Trail of Echoes

by Rachel Howzell Hall

  I gave a curt nod, then turned my attention to the framed photographs hanging on the walls. These pictures captured Chanita, Regina, and Alberta in different versions of Fabulous. But there were also shots of Malibu’s foggy seaside, downtown Los Angeles nightscapes, and an older woman’s gnarled hands. Pictures a collector would professionally mat and hang.

  “Ain’t much changed since y’all left,” Alberta said. “Remember Michi, the little Japanese lady who’d trim the bushes up front like bonsai trees? She still in nine. And Miss Candy from up front? She dead, but Lamar and Quinton still livin’ there. How’s your momma doin’?”

  “Good,” I said.

  “Still in LA?”

  “Yes, not far from the Ladera Ralphs.”

  Alberta laughed. “She didn’t like me much back then. But we all had our struggles. Tell her I say hi.” She returned to us with two glasses of grape soda. “Nita took those pictures,” she said, handing me a glass. “That girl got a good eye, don’t she?”

  “She certainly did.” I bristled. Shit. Just used past tense. I peered at the shot of a homeless man and his mutt walking past a parked Bentley. Sorrow set in—these photographs, just like the autopsy picture, made my stomach ache.

  “Wanna see her awards?” Another woman’s voice.

  She stood in the doorway separating the living room from the bedrooms. She looked close to vanishing in her red and black kimono. Her head had also shrunk, and the red scarf around her hair shadowed her expressionless, blemished face. She hadn’t slept since forever—the bags beneath her eyes testified to snatches of sleep and crying when she wasn’t sleeping.

  I knew that look—Mom had worn the same expression for ten years.

  And this woman had to be Chanita’s mother.

  I held out my hand. “Hi, Ms. Drummond. I’m Detective Norton—”

  “She used to live over in apartment seven,” Alberta shared. “You probably too young to remember. But the news story last June—remember they found them bones down in the plaza? That was Detective Norton’s sister.”

  Regina sighed, then retreated down the hallway.

  Colin and I excused ourselves from Alberta, taking the glasses of soda with us.

  Photographs lined the hallway walls: stray dogs, homeless men, prideful gang-bangers …

  Regina stood at a bedroom’s doorway.

  “We have news about your daughter,” I said.

  She nodded. “In here.”

  Chanita’s fuchsia and white comforter and matching curtains reminded me of my own teenage bedroom. Instead of Michael Jackson and LL Cool J posters on the walls, though, Chanita had taped-up posters of Bruno Mars and Beyoncé. A white dresser held fruit-scented body sprays and lotions, fingernail polishes, rolls of film, and a small television set. Countless ribbons, trophies, and certificates crowded the mirror, a small bookcase, and a desk.

  Regina sat at the foot of the bed, then met my eyes. “Tell me.”

  Dry-mouthed, I opened my binder to that picture of Chanita taken by Big Reuben. “Yesterday, we found a girl…” My throat closed as I held out the picture. “Is this your daughter? Is this Chanita?”

  Regina didn’t take the picture. Her eyes dipped once to the image there, then jumped back up to meet mine. “She dead?”

  I said, “Yes.”

  Her nostrils flared. “Soon as the sun set and rose on Saturday, I knew … And then the news yesterday, saying that y’all…” She shuddered and gasped and crumpled into a ball.

  Out in the hallway, Alberta wept and called on Jesus.

  Colin sat next to Regina on the bed. I perched in the chair at the desk.

  And we sat like that until the billowing curtains lay flat against the window.

  Alberta entered the room and handed her daughter a box of tissues.

  Regina plucked several sheets from the box, then wiped her face. Then, she sobbed into her hands again.

  Colin moved so that Alberta could sit next to her daughter and hold her.

  “We need to ask a few questions,” I said. “We need to know what happened that day, okay? I know this is hard, but it’s very important.”

  Regina took several deep breaths, hiccupping as she exhaled. “Uh huh.”

  Alberta took her daughter’s hand and kissed it.

  Regina wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “On Friday, my mom went to get Nita from school. Nita gets out late cuz she had newspaper—she’s one of the photographers.”

  “And where did she go to school?” Colin asked.

  “Madison.”

  My pulse jumped—I was a Madison alum. But then so was almost every kid who lived in this area.

  “And where were you?” Colin asked Regina.

  The woman scratched her cheek, then cleared her throat. “I had an appointment.”

  We waited for the rest of the explanation.

  Regina sat there, though, scratching her cheek, staring at the carpet.

  “I waited in the car for twenty minutes,” Alberta said, ending the silence. “Then, I went to the classroom. Mr. Bishop—he’s over the newspaper—he was getting ready to leave. He said that Nita didn’t come to newspaper, which was odd cuz she went to school.”

  “So Mom called Nita’s cell phone,” Regina said, finding her voice again. “No answer. Mom called me and told me that Nita wasn’t at school, that she didn’t know where she was. I flipped the hell out cuz that didn’t make no sense. I was like, What you mean, she ain’t there?”

  “I drove over to the mall,” Alberta recalled, “and walked around Walmart cuz that’s where she gets her pictures printed. But she wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere.”

  “When I got home,” Regina continued, “I started looking around the streets. I asked everybody: ‘Did y’all see Nita? Y’all talk to Nita today?’ Nobody knew nothing.”

  “And I didn’t believe that,” Alberta said with an angry shake of her head. “Not for one second. Folks just don’t up and…” She choked and clutched her neck. “After talking with some of her friends and with Mr. Bishop…” She shook her head and gazed at the carpet. “Nobody had seen her since lunchtime.”

  “Gone since lunch and nobody noticed?” Colin gawked at me. What the hell?

  “When did you call the police?” I asked.

  “Around eight thirty Friday night,” Alberta whispered.

  I did the math: 12:30 to 8:30. You could drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas and back. In eight hours, you could fly from Los Angeles to Miami. Forty percent of children abducted were killed before we were even called. Within twenty-four hours, ninety percent of those abducted kids were dead. Chanita missing for eight hours? Too much time.

  “The cops who took the report didn’t seem worried,” Regina said. “They thought she was probably off with some boy doing who knows what. I knew she wasn’t cuz Nita not that type. But this time I hoped that they was right. I hoped she had just run away, that she just wanted out of this place for a little bit. At that point, I didn’t care. I just wanted her to come home.” She sank into her mother’s arms again and wept.

  And we waited.

  Regina wiped her wet eyes on her robe’s sleeve, then smiled to herself. “Taking pictures was gonna get her outta here. Back when she was little, I used to give her those cheap little throwaway cameras and she’d run around, snapping everything, telling us to say ‘cheese.’ One day, I took one of the cameras to Walmart to be developed. And I was saying to myself, Why am I throwing my money away? This girl probably took pictures of fingers and feet.”

  She closed her eyes as she remembered. “She took pictures of her dolls, of my mom, of me. But they were good pictures. Really good. I was like, Wow, my baby took these? I got ’em somewhere…” She started to stand, but sunk back to the bed.

  “When was the last time you saw Chanita?” I asked.

  “I dropped her off at school like I do every morning,” Regina recalled. “She was wearing these new jeans she had begged me to buy. They was those low-cut ones. You know, the on
es that show your panties whenever you bend over? I thought they was too sexy for a thirteen-year-old, but all the other girls was wearin’ them, and she kept begging me and begging me to buy them, and so I gave in.”

  She grimaced and glared at the closet, the place that had provided sanctuary for those low-rise jeans. “I seen how the boys looked at her. They used to always say, Ooh girl, you got some pretty eyes. And … He probably saw her in them, and she was already curvy, more of a woman at thirteen than I was at thirteen. Them jeans called too much attention to her body.”

  “Whatever she wore,” Colin whispered, “didn’t give anyone the right to hurt her.”

  Regina squeezed the bridge of her nose. “I just wanna wake up from this.”

  “Tell me about the days before she disappeared,” I said. “Was everything okay? Did you two hang out, argue…?”

  Regina chewed her bottom lip as her eyes turned hard. “I had been … away, and I was just gettin’ back into everything, so…”

  I pulled the chair closer to Regina. “Did Chanita have a phone?”

  Regina nodded. “One of those cheap little LG phones.”

  “Did you have a family locater on it?” Colin asked, scribbling into his memo pad.

  She frowned. “Huh? We can’t afford that shit.”

  Colin and I looked at each other. Then I touched Regina’s wrist. “We’re asking—”

  “I don’t need some dumb electronic whatever now,” she spat. “Unless it’s gon’ bring her back to life or something.”

  “What about an e-mail account?” I asked.

  “Chanita Lords at Gmail dot com,” she said. “But she only used it for this online tutoring academy and for YouTube.”

  Thinking about those needle injection marks and the broken foot, I asked, “Was Chanita diabetic? Any recent injuries?”

  “Nah,” Regina said. “She was healthy.” She turned to her mother.

  Alberta nodded. “She was fit as a fiddle.”

  “Do you have any idea who would harm her?” Colin asked.

  Regina’s leg jiggled up and down. “I tried to keep Nita away from Ontrel Shaw’s nasty ass. He live over in Hillside Manor. Anyway, I threatened her. Told her to stay away from him cuz he was too old for her. He ain’t going nowhere even if you gave him a map and a bus pass. I told her that I was gonna take her camera, that I was gonna send her to Saint Louis to live with her other grandma. Nothing worked. It was the only thing she disobeyed me about.”

  Regina covered her mouth as her eyebrows crumpled. “I just didn’t want her to get pregnant. I kept begging her to wait, to just hold off. She told me that she and Ontrel wasn’t interested in having sex.” She rolled her eyes. “Come on now. What grown man you know ain’t interested in sex?”

  I cocked an eyebrow. “Ain’t no grown man I know.”

  “If she got pregnant,” Regina said, “I was goin’ straight to the police.” She took a shaky deep breath and pushed it out. “One time, I found condoms in her backpack. If she wasn’t havin’ sex, why she got condoms then? Ontrel better hope y’all don’t find none of his DNA on her.”

  “You shouldn’t hope that, either,” Colin said. Flushed, a vein pulsed in his neck.

  “Excuse me?” Regina tilted her head.

  I tossed my partner a glare, then said, “Let’s—”

  “You don’t know a damned thing about me,” Regina spat at Colin.

  I held up a hand. “Let’s get back to what’s real, right now,” I said, shooting one last glare at Colin. “Back to identifying anyone who could hurt Chanita.”

  Colin gave a “whatever” shrug, then turned away to look at pictures on Chanita’s desk.

  “Other than Ontrel,” Regina said with a new edge in her voice, “people think Eighteenth Street had something to do with it. And then there’s the Mexican dude down in apartment one. The cops asked him some questions when Nita first disappeared. His name’s Raul Moriaga.”

  Ontrel Shaw had also mentioned Moriaga.

  “You know if he’s been in trouble before?” I asked, writing in my binder.

  “He been to jail for molesting kids,” Alberta said. “I’d catch him staring at Nita.”

  Colin and I exchanged looks.

  “What about any men in Chanita’s life that were around?” I asked.

  Regina crossed her arms. “Like what kind of men?”

  “Like boyfriends of yours?”

  “What about them?” Regina spat.

  “Were they around a lot, and were they around Chanita at all?”

  She crossed her legs. “I don’t know what you asking. They came over sometimes. They knew who she is.”

  “They?” Colin asked, pen paused on the pad. “How many—?”

  “Your last relationship was when?” I interrupted.

  Regina squinted at me. “I just broke up with somebody, and he moved out a month ago.”

  “He lived here?” Colin asked. “With your daughter?”

  Regina scowled. “Why you got a problem with me? Why you talkin’ to me like I’m the one who killed her?”

  I touched Regina’s clenched fist. “I’m gonna need the names of your last ex as well as any other ex-boyfriends who knew Chanita. We want to talk to everyone, because right now we don’t know who could’ve done this.”

  She pulled her glare from Colin to gape at me. “I didn’t…” Her eyes misted with tears as she tugged at the kimono’s belt. “Didn’t have to worry about Nita. Other than hanging around Ontrel, she stayed out of trouble. She was nerdy. That’s why them girls that hang out around here kept jumpin’ her. For being a nerd the first time, and then they jumped her again cuz ShaQuan—the one who lives in this complex—she wants to be with Ontrel. They broke her arm, and some other bones I ain’t never heard of, over a thug.”

  “Is Nita’s dad around?” Colin asked.

  “He’s away,” Alberta said.

  “Away where?” I asked.

  Regina shrugged, then looked toward the window.

  “You know how that can be,” Alberta said to me. “They here. They not here. Ain’t nobody’s fault. It just … is.”

  Colin sighed. “Any male relatives—?”

  “Why y’all keep blamin’ the victim?” Alberta shouted.

  “We need to know everything,” I said. “Feelings be damned. If you want us to find out who killed her—”

  “Everybody in jail, okay?” Regina snarled. “Satisfied? We hood rats. Is that what you wanna hear, Miss Detective Who Made It Out?”

  Colin placed his hands on his hips. “Look—”

  I gave him a slight headshake. Let’s not go there.

  Regina glared at me and pointed at Colin. “He needs to get the fuck outta my house. Matter of fact, you also can get the fuck—”

  “Reggie,” Alberta said. “They here to help.”

  Regina stood, hands on her hips. “Let’s see how your white ass do out there without your ghetto tour guide.”

  Alberta shushed her daughter. “Relax, now. None of this is helping Nita.” To Colin, she said, “She’s just … just…”

  Colin blinked at me—I nodded. Relax. He sighed, then flipped a page in his notepad.

  “This newspaper teacher, Mr. Bishop,” I said. “What’s his relationship with Nita?”

  “He’s very involved,” Alberta said. “He’s also her counselor, and so he pays a lot of attention to her. I think she had a crush on him.” She allowed herself to smile.

  “Did that worry you?” I asked as I wrote ‘MR. BISHOP’ in my notes.

  Regina shrugged. “That’s normal, ain’t it? I mean, he’s cute, smart, about somethin’. The only positive man in her life. I’d be worried if she didn’t like him.”

  “Were they together a lot?” I asked.

  “He drove her to stuff,” Regina explained. “Photo contests, art exhibits … He believed in her more than anybody else did at that school. And he tried to get those girls suspended for all that they did to her.” She hid her face behin
d her hands. “I miss her so much. It’s like a giant piece of me is just gone. I’d do anything just to have her back with me and…” Regina gasped, then bent over to sob into her lap.

  “It’s okay, Reggie,” Alberta said, patting her daughter’s back. “Nita ain’t in no more pain. She takin’ pictures of the angels now.”

  “I need to search her room,” I whispered, search warrant in my hand. “Just to see if there’s anything that will tell us if she went to meet someone or—”

  Regina stared at the court order. “Do I have to stay here?”

  “No. I’ll also need Nita’s phone number to see who she called.”

  Alberta rambled off her granddaughter’s phone number.

  “It’s Moriaga,” Regina announced. “He shouldn’t even be around here. Why y’all even let him out of jail? He’s a predator.” She shuffled to the door, but stopped in her step. “Y’all see us and only look at the outside. They poor, so we don’t need to do nothing. Y’all thought she hung out and smoked weed and slept with bangers like Ontrel and that’s all she was about. But we ain’t all the same up in here.”

  Regina peered at me with granite eyes, determined to make me understand, to make me remember. “Chanita watched Big Bang Theory and took pictures and she was on the honor roll. Sometimes, she made me get up at the crack of dawn so we could see the sunrise. She was my Nita.” She swallowed and crumpled the search warrant into a ball. “And she was better than what I would’ve ever been.”

  * * *

  Colin and I found nothing strange in those drawers. No inappropriate pictures or diaries or love letters. Just lots of photos. Still, we shot pictures and then confiscated a yearbook, three birthday cards, and a notebook.

  “Ready?” Colin held seven evidence bags filled with Chanita’s things.

  I glanced around the room one last time. That. I took a picture with my phone, then walked to the window. Above the bed’s headboard hung a framed photograph: a vine of dusty-purple, star-shaped flowers. I lifted the frame from its hook.

  “Why do you wanna take that?” Colin asked.

  I stared at those flowers—yellow beaks, bent-back petals—until spots swirled before me. Finally, I shrugged.