“But it was six months later that Lamont disappeared. It’s hard to think that was connected with the marches.” Something in her face made me add, “When did you last see him yourself?”
She looked down the hall again. A choir on TV was singing with great gusto. “Daddy forbade it. Once he denounced Lamont, he said if I went out with him I’d be endangering my own soul.”
“But you saw him, anyway.”
Her mouth twisted in a painful smile. “I didn’t have the nerve. Lamont, he stopped me when I was leaving school. I was over at Kennedy-King—we still called it Woodrow Wilson then—studying nursing, and Lamont, he waited for me after school. He talked to me about the Panthers and Black Pride. I made the mistake of thinking I could explain it to Daddy.”
She looked down at her hands. “Maybe my life would have been different—could have been different. I got my nursing degree, and I could only get LPN jobs. It was years before I could get hired as a registered nurse. I used to think about that when I saw white women hired over me, and me with just as much schooling and good job reviews and everything and still emptying bedpans. I used to think about Lamont, I mean, and wish I’d paid him more mind. But—”
A bell rang, clear even above the sound of the televised choir.
“That’s Daddy. He needs me. I have to go.”
“Are you still working as a nurse?”
“Oh yes. I used to be an oncology nurse, but I had to give that up when Daddy turned so poorly. Now I do the night shift in the ER. I put him to bed before I go on duty, get him up in the morning before I go to bed.”
“And if you’d listened to Lamont, what would you have done different? Or what would he have done different? Would he have stayed around to be close to you?”
In the dimly lit hall I thought I saw her cheeks darken with embarrassment, but maybe that was my imagination. The bell sounded again, a longer ringing, and she pushed me through the open door. I pulled a card from my bag and thrust it into the hand that was holding the door.
“You’re an adult, Rose Hebert. You couldn’t talk to Lamont forty years ago. But that doesn’t mean you can’t talk to me now.”
Her lips moved soundlessly. She looked from me to the living room. Habit ruled. Shoulders stooped, she turned back down the hall to her father.
8
A VERY LATE-NIGHT CALL
THAT NIGHT, OVER DINNER AT LOTTY’S, I DESCRIBED MY frustrating day. After listening to my description of Pastor Hebert, Lotty said it sounded as though he had Parkinson’s disease. “The fixed staring, trouble talking, those you often see in an advanced stage of the illness. He must be ninety, wouldn’t you guess? We don’t know enough about how to manage the disease, and these symptoms are hard to control, especially in a man who’s that old.”
“Presumably he has other problems or his daughter wouldn’t be afraid of him,” I said. “She’s sixtyish, he’s dependent on her, but she lets him run her around as if she were a robot.”
“Yes, brainwashing also leaves symptoms that are hard to manage.” Lotty gave a wry smile. “I saw Karen Lennon at a staff meeting this afternoon. She’s worried that she might have made a mistake in introducing you to her patient—her ‘client,’ I suppose I should say.”
“It’s a little late for Karen to be second-guessing herself, not when I’ve spent a day stirring the pot and getting the phone tree shaking among all the women at Pastor Hebert’s church.”
Lotty laughed. “I think that’s what has her worried. Karen’s very young. She doesn’t know how much excitement a detective can bring to a closed community.”
“She should call me, not try to get you to do it for her. But I’ll talk to her in the morning,” I grumbled.
“Don’t take her head off as well as mine,” Lotty said. “If you worked with other people all day long instead of in a hole by yourself, you’d understand how natural it was for her to talk to me during a meeting.”
“After spending a day with people who twitch when they see me coming, I’d be happier in a hole by myself. As long as it had a cappuccino machine.”
“Yes, we’ll decorate it and make it gemütlich, a cozy hole. I’ll send a courier in every day with a fresh bottle of milk and a basket of fruit and cheese.” She squeezed my hand. “You’re still in mourning for Morrell, aren’t you?”
“Not mourning, exactly.” I fiddled with the heavy silver. “More questioning myself, to be my age and not able to keep a stable relationship going. In the back of my mind, I always imagined a child, a family, at this point in my life.”
Lotty raised her brows. “I’m not criticizing you, Victoria—God knows, I have no right—but you haven’t lived like someone who wanted a child.”