“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