He whispered back, finished his coffee in a single gulp, and pulled a tablet and pen out of his breast pocket.
“Nobody leaves till we talk to you, okay?” he said to the room in general.
The young guy in the corner who spent every night muttering and writing in a ratty spiral notebook muttered a little faster.
Tony told us the girl had been spotted jumping out of the Escalade at a light at the Hague Road exit to the freeway, on the other side of Columbus. The driver chased her on foot to the top of the overpass. Just as he was about to grab her, she jumped over the railing and landed on the freeway right in front of an eighteen-wheeler hauling corn syrup. From the timing, the whole thing, from the time they left, must have been a matter of half an hour.
After the cops finished questioning us, I stayed to help Sandy make some CLOSED signs. Since Waffle House never closes, they don’t have any. The front door lock, seldom used, wouldn’t work, so we wedged a ladder under the door handle to hold the door closed and left via the back door, the one that had a working lock.
I walked her to her car, a ratty old Escort. I gave her a half-assed hug, which she tolerated.
My roommate, a Mexican guy that had answered my local roommate-wanted ad, worked days at the local brake replacement place, so he was still asleep when I arrived back at the house. He yipped and muttered in his sleep, one reason I spent my nights at the House. I turned up the television until I could hear Katie Couric over his snores.
I slept like shit, which I always do when I’m sober. It had been almost three years since my last sound night’s sleep.
The girl was still on my mind when I woke later that afternoon. I surfed the television for news until my roomie arrived home from work. He went by the nickname Texaco, which fit since he wore ostentatious cowboy boots tooled with pictures of rattlesnakes and longhorn steers.
“Hey,” he said, the extent of our usual conversation, since he didn’t speak much English. He carried a plastic gallon jug of milk out the back door onto the landing, where I heard him light a cigarette. He spent hours leaning on the railing, watching dumpsters and alley cats, drinking milk from the jug.
I got nothing off the TV, so I dressed and walked next door to the library to use their computer and Internet access.
According to the web edition of the Columbus Dispatch, the girl’s name was Nancilee Harper. Local girl, city school, basketball player. An angel, but aren’t they all, when they’re dead? No parents mentioned. Her grandmother’s picture was up on the home page, a pencil-thin black woman with carrot-orange hair and a bombed-out look in her eyes; maybe they caught her on the way home from the clubs. She looked younger than me.
According to the lead story, Nancilee had no enemies. She attended the Baptist church on the east edge of downtown. Good grades. She’d been asleep upstairs when Grandma left that evening for work. Grandma, Phara Johnson, waited tables at Caddy’s, a near eastside dive. Grandma returned home at 7 A.M. to find her front yard full of cops and reporters.
No mention of the white guy, the Escalade, no artist’s sketch of a person of interest. I figured he was in the can already or two states away with his pedal to the floor. The license plate we’d written down was no doubt in a dumpster somewhere.
I signed off and drifted to the magazine room. I never knew what to do with myself late afternoon, early evening, the time when families would be regathering after school, work, errands, fighting for the remote, doing homework, arguing about dinner.
My disability check didn’t cover entertainment, so the library was my second most frequented haunt. I was sitting by the picture window reading the latest Popular Science when Sandy called.
“You see the news?” she said.
“The girl? Nancilee?”
“Yeah.” I knew she was leaning against the door frame in the hallway between her kitchen and dining room, probably twisting her index finger through the phone cord. She never sat down when she talked on the phone. I once asked her why. She told me her father used to sneak up behind her, take up some slack from the cord, and pull it around her neck like a garrote. All in fun, he’d said.
“We should’ve called.”
“We couldn’t have known,” I said. An old man across the table, holding a copy of Home and Garden an inch from his face, pulled it down to glare at me.
I ignored him. “She went with that guy like she wasn’t worried.”
“I’m going to call on that girl’s grandma. It’s the least I can do.”
“Don’t. You don’t have anything to tell her that would be a comfort to her.”
“She’d want to know,” Sandy said, her voice rushed, breathy. “I wanted to know.”
“Talking to the EMTs only made it worse for you.” One EMT had told Sandy he thought I had alcohol on my breath. That one off-the-cuff remark had driven a stake through our marriage. I never realized when I was a kid that every day of your life is a high-wire act. Twenty years you can say the right thing, and then pow-one casual comment, one inattentive moment, and you’re in freefall. Ask Karl Wallenda.
“Would you go with me?” Sandy said. “In an hour or so?”
I saw Tex walk out of our apartment building toward his Civic. He was dressed to kill, clothes tight and shiny, the silver on his belt buckle sparkling under the streetlights.
I agreed to go with Sandy. Not because I wanted to, but because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I was also perversely drawn to pain, and I assumed there would be plenty there.
I looked through my closet for something more formal than blue jeans. I considered my black suit but decided it might suggest I was claiming grief I didn’t deserve, as I’d only met the victim that one time. I settled on gray slacks, a dark green checked shirt, and a black sport coat, no tie.
Sandy picked me up twenty minutes later. The temperature had dropped back into the twenties, and the heater in her car was broken, but she wore only a thin overcoat. Her teeth were chattering.
“Where are your gloves?” I asked as I pulled the door shut and belted myself in. I had given her a nice pair of kid leather gloves for Christmas a couple of months before.
She pulled away from the curb right into the path of an old Volvo wagon. I could read the lips of the woman behind the wheel as she screeched to a stop to avoid hitting us.
“They’re at work,” Sandy said, oblivious to the close call. Her tone of voice was part of a package I recognized. It went with her head held high, and a way she has of drawing her upper lip down over her teeth, then curling it up, as though trying to dislodge something in her nose without touching it. That package says, Don’t talk, don’t touch. I regretted agreeing to accompany her.
We rode in silence for a few blocks. The address she had was on the other end of town. I waited until we were on the freeway before I said, “This is a mistake.”
Another nose twitch. “You can’t spend the rest of your life hiding. She needs us.”
“The last thing she needs is us. She’s probably suffering enough as it is.”
That was enough chitchat for our car ride. A short while later, she turned onto Bryden Road. We cruised slowly down the row of huge old houses, now subdivided into apartments, until we spotted the address. Most of the houses were dark upstairs, with a few lights on downstairs. We could see a group of people on Phara’s front porch. Or, more accurately, we could see cigarette glows, moving in arcs from waist level to head level, growing in intensity, then descending.
Sandy parallel-parked a few doors down the street, which took a few minutes. We walked up the unshoveled sidewalk, snow squeaking under our shoes. We could hear conversation, laughter, even the clink of a glass from the porch. Sandy took my arm.