Heaven, My Home

by Attica Locke

  “Can I ask you something?” Darren said, feeling awkward on his feet, his height making him seem freakish and too removed from the human beings around him. He lowered himself near her stool, crouching on his sore legs. “Who is Monica Maldonado and why was she working for your father?”

  “Who?”

  “Does this have something to do with the sale of Hopetown?”

  “There is no sale.”

  “What do you mean?” Darren asked. “Your father said this whole thing was your idea.”

  Behind him, he thought he heard a hmph cut through Margaret’s praying.

  “I mean,” Erika said, “he hasn’t signed the papers. I found the whole lot of them sitting on top of him and Mama’s chest of drawers. I don’t know what’s going on, but he’s waffling, or he’s changed his mind . . . ” Her voice faded as she turned back to look at her father in the bed. Leroy’s eyelids fluttered at the same time that the spasms in his body found a softer rhythm. “Oh, Daddy,” she said.

  She took a towel from the bedside table, dipped it into a plastic cup of water, then used it to gently moisten her father’s dry mouth. “Either way, he’s not staying here after this. I don’t care what happens out there. I’m not risking his life on some place that hasn’t been a real town, a real community, in fifty, sixty years. Hopetown is a memory, an idea that’s long past its time.”

  Now there was a cluck of the tongue from Margaret, who was clearly listening to every word. Erika, who’d had enough, stood and turned to face the elderly woman, pointing a finger in her direction. “He would have been gone years ago if it weren’t for you. As soon as Lester’s awful family moved in and took over, he would have left Hopetown if he weren’t trying to protect you.”

  Margaret opened her eyes. “Your father is an honorable man.”

  “My father is an old fool who lost control of our ancestors’ land.”

  “Your ancestors?” Margaret said, a curl of amusement in her eyes. “You understand so little of your own history, my girl. Between my ancestors and yours, the debt of gratitude goes both ways. Your father understands that.”

  At that moment, Leroy’s eyes popped open and he sat straight up in bed, his face twisted in either pain or terror over something he was seeing in his mind. He threw off the covers and yanked the IV from his arm while Erika screamed, “Daddy!” He tried to stand up but his legs immediately buckled beneath him; Darren swooped in and kept him from collapsing onto the cold floor. He could feel the heat coming off the old man, his skin as tight and hot as one of the Goodfellows’ drums left out in the sun. Leroy Page grabbed Darren by his upper arms, whether to steady himself or move the Ranger out of the way, it was hard to tell. His eyes were wide and red, and he was looking with desperation over Darren’s shoulder toward the door.

  “I’ve got to go, boy,” Mr. Page said. “I can’t stay here. It’s things I got to do out there. You’ve got to help me get out of here, before it’s too late.”

  Mr. Page’s roommate must have rung for help because the door suddenly burst open and two nurses ran in; they were followed by an orderly who carefully but forcefully put Mr. Page back in bed and then stood over him as one of the nurses replaced the IV. By now, Erika was crying, saying, “I told you he’s not okay. He’s not making any sense. That’s the second time he’s tried to leave.”

  Leroy was back to shaking in his bed.

  Erika laid her arm across her father’s body again.

  But it wasn’t until the hospital staff had left that Leroy’s body stilled. He looked at his daughter, then at Margaret, a kind of peace coming into his eyes so that he almost seemed lucid. Darren stepped forward, gently placed a friendly hand on the man’s leg, and asked, “Did you see who shot you, sir?”

  “Rosemary,” he said. But he was not looking at Darren, did not appear to have heard his question at all. “Rosemary could stop this anytime she wants to.”

  “Stop what, Daddy?”

  Then he looked at Darren directly. “You can’t trust them.”

  “Who?” Darren asked.

  “None of ’em,” the old man barked, spittle boomeranging from the corners of his mouth and back again. “There is no redemption, there is no future free from their past sins. You give ’em an inch, they’ll take a town.”

  Darren couldn’t tell if the distorted aphorism was a result of Leroy’s fevered brain misfiring or if there was something he was trying to tell Darren. “Mr. Page, who is Monica Maldonado? The lawyer? You had her business card.”

  Before he could answer, the door to the hospital room opened again, this time with enough force that Margaret Goodfellow gasped and dropped the prayer book that Darren hadn’t realized she’d been holding. He saw Erika stand, saw something electric run through her whole body, her hands curling into two tight fists, before he turned and saw two men in dark suits enter the room with several Marion County Sheriff’s deputies behind them. Greg huddled by the door, not making eye contact with Darren, as he watched one of the men in suits—a federal agent, Darren now understood—inform Mr. Leroy Edwin Page that he was under arrest for the murder of Levi King. As they handcuffed the man to his hospital bed, Erika collapsed over his body. “What is it, Kiki?” Leroy said, dazed. “What’s going on?” The agents and deputies crowded around the accused’s bed, so that Darren was completely squeezed out of the way. He ended up against the back wall near Margaret, the murmur of her renewed praying a hum of refuge amid the clink of handcuffs, Erika’s weeping, Leroy’s moans of confusion, the angry beep of the cardiac monitor as his frantic heartbeat lit up the room like a firework.

  18.

  IN THE hallway, Darren nearly grabbed Greg by the collar and pulled him to the farthest nurses’ station, out of earshot of the other agents. They’d directed the deputies to watch Leroy on rotating shifts. The two agents were on their cell phones right outside his door. Leroy’s roommate was in the hall asking anyone who would listen for a different room. Darren could not exactly name what he was feeling. Betrayal? But by whom? By Greg, for arresting Mr. Page? Or by the old man for maybe, just maybe, being guilty?

  “We found them in the search,” Greg said. “Several articles of the boy’s clothing, including Levi’s underwear.”

  Darren winced at the image. “And you found the kid’s blood, hair, something? Did some kind of testing to prove that they’re his?” he asked, knowing that even the FBI couldn’t have turned around a DNA test that fast. It felt rushed, this arrest, and Darren wondered if Greg might be trying to get as much out of the headlines as he would out of a conviction. Maybe that had been his plan all along. Show the incoming Trump Justice Department that the FBI meant business when it came to crimes against the white heartland and then hope they forgot about it once they were trying to find the light switches in their new offices. “You don’t even have a body.”

  “We’re working on it,” Greg said. “But right now we’ve got Page’s own statement that he was the last one to see the boy alive, and we’ve got the boy’s mother and sister making a positive ID on the clothing.” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his suit pants, which made his shoulders scrunch up toward his ears, made him appear self-conscious and unsure of his standing with Darren. “We weren’t aiming to make it come out this way. We weren’t, D.”

  “Come on,” Darren said. “I know you better than that.”

  Greg grew silent for a moment. “Look, about last night—”

  Darren stopped him before he had to hear his wife’s name come out of Greg’s mouth. And, anyway, the thought of Lisa gave him an idea.

  “Chafee, Humboldt, and Greene.”

  “Never heard of them,” Lisa said.

  “They’re out of Alexandria, Virginia, no other offices that I could find.”

  His wife sighed. He’d caught her in the hallway of the civil courthouse in Houston and nearly everything around her echoed through the phone. The click of high heels, the ding of an arriving elevator, the voices of court staff and attorneys, and the weight
of Lisa’s annoyance about this phone call. But some part of Darren couldn’t help noting that she was exactly where she’d said she would be this morning, that maybe her abrupt departure last night hadn’t been a lie.

  “What is this about, Darren?”

  “It has to do with this case,” he said. “Kind of.”

  “I have to be back in court in like ten minutes.”

  “I just want to know what kind of business they’re in, the firm’s bread and butter. I had a hard time finding anything concrete online. And away from my Lexis account, I’m kind of stuck trying to understand what they do.”

  “So I’m your secretary now?” There was something playful in her tone, a reach toward a repair of whatever had been broken and weird between them last night. “Give me a second,” she said, and he pictured her sitting down on a bench in the hallway. “Actually, let me look into it, and I’ll call you right back.”

  Darren was in the Marion County Hospital parking lot, leaning against his truck. The air was as cool as it had been since he’d arrived in Jefferson, but still strangely damp and humid, an affront to the large bells and red and green ribbon the hospital had affixed to the light fixtures in the parking lot. They were only a few weeks out from Christmas now, a time when he would normally be in Camilla. But nothing about Marion County said home to him. It was zydeco where he wanted blues. It was boudin where he wanted hot links. It was swampy cypress trees where he wanted pines, which always made him think of the holidays at home, even in the dead of summer. He was ready to get out of this county, but something had rooted his boots in place, some bits in this story that didn’t add up, that played like Russian nesting dolls—open one mystery and find another and another and another and another.

  He was thinking of the fact that he’d yet to buy Lisa a Christmas present, which allowed his mind to wander back to last night, to feelings he’d easily avoided by calling Randie Winston halfway around the world. What was that between Lisa and Greg? They were his oldest friends; they’d known one another since high school. There was no way he would have missed something going on between the two of them, would he? The evidence was light and circumstantial, but damn if it wasn’t compelling. The look on Greg’s face when he grabbed Lisa’s arm. The want there. Not for sex so much as for forgiveness. Of what, Darren didn’t know.

  When she called back, he picked up on the first ring. He fought an urge to demand to know what she and Greg had been talking about when he’d walked out of the steak house last night. Instead, he listened to his wife whispering from where she sat in the Harris County Civil Courthouse, as if even mentioning another firm’s business was breaking some kind of attorney-client privilege. “Chafee, Humboldt, and Greene is, as you said, your standard civil law practice, nearly identical to my firm. Contract law, tort litigation, some IP lawsuits. But Brendan Chafee, before becoming a founding partner, was a DC lobbyist, so I can only imagine that some part of that business spilled over into the current firm’s work, even if it’s not being advertised.”

  “Like what?”

  “People who need shit from the government probably,” she said, breathing more heavily. He imagined her standing and gathering her things. “Look, Darren, I really, truly have to get into Caselli’s courtroom right now.”

  “What about nonprofit work? Trying to get a historical landmark set up?”

  “Shit like that usually happens at the state level. Chafee’s work was federal all the way, dealing with the Treasury, HUD, Department of the Interior.” She paused here, thinking, hmming under her breath. “That could be it, where you would go to protect a federal site. But I don’t know about a firm like Chafee, Humboldt working for a nonprofit. You’re talking about Texas?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know, Darren, but really, I have to go.”

  “Thanks, Lisa,” he said.

  She stayed on the phone long enough to say, with what he took for soft sincerity, “You’re welcome,” adding with a lilt of uncertainty, “We’ll talk later, right?”

  “Lisa,” he started, wanting to reassure her or himself of something.

  But by then she had already hung up.

  Since he had nothing else to go on, he tried to find a phone number or an address for the Marion County Texas Historical Society, but nothing came up on either Google or Bing, which for a small-town nonprofit didn’t surprise him much. He slid his phone into the pocket of his slacks and walked back through the hospital’s sliding doors, feeling the rush of disinfectant-scented air-conditioning as he went hunting for a county phone book. He’d found them to be more accurate than anything online. For small-town business folks, it was still a point of pride to be listed in print; it made you legitimate in a way that a computer—which not everyone had access to—just couldn’t.

  Beyond the reception area was a row of pay phones, each partitioned by finger-smudged panels and each with a small cubby underneath that was filled with various items: gum wrappers, smashed paper cups that were flaking curls of wax, and, in one, a tiny plastic doll the size of Darren’s pinkie. Only the last phone “booth” held a Marion County phone directory. Darren opened the business listings starting with the letter M. He ran his long fingers down the names, searching through the businesses twice before accepting that it wasn’t there. No listing for the historical society. But his finger stopped on the spot just above where Marion County Texas Historical Society should have been. He actually smiled at the familiar name, at the jaunty moniker the man had chosen for his enterprise: MARCUS ALDRICH’S TRUTH AND TREASURES. His uncle Clayton’s old college friend with a PhD in history was still, as Clayton would say, messing around in an old, dead town, wasting his talent and time.

  Maybe not, Darren thought.

  The storefront was on East Austin Street, past the Jefferson General Store, which sold everything from moonshine jelly to locally made maple syrup to cowboy-boot galoshes to dixie-flag bikinis; it was on the other side of the railroad tracks, in the middle of a row of antiques shops that had Lone Star flags flying out front and rusted neon soda signs stacked near their front doors, which were outlined in Christmas lights seemingly blinking in time to the rhythm of the Oak Ridge Boys’ “Because of Him” on speakers inside each store.

  Marcus’s shop was not so festively adorned.

  He was early with a Kwanzaa kinara in the front window, each red, black, and green candle dry and dusty, as they’d certainly been sitting out since last December, and there were a few yellowing photos tacked to the windows, paintings of the lake and drawings of Caddo Indians, plus early photographic images of slaves, a group gathered in front of a small cabin, their skin scarred, bones gnarled at their joints, but other than that, the storefront and the store itself appeared nearly empty. Darren removed his hat to press his face against the window. Inside, he saw an open cardboard box of books, a table with a calculator, pad, and pencil, but no register, no proprietor, no sign of life at all.

  But the door was unlocked.

  It smelled of mothballs and incense when Darren stepped inside. There was an air-conditioning unit shaking in one of the windows near the back of the store, though the word store seemed not so much to describe Marcus Aldrich’s Truth and Treasures as openly mock it. There were more photographs inside, laid out on the long table in no discernible order. They were each encased in a plastic sleeve with a tiny colored sticker in the corner, circles of green, yellow, blue. Darren ran his fingers through the stack of pictures like he was splaying out cards in a saloon. His eyes stopped on a queen: a woman in a daguerreotype was wearing a familiar ruffled white dress, cinched as tight at the waist as it was at her throat, so it appeared these body parts measured the same. He saw black eyes, felt, when he looked at her tight-lipped smile, the same bolt of panic he had when she’d stood over his bed. Although without a derringer in her hand, this was the same woman. A ghost or a dream, who knew, though he couldn’t bring himself to believe the former.

  “The yellows are fifty,” a voice said.

/>   Darren looked up and recognized Marcus at once. His hair was seasoned with considerably more salt than pepper these days, but he still favored wrinkled Hawaiian shirts, Wranglers, and boots worn so thin, Darren could count his toes through the honey-colored leather. He had colorful strips of kente tied around his wrists like bracelets, and he had a pencil tucked for easy access in the tight curls of his Afro. He nodded toward the photo in Darren’s hand, which did in fact have a yellow sticker, and said again, “Those go for fifty.”

  “Dollars?” Darren said, voice cracking at the idea of it.

  “Cents,” Marcus clarified. “Most people come in here for the book.”

  He motioned Darren toward a clearly self-published tome with a red cover. The title was in black and green letters. TRUTH AND TREASURES: THE REAL JEFFERSON, TEXAS, BY MARCUS L. ALDRICH, PHD. Besides the surplus stock in the box, there were a few copies on the table next to the photo collection. Darren picked one up, handed it across the table to Marcus, and then added, “I’ll take this too.” He lifted the picture of the ghost. “Can’t beat fifty cents,” he said, trying to make light of the situation, his reason for purchasing a photo of an antebellum white woman. Marcus nodded, pausing to take in Darren’s badge and hat before ringing up the sale. This was an all-cash type place, and as Darren reached for his wallet to pay, Marcus stared at his face, trying to place him.

  Playfully, Darren said, “Maybe you could sign it to my uncle Clayton.”

  Marcus broke out into a grin so wide that Darren could see his tobacco-stained teeth, the halo of brown in his smile. “I thought that was you, Darren.”

  He came from around the table and gave Darren a hug, chuckling at the improbability of the whole thing, running into him here in Jefferson. “Last I saw you, you was tagging along when Clayton helped me move out of my ex-wife’s place.”