Of Things Unseen Read online

  “Oh. That’s not good.”

  He grimaced, knowing he was about to speak out of turn but unable to stop himself. “It’s a white guy,” he blurted out. “It just doesn’t fit to me.”

  “Wow. Yeah, I would have thought it would be a black guy.”

  He knew she would get it. “Exactly. But it’s out of my hands at this point.”

  “Well whatever happens, I think you did an excellent job.”

  “You do?”

  “Definitely. I know what you were dealing with. I worked in corporate America for years. Politics are the same in any bureaucracy, be it government or otherwise.”

  “That’s true.” He stared up at the sky. “For what it’s worth, you did an excellent job, too.”

  He heard her inhale sharply. When she spoke again, her voice sounded livelier. “Thank you for saying that. Half the time I don’t know what I’m doing but I hope I made a little bit of difference.”

  He told himself it was time to get off the phone. The conversation had reached a natural break and that was his opportunity to act like a fucking married man with self-control. But the pull was too strong.

  “So what are you doing right now?” he asked.

  “Lying down.”

  Shit. The last thing he needed was a mental picture of her lying in bed.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Sitting out at the lake trying to catch some fish.”

  “Are they biting?”

  “Not yet. It’s peaceful out here, though. Quiet.”

  “Well, it’s good that you have an outlet. Your job is stressful.”

  “It is. I just realized I don’t know what you do.”

  The long silence on the other end made him wonder if he had overstepped.

  “That’s a long story. Maybe I’ll tell you all about it one day.”

  Oh, word? “Well, I look forward to that.”

  “Listen, I really appreciate you letting me know about the arrest, especially since I’ve been out of the loop. It was...nice talking to you.”

  “It was nice talking to you, too.”

  “Goodnight, Barrington.” The timbre of her voice changed with those two words and the sound made his heart beat a little bit faster. He dropped his voice too, matching her tone.

  “Goodnight, Tamara.”

  He tried for several seconds but it was no use; his mouth refused to stop smiling. Just then, there was a tug on his line. He picked up his pole and felt it move again. He had a live one.

  Chapter 29

  TODAY WAS THE DAY. I had intended to do it last week but then I got sidetracked by the search. But it was a new day, I was feeling relatively good, and I didn’t have much else to do. Time to put the plan in motion. I was going to see Leah’s mother.

  I didn’t know exactly what I was going to say, but I was definitely going to confess. For the first time since that summer, I was going to tell the truth. Fear gripped me tightly and sent pain through my abdomen. Maybe it was my body’s way of warning me. It didn’t matter. I was resolved. I had no other choice.

  It wasn’t in my nature to pop up at someone’s home. It was rude and inconsiderate, and I’ve been known to leave friends outside ringing the doorbell when they dropped by unannounced. Still, it seemed the best course of action today. For one, I wasn’t sure how I would be received and I figured I had a better chance just showing up. And two, Ms. Glenda’s number was unlisted.

  I parked along the street a few feet from the mailbox. The street was quiet, same as it ever was, except for a lone wind chime that sounded oddly disconcordant. I took several deep breaths and psyched myself up. You can do this. You have to do this. Just get it over with.

  Time stood still for a moment when Ms. Glenda opened the door. Unsure of whether to smile or speak, I stood there and waited for her to recognize me. Her eyes narrowed as she stared at the strange woman on her porch. “I know you,” she said. “Didn’t you used to live around here?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” This was it. “I lived around the corner. I knew Leah.” I winced a little, bracing myself for an outpouring of...something. But there was nothing. Ms. Glenda simply nodded. “What is your name?”

  “Tamara. Ms. Bernard’s daughter.”

  “Oh, yes. I think I remember you now.” I tried to detect something in her tone but came up empty. I continued to stand there, not knowing what to do, while the wind chime rang the soundtrack of my awkwardness. Ms. Glenda finally spoke.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I wanted to talk to you about something.”

  Ms. Glenda looked behind her into her house and then back to me. “It’s a mess in there. You can come in if you don’t mind the clutter.”

  “Oh, it’s fine. You should see my house right now,” I said, being polite. Also, it was true.

  Ms. Glenda led me to a couch in the living room. “I don’t have anything cooked right now but I have sweet tea. Do you want some?”

  “No thank you.”

  “So Tamara, what did you wanna talk about?”

  I swallowed hard and picked at my fingers. “I...I wanted to tell you something. About that day.”

  Ms. Glenda nodded reassuringly and took a deep breath before exhaling slowly. “Okay...”

  I willed myself to say it, to open my mouth and vomit it out before my nerves took over, but no words came. Ms. Glenda looked alarmed, and I hated myself for putting this poor woman through this. Again. I picked faster, my fingers moving frantically around each other in circles. And then I decided I couldn’t do it. I had lost my nerve.

  “I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am for what happened. Leah was such a sweet girl. I wish things could have been different. I wish I could have done something to help.”

  Ms. Glenda stared at me while her wrinkled hands smoothed the skirt of her dress rhythmically. It seemed to be soothing her. “That’s not what you were gonna say, is it?”

  My shoulders slowly fell until they could go no further. She had seen right through me.

  “If you know something you need to tell me,” she said, staring again. “Do you know something?”

  “No ma’am, I don’t know anything. I saw her that day but I didn’t see anything that has to do with...what happened.”

  The woman nodded slowly. “What brought you here today? Were you in the neighborhood?”

  “Yes,” I lied. “My mom still lives around the corner.”

  “I know. I see her every now and then. She seems like she’s doing well.”

  “I guess so.” The silence seemed to last forever. I looked around for the first time. It was modest like my mother’s home with walls full of pictures and a dozen different plants in interesting pots. My mother kept a lot of houseplants, too. She even talked to them, swearing that some article she read recommended it. But she never did it when we were around.

  I zeroed in on an eight-by-ten of Leah, taken at Sears judging by the pose and backdrop. Ms. Glenda followed my gaze. “I have an album of Leah pictures. Did you want to see it?”

  I didn’t but it didn’t matter. “Yes,” I said politely.

  Ms. Glenda reached down and pulled the photo album from the bottom shelf of the coffee table, exposing neatly fanned rows of Essence and Ebony magazines. I couldn’t help but smile at the pictures, all of which reminded me of my own childhood. The obligatory kindergarten school photo with the kids lined up on risers and the teacher standing to the side. The goofy solo school pics with the wayward braids decorated with colorful beads. A birthday picture, taken after a long day of hot comb hell, just so that you could feel special and everyone could see how long your hair had gotten.

  I continued to flip the pages. I even spotted myself in one picture. It was taken on Leah’s street. She and two other girls were in the foreground jumping rope, and there I was in the background, skating with Fefe. Our skates never did roll right on the sidewalk and I had a scar on my knee to prove it. I flipped the page again and saw another familiar face. There, sur
rounded by a bunch of kids, including Leah, was Mr. Reggie.

  “Ms. Glenda, did Leah go to the Youth Rising camp?”

  She leaned over and looked at the picture. “Oh yes, all my kids went there once I started back to work. It was free back then.”

  “It still is. My husband went there too, to the one off of Greensdale.”

  “Oh, my kids went to the one on Covington.”

  “I know where that is. My husband’s fraternity just had a charity event for Youth Rising and Mr. Reggie came.”

  “Is that right?”

  There was a slight hitch in her voice that made me wonder. “Did you not like him?” I asked.

  Ms. Glenda turned her nose up. “He was okay. A little odd. He just seemed to take more interest in the boys over the girls. But I guess that’s how a grown man has to be when dealing with other people’s kids.” She shook her head. “It wasn’t a big deal.”

  I nodded. I felt a bit defensive but I wasn’t sure why. “I thought he was really nice. I kinda got the impression that he liked to mentor the boys, especially ones who didn’t have a dad around.”

  “Maybe,” she said, obviously disinterested.

  “And my husband wouldn’t be who he is without Mr. Reggie.”

  “I believe you.”

  I stopped, not wanting to offend her. “Anyway, how are your boys doing? Well, men now.”

  She chuckled at that. “They’re still my overgrown boys. Jarvis is doing good. He’s married and has three girls. He named the oldest one Leah. Touched my heart. And he’s a chef now.”

  “Really?” I scanned the room hoping to see a picture of an adult Jarvis. It had been almost 20 years and I was curious to see if the years had been kind.

  “Mm-hm. He works at Soleil,” she said, beaming.

  “Ohhh, Soleil is nice. I went there for my birthday.”

  “It is nice, isn’t it? I call him a chef but he doesn’t like that. He says he’s a cook because he doesn’t have the degree. He wants to go to culinary school but it’s really expensive, so I was telling him you don’t have to go to school if you apprentice under somebody good.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Mm-hm. I read that online. He wants to open his own restaurant one day. And he will.”

  I could see that. “He always was ambitious.”

  “Yeah. Now Junior, he’s had some troubles but he’s doing good now. Two kids, a boy and a girl. He’s working at the Chevron up the street right now,” she said with no trace of the boasting of a moment ago.

  “Good for him,” I said. “Jobs are hard to come by these days, especially for us.”

  “That’s true.”

  I stared at Leah’s picture, hurt and shame bubbling to the surface, and I knew I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t break this woman’s heart all over again. My burden wasn’t hers to bear. “Ms. Glenda, I’m really sorry I took up so much of your time. I just wanted to come by and speak to you.”

  “I appreciate that.” I stood and handed her the photo album. She clasped it to her chest and smiled at me for the first time. I felt like she was looking into my soul.

  “Next time you’re at your mom’s, feel free to come on by and say hi,” she said. We walked toward the door. “Wait, you never told me how you’re doing.”

  I stiffened and plastered on a fake smile. “I’m good. I’m working in PR.”

  “No grandbabies for your mother?”

  “Not yet.”

  “And why not?” She thought she was making small talk, but it felt like an interrogation. It wasn’t her business. It wasn’t anybody’s business. But everyone felt comfortable asking.

  “Just not the time yet.”

  I SAT IN THE CAR AND felt like an idiot for losing my nerve. What was I thinking bothering that woman?

  Two little boys rode by on their bikes and I smiled. Carefree black kids were so hard to come by these days. I said a silent prayer for their safety.

  My mother’s house sat just around the corner. I debated visiting her for about ten seconds but I wasn’t in the mood. As I drove away, I thought about Jarvis, and then I thought about Fefe, Diante, and Jason. None of us had ever really talked about what happened or our role in it.

  Maybe it was time.

  Chapter 30

  LAST WEEK’S MISSTEP had hit him hard. It was his own fault, really. He was off his game. Impatient. He had tipped his hand somehow and the girl had picked up on it.

  He hadn’t even planned to harm her that day. The idea was to watch her, much as he had done the week before, and allow his attraction to build to a slow boil. He already had a pretty good handle on her routine so it should have been an easy few minutes of admiring her from a distance. But for some reason, he hadn’t been able to resist the urge to speak to her that day. He hadn’t been hungry—and even if he had been, he wouldn’t have chosen Wendy’s—but he entered that store and ordered a greasy burger and fries, all for the chance to have a harmless interaction with her. It was a foolish mistake, and he begrudgingly gave her credit for leading him to the police station. She was smart. Smarter than him on that day, at least. But she lacked one critical piece of information.

  He already knew where she lived.

  He had followed her home from the gas station the first time he saw her, only making it as far as her neighborhood that first day. But he went all the way to her house on the second day, and that’s how he knew he had done something to spook her—she was usually completely oblivious and unaware of her surroundings. Black women, as a group, possess a keen situational awareness that he didn’t generally see in other women. Street smarts, even in the suburbs. But Aria was just a girl—which he hadn’t realized until she mentioned a school dance—and the younger ones always had their guard down.

  What had he done to make her so uneasy? He had replayed it over and over in his head and the best he could come up with was that she was stuck-up. He couldn’t stand the uppity ones, so perhaps it had all been for the best. But despite his pragmatism, the experience had left him feeling uneasy. Unsatisfied.

  And that is how he ended up here, at the mall of all places. He turned his air conditioner up another notch and aimed it directly at his face. He wasn’t sweating, yet, but there was no telling how much longer he would be sitting in his car. He watched women, or creeped as he liked to think of it, as they walked to and from their cars. They didn’t see him sitting there, and if they did, they didn’t give it a second thought. Lots of guys sat in the car and waited as their wives or girlfriends shopped, so there was no reason to believe this particular man was up to something. They wrote him off, walking within two feet of him, parking next to him, not seeing him, perfectly carefree. They weren’t worried at all, even though they should have been.

  It would have been out of the question for most men. Creeping, that is. Not because of any moral compunction, and certainly not out of respect for women. No, it was because the average man simply didn’t have the patience or the wherewithal to take what he wanted. Especially when it comes to women. Most men are actually afraid of women.

  The thing that pissed him off was that creeping would be considered deviant by most people nowadays but if you traveled back in time, say, 200 years or so, you would find all manner of debauchery and savagery that, at the time, was considered normal. It was all relative. And the elimination of such behaviors from society wasn’t due to any awakening of righteousness. It was because people love the veneer of civility. They love to pretend mankind is inherently moral. They need to be able to say things like “those kinds of things don’t happen here.”

  Even black folks believe that bullshit mantra. They have no illusions about other crimes occurring in their neighborhoods but they’re infected with selective blindness when it comes to people like him. There are murderers, sure, the type who shoot up the block indiscriminately or snap and kill in the course of a robbery or some such. Everyone knows those people exist. They’re the devil you know. But then there are the others. The ones
who aren’t flamboyant. The ones who don’t rap about murder or use it for street credibility. The ones who creep under the cover of night and quietly and respectfully choose their victims. He didn’t like the word serial killer, but that's what most people considered men like him. Black folks seem to believe their people don’t do that. Only white men are that evil.

  And the police were no better. He’d read several books about serial murder and was consistently amazed by the way cops spoke on the Ted Bundys and middle-name-Waynes. They low-key admired them. Smart. Organized. Methodical. Genius, even. Yeah, the police were blind, too. Struck down in their prime by racial aumorosis, a chronic condition that’s acquired early and worsens over the life course, causing the infected to see brown skin and lose all ability to reason.

  Consider the logic: serial killers are believed to possess above average intelligence. Black men are believed to be afflicted with below average intelligence. Ergo, black male serial killers are rare. He often laughed to himself at the irony. It was almost as if the world had conspired to make it easy for him to creep in peace. The longer they stayed stupid, the longer he stayed invisible.

  He had never been the type to deprive himself of what he wanted. Anything he wanted. If he couldn’t afford it, he stole it. If he got a no, he turned it into a yes, and there wasn’t a person on earth who would ever be able to convince him he was wrong. Besides, he was in good company. Some men were more risk-averse than others but they were all after the same thing. He dared anyone to find a clear line of demarcation between him and the losers who drive around the high school parking lot long after they’ve graduated or the musicians, actors, and athletes who use their clout to coerce young women. Even so-called men of God were using their holy books as religious roofies. And he was the monster?

  His creeping started when he was twelve years old and he immediately took to it like a pro. There was only one way to describe the sensation; it was the buildup before the release, exquisitely magnified a thousand times over. He had maintained control over it for years until one day he realized he needed to do it. It was a compulsion. And when the urge began to build, he had no choice but to satisfy it.