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  It’s Dot, his elderly wife, to whom Jay speaks about the case, and one of her grandkids, a dentist in Clear Lake who demands updates on a monthly basis.

  Still, the Cole case was a turning point for Jay.

  It was only a month after the verdict that Jay took a call from a local official in Trinity County, not even ten miles from the town where Jay was born. The woman spoke so softly it seemed she was whispering into the telephone. A lumber company out of Diboll, she said, was driving across the county line and dumping wood waste in a makeshift and wholly illegal landfill just outside the town of Groveton. The arsenic the company used to pressure-wash and treat the wood was leaching into the soil, seeping into the groundwater. There were calls coming in from local residents. One woman had twelve dead chickens on her hands. Another swore she could smell death in her ice water. Jay had driven up Highway 59 that afternoon, stopping in Diboll first, and then tracing the back route he imagined the lumber mill was using. Sure enough, just off Farm Road 355, within plain view of a neighborhood of chain-link fences and chicken coops, home to a majority of Groveton’s black population, Jay was able to take pictures of a massive pile of rust-colored, rotting wood chips and pulp, steaming poison after a cold winter rain. Two days later, he met with Groveton’s beleaguered mayor and walked out as the city’s official counsel in the matter of City of Groveton v. Sullivan Lumber Co. A week after that, he filed the papers at the courthouse in Lufkin, stopping on his way to have a tense lunch of chicken salad and boiled peanuts with his mother at his childhood home in Nigton, the two avoiding so many topics that they’d hardly said anything at all.

  There were many others after that–DDT residue found in a neighborhood of trailers and mobile homes near a plant in Nacogdoches; a hazardous waste site contaminating the well water in the town of Douglass; a chemical plant illegally dumping its runoff in a Latino neighborhood in Corpus Christi–the out-of-court settlements growing in proportion to his reputation.

  The Cole deal is still his biggest payout to date, money he has yet to see.

  He sends Thomas Cole a Christmas card every year, and he waits.

  He’s a more patient man now, more measured and wise, he hopes, and less paranoid than his younger self, less quick to see the whole world as a personal attack on him, liars and spies at his back. There are no more pistols under his pillow, an argument his wife won years ago. Most days, he holds his head up for her, keeping a promise he made long ago: to get right in his mind, for her and for their kids, the two of them more beautiful than he feels he deserves.

  The radio station is still running a postgame analysis of the general election when Jay turns onto Westheimer, about a block from Lamar High School, pulling into the parking lot of the dry cleaner across the street. He lets his daughter walk the rest of the way on her own. KCOH is heated up this morning, taking calls in the run-up to Person to Person, its daytime talk show, Phil Donahue for black folks. There’s no shock about Clinton heading back to the White House, so today’s topic on 1430 AM is closer to home: the runoff next month between Axel Hathorne and Sandy Wolcott. The question: How the hell did Dallas get a black mayor before Houston? “It’s 1996, people,” the host, Mike Harris, says, before the station cuts to a wrap-up of the morning’s big news.

  The story of the missing girl has already played twice.

  By the seven-thirty segment, she has a name: Alicia Ann Nowell. Jay reaches for the volume. Ellie has her books in her lap. She reaches for the door handle but doesn’t move right away, pulled in by the story as well. According to the radio, the girl, a Houston native, did not come home Tuesday night. Early reports indicate she was last seen in the neighborhood of Pleasantville, at the corner of Ledwicke and Guinevere, a few miles from her home in Sunnyside. At the mention of Pleasantville, Ellie turns and looks at her dad. Jay is tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, his brow creasing deeply. The story ends with an emotional plea from the family for information. Jay can hardly make out the mother’s words, so choked and garbled are they with panic and tears. It’s already been two days. “My name is Maxine Robicheaux. Alicia Nowell is my daughter. Please, please, if you have seen my child, please call your local police station, tell somebody something, please.” The news reporter goes on to describe Alicia as eighteen and black. She was last seen in a long-sleeved T-shirt, blue. Her ears are triple pierced on both sides. “I have to go,” Ellie says, opening the car door.

  Jay turns off the radio, watching as she starts toward the school.

  She stops suddenly and runs back to the car, her hair springing loose from the collar of her jacket. She favors Evelyn, Bernie’s sister, more than her mother, but more than anyone else she looks like Jay’s sister, Penny, who lives in Dallas. Ellie is fairer than either of her parents, redbone they used to call it in the country. She has freckles across her nose and forehead, and her eyes are the very color of her aunt’s nickname, copper and full of fire when she laughs or sings, which she does when she thinks no one is listening. It’s Ben who is the spitting image of his mother, down to the dimple in his left cheek. Jay rolls down the passenger-side window so Ellie can lean in and tell him, “Ms. Hilliard wants to see you.”

  “Which one is that?”

  “The principal.”

  “What’s that about?”

  She shrugs and then waves, saying she’ll get a ride home with Lori’s mom, adding that Mrs. King said she could pick up Ben too. “Bye, Daddy.”

  “Elena,” he calls after her. But she’s already gone, swallowed up by the crowd of teenagers moving across the street. It’s mild outside, but bright and sunny. Across Westheimer Road, Jay can hear the snap of the halyard against the school’s metal flagpole. He traces his daughter’s movements as long as he can, but eventually loses sight of her in the crush of students, at least a dozen of them wearing nearly identical puffy Starter jackets, girls tucked inside their private cocoons, trapped somewhere between childhood and the coming chrysalis. Jay can still remember the day Ellie was born, can still remember holding Bernie’s father, Reverend Boykins, who wept openly in the hospital parking lot, Jay saving his own tears for the moment he brought his daughter home, a fall day like this one.

  Officers Young and McFee keep their three-thirty appointment, stopping by Jay’s office at the tail end of their shift. They’re day cops usually, seven to four. Tuesday night they’d been picking up overtime. By sunlight, McFee looks a little older than Jay originally thought, and she’s Latina, no matter the last name. She has her hair slicked back into the same tight little bun. In the entryway to Jay’s office, she hovers, barely filling half the door frame. She’s letting her partner take the lead. Young, to Jay’s dismay, hasn’t written down a single word. He’s holding a notepad and is clicking the top of his ink pen.

  “He was in the room where my files are kept,” Jay says. “Wouldn’t figure a kid like that to be interested in anything he couldn’t trade or pawn before the sun came up.”

  Young nods, a gesture more of appeasement than agreement. “But you said yourself that nothing was actually stolen from the property.”

  “The case files up there go back more than ten years,” Jay says. “It would take nearly that long to go through every photograph and sheet of paper to know if any of it is missing.” The phone on Jay’s desk rings. From down the hall, Eddie Mae hollers his name. Since her eldest grandson installed their phone system, she’s learned to forward calls to his office, but she won’t fool with the intercom, not when it’s just the two of them in the office half the time.

  “Mrs. Delyvan is on the phone for you.”

  Jay sighs.

  He has to take this call.

  “Did you see him take anything?”

  “Well, no.”

  “He have anything in his hands?”

  Looking back, Jay can see only one thing: the smile on the kid’s face, a split second before he leaped out the second-floor window. Of course he didn’t see if the kid had any stolen goods in his hands; he was looking for a g
un. “If you hadn’t walked out of here without doing a proper search, you might have actually found the kid upstairs, had a chance to pat him down yourself.”

  “One more time, Mr. Porter,” Young says, his thick jaw bricklike and unyielding. “There was no one upstairs. I checked the place myself.”

  “I didn’t see any sign of a suspect downstairs either,” McFee says.

  A suspect, Jay thinks, not the.

  Suddenly, the very existence of a perpetrator is under suspicion, as if Jay imagined the whole thing, or made it up, or maybe broke into the office himself, which for all he knows is what the cops are really thinking, the two of them on the verge of opening a separate investigation into a potential insurance scam. He resents the two cops for making him feel crazy, for making him feel that he can’t trust his own eyes.

  The phone on Jay’s desk rings again.

  “That’s the Delyvan woman, Jay!”

  “Look,” the cop says. “Officer McFee and I have no problem amending the initial report, Mr. Porter, adding in your description of the intruder and the bit about the misplaced glass.” He delivers that last part as if he were describing the plot of an Agatha Christie novel. This isn’t a murder mystery, he wants it known, just a simple case of breaking and entering, one of thirty or forty on a given night in the city of Houston, depending on the weather. “But I will also add words to support my opinion, based on ten years on the force, that I did not see evidence of an intruder in your place of business at the time my partner and I were present.”

  Jay holds up a finger, not the one he wants to, mind you, but a single index finger to indicate he needs to answer this ringing telephone.

  “Mrs. Delyvan,” he says, picking up the line.

  “Jay, this is Arlee calling.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Jay’s office is one of the smaller rooms in the house. It sits opposite the kitchen on the other side of the house, where, at least once a week, Eddie Mae has a pot of red beans on the stove. He can smell the pork fat and brown sugar from here, the smoky scent passing through two walls and filling every inch of the room. The window behind his desk he’s propped open with an ancient text on Texas civil statutes, borrowed from his library upstairs. It’s strikingly uncluttered for a lawyer’s office. But he hasn’t carried a full caseload since his wife died; he’s been turning away all new business and clearing out the old. His entire practice has come down to a single class action suit, Pleasantville v. ProFerma Labs, a case he kept because it was local, close to home, and close to his kids; he wouldn’t have to travel, and there would be no trial, that much he was sure of. Last year, when two explosions from ProFerma’s chemical plant threatened to burn one of Houston’s most storied neighborhoods to the ground, it was Jay Porter whom the residents of Pleasantville called, what should have been a slam dunk. Half the city had watched the smoky scene on their television sets, orange embers flying into folks’ backyards, lighting up roofs and wood-frame houses, and Jay was sure the case would never see the inside of a courtroom. ProFerma had every incentive to settle the matter quickly. But a year and a half later, they’re no closer to a deal. The company has yet to make a serious offer. Arlee Delyvan was the first to sign on as a plaintiff.

  She was one of “the original thirty-seven,” one of the three dozen or so families who’d settled into the first homes in Pleasantville when the neighborhood was built in ’49. Dr. Delyvan, who’d been a pediatrician, bought a four-bedroom, ranch-style home on Tilgham. It came with a his-and-hers two-car garage, with room enough for his Ford and his wife’s blue Lincoln Continental. Mrs. Delyvan, a widow, is in her late seventies and volunteers part-time at the Samuel P. Hathorne Community Center, where she’s calling from now. As Jay is ever in the business of maintaining his clients’ trust, he takes their calls, day or night, no matter the topic.

  “You heard about the girl, I guess,” she says. “Alicia Nowell?”

  It takes a moment for the name to land. When it does, Jay swallows a clump of dread that’s suddenly lodged itself in the back of his throat. “I heard something on the radio this morning, yes, ma’am,” he says.

  “They’re saying somebody might have grabbed her out here.”

  “That’s what I heard.”

  “Well?”

  She waits for him to say more, to put two and two together, or in this case, two plus one. Alicia Nowell makes three girls now who have gone missing in and around Pleasantville. The first one in ’94, the second last year. Two girls, more than a year apart, is a mean coincidence. Three girls is officially a problem.

  Jay puts his client on hold and tells Officers Young and McFee that he wants a look at the amended incident report whenever it’s ready. He has Eddie Mae see them to the door. Then, sitting down in the rolling slat-back chair behind his desk, he again picks up the line. Mrs. Delyvan sounds heated, her voice hushed, but stern. Nobody, not anyone on the radio, not the newspaper, no one has mentioned a word about the other girls, both of them local, raised in Pleasantville, their families about to pass another Christmas with no answers.

  “This one was from south of here, Sunnyside,” Arlee says, spitting out the word like an unwanted seed. “But a child is a child, and here’s another one who seems to have just disappeared off our streets.” She sighs heavily into the phone. “Her parents have been calling here nonstop. I’m afraid I don’t know much more than they do, what little I’ve heard on my street. It was Elma Johnson who saw the girl, standing at the corner of Ledwicke and Guinevere. Elma was at her kitchen sink, rinsing a head of cabbage, when she looked out her window and saw this Nowell girl, same description her parents gave the police, standing alone at the corner. She had a purse in her hands but nothing else and looked to Elma like she was waiting for someone.” She kept looking up the north side of the street, watching cars coming from that direction. Arlee added that Clarence Watson and another woman over on Pleasantville Drive both believed they’d seen the Nowell girl before, or at least a girl who looked a lot like her, passing out Hathorne campaign leaflets. “But that’s impossible, Jay. The Voters League, we made our endorsement on Sunday,” she says, speaking of Pleasantville’s voting organization, the most important and influential community institution of its kind in the city, a group almost as old as the neighborhood itself.

  Pleasantville’s home precinct, number 259 in Harris County, Texas, is known as one of the most vote rich in the state, and the Voters League, therefore, holds a lot of sway. It’s a level of political power the people of Pleasantville cherish because they built it out of thin air back in the early 1950s, when they fought the city and the all-white school board to get an elementary school for their new neighborhood, a school that wasn’t overcrowded and underfunded, like those in Denver Harbor and Fifth Ward. It took nearly a year of pressing the mayor, but finally the residents, their numbers growing each time they marched on city hall, got their state-of-the-art school. And got something even more valuable in the process: a place to vote. It eliminated the need to split Pleasantville into arbitrary sections, with some residents voting in existing precincts to the north and some to the east and west, by creating a single precinct of consolidated black voting power, nicknamed “the mighty 259” by more than a few mayors, city council members, state senators, governors, and congressmen, who know the neighborhood’s power to swing an election. There is and always has been a culture of civic engagement that defines the neighborhood as much as its wide, clean streets with pink and white crepe myrtles lining each side, its legendary Christmas banquets and Sunday barbecues, the gin and whist parties on Saturday nights.

  Bottom line: folks in Pleasantville vote, always have.

  And in numbers unmatched almost anywhere else in the state of Texas.

  “It’s no secret we’re pushing for Hathorne, the hometown boy,” Mrs. Delyvan says. “But we made it official on Sunday. Pleasantville is going for Hathorne all the way. By Sunday night, his campaign pulled out of here, instead putting their folks on the ground out n
ear Memorial, places like Tanglewood and South Post Oak, parts of the city that were still up for grabs. Sunday till the polls closed on Tuesday night, there wasn’t a soul from the Hathorne campaign working these streets. We were expecting Axel, sure, some high-level staffers and family members. But I don’t know what that girl was doing out here.”

  “You talk to Axel?”

  “I left a message with his nephew, Neal, the one running his campaign.”

  “What about Sam?” Jay says, meaning Axel’s father.

  “I’m told he’s aware of the situation,” she says. “But it’s been two days.”

  “Right,” Jay says, hearing the hint of desperation in her voice, the drumbeat at the edge of this entire conversation. The first girls, Deanne Duchon and Tina Wells, were found exactly six days after they went missing, their broken bodies discovered a year apart, but no more than a hundred yards from the same creek, and rumors ran rampant across northeast Houston that each of the girls had been alive up until a few hours before she was found in the field of brush. Around Pleasantville, there has always been a sense that if the police department had acted sooner, if the girls had been from River Oaks or Southampton Place, one or both lives might have been saved.

  “There’s still time, Jay. She might be out there somewhere,” Arlee says, making clear her belief that the cases are most certainly connected.

  Jay believes it too.

  The thought crossed his mind the second he heard the news.

  “You know the Duchons still got that girl’s room closed off? Every last thing in it just the way she left it, her car still sitting right there in the garage, a little yellow Mustang Betty bought her when she turned sixteen, a month before she went missing.”

  Jay slides his hands into his pockets, looking out his office window. He still has Bernie’s car. With Evelyn’s help he was able to pack up most of her clothes, on a day when the kids were at school, but her Camry is, like Deanne Duchon’s yellow Mustang, still parked in his garage. He still sits inside it some nights, after the kids have gone to bed.