“Sam, what is going on here?” Arlee says.
Keith Morehead, youth pastor at the Pleasantville Methodist Church, one of the youngest clergymen in the community, is in jeans and sneakers. “Why aren’t we meeting at the community center? There’re a number of families who’ve expressed their concern to me personally. I’m sure they’d like to be heard on the issue.”
“Why aren’t the Wellses here? Or Deanne’s parents?”
“I wanted us to be able to speak freely.” Sam pours himself another bump of whiskey. “Grief and guilt cloud things,” he says, leaving Jay to wonder to whose guilt he’s referring, why that word would enter this room. “We have a young woman missing, in my neighborhood, Axel’s old stomping ground, a story that will get out of our hands if we let it, and at the worst possible time.” Neal opens his mouth to speak, but Sam shakes his head, hushing him. “I thought a gathering here, among friends, people we trust, was the more prudent approach,” Sam says. “Arlee, Ruby, you know as well as anyone how meetings at the center can easily get off track, veering into arguments over deed restrictions and what kind of punch to serve at the next PTA meeting. Especially in the last few years, with the newer folks coming in.”
There are nods of recognition around the room.
These are some of the oldest families in Pleasantville.
What was once a segregated oasis, a black Levittown where flowers grew and families thrived, now seems hardly worth the gas money for young black professionals, not for a daily commute ten miles past downtown, not when they can buy property anywhere these days. No matter the best efforts of the old-timers to keep the neighborhood as it’s always been, to secure its borders, keep the money in and the newcomers out, there are, every year, new families who are buying their way in, working-class blacks from places like Fifth Ward and South Park, and Latino families from the north side, who see in its quaint, tree-lined streets their chance at the American dream. You can’t put up fences on change.
“It’s been two days,” Arlee says. “Three, when the sun comes up. We’re losing time every hour that passes, every hour there’s a killer still out there.”
“We don’t know that’s what this is, Arlee,” Sam says.
“We’d be fools to think otherwise,” Mr. Wainwright says ruefully.
“It’s been two days,” Arlee says again. “Deanne, Tina, whether HPD wants to say so publicly or not, those girls were still alive at this point. You all saw the reports. If HPD had made a bigger push to find them, who knows how things might have turned out for them, for their families. I imagine the Duchons and the Wellses might have cause for a civil suit against the department, if they wanted to go that route.” She glances across the room at Jay, who feels put on the spot, aware too late that Arlee had something like this in mind the second she called his office this afternoon. He had come tonight to offer what support he could. His heart aches for the girls’ families. But he is in no position to consider a lawsuit against the police department. Sam follows the look between them, Jay and Arlee, wrongly assuming that this was planned.
“You can’t be serious,” Marcie says.
“I’m in the middle of the biggest fund-raising push of the campaign,” the man in the dark brown slacks says. “We’re waiting on a dozen five-figure checks right now. Any word about this would be a disaster.”
“We’re on top of it, Stan,” Neal says. Stan, the moneyman, Jay thinks.
“I love you, Sam, I do,” Arlee says, looking at him, one of her oldest friends. “But I am not putting your campaign ahead of these girls.”
“Suing the police department won’t do a thing for Alicia Nowell right now,” Sam says, and Jay is inclined to agree.
“Elma,” he says. “You saw her Tuesday?”
“Tuesday night, ’bout a quarter to nine. She was just standing by herself.”
Vivian Hathorne, Sam’s wife, emerges from the kitchen. She leans against the door frame, cupping a tumbler filled with a clear liquid she’s sipping too slowly for it to be anything other than vodka. She’s wearing a navy skirt, a lace apron tied around her waist. She was a schoolteacher once, back before Sam’s bank set them up in comfort and style. Viv is taller than her husband, and round in every place he is stick straight, her hips opening like a rose beneath her narrow gold-plated belt. She wears her hair in a thick braid, streaked with pewter; it rests dramatically across the front of her left shoulder. She is, even in her late seventies, utterly striking. Johnetta, at the sight of her, rolls her eyes. “What’s her name?” Viv asks, her voice soft and bell-like. “The girl?”
“Nowell,” Arlee says. “She wasn’t from around here.”
“What was she doing in Pleasantville?”
“She work for your uncle’s campaign?” Jay asks.
He remembers the description of the blue, long-sleeved T-shirt she’d been wearing. And the reports from at least two residents in the area that Alicia was leaving leaflets on doorsteps in the hours before she went missing.
“She wasn’t on the payroll, no,” Neal says.
“Which means what exactly?”
“She wasn’t employed by the campaign, that much we know.”
“Which is exactly what everyone in this room needs to say if asked,” Marcie says, looking up from her legal pad. Her upper lip is sweating.
“Was she a volunteer?” Jay asks.
“Was she?” Vivian says, alarmed. “Sam? Was she working for Axel?”
Sam, staring into the bottom of his glass, doesn’t answer right away.
“Sunny?” It’s Mr. Wainwright, pushing for an answer.
Neal sighs. “The truth is, we don’t really know.”
“She was off the books?” Jay says. He makes a gesture with his right hand, rubbing his fingers together to suggest the untraceable cash that might have landed in Alicia Nowell’s hands, street money to get out the vote.