by Gwen Florio
And her own grief, then and now?
A clawing, private thing, descending at night, even as she buried her face in her pillow and screamed for it to be gone.
She couldn’t remember when it dawned on her that Nora had returned to Chateau. She’d heard about her over the years, of course. Grace had cut back her time at Quail House to three times weekly, then once a week, but despite her best efforts to avoid Penelope, she occasionally ran into her. After years of a tense, guarded silence in Grace’s presence, Penelope became voluble after Nora’s departure for college, following her around as she worked, regaling her with bits of gossip and the occasional tidbits about Nora – her job, her marriage – in the inexplicable assumption that Grace cared.
At first, Grace fumed, fighting an impulse to backhand her across her lipsticked mouth to shut her up. Then she forced herself to listen in the hope that, after all this time, Penelope might drop some tidbit. Because even if she’d apparently forgotten – or, more likely, had successfully suppressed – the most consequential event of her lifetime, Grace had not.
She had, however, made her peace with the fact that she might never get at the truth of things; that it was enough that she hadn’t given up. Or so she’d told herself until Chateau’s lone black cop – oh, they’d known whom to send – showed up at her door on a soupy August night and told her that one of his colleagues had shot her beloved nephew.
She’d caught a glimpse of Nora at the demonstration and had gone through the mental gymnastics to link the grown woman to the shy, skinny child who’d never divined the simmering rage that lay beneath Grace’s stony façade. And, having placed her, and felt the stab of fury that any member of the Smythe family provoked, willed her focus back to Kwame and Dorothy.
But then Nora had shown up on her doorstep, with a peach cake in her hand and the gall to ask about Bobby.
Grace was tempted, then, to tell her. But that would have let Penelope off the hook, and if anyone deserved to be held to account, like an insect writhing on a collector’s pin before the chloroformed bit of cotton descended, it was Penelope.
‘Talk to your mother,’ she’d said. She wondered if Nora had.
Nora had given the police some cockamamie story about Robert and road rage. Then she’d been caught gallivanting with Alden. Worse than Penelope. Well, maybe not worse. But just as bad. ‘Blood tells,’ Grace muttered.
Maybe it was time for her to tell.
FORTY-SEVEN
She had a brother.
Nora started her run without stretching, not even a slow warm-up jog, pounding down the lane toward the main road as though trying to outrun the questions in her head.
Where was he? What did he look like? Did he have his father’s luxuriant hair, his stocky build? Her mother’s green eyes and discerning sensibilities? If she saw him in a crowd, would she do a double take, divining some resemblance, some indefinable emotional affinity? Was he liberal or conservative, professional or blue-collar, city sophisticate or contented suburbanite?
Did he have children of his own? Did she have nieces and nephews? She’d never had, nor particularly wanted, children of her own, but enjoyed friends’ children and had often rued the lack of younger family members to spoil with gifts and play dates.
She hit the main road, sprinting for McKay’s Woods, then slowed to savor the shade. Sweat dripped in her eyes. The fox emerged from its den, an orange blur. She swiped a hand across her face and it came into focus, swishing its bottle-brush tail and regarding her with a tilt-headed, bright-eyed stare.
It had something in his mouth, something shiny. It looked like …
‘Hey!’ She yelled and waved her hands. The fox dropped it and ducked back down into the den.
She looked up and down the road – no cars – then picked her way across the ditch and toward the mound where the fox made its home, stepping carefully around the shiny green patches of poison ivy.
The smell hit her, the fox’s own musky scent plus a whiff of decomposition, the entrance to the den a litter of small bones. Nora peered into the darkness, half expecting to see a pair of eyes shining back. But the fox had retreated deep within. Its treasures lay scattered about. Some golf balls. A leather glove, well chewed. A Croc, likewise shredded into near-unrecognizability. And there, so recently acquired as to have suffered little damage, a cellphone. She grabbed it and ran.
The phone could have been anyone’s.
But she remembered the fox darting across the road moments before the shooting. Kwame Evans’s quote in the Afro: ‘Where’s his damn phone?’
The phone in her hand could have served as an advertisement for the impermeability of its case. Other than being crusted with dirt and ineffectually scratched by small sharp teeth, it was unscathed. Nora hadn’t seen rain since her return to Chateau, but mornings had been heavy with dew. Back at Quail House, she unearthed a box of white rice from deep within the pantry, dumped its contents into a bowl, buried the phone within it, and, for good measure, took it to her room against the possibility that Penelope might discover it.
More than ever, she missed Electra, her own safe hideaway that she could lock against intruders. At least she’d have it back in a couple of days, according to a phone call from Todd Burris.
She’d recognized the dealership’s number and let the call go to voicemail, sure that somehow in a conversation he’d divine that she’d discovered he was her half-brother’s father. ‘It’s not discussed,’ Penelope had said. As though it were the easiest thing in the world.
She tried to imagine the years of encounters they must have had, at Founders’ Balls with their respective spouses, in the grocery store, at parades. Her mother would have attended events with Todd’s wife. Had her father ever gone duck-hunting with Todd? Did her father know about that previous baby?
Given her mother’s chilly dismissal – ‘I didn’t love him’ – Nora wondered whether she’d loved the man she’d married, either. It had been a smart move to wed someone from far away, who wouldn’t have heard the inevitable speculative whispers about Penelope’s disappearance from Chateau, her delayed graduation date; who wouldn’t have known to question her about those things before rushing into a courthouse ceremony.
She wondered if he’d heard them later, as he was slowly drawn into Chateau’s social life, where the matrons held doctorates in the art of sly insinuation. She could just imagine someone like Miss Alice clasping her father’s hands in welcome, holding them a little too long, as she looked meaningfully into his eyes. ‘Now we know why our dear Penelope was in such a hurry to run away up North. We were all so curious when she left us, but here you are!’
Leaving him, probably, to linger over the words ‘run away’ and ‘curious.’ What was so curious about a girl going away to school?
Had he ever figured it out? Or at least had his suspicions? It would explain his slide into cocktails after work, wine with dinner and bourbon by the fire afterward, the resulting mental blur masking his awareness of the signs of cancer until far too late.
The phone proved a welcome distraction from those needling questions. She knew she should call the Attorney General’s Office about her find. It probably wasn’t even Robert’s. The AG would be able to figure it out. And she would call … as soon as she’d examined the phone for herself. She no longer trusted anyone around her to give her a straight answer about anything.
She was supposed to leave the phone in the rice for at least twenty-four hours. She managed sixteen.
At eleven at night, with Penelope presumably deep in sleep, and even the animals slumbering, Nora sat up in bed, dug the phone out of the rice in the bowl on her nightstand, and plugged it into her charger, giving thanks that it, like hers, was an iPhone.
She closed her eyes, said a prayer to the gods of technology and, like a new millennium miracle, felt an answering vibration in her hand. She looked down. A red bar glowed back at her. The phone would need to recharge before she could proceed.
Beside her, the ca
t opened one brilliant green eye, and closed it again.
‘Go back to sleep. Nothing’s going to happen for a while.’
She tried to take her own advice, forcing her eyes closed, only opening them every five minutes to check. The phone signaled green in a gratifyingly short time. But it also demanded a passcode. Shit.
She tried variations of the obvious Hail Mary – Pass1234 – only to see them rejected. She wondered how many tries she’d get before the phone shut down again.
What did she know about Robert Evans? Not nearly enough. His age, nineteen, but not his birthday. She’d look it up, maybe paying for access to one of those stalker websites, if other options failed.
He attended Morgan State. She checked a few things on her own phone and typed in ‘Bears,’ the school’s mascot. No dice.
But … he’d been wearing a Baltimore Ravens jersey the night he was shot. She typed in Ravens, then Baltimore Ravens. Nothing.
She returned to her own phone. A few clicks told her it was a Jacoby Jones jersey.
J-o-n-e-s. Nothing.
J-a-c-o-b-y-J-o-n-e-s. Nada.
J-a-c-o-b-y-J-o-n-e-s-R-a-v-e-n-s. Zip.
She tried various combinations of capital and small letters until she threw the phone down in defeat. She returned to her own phone to check one last thing.
Then typed: J-o-n-e-s-1-2. The number on his jersey.
The phone opened like a flower, showing a photo of – her heart lurched – Robert’s Uncle Bobby. A man he’d never met, but whose fate pursued the family through the decades, catching up with Robert on a country road just a few miles away from where his uncle had been murdered.
Nora took a few deep breaths and then got down to business.
First, Robert’s texts. She scrolled back through several days’ worth of nearly incomprehensible messages comprising acronyms and emojis before giving up and turning to his photos, swiping back a few days from the final image and scrutinizing them in reverse order.
Selfies, mostly, several taken with friends, including a number of pretty girls, though not enough of any one girl to suggest someone steady. Robert at backyard barbecues. Robert, sweaty and grinning, after winning a race. Robert holding up a textbook and making a sad face – paired with his beaming visage beside a test displaying an A+ scrawled in red. ‘Winning!’
Robert in a suit and tie between an equally formally dressed Kwame and Dorothy. Robert, in the same suit, next to Grace – some sort of family event, apparently. In nearly all, the same wide smile that pushed his cheeks high, crinkling his eyes – the grin he’d flashed as an apology when he’d passed her on the road that night.
The final image, on the day of the shooting, was a brown blur, so dark she almost missed the arrow signaling a video. She tapped it.
It didn’t show anything at first, just the same dark smear, although now she heard music. She held the phone close to her face, ducked beneath the covers, and raised the volume. A hip-hop beat sounded and, over it, shouting.
‘I said, turn off that goddamn music and step out of the fucking vehicle now.’
Even distorted by the music and the phone’s tinny quality, she recognized Alden’s voice. A minute later, the image swerved past a dashboard and steering wheel and toward an open car window. Alden’s face loomed on the tiny screen.
Another voice, disembodied, slow and even, but with an edge.
‘And I said, do you have a warrant? You haven’t even told me why you’re stopping me. For sure I wasn’t speeding. I’ve been coming down here for years. I know all about this speed trap.’
‘Your taillight’s out. Step out of the car.’
‘My taillight is not out.’
Alden’s face disappeared. Nora heard a crunch, and the video wavered as though something had struck the car. Alden’s face reappeared.
‘It is now. Don’t make me tell you again.’
‘You know I got that on video. Well, audio … Whoa.’
A gun barrel filled the screen.
‘I’m getting out.’ Robert’s voice shook. ‘Put that thing down. I’m getting out now.’
‘Too late, motherfucker.’
The images jerked and wavered, views of car and sky and the briefest flash of Robert’s wide-eyed face, and a last terrified plea – ‘Hey, wait! I’m doing what you say’ – as Alden snarled, ‘Give me that fucking phone’ before the image soared high, sky and field alternating, only the sound of a single shot before everything went black.
FORTY-EIGHT
Robert hadn’t had a gun.
He hadn’t lunged for Alden’s weapon.
He’d just been a terrified kid, responding reasonably to an unreasonable request and paying for it with his life.
Nora huddled under the covers, shaking. The cat paced the bed, meowing anxiously, stopping to knead at her with his paws. Murph laid his head on the bed with a soft thump and whined.
The phone glowed beside her. She shoved it away with an index finger. She wished she’d left it with the fox. Because what did it really show?
There’d been no question that Alden shot Robert. Yes, he’d claimed self-defense, but did it really matter? Robert was still dead, and Alden suspended. The suspension might be lifted, but he himself acknowledged the impossibility of ever returning to work in Chateau, even if a significant portion of the population – the white residents, anyway – supported him.
Only hours earlier, she’d disdained her mother’s words: ‘Some secrets are best kept.’
Revelations about the phone would only stir things up again – for everyone, not just her. Kwame and Dorothy and Grace had already been through so much. Why tear at their wounds anew?
Because.
No. Nora shoved the phone farther away.
You know why.
She pulled the pillow over her head, unable to blot out the argument within.
The cops think their son was a drug dealer.
So? This doesn’t prove differently.
That he was violent. See: road rage. But he wasn’t. That shrug …
Maybe I saw it wrong.
You know you didn’t. Who are you trying to protect, Nora?
His family.
Bullshit.
Alden. If I turn this in, it’ll look like I’m just being vindictive. Besides, my mother’s been through enough.
So he evades true justice just so you and your mother can escape the judgment of the good people of Chateau?
She moaned aloud, swatting at the covers as though somehow that would quiet her conscience.
That’s what’s most important? Covering your own cowardly ass? You’ve got a brother out there you’ll never see just because of crap like this.
Nora’s fingers scrabbled for her own phone. Scrolled through the contacts. Tapped a number.
The voice on the other end had that peculiar combination of sleep and instantaneous adrenaline prompted by a midnight call.
‘Brenda Holiday.’
‘This is Nora Best. I found Robert Evans’s phone.’
She clicked off. The phone burned in her hand. She held it another long moment, trying to figure out how to word her message in a way that removed her own involvement, before dialing another number.
‘Miss Grace? It’s Nora Best. I’m sorry to wake you at this hour. I wanted you to be the first to know. The AG’s got Robert’s phone. There’s a video. It wasn’t self-defense.’
The silence went on forever, so long Nora took the phone away from her ear and checked the screen to make sure the call was still connected. Grace’s voice shot from it, wide awake and hard as a slap.
‘Didn’t need a video to figure that out. You called me in the middle of the night to tell me what I already knew?’
The phone went dark.
Things weren’t as bad as she thought they might be.
They were worse.
Two identical black sedans pulled up in front of Quail House at seven a.m., setting up a great outcry from Murph and a dash for cover by the cat. The st
accato raps of the brass door knocker made no allowances for the possibility that anyone might still be sleeping.
Nora, of course, wasn’t. She opened the door to Holiday. Beyond, George Satterline sat behind the wheel of the second car. She wordlessly handed Holiday the phone, now encased in a Ziploc bag.
Holiday pinched the bag between two fingers. ‘Is this to make me believe you haven’t looked at it?’
‘I’ve looked. I figured out his password. It’s Jones-twelve. For Jacoby Jones and the number on his jersey.’ She hoped that her complete honesty in this regard would help Holiday believe the preposterous answer to her logical next question.
‘I know who Jacoby Jones is. 2013. The Miracle at Mile High. Where did you get this?’
‘A fox had it.’
The look on Holiday’s face. Nora almost felt sorry for her. ‘Would you like some coffee?’
Holiday’s voice dripped icicles. ‘No. I would not like coffee. I would like you to immediately drive to Baltimore to answer some questions. You can follow me. Satterline will drive behind.’
‘Am I under arrest?’
‘No,’ said Holiday. But her voice said, ‘Not yet.’
FORTY-NINE
She wasn’t arrested. But Alden was, charged with involuntary manslaughter, which set off a whole new round of outrage and protests.
‘Is that what we’re calling murder these days?’ Kwame said to the Afro, declining to speak to the Sun at all.
The governor sent the state police to buttress Chateau’s force. Downtown businesses closed, and some even boarded up their windows, in preparation for violence that never erupted, the renewed protests as sad and somber as the first. With no excitement downtown, a parade of reporters made their way to Quail House, even though Nora’s role had not been publicly revealed. Robert’s cellphone, according to a terse news release from the AG’s office, had been found by ‘a citizen’ in a field some distance from the shooting site, near a fox’s den.
Whether the reporters had been tipped off about her role in finding the phone or pursued her only because of her earlier involvement with Alden, Nora didn’t know and didn’t care.
