No Place Safe

by Kim Reid

  *

  On a Sunday evening after I had come home from a day of training on my new job and had showered the fast-food smell off of me, Kevin came by to visit. Ma and Bridgette were home so we went for a walk. By now I realized that there wasn’t much to our relationship other than his asking for sex and me trying hard to turn him down. He had that scent, the way a boy/man smells warm and so unlike me after he’s played a short game of H-O-R-S-E in the sun, or after I’ve watched him mow the lawn without his shirt. Past the scent of soap from his morning shower, just before he crosses over into funky. Man smell. I could detect it on him as we walked the quarter mile to his house. It was given that we’d mess around a little. The question was where.

  “We can go to my house. My mother won’t be home for another half hour.”

  The idea of going to his house when his parents weren’t there scared me. Being alone in his house, and him swimming in man smell, might finally wear me down, drown out Ma’s warnings about no babies in her house.

  “But what if she comes home a few minutes early?” I said, hoping it was enough to scare him. For added effect, I said, “And you know she’d tell your father.”

  Kevin’s father, from what I could tell, had the same effect on him that Ma had on me, and I wondered if it existed between other kids and their cop parents. It’s a mix of emotions that goes beyond a typical child-parent relationship. There is awe of their courage to do what they do. Throw in a child’s pride in being able to brag that his mother or father carries a gun—an exaggeration of the playground taunt My dad can beat your dad, made even more exotic and intimidating when it’s a mother. Underneath all that is fear; cops have a sometimes imperceptible aggression that, even though it’s intended (and necessary) for dealing with bad guys, carries over into their emotional relationships and can sometimes be a bit scary even to their own children. You know your cop parent would never hurt you, but it doesn’t escape you that they are paid to handle far greater threats than you could ever pose.

  “Yeah, maybe we shouldn’t go to my house,” Kevin said. “Then there’s only one place left.”

  “Where?” I asked, wondering why we were walking toward his house if that wasn’t safe, either.

  “The path. No one will be on it now.”

  The George High path was a shortcut through the woods that separated our subdivision and the high school. Originally it was just a path worn into the dirt by the kids who preferred the short walk to taking the Bluebird school bus around the long way, but recently the city or the school had decided to pave it and make it official. Kevin lived just three houses away from the path, which made it a convenient place for our stolen kisses, his fumbling attempts to unfasten my bra while I slapped him away with one hand and ran the other up his becoming-muscular back. There was no comfort to it, no park bench or even a flat rock to sit on. The best I could do was lean against a tree while we kissed, reminding Kevin afterwards to brush bits of white pine bark and dried moss from the back of my shirt. What it provided was cover and a measure of privacy, but we hadn’t used the path in a few months for two reasons.

  “You know I don’t like going up there anymore, since that boy got jumped and beaten up so badly,” I said.

  “I told you they got the kids who did it. He shouldn’t have been making a play for someone else’s girlfriend.”

  “They put him in the hospital for it.”

  “Yeah, well, no one’s waiting to jump us in there.”

  I wondered whether that was true, given the gossip I was beginning to hear about Kevin, that our arrangement wasn’t exclusive, that he was quite the player. But jealous sixteen-year-old boys lying in wait weren’t my only worry.

  “I’m not going into any woods while the killer is on the loose.”

  “What? The killer is nowhere around here.”

  “But he’s getting closer. I know more than you do.”

  “I know, too. My father tells me.”

  “Yeah, but he’s not working the case. My mother is unofficially assigned to it. I know more about it.”

  Kevin dropped the tactic of saying he knew what was what. That was the good thing about going with a boy whose father was a cop. He understood things none of my other friends did. But that didn’t mean he was willing to give up a make-out session. He was smart and a smooth-talker who usually got his way, a combination that made him persistent.

  “Ah, come on. If the killer’s in there, I’ll protect you.”

  I looked at him, beautiful and already more man than boy, his face becoming defined, the whisper of hair above his lips, the shoulders broader than I remembered them being that summer night behind the forsythia bush. But he was still part boy. I bet some of the dead boys, the older ones, thought the same thing.

  “You’re the one he wants. Who’ll protect you?”

  *

  During my two-week training at the restaurant on Hightower Road, a twelve-year-old boy whose prize possessions included a Pete Rose Baseball board game and an Around the World notebook, disappeared. Christopher Richardson had last been seen in his nice, middle-class neighborhood on the way to the local recreation center. We didn’t know until later in the summer that the killer was just gearing up, taking advantage of the warm months when kids could be found everywhere—playgrounds, recreation centers, public pools. It seemed memorials were made of places considered as much a part of being a kid in summer as eating tree-ripened peaches and riding bikes down hills to catch a cooling breeze. Those places were spoken of as the last place so-and-so was seen. When kids talked about them, they said, No, Mama won’t let me go there anymore. The addresses of those places appeared in the Special Bulletins on Missing Children later printed and circulated by the police.

  By the end of June 1980, seven-year-old Latonya Wilson had disappeared and ten-year-old Aaron Wyche was found dead the day after he disappeared, under a bridge that crossed railroad tracks in Dekalb County. The girl’s disappearance didn’t seem to fit; she was a girl for one thing, and her parents said she was taken from her bed while she and her family slept. Up to that point, all the victims had been taken off the street and none from within a block of their homes. Aaron wasn’t listed as a homicide at first because the coroner said he’d fallen from the bridge and was smothered by the leaves and ground cover that he’d fallen into. It would be nearly a year before he would be added to the official list of missing and murdered children. Aaron’s mother never believed the theory because she knew her child, and he was afraid of heights. He wouldn’t have been playing around on a bridge in the first place.

  Because he was last seen alive only two miles from my house, Ma became more strict about where Bridgette and I could go, how late we could be outside, even in our own neighborhood. One of my favorite things about summer was playing basketball late into the night around the neighborhood, at the house of whoever had the most lenient parents, those who didn’t mind the sound of a basketball hitting their driveway long after dark. An hour past dark was the only time of day when the humidity didn’t feel as real as a fourth player in a game of three-on-three, an extra man whose defense wore me down. The scent of honeysuckle nectar, made sickly sweet when it cooked in the midday sun, was pleasant on a night breeze. But Ma said no more late-night ball games, we had to be in by dusk. And don’t make me have to come looking for you.

  As summer got into full swing, the total of missing and murdered children had grown to ten. It was just the beginning.

  Chapter Ten

  In mid-July, Ma told me that she was being assigned officially as an investigator on the newly created Special Task Force on Children. Along with the Task Force came the city authorities’ long overdue admission that the murders were connected, though they were careful not to call them serial murders. Even before joining the investigation, at the district attorney’s request, Ma had begun looking for patterns. She first thought the child murders might be related to the John Wayne Gacy serial killings in Chicago. During the winter lull in the Atlanta murder
s, Gacy was on trial for killing more than thirty boys and young men, and Ma wondered if the Atlanta killings were the work of a copycat murderer or a Gacy accomplice that had escaped detection in Chicago and had moved south. But the fact that Gacy’s victims were white was enough of a departure from the Atlanta killer’s modus operandi for Ma to drop that theory.

  She and her partner at the DA’s office revisited a case they’d worked on when their boss brought it to trial the year before. In early April 1979, a nine-year-old white boy named Dewey went missing. His disappearance was widely publicized, and fliers and news reports stamped a slogan across the city: WHERE’S DEWY? The boy’s body was found a few days later near some railroad tracks. There was a lot of pressure from the white business community to find the killer—nine-year-old white boys just didn’t turn up dead in Fulton County. The result of the investigation was the arrest of Donald Wayne Thomas, a black seventeen-year-old boy. Thomas was tried and convicted of the murder and received the death penalty, one of the first to receive a capital punishment sentence after the use of the death penalty resumed in Georgia in 1977. Months before the first black child went missing, that trial exposed the racial tension that had always lurked just below Atlanta’s surface. A black man convicted of killing a white boy raised hard feelings that had roots going back to slavery, grown ripe through lynching in the twentieth century.

  Ma and her partner thought they saw a connection between Dewey’s murder and the current murders. Like Dewey, one of the boys found in June was found near railroad tracks. They got a tip that Dewey’s father and some of his friends said they would “get some black boys” since it was a black boy who killed his son. It was with that that she launched into her official role as a task force investigator.

  “I’ll be working more hours, so you’ll have to do more around here.” She said this while standing outside the fence that surrounded our pool, watching me drag a net on a long metal pole across the water’s surface. Ma had a serious fear of water, perhaps the only thing I remember her being truly afraid of, at least before the child murders began. She rarely came inside the fence, and when she did, she’d walk alongside it, holding on to the chain-link and being careful to stay away from the pool’s edge. Now she was standing outside of it watching me, fingers of both hands wrapped around the metal, making me think of an anxious child.

  “More of what?” Even now, I was working as the pool man we couldn’t afford to hire. What more did I have to do?

  “Whatever I need you to do to help.” She sounded tired and worn out already and it was only her first day officially on the case, but I didn’t care. I was already tired, too.

  “I’m working nearly full-time now and all my money goes into the bank or to you. I cook dinners most nights, Bridgette and I do most of the housework. I have to watch Bridgette on my off-days, or take her everywhere I go. When do I get to have some fun this summer?”

  “Those dead kids won’t ever have any fun.” It was a silencing blow, a tactic similar to the “kids are dying in Africa” ploy used to encourage the cleaning of dinner plates, but this one actually had teeth. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m just frustrated. You do so much already, I know that, and I appreciate it. I know it’s hard sometimes, but it’ll have to be a little harder for a while. Working this case means I can’t take any side jobs, so money will be tight for a few months. Just a while until we can catch the son-of-a-bitch.”

  Ma didn’t cuss much around me unless she was mad or driving, so I knew she was angry, but at what I wasn’t certain. Was it at the killer, or at the circumstances that forced her to ask her child to grow up sooner than later? I figured it was some of both.

  *

  We had just finished the five-hour drive from Atlanta to Hilton Head, South Carolina. The island was where well-off people from Atlanta and beyond escaped the city for long weekends of golf and tennis, or shopping at boutiques where you had to ask the price of things because they weren’t always labeled, and dined in restaurants that took reservations. We didn’t go into those boutiques more than once because they’d follow us around, and Ma said there was nothing we needed that got its allure just from being overpriced, anyway.

  It was a trip we would make for the next three summers, renting a condo at the Hilton Head Beach and Tennis Resort. I think it made Ma feel richer to say we vacationed in Hilton Head, the way her fox coat and new car made her feel, despite the fact that we were just two or three paychecks from poor. As my mother’s daughter, I looked forward to conversations about summer vacations when I went back to school. I’d leave out the part about standing over hot grease and bagging fries and burgers for most of the summer. I’d make it sound like we owned the condo in Hilton Head instead of renting it by the night.

  Bridgette and I left Ma making some lunch from the groceries we bought on the mainland where the prices were cheaper—enough food for the whole weekend—while we checked out the beach. We’d spent vacations on the Georgia and South Carolina coasts near Savannah before, so we were no longer surprised that the water wasn’t blue like it was on travel brochures. But the first time we found out, it was a disappointment. Now I was only willing to let the murky brown water touch my feet and no more, but Bridgette was still young enough not to suspect anything, and she went in boldly, letting the waves knock her down onto the beach while I watched from the shore. I envied her fearlessness, the way she’d try anything once without considering the drawbacks or weighing the danger.

  “I wish we remembered to bring a towel,” she said when she walked to where I was sitting and dropped to the sand.

  “We weren’t expecting to get wet. Ma’ll have a fit you going into the water wearing your new shorts and T-shirt.”

  “We’ll stay out here until the wind dries me.”

  Some birds were flying low over the water, dipping in occasionally searching for dinner. I thought it was a pretty scene, but I couldn’t help thinking about acid rain and whether the fish swimming in the dirty water were at all connected to the fish in the grocery store. I hoped not.

  “I bet soon as Ma starts on the Task Force, she’ll find the killer in a couple of days,” Bridgette said.

  “She doesn’t think so. She’ll be busy working on the case and won’t have much time for us. That’s why she brought us out here, sort of like an ‘I’m sorry’ present to make up for something she hasn’t done yet.”

  “That’s not why.”

  “I’m just saying you shouldn’t expect her to find the killer right away.” I didn’t admit that I also thought Ma would make all the difference on the case, but my rational self tried to believe otherwise. Low expectations meant less disappointment.

  A warm breeze kicked up the odor of rotting fish. If Bridgette noticed it, she didn’t say anything, just kept shoveling sand into a pile as if she’d lost something and was trying to find it. Not building a sand castle or searching for shells, just absent-minded digging. She stopped when she reached packed wet sand.

  “Well, I hope you’re wrong. I’m tired of being worried about the killer.”

  “You worry about the killer?”

  “Who doesn’t? When that one boy disappeared from just down the street from the school, we all got scared, all my friends and me. It was near that gym where y’all practiced basketball after school, where we caught the number ten bus home sometimes, that gas station is where he went missing from.”

  “I remember.”

  “It could have been one of Mrs. Ingram’s boys—they just live down the street. Even if they’re all the time getting on my nerves, I wouldn’t want them to get snatched.” She looked down at the hole she’d created in the sand and began refilling it. “It could’ve been me, for all I know.”

  I knew Ma couldn’t afford to send Bridgette to private school anymore, but she hadn’t told her yet. So I only suggested the possibility of change. “Maybe you won’t have to go to school in the West End next year. Maybe Ma will take you out of the school because of the boy disappearing over t
here. Don’t worry about it anymore.”

  Bridgette looked as though I’d just walked in from the moon. “Don’t you know the killer can be anywhere?”

  *

  Later that night after Bridgette had fallen asleep watching The Love Boat, Ma said, “I haven’t seen Kevin around much lately.”

  “That’s because he broke up with me a couple of days ago.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? Is that why you’ve been moping around the house? You want to talk about it?” Ma rarely asked single questions, they usually came in twos or threes, and rarely with a space between for an answer. All the answers had to come at the end. I figured it was her way after making a living out of interrogating people, so I didn’t mind.

  “He dumped me for the girl across the street. I guess he got tired of begging when she was more than willing, from what I hear. That’s probably where he is right now.”

  Ma wasn’t surprised by what I’d said, and made a sound that was full of disgust. “That’s why I don’t date cops. Not anymore.”

  “Kevin’s father is the cop, not him.”

  “Same thing. Some things just rub off.”

  Like us, I thought. It works that way with female cops and their daughters, too.

  “I thought you loved cops.”

  “To watch my back, not to give my heart. They’re too messed up, got too many problems.”

  I wondered whether she included herself in this appraisal, or if she was only referring to the men. Either way, it was one of those mother lessons that stuck with me well into womanhood. When my husband, who spent ten years in civilian management on a police force, suggested he might want to be a cop, I didn’t need to consider my response. It didn’t matter that ours was a happy marriage, there was no way I’d live with a cop again. Once was enough.