By the time April wrapped itself up, another name was added to the list. Twenty-one-year-old Jimmy Ray Payne went missing on April 22. They found him in the Chattahoochee five days later. That was the same day the Task Force began their surveillance of the bridges over the Chattahoochee and the South rivers. The killer was disposing of his victims’ bodies exclusively over bridges now, and watching the bridges was as good a chance as any to catch him. The sad part about that was if the theory was to work, it would mean another victim had been killed. But it was something.
A questionnaire was sent out to boys in Atlanta public schools in an effort to get leads. Had the boys been approached by anyone in the last year? Had they noticed something that didn’t seem right, anything at all? I wondered what the boys did that night when they went home and sat down with their parents in the place they usually did homework, and told them about the questionnaire. The evening was probably like any other, except for the questions. Dinnertime was likely strained. I’m sure it was difficult for some of them to get to sleep that night because the questions made them remember moments when they came close, much closer than they’d ever realized before the cops made them fill out a survey to help find a killer, handed out during a regular old school day.
I wondered about Kevin and the questionnaire since he was the right candidate for it —a black boy going to school in the Atlanta public system. Even though he lived just around the corner, I didn’t see him very often. At first I’d see him visiting the girl across the street, but within a few months of his dropping me for her, she’d already been dropped, too. He was sixteen by then and driving, so that I saw him once in a blue moon, and then only briefly as he passed by in his parents’ car.
Tonight he was filling out the questionnaire and that made me afraid for him simply because he fit the profile. He’d think it was a waste of time; no killer was going to get him, he was too smart to fall for some offer of easy money. No doubt all the victims thought the same thing because that’s the way boys are. But I tried not to worry about him too much when I realized that he probably hadn’t given me a single thought in months.
*
The next morning, Ma still wasn’t up when it was near time for me to go catch my bus for work. Even though it was Saturday, we both had to work, so Grandma was on her way over to pick up Bridgette for the day. I was hoping to catch a ride with Ma downtown if she was anywhere close to being ready. When I went into her room, I found her awake but still in bed.
“I had a bad night.”
“Finding the kids?”
“Yeah, it knocks me on my behind every time, even when I think I’m ready for it. I guess I won’t ever be ready.” The curtains were still drawn, making the room dark. She had the television on, turned down low and flickering the morning news. I switched it off, thinking how that was half the problem—she could never let it go.
“You feel sick? Want me to get you some Pepto or something?”
“I don’t feel bad that way. This bad goes deeper. I had a dream last night about the kids. They were alive, but they still looked the way we found them in the woods and rivers.”
“It’s too much trying to work every crime scene,” I said, because I was like Ma, always trying to find a solution. “I think you should tell your commander that it’s too much.”
“It was one of those dreams, the kind when you know you’re dreaming and you try to wake up from it but can’t. And the kids were begging me to find their killer, crying. And all I could tell them was that I’d try.”
“I was thinking I could ride with you into work this morning. We can both make it on time if you get up now. I already made some coffee.”
“The craziest thing about it was when I woke up…at least, I think I was awake by then, you never know, it was one of those kinds of dreams…but when I woke up, those kids were at the foot of the bed, right there where you’re sitting now, smiling at me.”
I jumped up from the bed, partly because I’d been raised by superstitious women, but mostly because Ma hadn’t been one of them and now she was talking about seeing ghosts.
“Let’s see, what do you want to wear today? Since it’s Saturday, do they let you wear jeans?” My back was turned to her while I went through her closet and so she wouldn’t see on my face how much she’d spooked me with her crazy talk.
“Something comfortable. I have to go back out there today to look for evidence.”
I threw a pair of jeans and a shirt across the foot of her bed, wondering if I’d disturbed the spirits.
“I’ve had dreams about the kids, too,” I said. “Probably a lot of people have, especially the people who loved them.”
My words didn’t seem to make it any better for her, though she smiled at me like she appreciated the thought. I left her in her bed, yelled at Bridgette to get up and get some breakfast before Grandma arrived, then headed out for the bus stop.
*
Ma still had questions about the people closest to the girl in her second case. Detectives who’d interviewed the mother’s cousin weren’t left with the feeling that he could be eliminated from the list. He said he had nothing to do with the girl’s death, but seemed nervous and apprehensive throughout his interview. He agreed to a polygraph, but at the time of the test, he fidgeted in his seat, making the testing impossible. He blamed his lack of cooperation on a mistrust of the police and to smoking pot earlier in the day, though the tester didn’t believe the pot explanation, saying marijuana alone wouldn’t cause such agitation. Mistrust of the police? That part was believable since it seemed most of Atlanta had come to feel that way.
In the Evans’ case, she still didn’t have enough evidence to make an arrest, either. I read another section of an interview she and Sid had with the suspect, hoping to pull a confession from him.
Sid: And did you ever accompany [the victim] to the movies?
Suspect: Naw.
Sid: Do you go to the movies?
Suspect: To the drive-in sometimes.
Sid: Did you ever take [the victim]? I guess if you going to the drive-in, you’re going to take a lady, right?
Suspect: Something like that.
Sid: Something like that. You mean sometimes not a lady?
Suspect: Young ladies or young players.
Sid: Young lady or whatever, or an old lady? Usually a lady?
Suspect: I prefer older women to younger women.
Sid: How old, like Ms. Fuller, for instance?
Ma: I beg your pardon, I’m not an old lady.
Sid: Older.
Ma: [Suspect], do you think I’m older?
Suspect: Well, you’re older than I am.
Ma: How do you know that?
Suspect: I guessed it.
Ma: Oh, at least he didn’t say I looked like it.
Sid: Do you think I’m older than you?
Suspect: Not that many years, but you are older than I am.
Sid: Not that many years. In my twenties?
Suspect: You might be thirty.
Sid: I appreciate that. You are a good man. Now if we can get you to tell the truth, I can get your heart beating normally and your hands to be warm. You said earlier that you were a Christian, didn’t you? That you believed in a Supreme Being, the Almighty? Did you not?
Suspect: Yeah.
Sid: Let me tell you what we think. Yvonne and I have discussed this case. We discussed you, and I want you to know what we think, and I guess this is the proper time to just tell you what we think…We believe that you and [the boy] went someplace. Right now we don’t know where, but believe you me, we are digging like hell. We think y’all went somewhere, possibly stayed overnight, somehow [the boy] was either killed or in effect, died accidentally in your presence, and you disposed of the body. That is what we think. And if that is the case—let me go on—if that is the case, then that would be no murder charge against you. It’ll simply mean that you did violate the law by having concealed death. And I’m not sure the DA’s office will push to prosecute you for that. They might.
Ma: I would recommend…that they not, if you tell me the truth.
The interview ended without the hoped-for confession, and not long after, the man was dropped from the list of possible suspects.
*
I could hear a car slowing behind me, and the fear from that spring day a year earlier slapped me, fresh as yesterday. But it was only Kevin, and my body was suddenly full of adrenaline produced by fear, relief, and anticipation. He drove slowly alongside me, my still warm heartbreak and the cause of it separated by a yellow dividing line and one lane of blacktop. We hadn’t talked to each other in a long time, but hearing his voice, it seemed to me we had never stopped.
“Don’t you want to slow down a minute and talk to me?”
I considered acting nonchalant, but only briefly. I walked over to his idling car and stood on the yellow line, hoping no car came by to run me over just as I was beginning to see a possibility. He looked bigger, like his shoulders had broadened, and there was more hair above his lip. I thought if I looked away for just a second, down the street toward that place where I used to fly on my bike with arms outstretched (was it just two summers ago?), I’d turn back to find he was a full-grown man.
“How’ve you been?”
“Not bad, just busy, you know, with football and stuff. I’m not around the neighborhood as much.”
Was he trying to explain why we hadn’t talked in nearly a year, even though we lived an eighth of a mile apart? We were in front of the girl’s house he left me for, and I hoped she was looking out of her window watching us. That female predilection kicked in, the one that can turn a single hello into a lifetime commitment. It took only a few seconds for me to understand that he was trying to tell me he’d made a mistake. I thought him shrewd for asking me back and demonstrating to the girl that he’d been wrong, all at the same time. We stared at each other hard, not saying a word, not knowing what else to do.
“Don’t you want to give me a kiss?”
I did, and didn’t require further prodding. I leaned into his car and gave the most passionate kiss I could muster from such an awkward position, because I thought it held the power to bring him back to me. That kiss had to cover more than a kiss—it had to be me holding him while we watched Soul Train in his basement, us swaying together while “Reunited” played, the rush of finding two remote seats in the back of the movie theater for two hours of messing around, including the trailers and closing credits. I was certain I pulled it off when we broke apart and I walked down my driveway, expecting his call later that evening.
“I saw you out there kissing Kevin,” Bridgette said when I got into the house, surprising me that there was someone home. “I was watching through the window.”
“You like to gave me a heart attack. What’re you doing home? Where’s Ma?”
“I got sick at school. She had to come and pick me up and bring me home, but then she left for work again. I guess I should be glad she at least came to pick me up, and that it wasn’t some black and white pulling up to the school.” I noticed for the first time that Bridgette was not wearing her hair in afro puffs or plaits, no ponytail banded with pink acrylic balls, no barrettes. She had made a not-so-effective attempt at using a curling iron that morning, creating a bob that was half flipped up, half curled under.
“You don’t look sick.” I touched her forehead with the back of my hand. “You aren’t feverish. Ma wouldn’t have left if she thought you were sick. Maybe she thinks you’re faking.”
“She knows I’m not faking. The school nurse told her I had a fever, and I puked in the parking lot.” Bridgette tried to act like she was unfazed, but the fact we were talking about it made it plain that she was bothered. “She said you’d be home soon to take care of me.”
“Well you seem okay now. Why aren’t you in bed if you’re so sick, instead of spying on me?”
What was that I smelled on her? How long had she been sneaking into my cologne?
“I wasn’t spying. You were right there in the middle of the street kissing on him so the world could see.”
The way Bridgette presented it, I imagined hookers in wigs and vinyl leaning down into the cars of their johns.
“What’s it like to kiss a boy like that? Looks nasty to me, but I guess you wouldn’t be all the time doing it if it was nasty.”
“Now I know you couldn’t see all that from the window.”
“Not this time, but I’ve seen you and him once, before y’all broke up. So I guess it isn’t as nasty as it looks, then?”
“You don’t need to know anything about it. Eleven years old and asking me that.” Then I remembered I was only twelve that time between the forsythia bush and the brick wall. “All I know is you’d better not try it.”
“You sound just like Ma. Now I got two mothers, one I don’t need and one I never see.”
*
Kevin’s kiss left me believing we’d be getting back together, but a few days had passed and I’d heard nothing more from him. I consulted on the matter with someone who knew more than I did about boys. Halfway through the second year of school, I’d made almost-friends with a girl outside my usual circle, and regretted that we hadn’t gotten to know each other earlier, maybe the school would have been more bearable. But she didn’t have many friends at the school, and it seemed to me that she treated the place like a job—come in, do your work, get out.
I always thought her glamorous even though we were in the same grade. She seemed older than the one year in age that separated us, and more worldly. Perfume was already a part of her daily ritual, where for me, on the days that I’d remember to spray some on, it would be an afterthought. I still wore Love’s Baby Soft. She wore real perfume, something I imagined Ma might wear but would say to me, “That’s too old for you” if I ever tried to use some of it. This girl really knew about boys and sex, or she claimed to know. I guess that’s why she shared with me how she and a boy from senior class had done it in the school chapel.
“No you didn’t,” I whispered, because we were in the chapel at that moment, alone but it was still instinct to whisper, just like when we first entered and did a half-hearted genuflection in the direction of the altar, while making the sign of the cross. That was instinct, too.
“Yes we did.”
“You’re gonna burn in hell,” I said, not sure I believed her.
“Maybe, but I’ll have good memories of how good I felt getting there.” We both laughed at that, forgetting to whisper, me acting like I knew what she was talking about. I wondered what Ma would say if I got an extra piercing in my ears. It made Roxy look bohemian, and more like a college girl than a high school sophomore. I could probably learn all kinds of things about boys from her.
“So what do you think about my story, my boyfriend’s kiss?”
“Ex-boyfriend you mean. I only see two possibilities.” She paused, and I waited for whatever she was going to say, certain it would be brilliant. “Either he’s a dog and just wanted a free kiss and had no other intentions, or he wanted to see if maybe he made a mistake in breaking up with you, and he realized he hadn’t. Either way, it’s over.”
Her words hit me like a slap, the way the truth usually does when you’re not ready to hear it. I pretended that she’d told me something I already knew.
“I figured as much. He was a dog.” He was, as well as my first love.
“Most of them are.” From her blazer pocket she pulled a pack of cigarettes, a matchbook stuck between the package and the film wrapper. I waited for lightning to strike us from the altar when she lit up, but the only fire and brimstone in the air was from the meeting of her match and menthol cigarette. To a girl who claimed to have fucked in the Lord’s house, smoking was probably nothing.
“Do you do this often?” I asked. “Cut class, I mean.”
“It’s not cutting class if you have an excuse.”
“Yeah, but we’re supposed to be in the library helping get ready for the fundraiser this weekend, and you’re sitting here smoking a cigarette and telling me how you got laid in the chapel.” When I said that last line, I thought about how much my language had changed in the two years I’d been at the school. Before the school, my friends and I said “did it,” or the bolder ones simply said “fucked.” We never said “getting laid,” and now I said it effortlessly.
“If I’m going to burn in hell, I may as well get my money’s worth.” She exhaled, creating a bracelet out of smoke, and I was endlessly fascinated.