enough for a jacket but spring seemed less an impossibility, a caretaker of some land near Vandiver Lake in Southwest was out destroying rabbit traps on the property when he found the body of Lubie Geter, the boy last seen selling car deodorizer. When Ma called that night to say she was on her way home from the crime scene, I put a plate of food in the oven to get warm. Even though it was a school night, I’d wait up for her no matter how late she got in, unless she told me she’d be sleeping over on a Task Force cot. It seemed so long ago that staying alone overnight had worried me, but it had been only two months. I’d been right the first night—it became easier for Ma not to come home after the first time. Fortunately, it became easier for me, too.
On the nights she worked a scene, she always came home. And I always waited up for her because those were the worst days, making her feel blue in a way nothing else could, and I didn’t want her to feel worse by coming home to a quiet house and nothing hot to eat.
“Animals had gotten to him and he’d been out there nearly a month, but he was still identifiable.” She said this while I pulled off her boots, even though I hadn’t asked her about the scene. “Thanks. Feels like I’ve been on my feet for a lifetime.”
“These probably aren’t the best shoes for police work, but I know you gotta be cute. And look how muddy they are.” My efforts to take her mind away from the crime scene with some teasing didn’t work.
“We were in the woods. My heels kept sinking into the ground.” She kneaded her feet with gloved hands. I didn’t hear the usual strength in my mother’s voice, which once calmed my worries with a few words. “He was only wearing his underwear, but like all the other boys, there wasn’t any sign he’d been messed with. But they don’t know for sure. There’s not much for the medical examiner to go on by the time we find some of them.”
“I got dinner warm for you.”
“Let me wash up first.”
Ma came back to the kitchen table, but the minute I pulled the plate from the oven, she had to run for the bathroom. She closed her door, but I waited outside until the retching sounds ended. She was in there a long time before she told me to go to bed.
“I’ll wait until you feel better.”
“No, it’s after midnight and you have school tomorrow. I’m all right.”
I didn’t believe her, but I left my post at the bathroom door anyway.
*
I grew up with superstitions taught to me by the women in my family, mostly from my grandmother and aunts because Ma said she didn’t have time for that foolishness. I learned to burn my hair lest birds make a nest with it and bring all types of bad luck on me. I never put my purse on a floor unless I wanted to lose all my money. And I was careful not to swipe anyone’s feet with the broom while sweeping because I didn’t want to be the reason for any catastrophe that might befall them.
My greatest fear was Friday the 13th because since I’d turned ten, I’d had some mishap on every Friday the 13th: slipped in the garage and fractured my arm (didn’t matter that I was wearing flip-flops and hosing down the slick concrete floor); riding my bike down a hill, I crashed into a just-opened car door and went flying (didn’t matter that I was riding on the wrong side of the street); electrocuted while plugging in the sewing machine (this turned out to be bad wiring in the apartment we lived in at the time). Each accident put me into the emergency room, but I’d survived them all.
So I waited for whatever was coming on Friday the 13th, February 1981. It turned out the bad thing wasn’t meant for me this time. Two more bodies were found. One was the body of Patrick Baltazar, who had gone missing a week earlier from Piedmont Avenue in downtown Atlanta. The eleven-year-old, who had enough confidence and maturity to hold down a job as a restaurant busboy, had boasted to his friends that the killer would never get him. He was found in a ditch behind the Corporate Square office park just inside Dekalb County in north Atlanta. It had rained heavily on the Tuesday and Wednesday of that week, and the police could tell from his waterlogged clothes that he’d been in the ditch since at least Tuesday. He’d disappeared the Friday before.
I thought of this boy often when, a few years later as a college freshman, I got a job working in the same office park, in the same building near where he was found. I’d forgotten many of the details of the investigation by then, but this case came back to me the first time I walked past the ditch, and each time after. The memory wasn’t vivid, it was just a fleeting realization that there had been a cool February day when a dead boy had lain nearby, that his killer had been there, and that Ma had been there, too, working the crime scene, slightly distracted, wondering whether I’d gotten home safely that day.
On the same day the boy was found in the ditch, Ma and the rest of the Task Force searched an expanded area of where other victims had been found, now considered one of the killer’s dumping grounds, in some woods off Suber Road. That’s where they found the skeletal remains of Jefferey Mathis, the ten-year-old boy who’d gone missing from the West End, just two blocks from my old school, in March of 1980. It was believed he’d been lying out in those woods for nearly a year. It took the medical examiner a week to identify the remains. His mother didn’t believe, or maybe didn’t want to believe, that it was her child they’d found, said it couldn’t be her boy. But that must have been her heart and her hope talking, because there was nothing left of him that even a mother could identify with only her eyes. The boy’s medical records were enough confirmation for the medical examiner and the cops, even if not for the boy’s mother.