Triptych

by Karin Slaughter

Miriam sat back in a comfortable-looking chair as the dog settled at her feet. “Would you like some lemonade?”

  “No, thank you,” Will told her, sitting on the couch. The cushions were hard and he guessed they didn’t use this room much. He wondered if the grand piano tucked under the bay window was just for show. He also wondered what the hell he was doing. Will had learned a long time ago that giving a parent the news that their child was dead should be done quickly. Dragging it out only made it harder when the information finally came. Will wasn’t Miriam Monroe’s best friend; his job was simply to tell her the truth, then leave.

  So, why wasn’t he?

  Maybe it was because there was something soothing about the woman’s voice, her presence. Her face could have been the illustration dictionaries used for “mother.” When Will was a kid, he had assumed that black kids were more loved than whites for the simple reason that of the hundred or so kids at the Atlanta Children’s Home, there were only ever two African-Americans. Funny how stereotypes got stuck in your head when you were little.

  “How can I help you?” she prompted. Her voice was very cultured, and she managed to glance at her watch without looking impatient.

  “I’m sorry I frightened you. I assumed the woman I talked to on the phone earlier told you that I called.”

  “She mentioned someone called, but I wasn’t expecting a policeman on my doorstep.”

  “I’m sorry,” Will repeated, taking out a spiral notebook and a pen. He used this for show, mostly to let people know he was paying attention. He had clicked on his recorder when he’d taken the pen out of his breast pocket.

  He said, “You don’t seem surprised that I’m here about Aleesha.”

  “I suppose I’m not. Aleesha chose a life for herself that her father and I did not agree with. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to know that you’re not the first police officer to knock on our door.” She smiled, but there was something more guarded about her manner. “If you think we can lead you to her, I’m sorry to say that we cannot.”

  Despite, or maybe because of, the woman’s poise, Will knew that this was not going to be easy. “Where is your husband now?”

  “He’s giving a lecture in New York,” she explained. “He specializes in health issues affecting women.”

  Will scribbled something in his notebook. “I see.”

  “You think it’s ironic that a man who has devoted his life to helping women has a daughter who is a prostitute and a drug addict.”

  “Yes,” Will admitted. “I do.”

  She sat back in the chair, seemingly relieved that they had gotten that out of the way. “We did everything we could to try to help our daughter.”

  “I’m sure you did.”

  “Are you really?” she asked, as if she wanted to catch him off guard. “We spent thousands of dollars on treatments, family therapy, individual therapy. Anything we thought would help her, we did.” She clasped her hands in her lap. “The simple fact was that Aleesha did not want help. She started running away before she turned thirteen.”

  Will echoed something that Angie had said about the girl. “You can’t help somebody who doesn’t want to be helped.”

  “That’s true,” the mother agreed. “Do you have children?”

  “No, ma’am. I don’t have any children.”

  “It’s the most wonderful blessing God has given us, our ability to bring a child into the world.” She held out her hands, cradling an imaginary infant. “You hold them in your arms that first time, and they are more precious than gold. Every breath you take after that is only for your child. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Will nodded, his chest feeling as empty as her arms. He figured even if his own mother had held him, she obviously had no problem handing him off to somebody else shortly after.

  Miriam continued, “Aleesha got mixed up with this boy.” He could see tears wetting her eyelashes. “I grew up poor, as did Dr. Monroe. We both knew the value of a good education, though, and we worked very hard to take advantage of the opportunities that other folks had fought, even died, for.”

  He tried to compliment her. “Obviously, you’ve succeeded.”

  She gave him a glance that said they both knew that material things were hardly a measure of success. “We thought raising our children here in this neighborhood would protect them. Decatur has always been a little oasis.”

  “Drugs have a way of getting into any community.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” she allowed. “We wanted so much more for her. You live through your children. You ache for them, hurt for them, breathe for them when you can.” She told Will, “She ran off with some man she met at the treatment facility. She was arrested a few weeks later on a drug charge. Aleesha went to jail and the man disappeared, probably found himself another silly girl.”

  When Will started with the GBI, he had been amazed to find how many women ended up in jail because their boyfriends had sent them out on a deal, convincing the women that cops were more lenient with the fairer sex. Prison was full of young girls who thought they were in love.

  Miriam interrupted his thoughts. “Dr. Monroe and I realized very gradually that drug addiction is a terminal disease. It is a cancer that eats families alive.” She stood up and walked across the room to the grand piano, saying, “You get to a point where you look around and you ask yourself, ‘What is this doing to the rest of my family? What harm am I doing to my other children by concentrating all of my energy on rescuing this one child who will not be saved?’ ”

  Framed photographs lined the piano, and she held her hand over each of them in turn. “Aleesha was the last girl. We called her our middle child because she was such a handful.” She went to another frame, another child. “Ashley is the oldest. She’s a gynecologist, like her father.” She indicated yet another photograph. “Clinton is an orthopedist. Gerald is a psychiatrist. Harley is a classical pianist. Mason…” She picked up a small frame shaped like a dog and laughed. “He’s a dog groomer, God love him.” She was extra careful as she put the frame back in place and Will wondered if Mason was his mother’s favorite.

  Six children. A comfortable house. Plenty of clothes and food and parents who took care of you. What would it be like to grow up in a family like that? Why had Aleesha turned her back on all of this?

  Of course, Will had been in law enforcement too long to take all of this on face value. He knew from experience that drug addicts didn’t generally start out as the happiest people on earth. They turned to drugs for a reason, whether it was the desire to fit in or the need to tune out. The absent father could be some kind of sadist. The brothers could have looked no farther than the hallway for their first sexual forays. The older sister could have been an overachiever who cast the kind of shadow in which nothing could grow.

  But Will was not here to rattle the skeletons in the Monroe family closet. He was here to tell this woman that her daughter, lost so long ago, was finally lost forever.

  He asked, “You haven’t seen your daughter in twenty years?”

  “At least.”

  “No phone calls? No cards or letters?”

  Miriam recalled, “A few years ago we got a call. She was in jail. She wanted money.”

  Michael had said that Aleesha listed only Baby G as a contact when she’d been arrested, but the duty officer would have made a notation of who she called while she was inside, who visited her if she was kept more than a day.

  He asked, “Were you the one who spoke to her?”

  “Yes,” she answered. “The conversation didn’t last more than a minute. I told my daughter that I was not going to give her any money and she slammed the phone down on me.” Miriam explained, “That was the last time we heard from her. I don’t even know where she lives now.”

  “Do you have any idea who she associated with? Who her friends were?”

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Officer. I warned you I would be little help in finding her.” She looked down at her h
and, which was still resting on the piano. “Could you tell me what she’s done? She hasn’t…” She glanced up at Will, then back down again. “She hasn’t harmed someone, has she?”

  Will felt a lump rise in his throat. “Do your other children live close by?”

  “Not close enough,” she told him, a smile playing at her lips. “Mason is just down the street, but that’s never close enough when you’re a grandmother with three grandbabies to spoil.”

  “Maybe you should give him a call.”

  Her smile faltered. “Why would I need to do that?”

  “Mrs. Monroe, I really wish you would call your son, or somebody who could maybe come and sit with you.”

  She sagged against the piano much as she had done at the front door. The dog gave a low growl as Will stood up.

  Miriam’s throat worked. “I suppose you’re going to tell me that she finally took too much.”

  “No, ma’am.” Again, he indicated the couch. “Would you please sit down?”

  “I’m not going to faint,” she told him, though her chocolate complexion was a marked shade lighter. “Tell me what happened to my daughter.”

  Will should have just told her and left her with her grief, but he couldn’t. To his surprise, when he spoke, he sounded as if he was begging. “Mrs. Monroe, please, sit down.”

  She let him lead her over to the couch and sit beside her. He should take her hand, do something to soothe her, but Will didn’t feel equipped to comfort her. He did know that prolonging the inevitable was one of the most selfish things he had ever done in his life.

  He said, “Aleesha was murdered Sunday night in the stairway to her apartment.”

  Miriam’s mouth opened as she gasped for air. “Murdered?”

  “Someone killed her,” Will provided. “I think she probably knew her attacker. I think that she followed him out into the stairway and he injured her…” He faltered. “He injured her in such a way that it led to her death.”

  “ ‘Such a way,’ ” Miriam echoed. “What does that mean? Did she suffer?”

  He was supposed to lie—it did no harm telling a mother her child had died quickly—but he could not. “I don’t think there’s any way to know if she was aware of what was happening to her. I hope she wasn’t—” He stopped. “I hope there were enough drugs in her body so that she had no idea what was going on.”

  She gasped suddenly. “I saw it in the paper. A woman was murdered at Grady Homes. They didn’t list her name, but…I never thought, I just assumed…”

  “I’m sorry,” Will told the poor woman, thinking he’d said that phrase more times in the last few days than he had in his entire life. He took out the photocopy of Aleesha’s letter. “We found this in her mailbox. It was returned because there wasn’t enough postage.”

  The mother grabbed the letter like it was a lifeline. Tears fell down her cheeks as she stared at the words. She must have read it a dozen times before she murmured, “The pariah.”

  “Can you tell me what she was talking about?”

  Miriam held the letter in her lap, her hands trembling. “There was this house across the street—three doors down and a world away.” She stared out the window as if she could see it. “We were the only black family in the neighborhood back then. Tobias and I laughed about people saying, ‘There goes the neighborhood’ when they already had the devil living in their own backyard.”

  “Does the family still live there?”

  She shook her head. “There’s been about ten different families in that house since the Carsons moved out. It’s been added onto, turned into some kind of palace, but back then, it was just this little house where bad things happened. Every neighborhood has that, don’t they? That one bad house with that one bad kid?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She looked back out the window. “Parties every weekend. Cars racing up and down the road. That boy was poison to everybody he came into contact with. We called him the Pariah of Paisley Street.”

  Will thought of the letter, the way Aleesha had referred to herself as a pariah.

  Miriam continued, “His mother was never home. She was a lawyer, if you can believe that.” She turned back to Will. “I suppose I could blame her until I was blue in the face, but the fact was that she was just as incapable of controlling her child as we were.”

  “Aleesha ran off with this boy?”

  “No,” the woman said. “She ran off with a thirty-nine-year-old man named Marcus Keith. He was one of the advisors in her treatment program. We found out later he had already served time for interfering with a minor.” She gave a humorless laugh. “They might as well put a revolving door on every prison in America.”

  Will tried to tread carefully. “In the letter, she seems to be blaming you for something.”

  Miriam gave a tight smile. “When Aleesha was eleven years old, I left my family. There was a man. Like mother, like child, I suppose.” She held up the letter. “Or, ‘the sins of the parent,’ as my daughter so eloquently put it.”

  “Obviously, you came back.”

  “Tobias and I worked it out, but things were very rocky for a long while. Aleesha got lost in the shuffle, and then she fell in with that boy up the street.” She put her hand to her collar, pulling at a small cross that hung from a gold chain around her neck.

  Will reached into his pocket and took out the cross from Aleesha’s letter. “We found this, too.”

  Miriam looked at the cross but did not take it. “All my children have one.”

  He did not want to tell her that Aleesha had sent it back. The letter was bad enough. Still, he had to ask, “Is there any significance to the cross?”

  “Tobias bought them when I returned home. We all gathered around the table and he passed them out one by one. It signified our unity, our faith that we could be a family again.”

  Will put the cross in her hand and folded her fingers around it. “I’m sure she’d want you to have this.”

  He left her alone in the room, walking down the hall, past the artwork, the photographs, everything Miriam and Tobias Monroe had accumulated over the years to turn their house into a home. There was a tall table by the door, and Will was leaving her one of his cards when he heard her speaking in the other room. Her tone was muffled by distance and grief. She was obviously on the telephone.

  “It’s Mama,” she told one of her many children. “I need you.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  9:16 PM

  Angie was dead tired by the time she finished her shift. Thanks to her hard work, a pair of visiting propane salesmen, a truck driver and an unemployed father of three were sitting in jail right now, trying to figure out how they were going to explain to their wives that they had been arrested for soliciting a prostitute. If their explanations were anything like the ones they gave Angie—My wife doesn’t understand me…I get lonely on the road…my kids hate me—they were looking at a long night in a cold cell.

  In the scheme of things, Angie figured what she did every day was a pointless endeavor. The johns still kept coming back, the girls still kept going out. No one was interested in getting to the root of the problem. Angie had spent the last six years getting to know these women. They all had the same stories of sexual abuse and neglect in their pasts; they all had run away from something. It didn’t take a Harvard economist to figure out that it’d be a hell of a lot cheaper spending money on helping keep kids safe when they were younger than it was to put them in jail when they were older. That was the American way, though. Spend a million dollars rescuing some kid who’s fallen down a well, but God forbid you spend a hundred bucks up front to cap the well so the kid never falls down it in the first place.

  Jasmine Allison was probably one of those lost kids who would never be found. She’d end up on the street with a new name, new attitude, new addictions that a pimp could use to control her. Angie could tell from the way Will talked about the girl that he was worried. He had good reason, considering Jasmine had been paid to ma
ke that phone call the night Aleesha was murdered. Angie also knew that there could have been a million other little things that chased the girl from her home. Still, she’d called a couple of guys downtown and asked them to look into the case.

  Angie looked at the directions she’d scrawled on the page she’d torn from the phone book. Ken Wozniak was living at a nursing home on Lawrenceville Highway. The charge nurse who had given Angie directions had sounded excited to hear the man was going to have a visitor. Angie had only met Ken a couple of times. She doubted he would even remember her.

  Visiting hours were over at ten. Judging from the empty parking lot, Ken wasn’t the only person who didn’t get many guests. The lobby was sparse but clean, with the usual white tiles and fluorescent lights. Some fake flowers were on a table in the small waiting area and a water cooler burped as she walked to the receptionist’s desk.

  The man leaned back in his chair, a knowing smile on his face as he looked Angie up and down, taking in every inch of her whore’s outfit with the kind of sneer that said he knew exactly what she was and how much she should cost. He laced his fingers behind his head, making his shirt ride up so that she could see his bloated, hairy belly.

  He licked his lips, asked, “How much?”

  Angie reached into her purse and pulled out her badge.

  The guy literally fell out of his chair. He scrambled to stand back up, mumbling, “I was just—”

  “I’m here to see Ken Wozniak.”

  “Oh, God.” His voice shook as he tried to right the chair. “I need this job.”

  She wondered if he needed it so he could diddle the old ladies while they slept in their beds. “Take a pill, Cletus, I’m not here to bang you up.”

  “I just—”

  “Wozniak,” she repeated. “Where is he?”

  His hands trembled as he tapped something into the computer keyboard. “Up the hall and to the left. Room three-ten. Jesus, lady, I’m sorry, okay? I’ve never done this before.”

  “Yeah, right. Me, either.”

  Angie’s spiked heels clicked as she walked up the hallway. She could still see the way the prick receptionist had leered at her when she walked in the front door. That knowing look on his face like she was just a hole he was going to fuck. By the time she got to room three-ten, she felt about two feet tall.