“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 near 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.
“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.”