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  I wonder if he thinks I’m flirting with him, Nell suddenly thought.

  “Don’t work too late. I’m off to get the kids. You’re allowed to leave five minutes after the boss with no penalty.” She headed out the door, lest any lingering give him the wrong signals. Jacko was cute, but Nell could more easily see him dating Lizzie in five or six years than as an older woman-younger man fling for herself.

  She missed Thom terribly, sometimes for the hard passion that had always flared between them, but more for the daily touches, an embrace while cooking dinner, the neck rubs they traded off, sitting next to each other while reading or watching TV, their thighs leaning against each other with the ease of long intimacy. At night, in bed, she could look at his empty side and know he would never return. But sometimes in the kitchen or in the office they used to share, she still expected to feel the warmth of his hands.

  Sex without love, or at least the possibility of love, seemed cold and barren to Nell. Masturbation with a body temperature prop. She couldn’t imagine ever falling in love with Jacko, so she found the idea of sex ludicrous. Passion is such an odd, elusive thing, she thought.

  It was too painful to think about holding Thom, so she’d conjured up the perfect stranger when she wanted to imagine herself in someone’s arms. The tall, dark, handsome man, a moonlit island, all a safe, unattainable fantasy. It hurt too much to remember Thom, and it hurt too much to wonder if she would ever find love again.

  Nell unlocked her car and dismissed the thoughts. It was time to find her son.

  Beck’s Bike and Camping Store had been a fixture in Pelican Bay since before Nell had even met Thom. Tobias Beck, the owner, could always be counted on to sponsor Little League teams and Scout Troops both Boy and Girl, or to fix up old bicycles for free to give to needy children at Christmas. He had never married; Nell had heard a few whispered rumors of an injury when he’d served in Vietnam.

  A few years ago, he’d gone to New Orleans, seen some doctors there, and come back with the announcement that he had cancer.

  His niece, Kate, had come to town to take care of him, and after he died, she took over the bike shop. Nell had always wondered what the arrangement was, whether it had been an up-front trade or whether he’d always been her favorite uncle and her care had been a gift for which he’d given in return the only thing he could—his business. Kate had taken good care of him; Nell knew this not only from seeing it during the times she’d visited Toby, but also from hearing others talk about it. Small towns have no secrets.

  She wondered if she might ever know Kate well enough to ask that question—not in crass terms, but to discover what had caused her to choose a life in Pelican Bay, where the only person she knew was her uncle.

  Nell doubted that she’d ever ask Kate the other question she had. Toby Beck’s death certificate had not listed cancer as the cause of death, but liver failure, caused by hepatitis C and HIV infection. Maybe she was wrong; maybe small towns did have secrets, ones that were fiercely guarded, as their residents were without the shield of anonymity that larger cities could offer.

  Nell had always liked Toby, and the idea that he’d had a secret life was disturbing. She and Thom had had him over for dinner; he had taken them out fishing in his boat.

  Surely Kate would know if her uncle was a gay man and the death wasn’t the cancer he claimed. But it was not a question Nell could see asking her.

  Sometimes she wondered if that was one of the things that attracted her to journalism: the desire to know secrets, to have an excuse to probe and inquire. She always felt like she’d slipped up when a secret completely eluded her. But Toby had taken his secrets to the grave, and Nell could come up with no good reason to disturb his rest.

  She parked her car and entered the bike shop, feeling a bit chagrined when she noticed that Josh was the only remaining child from the Bike Care and Maintenance class. Her son was happily leafing through one of the bicycling magazines; Kate was behind the counter, sorting some odd nut-and-bolt type things. She was a handsome woman, though not conventionally pretty, with a very strong chin and a slight hook in her nose. Although in her early thirties, her blue eyes showed the lines made by sun and wind, and laughter. She was tall for a woman, with more clearly defined muscles than most women would care to display. Her hair was a straw blond, with shades from chestnut brown to glints of red.

  Nell admired Kate’s easy manner with the kids who swarmed the shop. Via Josh, she’d learned that Kate used to be a forest ranger out in the Pacific Northwest, and that she’d been to Alaska and even Australia.

  “Hey, Mom,” Josh called out, catching sight of her.

  Kate looked up from her counting.

  Her hello was stepped on by Josh’s excited “Guess what? I changed a tire faster than anyone else, even Bryan.” Bryan was the oldest and biggest boy in the class.

  “Keep it up and I may have to hire you,” Kate said.

  “Wow! Really?” Josh exclaimed.

  Kate gave Nell a quick look, as if to say oops, got to be careful bantering around kids. “As soon as child labor laws permit,” she said.

  “Sorry I’m a bit late,” Nell apologized.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” Josh answered. “I was straightening up the books and magazines.”

  “Looks like I’m already violating those child labor laws,” Kate said to Nell.

  “I saw reading, not hard labor, when I came in,” Nell replied.

  “Then my automatic mother-warning system works.”

  Nell suddenly had an urge to say, “Let’s do lunch some time, I want to hear about Alaska and Australia,” but Josh cut in.

  “I was working. I brought the box from the back and now it’s empty. Everything’s on the shelf just like Kate asked.”

  If it’s not a crush yet, Nell thought, it will be in a year or two. She felt just the tiniest stab of jealousy at the woman who’d taken her son’s affections. When Nell asked Josh to help with the groceries or clean up his room, she usually got an “Ah, Mom …” or “Just a sec,” which always stretched into much more than a second. But the jealousy was quickly quelled by a streak of pride; Josh had picked an intelligent, independent woman. Nell took it as a compliment that she was raising a feminist son.

  “Since you’ve gone to the trouble of carting and stacking them, I guess you should take one home and read it,” Nell said.

  “Thanks, Mom,” Josh said, clearly relieved that he had gotten the magazine without having to directly ask for it.

  Kate started to wave away the money Nell was taking out of her purse, but Nell said, “The stacking is in exchange for my being late, but I owe you for the magazine.” After paying, she and Josh left the bike shop.

  When they got home, the door to the den was shut, with the telephone missing from its charger. Lizzie was home and on the phone, more usual than not. Also as usual, she hadn’t done the dishes left from breakfast, as Nell had asked her to do.

  Forty-one-year-olds, not teenagers, are supposed to have this kind of memory problem, Nell thought. Three cereal bowls and spoons wasn’t a major transgression, but Nell was tempted to breach the sanctuary of the closed door. However, she already knew Lizzie’s excuses: “I was just going to do it, you’re home early”; “The phone rang, so I had to answer it”; “I forgot, let me finish talking to …” Lizzie would then talk for at least another half hour.

  Nell decided that cereal bowls weren’t worth the battle of wills that would ensue. Battles with rebellious teenagers had to be judiciously picked. But she might still be able to use Lizzie’s dereliction to her advantage. Nell glanced at her watch. Josh on the computer and Lizzie on the phone should keep them content long enough for her to ask a grandmother a few questions about a granddaughter.

  Nell breached the barricade of the closed door to inform Lizzie, “I’ve gone ahead and done the breakfast dishes, but I need to run out for about an hour
. Josh’s here, so the two of you watch out for each other.”

  Lizzie had stopped mid-sentence, clearly discussing things mothers must never hear from their daughters’ lips, and listened. With a head nod, she agreed, adding a sigh to indicate that she realized she hadn’t gotten out of any chores, just exchanged one for another at her mother’s exchange rate.

  Nell closed the door and wondered what lesson she was giving her daughter—not to shirk responsibility, or that those in power set the terms.

  “I’ll be back in about an hour,” she told Josh, who echoed his sister with a nod of acknowledgment as he stared at the computer screen.

  They’ll be fine, Nell told herself as she closed the door behind her. The worst that could happen was for Lizzie to decide she needed the computer and Nell could come home to two quarreling kids.

  She caught herself and remembered that she was going to visit a grandmother whose granddaughter had died young. But the moment of worry was replaced with the thought that what had happened to Tasha Jackson couldn’t happen to her children. Tasha had been killed either in a random accident or through the intent of someone close to her.

  Rail Street was a prosaic name for the street closest to the railroad track. Several of the houses on the block had been recently painted; one was clearly derelict, with a badly overgrown yard and a listing porch, while the rest fit somewhere in between. But even the painted houses made it clear that the paychecks of those who lived here did little more than keep them tottering on the edge of poverty.

  As Nell scanned the houses for Ella Jackson’s address, she wondered if it was that hard cycle of work, overtime at the factory, and night work as a waitress that had created the gap for Tasha to slip away in, unnoticed.

  Further down the block, a car stopped and let out an older woman. As Nell got closer, she realized that the woman was climbing the steps at the address she had for Ella Jackson. She was moving slowly, as if tired from a long day and with no place to hurry to.

  Nell quickly parked and caught up with her as she was putting the key in her door. “Ella Jackson?” she asked.

  The women turned to look, her eyes flicking over Nell, clearly noting how out of place she was in this neighborhood. She paused for another moment before finally replying, “I’m Ella Jackson.”

  “Nell McGraw. I’m with the Pelican Bay Crier.” That did little to change the wary look on Ella Jackson’s face, so Nell continued. “I’m here to talk to you about your granddaughter, Tasha. I know that this is a hard time for you and you may not want to answer questions—if so, I understand. But I’d like to do a follow-up story on her.”

  “Why?” Ella Jackson cut in. “To make public that my son isn’t the best father? That he messed up some years ago, and make it seem like that’s why his daughter got killed? Or that now I’m taking care of her while he and his wife work over at the casinos and I have a beer when I get home from work because it makes my knees hurt less? And make it like that beer killed her?” Ella Jackson’s voice didn’t get louder, but it gained in intensity as her anger came through.

  “The police and the sheriff have been asking a lot of rough questions, haven’t they?” Nell said, conscious of keeping her tone of voice quiet and polite. “I guess that’s their job, to catch the criminals, and it makes them see the world that way. But I’m not here to find blame, Mrs. Jackson. Something happened to Tasha that shouldn’t happen to any child anywhere, but particularly in a small, supposedly safe town like Pelican Bay. Maybe I’m really here because I have two children and what happened to her could happen to them.”

  Ella Jackson looked at her for a moment, then said, “How old?”

  “A girl, fourteen, and a boy, twelve.”

  She paused again, turned back to finish opening her door, and then said, “I suppose that you’d better come in.”

  Nell followed her into a living room, the furniture a mixture that suggested some had been bought, some found, at different times and places. But it was tidy and clean, the stack of morning newspapers and the coffee mug left out indicating that this was the way Ella Jackson lived, not just made neat for some company expected later.

  Mrs. Jackson offered Nell something to drink, including the beer she’d mentioned earlier. Nell declined automatically, then wondered if she shouldn’t just join her in a beer. It wasn’t like Josh and Lizzie were going to check her breath when she came back. And it might have proved to Ella Jackson that Nell didn’t think having one beer after work led to children being killed.

  The woman glanced at Nell warily as she put away her coat and purse and took a moment in the kitchen to grab a sip of water. She didn’t get a beer after all, and Nell wondered if she’d decided not to drink in front of her.

  Ella Jackson joined her back in the living room, sitting at the other end of the couch Nell had chosen. She watched Nell expectantly. Nell quickly glanced down at the notepad she’d taken out, searching for a question that would start the interview off right.

  But it was Ella Jackson who spoke first. “It was your husband who was killed last fall, wasn’t it?”

  Nell kept her eyes on the blank paper, now searching for an answer instead of a question. “Yes, it was,” she finally said.

  “That must be hard for you,” Mrs. Jackson said.

  This time Nell looked up at her. Ella Jackson’s eyes were clear and direct. She knew what hard was. Nell realized that she had no perfect question—that there were no perfect questions and maybe all she needed to do was talk to this woman. “It isn’t easy,” she softly replied.

  “With two children.” Ella Jackson made it a statement.

  “That’s the hardest part. No matter how I try, I can’t make up for …” Nell trailed off.

  “A father gone.” Again, it was a simple statement, but it held acknowledgment that many people shied away from. As if not mentioning Thom’s death could let Nell escape feeling the loss.

  “What do you think happened to Tasha?” Nell asked her question.

  “What usually happens to little black girls. Some man thought his needs were greater than her life.”

  Nell nodded. It was what she thought, too. But she still had to ask. “Could she have just wandered away?”

  Lizzie wouldn’t just wander away, but some man could take her as Tasha had been taken. I don’t want to think about that, Nell admitted to herself.

  Ella Jackson looked straight at her. “Tasha did not ‘just wander’ away. She wasn’t like that. I know that child. Twelve years I’ve known that child. Wander away, no. Something happened to her.”

  A child that still lived in present tense, Nell noted. She also understood that Ella Jackson had rendered her verdict and no question would get another answer.

  “What would you like the police to do?”

  “Justice, that’s all I want.” Ella Jackson quietly added, “That’s all we ever wanted.”

  Nell left the question unasked: how rarely black women her age got justice from the still-too-white police and sheriff departments.

  Instead, she asked about Tasha, wanting to make the girl real and her death matter.

  Tasha had been a good student, mostly A’s and B’s, liked animals, and was going to be able to get a dog on her next birthday. “She was the kind of girl who’d take good care of it,” Ella Jackson said. Tasha had last been seen walking home from school.

  “I’ll let you look at the story before I run it,” Nell offered as she got up to leave. That was something she very rarely did, but she didn’t want to add to Ella Jackson’s pain.

  “You don’t need to do that. Just ask for justice. Ask that they find the man who hurt my little girl.” Her eyes clouded for a moment, then she turned away to open the door for Nell. “Tasha was a good girl. She didn’t just wander away.”

  Tasha was now past tense. With tears brimming in her eyes, Ella Jackson gently closed the door.

&
nbsp; Nell walked slowly to her car. Why do we need evil to explain the tragedies in life? Ella Jackson’s certainty of foul play wasn’t hers. While it could have been the stranger that all girl children are warned of, it could also have been something as banal as Tasha’s first stirrings of adolescent rebellion, a forbidden swim turned to tragedy by a cramp and a current. Or stumbling off the dock and hitting her head. Was it even possible that Pelican Bay held the kind of monster that Ella Jackson thought had killed her granddaughter?

  Nell got in her car. For a moment, she desperately wished she could fulfill the woman’s request for justice. But she knew the most likely outcome was a newspaper story that reminded people that a young girl had died, but the moment would pass and they would turn the page.

  She started the car and drove home.

  Lizzie emerged from her phone cocoon just in time to eat.

  After supper, she and Nell had a discussion about the supper dishes, with Lizzie promising she’d get to it before she went to bed.

  It was a quiet evening, Josh reading his bicycling magazine cover to cover, including all the ads. Nell only had to remind Lizzie once about the dishes.

  four

  The phone woke Nell. One shrill ring, then a second pierced the darkness. She hastily grabbed for the receiver next to the bed.

  “Hello?” she said, the harsh ring having fully woken her. Phones in the night sent a jolt of fear through her. There had been a time when the ring meant a breaking story, news so important it couldn’t wait until morning. Until the night she’d taken the call that told her her father had died, a sudden heart attack. The quiet man who’d rarely argued with her strident mother except to insist Nell go to college, go live a life far from the Indiana farms her siblings had settled for. After that, every late phone call carried the threat that it could shatter her life.

  “Hello?” she repeated to the silence on the line.

  “Nell McGraw?” a voice asked, though it wasn’t much of a question, more to show that the caller had access to her name.