Pleasantville Read online

  “Elma, Ruby, Joe Wainwright, and me,” Arlee says, “we called a meeting on the issue, to see if we can’t put pressure on law enforcement, let them know that Pleasantville takes the lives of these girls seriously.” Jay would have expected no less from them. They are a group of people who believe there isn’t a single problem that can’t be solved with a meeting, a neighborhood that believes deeply in the power of its number, and Jay respects them for it. Their activism preceded his by more than a decade, and he is, at forty-six, ever aware that he walks daily in their debt. “We think you ought to come tonight, Jay.” He reaches across his desk for his Rolodex, looking for the number for Alice King, Lori’s mother, knowing he will not be picking his kids up before dinner. “What time?” he says.

  “Ruby will set out the coffee around six.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  He changes into a fresh shirt. In the back bathroom, he gives himself a good shave, his first in a week. Next, he calls Mrs. King to make sure it’s all right if the kids stay a little late. Ellie’s upstairs with Lori, she says. Ben is right there with her in the kitchen. “I want to go home,” he says as soon as he comes on the line. Of all the after-school help Jay regularly relies on, the King household is Ben’s least favorite. Lori’s two older sisters are in college, and there isn’t anyone in the house anywhere near his age. He spends most of his time in the Kings’ kitchen, teaching Mrs. King to use her computer, while she asks him at least five times an hour if he’s hungry. Ben’s version, of course. “You guys okay?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You minding Mrs. King?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Okay, I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Love you, son.”

  “I love you too, Dad.”

  Ben makes it easy. Their affection for each other is pure and unguarded, nearly elegant in its simplicity. Ben always says exactly what he means, or else he hardly speaks at all. It’s a trait that Jay respects, mainly because he recognizes it in himself. It’s not fair, really, the ease with which he and Ben get along, or that Ellie got stuck with the parent least equipped to raise her. Jay reaches for his suit jacket and tie and heads down the main hall, telling Eddie Mae he’ll be out for a while. She’s on the computer, fiddling with her AOL account. “Rolly called,” she says, motioning toward the broken window, still covered in cardboard. “He mentioned something about Tuesday night.”

  Jay sighs. “You know I have to ask.”

  “I ain’t give nobody a key, and you know it.”

  “I know you wouldn’t give it, Eddie Mae, but I’m thinking more about the number of people in and out of your house and whether one of them might have made a copy, might have got some idea in his mind that this was an easy target.”

  “You wondering if my family tried to steal from you?”

  “I said I had to ask.”

  “Them boys ain’t half right, but they ain’t all wrong neither.”

  Jay fishes for his keys, in his pocket. “Don’t hold it against me, huh?”

  Eddie Mae waves off the thought. “You want to take some beans? It’s some rice in there too, and beer,” she says, which Jay guesses she might have already cracked into, judging by her plump, flushed cheeks and the nearness of five o’clock. “Do me a favor,” he says on his way out. “Take another look around and make sure no one took anything, would you? Tomorrow, I’ll poke through the files upstairs, just to make sure we didn’t overlook something that may be missing.” He turns and walks through the front door, down the steps, and through the wrought-iron gate, heading toward his car.

  On impulse, he drives past the Hathorne campaign headquarters, a block over on Travis. The windows of the brick storefront are papered with red-white-and-blue posters, featuring both the campaign slogan (HATHORNE FOR HOUSTON!) and photos of the man himself, Axel Hathorne, in his late fifties now, tall and hook nosed, like a hawk, nicknamed “the Axe” when Jay first met him, nearly thirty years ago, back when Jay was a student and activist at the University of Houston. Despite the name and his reputation as a ballbuster, especially when he was a beat cop patrolling the streets of Fifth Ward and Kashmere Gardens, baton in hand, Jay always found Axe to be one of the better men to wear the uniform. To his comrades in COBRA and AABL, his few buddies in SNCC, he frequently spread the word: if an arrest was coming, better to turn yourself in to a man like Mr. Hathorne than risk an arrest at the hands of a beat cop with no interest in, or understanding of, the racial justice movement. Axel had said publicly that he’d rather see black men marching in the streets than climbing through back windows–words that had pissed off both sides of the racial divide–when he was first appointed to run the police department, by none other than Cynthia Maddox, the city’s first woman mayor, and the first woman to break Jay’s heart.

  It’s odd, he thinks, that Hathorne hasn’t gotten out ahead of the story of the missing girl. Axel grew up in Pleasantville after all. Jay would have thought a former police chief with an eye on the mayor’s office would have lined the streets of Pleasantville with men in blue, had cops knocking on doors and checking every field and creek within a five-mile radius. The door to his campaign headquarters is propped open by a cardboard box, out of which a young staffer is distributing campaign T-shirts to a line of volunteers that stretches all the way to the kosher bakery next door. They’re eager teenagers, some, and others as old as or older than Jay, men and women in tattered jeans, getting paid a few bucks to pass out campaign leaflets, papering neighborhoods across the city; every election season, Jay clears their junk mail from his doorstep. For the marginally employed, it isn’t a bad gig. From the front seat of his car, Jay watches the line of volunteers as each is handed a clipboard, a stack of pamphlets, and a campaign T-shirt, blue with long sleeves. Just like the one Alicia Nowell was last seen wearing.

  CHAPTER 2

  Rolly spent Tuesday night in the backseat of his car, a ’92 Lincoln with gold detailing on the hood, the only one in his fleet of ten that his regular crew is not allowed to drive. Around one in the morning, he’d dropped off his last fare, a Wolcott campaign straggler who spent most of the drive to West U. on his two-way pager, and then he swung by his garage on Telephone Road, to change his clothes and pay the staff, two hundred cash to each of his drivers. He put a cooler of beer in the backseat, and a bag of peanuts and some Fritos from the vending machine in his front pockets, and then he drove south to Jay’s office on Brazos, parking, for the purposes of surveillance, a half block from the nearest streetlamp. He killed the engine and cut the Lincoln’s headlights, settling in for his night watch. He munched on salted peanuts and juiced the battery on his mobile phone, plugging it into the cigarette lighter. He has a gal he’s seeing out to Hitchcock, halfway to Galveston; she doesn’t sleep but a few hours a night and is always up for a call from Rolly. He can’t predict where the romance is headed. Hitchcock is forty minutes away, an hour in traffic, and his little miss is without a car or a bus pass. She stays in a two-bedroom house with her daughter and two of her grandkids. He swore he would never mess with an older woman, but this one is six feet in heels with a tight little ass, and she has his nose so wide open he can smell a raindrop from two miles away. He knows he’s in deep trouble.

  He was dialing her number when a suspicious car came up Brazos, cruising to the north. It was a Nissan Z, black, and Rolly got three digits off the license plate as the car, unexpectedly, slowed in front of the gate to Jay’s office. Before he could catch the other three numbers, the driver cut the Z’s front and rear lights. The door swung open, and someone got out, a man cutting a tall, lanky figure. He paced in front of the gate, as if scoping the place, as if he expected something was about to jump off. Rolly felt for the grip of the Colt .45 in the waistband of his black Levi’s. But stopped himself when he realized Jay had given him no clear instruction as to what to do in the event he ran into trouble. Calling the cops was not Rolly’s style. But neither did he want to start somethi
ng out here without knowing what he was getting into. He cleared the Motorola’s screen. But before he could call Jay, he heard the car door slam. The driver of the Nissan Z revved the engine and quickly sped off, heading in the general direction of downtown. Rolly managed to eye another piece of the license plate’s puzzle. This morning, he ran the four digits by a friend at the Department of Public Safety; 5KL 6 matches the first four digits of only one black Nissan model Z in the entire state of Texas, registered to a Jon K. Lee in Houston. “Might be nothing,” Rolly says on the phone now.

  Jay, who doesn’t like to talk while driving, has pulled off the 610 Freeway, the first exit past the bridge over the Ship Channel, less than a mile from the village of Pleasantville. He’s idling in the parking lot of a Circle K. On the back of a receipt, he writes the name and address of Jon K. Lee. “Funny thing is,” Rolly says, “he filed a notice with the Department of Public Safety that his ’96 Nissan Z was stolen last month.”

  He must be calling from the tiny office in his garage. In the background, Jay hears the thump of a car’s stereo. When not on a call, his drivers play cards mostly, smoke and drink. The garage has the feel of a barbershop or a fraternity house, a place where men and boys go to willfully lose track of time. Jay makes a note about the stolen car. “ ’Preciate it, man,” he says.

  “Not a problem, Counselor.”

  Jay turns off his car phone, stowing it and its long cord in the compartment beneath the Land Cruiser’s armrest. He goes into the convenience store and buys himself a Coke. The place has already put up Christmas decorations, cheap tinsel and paper wreaths hanging from the ceiling. It’s still three weeks from Thanksgiving, on its own a rough current to cross for two kids who lost their mother, but nothing like the emotional shit storm that’s waiting for all of them come December. Last year they rented a house in Corpus. Unplugged the TV and went fishing every day. Evelyn stopped speaking to Jay for a week. She’d had a tree out, everything ready at her place. But he never showed.

  From the parking lot, he turns onto Clinton Drive. At the Gethsemane Baptist Church, he turns left on Flagship, coming into Pleasantville at one of its southern borders, arriving, within a few turns, at the corner of Guinevere and Ledwicke, the spot where, as far as anyone knows, Alicia Nowell was last seen.

  Jay slows at the intersection.

  The streets are empty tonight, and the scene in his rearview mirror is dim. Behind him, Ledwicke, the neighborhood’s major north-south connecter that leads to the Samuel P. Hathorne Community Center, the pool, and the football field, ends at the edge of a wide area of wild woods. It’s a rare block of undeveloped land in a city that wears its disdain for proper zoning as a badge, its belief in industrial growth as a democracy’s birthright, penciled in just behind the pursuit of happiness. Pleasantville, in particular, has become surrounded by industry over the last twenty years, ever since the 610 Freeway was built against the residents’ strident opposition. Besides the chemical plants that moved in, there’s now a Budweiser brewery nearby and a six-acre factory that produces plastic packing materials, all on what used to be open prairie.

  Elma Johnson’s house stands on Guinevere, facing south. It’s a cream-colored four-bedroom with Tudor accents and a Carolina cherry tree in the front yard. Jay’s been inside once before. In her living room, he sat over her kidney-shaped coffee table as she’d signed the voluminous plaintiffs’ forms, joining, at that point, sixty-seven of her neighbors and friends. From her kitchen window, she was the last to see the girl. Alicia was standing on the corner where Jay is parked now, maybe fifty feet from the tangle of trees in the open field, a dark maze of thorns and brambly vines. There’s a soggy creek that cuts through the woods there. If Jay hadn’t spent nearly ten grand earlier this year having it tested for the chemical SBS, or polystyrene-butadiene-styrene, the accelerant in last year’s fires, he’d never have known it was there. It’s completely hidden from the street, the reason someone chose it as a final resting place for the first two girls.

  Jay still remembers the second girl.

  She slipped away, must have been, the day Bernie checked in for her last stint at St. Luke’s, on the cardiac floor that time because oncology had no more beds. Tina Wells had gotten off the school bus one afternoon and never made it the thirty or forty yards from the bus stop to her front door. Her mother, on the evening news, couldn’t speak. It was Pastor Morehead, from the Pleasantville Methodist Church, who spoke for the family.

  “This is a little girl,” he said. “Someone’s child.”

  Bernie watched it all from her hospital bed, and she woke the next day asking if there’d been any news. She worried over that missing girl for days, wouldn’t let anybody change the channel on the TV if the news was on, hoping for an update. Jay sat through it, fidgety and uncomfortable, staring into the hall, waiting on the next doctor or nurse to come in, listening for the soles of shoes squeaking on the linoleum outside. And when nearly a week went by with no answers, no happy ending, on TV or in that tiny hospital room, or in the pages and pages of her medical chart, Bernie finally said she thought it would be best if she were the one to talk to Ellie, their fourteen-year-old daughter, about what was happening to her mother, that she wasn’t coming home the way anyone wanted, and there were things she thought her girl needed to know to go on without her. Jay felt relieved and grateful at first, Bernie taking this off his shoulders, and then ashamed of himself, his bald cowardice. He excused himself and went out to the hall, where he leaned his face against the cold wall tiles to keep from puking.

  Tina Wells was found the next day. She’d been fifteen, Ellie’s age now.

  A car rolls up behind Jay and honks.

  He’s been idling for a couple of minutes, blocking the intersection.

  He waves an apology to the driver, then scoots his car along, heading toward the community center, where Arlee was when she called, and where Jay assumes tonight’s meeting is being held. The car behind him, a black Cadillac, honks again, just as the driver pulls alongside Jay. The rear window slides down. Sam Hathorne is sitting in the back passenger seat, alone.

  “Follow me,” he says, before rolling up the tinted window.

  The Cadillac picks up speed, zooming ahead of Jay. At the turnoff to the community center, Hathorne’s driver keeps going, and Jay follows, unsure where they’re heading until the Cadillac turns onto Norvic, pulling up in front of the Hathorne family homestead, a sprawling ranch-style house painted russet brown and set back from the street by thirty yards and twin magnolia trees shading damp grass. The driver steps out of the car first. Sam Hathorne opens the rear passenger door on his own. He comes out smoothing his suit jacket and holding out a hand for Jay. “Arlee told me you were coming.”

  The two men meet at the start of the house’s brick walk.

  “Sam,” Jay says, shaking his hand.

  “I thought it’d be more comfortable if we met here.”

  Samuel P. Hathorne, “Sunny” to a number of the old guard, men and women who’ve known him since ’49, who raised their children alongside his, is no more than five feet six in boots, a pearl gray ostrich pair on his feet now. He is barrel chested, with a torso that narrows to the tip of a V at his small, nearly birdlike waist. He wears wire-rimmed glasses, black across the tops of the lenses, and he keeps his silver hair close to the sides with a lift at the front, giving him an extra inch in stature. Sam moved his family into the first single-family home at Pleasantville’s founding, had, in fact, been the unofficial liaison between the Negro community and Mel Silverman and Bernard Paul, the developers who dreamed up the town. Sam, even way back then, decided who would benefit from his connections, who would get a home loan from his bank, Southern National–which he’d built over the years from a few thousand dollars to the premier black bank in the state–and who wouldn’t, who got to buy into the most coveted new community for black folks in the city and who didn’t. He was the unofficial “mayor” of Pleasantville, the man to see if you had a beef with a neighb
or, or needed a reference for a job or a loan, of course. And if Sam Hathorne wouldn’t give you the money, he would tell you who would. He was one of the first to organize the new residents in their many fights with city hall over city services, spearheading that campaign for the elementary school, and he’s had the ear of folks in city government ever since. He is the funnel through which power flows, from city hall to the north side. A walking conduit for Pleasantville’s needs, he’s simply beloved in these parts. He still owns the house on Norvic, though most people know he doesn’t really live in it anymore, and most folks forgive him for it. A lot has changed in Pleasantville since 1949.

  His driver, a fair-skinned black man in a navy suit, gray shirt, and tie, lights a cigarette as Sam leads Jay toward the front door of the house. Eighty now, he walks with a slight limp, favoring his right leg. He pats Jay warmly on the back and asks him what he’s drinking tonight.

  Inside, there’s a fire going. But the mood is somber.

  Arlee Delyvan nods to Jay when he walks in. She’s wearing black slacks and a gray sweater. Next to her on the Hathornes’ leather sofa are Ruby Wainwright, tall and lean like her husband, and Elma Johnson, a dark-skinned woman with a head full of finger curls. She sits stone faced, a gold-rimmed china cup resting on her lap. Trays of tea cakes and honeyed ham sit on the coffee table, untouched. The men in the room hover over a standing ashtray, curls of white cigarette smoke reaching up toward the ceiling.

  Sam Hathorne pours himself two fingers of Crown Royal.

  “Turn that off,” he says, nodding toward a wooden stereo cabinet and record player, on which a lick of blues guitar is playing. When no one heeds his instruction, he crosses to the stereo and lifts the needle off the record himself. “Axel called the family,” he says, taking a hearty swallow of his whiskey. “This morning, Axel spoke with the girl’s mother and stepfather.”