The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 (42 page)

So near any time always
.

 

Rollo's body was never recovered.

NANCY PICKARD

FROM
Kansas City Noir

 

The Paseo

 

It took judy harmon fifty-eight years to wonder about the other children. Maybe it was the deluge outside her apartment that reminded her of the flooding that summer in Kansas City back in the '50s. Maybe it was the lightning flashing over downtown Detroit that jogged her memory. Whatever the cause, the epiphany struck her all of a nasty sudden while she was doing nothing more than watching a crime show on TV and drinking her supper of wine and more wine.

Oh my God, there must have been other children
.

Judy sat up so fast that she spilled wine and didn't care: pink blotch on white pants, new stain on her conscience seeping through to soak her in dismay. Only now, fifty-eight years later, did her unconscious pull a light cord to force her to look—
Over here, Judy!
—at the decaying fly in the spidery corner of her psyche's forgotten basement.

How could I have failed to realize it for so long?

It felt like her boss coming in to tell her she was fired, which he had done last week. It felt like not being able to pay her mortgage, which she couldn't next month. It felt like watching her retirement slip away as CEOs bought yachts and stockbrokers sent their kids to private schools. It felt like when she'd realized that she was never getting married, or having children, or doing anything but working all of her life, and it felt like not even being able to do that now. It was a sinking in her stomach, a sick feeling in her heart, a setting of a match to an unburned pile of regret.

I was a child myself! I couldn't have known!

She defended herself to herself and to the other—possibly other, probably other—children who might have been hurt, might have been scarred, by the man.

Outside, rain plunged down her windows in the same waterfall way it had poured that July in Kansas City. That summer, the Missouri River drowned the industrial districts of both Kansas Citys—the Missouri one, where she spent her childhood, and the smaller, poorer one in Kansas. She remembered staring at the frightening water from the back seat of her parents' '47 Chevy. The river made a washing sound, like surf where there wasn't supposed to be a beach. Judy remembered a green car, brown water, and a dull bright sky that looked like the dirty chrome on the car's bumpers before her daddy washed them in the parking lot behind their apartment on Paseo. The air that summer smelled wet—not the fresh, clean wet of ordinary summers, but the wet of dirty dishrags, drowned rats, overflowing sewers. She'd been excited to see the flood, wanted to get near enough to watch it rising up the floors of the buildings, and then got scared when her father inched the car close enough to spy the river's currents. They bubbled ugly brown and sudsy white; they surged and swirled in boat-sucking eddies.

“Back up, Daddy! Back up!” she had yelled in panic from the back seat. That had made her father smile, but he slid the gearshift into neutral and didn't tease the Chevy any closer.

“I swear that river could shoot us all the way to St. Louis!” her mother had said.

Now, fifty-eight years later, Judy berated herself:
I should have told them about that man. Why didn't I tell my parents?

Judy Harmon picked up her cell phone to call her mother.

 

Judy was eight years old that summer.

While the two Kansas Citys were flooding, she went to Vacation Bible School at a Presbyterian church on Linwood Boulevard near their home. She and her parents lived six blocks south, on the white side of the city's “color line,” Twenty-seventh Street. Blacks who ventured in that direction generally needed the passport of a job.

Theirs was a block of red-brick apartment buildings and old homes converted into rentals. There was a synagogue catty-cornered to their building. It was safe to play outside or walk home alone from school in her neighborhood, even though it wasn't a rich one. The only bad things that had ever happened to her on her own block were getting stung by a wasp and falling off her bike. Once she'd watched her mother give a hobo a half-empty box of powdered doughnuts after he knocked on their door and asked for something to eat. When he left, he had confectioners' sugar on his whiskery chin, as if he'd dipped it in a snowdrift, but she didn't have the nerve to tell him.

There were many things she'd never had the nerve to say.

 

That day, when she walked to the babysitter's by herself from Bible school, Judy carried an umbrella that was too big for her. She had to fight it to keep it up. Judy remembered feeling nervous when she started out—it was five blocks to the sitter's and she'd never walked so far alone. Her father was at work at the factory; her mother had a summer job at Katz Drug Store. Usually Judy went with a little friend; years later she couldn't remember why she walked by herself that day. She remembered hearing thunder rumble, though. Her too-big umbrella was black with a wooden handle, and it didn't keep her dry. The backs of her calves got spotted with raindrops, her dress clung to her legs, her fingers got wet and slipped up and down the handle so she had to carry it in both hands.

 

“Why didn't you tell us?”

Judy's mother lived in a retirement home in Arkansas. Judy had just told her about that day in the rain.

“I told the babysitter, didn't she tell you and Daddy?”

“She never said a word.”

Her mother was angry, as if it had happened only yesterday. Judy remembered her mother as she'd looked in those years—young, harried, smelling of cherry-scented Jergen's hand lotion and dressed in a cotton shirtwaist, with hose and pointy high heels that caused bunions and bent her big toes sideways.

“Nobody would have believed me, anyway,” Judy said.

“I would have! Your dad would have gone over there.”

“But then what would have happened? People would have hated us.”

Her mother fell silent.

“You know they would have, Mom, for saying bad things about a churchman. Maybe that's why I didn't tell you—because I didn't want to cause you and Daddy any trouble.”

Her mother couldn't let it go. “I can't believe she didn't tell me. You were just a child, and she was the grownup. And I'm your mother. She should have told me.”

 

The man was white, tall, and thin.

In Judy's memory, he wore black trousers, a white dress shirt buttoned to his neck, with a thin black tie, although she might have invented the tie. As she walked home alone from Bible school she passed another church, where she heard someone call out to her.

“Little girl!”

Startled, she paused and looked left. The rain had slowed a bit, so she could see the man from under her umbrella. He stood just inside an open door. He could have been the minister or janitor, he could have been a deacon. She didn't know who he was, but she had a sense of what he was even though she couldn't name it.

She saw a ladder in front of him.

“Little girl, come help me change this light bulb.”

She glanced up and saw a light fixture above the ladder.

She was an obedient child, respectful to grownups, but something inside of her didn't like this. Nobody had ever warned her; nobody ever warned any children about anything like this in those days, but still, she knew.

She shook her head and gave him a small, stiff smile.

“Come in here and help me,” he called out to her. “Don't you want to come in out of the rain?”

He wasn't attractive. He had dark hair that looked thin and greasy, which was how his voice sounded to her, too. She had a crush on the handsome husband of one of her mother's friends, but this man didn't look like that. She wouldn't have wanted to laugh at his jokes, or take any lemonade he handed her.

She shook her head again. “I have to go.”

“What? Come closer so I can hear you!”

“No,” she whispered, her heart pounding as she started walking away from him. “No thank you.”

“But I need help. It will only take a minute. You should help me, little girl. Don't you want to help me?”

He wasn't much of a salesman, she thought years later, or he'd have known never to ask a question that could be answered no.

She walked faster. Why would a grown man need to have a little girl help him put in a light bulb? She felt shaky and afraid and embarrassed without knowing exactly why. Nobody had told her anything about sex, but she'd seen her parents kiss, she'd been to an Elizabeth Taylor movie, and she blushed when her mother's friend's husband was nice to her. She didn't know anything, and yet she knew. She wanted to run, but she had an instinct like a little animal that knows that if you run you'll look even more like a rabbit. She walked awkwardly, as if she'd forgotten how to move her legs; she walked quickly, longing for the end of the block, longing to turn the corner and get out of his sight, afraid to look back. She kept her face pointed straight ahead, as if nothing were amiss, as if she didn't think he was scary. When she was sure he couldn't see her any longer, she finally did run, releasing the handle of the umbrella when it pulled against her hand, letting it fly off behind her.

 

“I was so mad at you for losing that umbrella.”

“What if he's still out there, Mom?”

“After all these years? Judy, he's dead by now. Or he's as old as I am.” She was ninety-three. “He could have Alzheimer's. He could be in prison.”

“I think he was about thirty. That would put him near ninety now. He could still be in pretty good shape. Look at you. You're as smart as you ever were, and you'd still be walking a mile a day if your back didn't hurt so much.”

“I want him to be dead,” her mother said. “Judy, tell me the truth, are you sure he didn't hurt you?”

“He never touched me. Truly, Mom. He never got close.”

“You were smart.”

“I was lucky.”

She didn't tell her mother there was another Judy, an imaginary one who had developed in her mind over the years, a little girl who obeyed him even though she didn't want to, a child who did go up that walk, who entered the dark hallway and started to climb the ladder, a little girl he grabbed when she was halfway up. Judy thought of her as Alternate Reality Judy. Sometimes Alternate Reality Judy made it home and told her parents and they got him arrested and thrown in jail, sometimes she bit him and hurt him, and sometimes nobody ever saw that little Judy again. She'd had nightmares about imaginary Judy. And now she realized there could be real children, other Judys out there, and maybe she could have saved them.

“How's your job?” her mother asked.

“Okay,” Judy lied, and then quickly got off the phone.

Two more glasses of wine later, she looked at her calendar, and then she looked up airfares to Kansas City.

This is crazy
.

But it wasn't only that she hadn't told her parents about a child molester. It was that she had kept silent about a lot of things throughout her life. She didn't say a word when a popular boy in high school mocked an old black man and called him nigger. Cringing on the inside wasn't courage, and neither was shame. Sympathy, alone, was not integrity. Moving to Detroit, where she was in the minority, wasn't anything noble either; she'd been chasing jobs, not racial equality. She hadn't ridden a Freedom Bus or marched in Selma, or even in Kansas City. She hadn't crossed lines, not literal ones like Twenty-seventh Street, nor metaphorical ones. Once she'd had a boss who cheated customers, but she'd never reported him. She'd seen car accidents where people could have used a witness, and she'd driven on. She felt as if she'd spent her life with tape over her mouth, one word written on the tape in black and permanent ink—
coward
. It was why she liked mystery novels with strong female detectives; she could feel their courage without having any herself.

“Little girl! Don't you want to help me?”

“I did help you,” she murmured as she clicked her payment through for a flight. “I helped you to keep doing it.”

 

In a rental car she picked up at the Kansas City airport, Judy drove into downtown and then cut east to Paseo, where she turned south toward Linwood. What she saw along the way seemed to confirm what she'd heard: the city of her birth was still segregated. She drove past her old address, but the building was gone. The Presbyterian church was still there on Linwood, but it stood empty, truncated, half of it vanished, leaving only bare ground in the place of three stories of brick that she would have sworn could never fall.

And then, there it was—the corner with the church where he had stood in the doorway calling to her. It was an African American Methodist congregation now, she saw from its sign. It looked as deserted as her own old church. She parked anyway, and walked over to the side door. How many times had she sent Alternate Reality Judy up this walk? she wondered. How many other children had crossed that distance?

“That church is closed.”

She turned and saw an elderly black woman coming slowly down the sidewalk. Judy walked toward her.

“Hello. I used to live around here,” she said, “back in the fifties.” She wanted to defend herself:
I was just a child
. “This was a different church then, and I can't remember the name of it. You wouldn't happen to know what it used to be, would you?”

“Well, it wouldn't have been like this one,” the woman said. It wouldn't have been African-American, she meant. She looked permanently tired; the circles under her eyes were twice as dark as the rest of her face. “It's been a lot of different churches.”

“Do you remember any of them?”

She appeared old enough to remember when she herself wouldn't have been allowed to sit in the pews of any church along the boulevard.