by Attica Locke
“Self-defense,” Darren said. “Which is all Mr. Page and the Native folks out there have been doing, protecting themselves from bullies. Let me ask you this, has there been any evidence that Leroy Page has expressed racist views?”
Greg gave Darren a rueful smile, before he said, “HCIC, head cracker in charge, that’s a direct quote from Mr. Page during our interview.”
Darren shook his head. Greg was being grossly unfair.
“Look, I’m not any more happy about this than you, but—”
“Cracker and nigger are not the same, and you know it,” Darren said.
“I do,” Greg said with mild indignation that Darren didn’t know him better. “But you know who does not have the capacity for that kind of nuance? Your next president,” Greg said, his face screwed up with frustration. “This is the dilemma we’re in. If we don’t prosecute hate crimes against whites—if that’s what this is,” he said, just to get Darren to hear him out, “if we don’t prosecute crimes against white lives to the degree that we do those against black lives—”
Darren laughed so hard the bourbon nearly choked him, burning at his throat. Greg put a hand on Darren’s forearm and looked his friend in the eye, an expression of bafflement and pain on his face. “I’m serious, D. You see who’s about to walk into the White House? You see where this country’s at? We’re in trouble, man. There’s a point to what I’m trying to do. A case like this would make it easier for the new Justice Department to know that hate crimes aren’t some kind of liberal hocus-pocus. They’re real and deadly and unacceptable in American life. They need to see the FBI taking every hate crime seriously. The hope is that a case like this makes them more committed to prosecuting when the tables are turned, when it’s a black man killed, that this could change the game.”
“So this is the Jackie Robinson of federal hate-crime cases?” Darren was a little bit drunk; his tolerance over the past couple of months had dried up, a muscle atrophying when he needed it most. He would drink his weight in bourbon right now if he could, would do anything to avoid talk of Leroy Page killing a child, the nag of truth in what Greg was saying.
“No,” he said, pushing back on this whole thing. “Page sold everything. He’s moving in a matter of weeks. It’s over. And we’re talking about a nine-year-old. He knew the boy’s grandfather, for God’s sake—”
“Yes, the man he blamed for turning a once idyllic black community into a haven for white supremacists and Brotherhood sympathizers.”
Darren shook his head at the logic. “They were friends, the old men.”
But Greg kept pressing his case.
He asked Darren to imagine he was the descendant of slaves, to which Darren rolled his eyes and said, “I’ll try.”
Imagine, Greg said, you come from hardworking people who literally built a town on hope, hope for what freedom in America might mean for them, who supported themselves and lived in prosperous peace for well over a hundred years. And then along come some white folks who ain’t got shit and don’t know shit, and they start tearing at what you built, creeping in on it. Worse, they hate you for what you were able to do with nothing. They leave shit at your doorstep. Literally. They threaten the people you hold dear. They make your life hell, your paradise a living hell. And then one night, you see this little one all alone. It’s just the two of you. Nobody watching. And maybe he mouths off or something, calls you, a grown-ass man, a nigger. And you lose it, can no longer hold back the rage, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a nine-year-old kid or a ninety-year-old woman, you are simply through. Done.
To Greg, this made emotional sense, but it also required vigorous prosecution. But Darren—chafing at a depiction of a violent impulse he didn’t recognize within himself or in the men who’d raised him—wasn’t buying any of it. He took pleasure in laying down a cultural trump card, speaking with an authority his friend couldn’t touch. “Black folks ain’t like that,” he said. Or all of y’all woulda been dead by now, he wanted to say but didn’t. Instead, he offered a different sentiment from Leroy Page: “Black folks are the most forgiving people on earth.” But even as he said it, the memory of the man stating that he didn’t like Levi tapped Darren on the shoulder, demanding his attention. He thought of the old man growing wary when Darren asked to search his place—squirrelly, actually—treating Darren as a traitor for asking questions about the death of a white boy, and he heard his uncle Clayton’s words again: Forgiveness has a limit.
11.
THE BUREAU had Greg staying at a motel off Highway 59, so he drove Darren the block and a half back to the Cardinal Hotel in his Ford Taurus, then reached across the front seat when Darren opened the passenger-side door. In the shaft of light from the dome bulb inside the car, he went in for hug, which ended in an awkward mash of forearms, Darren going for a bro shake and Greg wanting more, some reassurance that their friendship remained intact despite the heavy conversation tonight and the tack Greg was clearly planning to take with his investigation. He said, “We’re good, right?”
Darren didn’t have an easy answer, but the question touched him. He knew Greg’s heart even if he thought his ambition might be clouding his view of the situation out in Hopetown, just as Greg thought Darren’s compulsive sense of familial duty to every black person he came across—and particularly those over the age of sixty-five—had blinded his judgment of Leroy Page. Even without knowing about Mack and the case hanging over Darren’s head back in San Jacinto County, Greg could feel his friend’s distress over even the possibility that Page was involved in whatever happened to Levi King. The two men knew each other like brothers. Could they still love each other through whatever came next in Marion County? When the hug fell flat, Greg held out a fist and Darren tapped it with his. Greg smiled and said, “I’m happy about you and Lisa, man.”
So not only had Greg and Lisa run into each other at the courthouse, they’d spent enough time together to get into Darren’s drinking and the state of his marriage.
Outside the hotel, Clyde, Rosemary King’s driver, was leaning against the driver’s-side door of her silver Cadillac, waiting. Darren checked his watch, wondering if Rosemary’s dinner party had finally broken up or if Clyde had been sent to fetch one of her guests. Either way, he was happy to catch the man alone. He’d spoken to so few black folks in Jefferson proper that he had no sense of what all they knew of Hopetown, what the old slave settlement meant to them. “Lot of folks think they all gone by now,” Clyde said when Darren asked.
Through the cracked window of the car, Darren heard a husky, swinging blues, music Clyde played when no one else was around. I believe my soul’s found a happy home. Ruthie Foster. Darren knew the tune, knew she’d once recorded with Jessie Mae Hemphill. The music reminded Darren of being in Mr. Page’s kitchen this afternoon, called to mind the second verse of the hymn Jessie Mae was singing then, lyrics he’d never heard in any other version. I make heaven my home, I shall not be moved. Black music, Darren thought, so often points hearts and minds to a higher plane. The musicians know that faith is more important than terra firma, that it has to be, for the material world is full of trials and tribulations, transgressions against body and soul, against our right to any piece of this country, its fields and prairies that we once tilled until our backs broke and bled.
“Naw, it’s some folks still out there,” Clyde said of the old slave settlement. “They keep to themselves, never seen one myself. The old-timers used to say they was all runaways, scared to come into town. But my understanding of history, of Jefferson, ain’t no way a white man was just gon’ let his niggers walk off to Shangri-la and not come hunting ’em. It’s so many tall tales in this town. You can’t put stock in half of it. I don’t even know if that place is real and not a story some of us made up long ago, a fantasy of slipping free of white folks.”
Darren nodded sagely at the Southern logic. He thanked Clyde for talking with him. The driver looked twice over his shoulder before giving Darren a piece of advice. “Be careful,
” he said in a near whisper. “Rosemary don’t play.”
Darren would have asked the man what he meant, but his phone rang.
It was his wife calling.
They hadn’t even spoken since he’d left Houston this morning.
“Hey,” she said once she knew he was alone in his hotel room, her voice husky the way it got after eight p.m. She’d be in one of his old sweatshirts by now. He could picture her collarbone peeking out where the fabric slid off her shoulder, and he felt a pinch of longing. It was there for her too. “I was thinking,” she said. “Maybe this time I could come see you.”
“I’m working, Lisa.”
“I know. It’s just the hearing in the Madison Holdings deal got pushed another week, and I could take a day or two, drive up there, give you a hug.”
“You want to drive four hours to give me a hug?”
“Well, maybe more than a hug.” There was a pause on her end of the line, and then she whispered, almost as if she were ashamed of it, “I miss you.”
Darren flipped on the overhead light in the suite’s front room. It seemed smaller than when he’d left it, everything swallowed in an oxblood velvet. It was hanging from the windows, it was woven into the wallpaper, and it was in the upholstery of the chesterfield sofa where Darren sat down to peel off his boots.
“I miss you too. But I’m just here for a few days.”
“It’s just, you heard Dr. Long, we’re in a good place right now, and the last time we were apart, the distance, it got between us, it changed things—”
She was talking about his time in Lark, of course, the days and days he’d spent closely with another woman. Randie’s name had come up only once during their counseling sessions. Still, she sat at the edge of his consciousness, a watery light in the distance, a beacon of him at his best self, and Lisa knew him well enough to understand some new thing had a hold on him, had taken up residence in an ill-lit corner of his heart, a place where perhaps she, his wife, had never been welcomed. She’d never accused Darren of laying a hand on Randie but, more cruelly, of him being unsatisfied with a wife who didn’t need him the way the widow had. It irritated him to hear Randie reduced to the widow, but he knew instinctively it would be unwise to say so. His job in that suffocatingly warm therapist’s office was to listen. He never told her that Randie had invited him to be with her when she buried her husband’s ashes in Tyler. Or that just a few weeks ago, Randie had sent a postcard to his office, a picture of the arch at the Freedman’s Memorial Cemetery in Dallas, where, despite her professed distaste for all things Texan, she’d taken a job for a start-up fashion label. She’d be in the state for another week, she’d written in an artful script. Nor did he tell his wife he’d actually thought of driving up to Dallas to see Randie, just to know if she was doing okay. He kept it all to himself. It was, all of it, better left alone. He’d never responded to Randie’s voice mail or the postcard, but guilt lingered, which was why he told Lisa now, against his better judgment, that it might be okay if she came to Jefferson for a night. “Dinner, maybe. But I can’t promise anything else.”
Lisa let out a throaty chuckle and said, “I can.”
It was playful flirting, and what man didn’t want his wife throwing herself at him? But Darren registered something pushy in it too, something slightly heartbreaking about the desperation in his wife’s willingness to drive four hours to hold him, as if she wasn’t sure their marriage could withstand a few days apart. She wanted now what she’d so casually tossed aside when she’d kicked him out of their home in the fall: the music of Darren’s breath at her back, his body pressed against hers in the dark of night. But even four sessions with Dr. Long had left him with a sharp pill of resentment he couldn’t quite swallow.
He had trouble falling asleep. He kept hearing voices outside the bedroom window, women giggling and even a few girlish shrieks. He crossed the room in the dark and pulled back a corner of the heavy drapes to see a gaggle of middle-aged white women, their double chins lit by the candles they were holding. They were staring directly into Darren’s room. Naked except for his boxers, he quickly ducked back into the darkness of his hotel room, which apparently was a site of great interest on the town’s famed ghost walk. Another tour group came by forty-five minutes later. The same deal—candles outside his bedroom window, women staring gape-mouthed at the Cardinal Hotel, at Darren’s room in particular. Bored and unable to sleep, he pulled one of the hotel’s brochures from the nightstand and read about the Cardinal’s grisly past. He was startled to discover a whole page dedicated to the very room he was staying in, the Garden Suite, a room that also showed up in the other ghost-tour brochures fanned on his nightstand by hotel staff. Apparently, a Penelope Deschamps, née Penny Deckard, of Acadia Parish, Louisiana, shot herself with a pearl-handled derringer in this very room, heartbroken over the death of her husband and the loss of her favored slaves. Her ghost was said to reside in the famed Garden Suite, occasionally showing herself at the bedroom window to passersby. Darren hadn’t truly appreciated the breadth of Rosemary’s distaste for him until he remembered she’d arranged for him to stay in this very suite, knowing he wouldn’t get a lick of sleep. Jefferson billed itself as the most haunted town in Texas. There was no part of its past it wouldn’t turn over for a dollar; these ghost tours could go on all night. He made a dive for the minibar, seeking obliteration. He ate a tube of Pringles and drank two beers back to back, praying the alcohol and starch would knock him out. Sleep finally came on him like a black wave; it moved up his body until he felt a heavy comfort on his chest, felt his eyes give in to the weight of it. He dreamed of slaves and Indians, of the water on Caddo Lake, moss-choked cypress trees crowding him on all sides. He thought he saw Levi King behind this one; no, that one. The boy was hiding. He just had to catch him. He just had to move faster. But the water was heavy. His clothes were soaked through as he tried to navigate the swamp, the toes of his boots scraping the lake bed. And then he was back in the bayou in Lark, Randie standing on the shore watching him. She was leaning against a post oak tree, wearing that white coat and nothing else. Darren averted his eyes; even in the dream, he seemed to know he’d conjured her half naked, and he felt shame, hot and pink as his insides, flush through his entire body.
He woke up hard.
It confused him almost as much as the realization that something had woken him—a crash coming from somewhere inside the room. He sat up and felt a cold dread, the hairs on the back of his neck standing up as straight as a tiny army at attention. He saw the gun first, gripped in the hand of a white woman wearing a ruffled white dress buttoned to her throat, her eyes as black as pellets of buckshot. He was so sleep-deprived that at first he thought it was Rosemary King pointing the small pistol at him. A derringer. That’s what it was. The story of Penelope Deschamps popped in his mind just as he turned on the bedside lamp and the woman vanished. He was still dreaming, wasn’t he? He had to be.
He heard a faint thud overhead, followed by a woman’s muffled voice. Darren realized now the noise that had woken him was coming from the room above his. He heard what he imagined were two bodies in a tussle and what sounded like furniture being pushed against walls, and then everything went quiet save for his own rapid breath. And then a woman’s voice, raised in pitch: Wait, he thought he heard her say. Unless it was Rape.
He grabbed his gun and ran into the hallway outside his room.
His feet were bare and the carpet was rougher than it looked. The needle above the single hotel elevator put its car on the second floor, and Darren didn’t imagine the woman who was in the room above his had time for him to wait for it. He opened a door onto an unadorned and vaguely foul-smelling stairwell. It stank of rotting flowers and urine, though neither was in evidence. The second story of the hotel had an open floor plan; it was essentially a gallery that looked down over the first-floor parlor, the lobby’s enormous crystal and brass chandelier at eye level from where Darren was standing now; it threw dagger-like prisms of color
on the door to the room that was directly above his, room 207. He banged on the door, then knocked into it with his shoulder to test the sturdiness of it, wondering could he break the lock. But for all the dated elegance of the Cardinal Hotel, the lock was part of a modern key-card system; the door didn’t budge, nor did anyone open it when Darren said, “Police!” He pressed an ear to the door but heard only a soft silence that felt more ominous than the commotion that had woken him earlier. “Everything okay in there?”
The door to the adjacent room opened and out stepped a man in his sixties. He was wearing a white hotel bathrobe, his belly wrapped as tight as a Christmas ham in butcher’s twine. He had the thick hair of a teenager, and without the pomade in it, Darren almost didn’t recognize him. But when the man pushed a lock of it from his face, Darren blinked, and it came back to him at once: it was the man who’d escorted the brunette woman into the hotel earlier this evening. He remembered thinking that they’d been coming from Rosemary King’s place and that they’d been drinking. The man looked stone sober now. A bemused expression on his face, he stared at Darren, who realized he was wearing only his boxers. “Well, if you don’t look a sight,” the man said.
“Heard trouble in your neighbor’s room.”
“Don’t see how. There’s nobody in there.”
“How do you know that, sir?”
“I always rent the rooms on both sides of me when I travel. Else what the hell am I working this hard for, right?” He gave Darren a faint smile. He was ruddy . . . or flushed. His lips were plump and cherry red, even though his skin was spotted with patches where melanin had fled his face, like ghost freckles on his skin. “I don’t sleep too good, and people play their TVs too damn loud.”
“I’d like to search the room,” Darren said, indicating 207. “Both, actually.”
In the end he searched all three of the rooms rented to the man and found nothing. No woman in distress, no sign of a struggle, nothing out of the ordinary except for a pair of pink sponge curlers resting on the nightstand by the bed the man had been sleeping in when Darren’s “banging and shouting” had woken him. He took the loose lock of hair in front—a good three inches longer than the rest of his hair—divided it into two sections, wound each one around a pink foam roller, then snapped each roller into place. Darren, half naked, watched with utter bafflement the careful work the man made of it and wondered vaguely why, if he’d been asleep, he was just now putting up his hair for the night. “And you didn’t hear anything?” he asked. “No commotion in any of the rooms?”
