The Houston Chronicle runs a small piece in the City Section, page 2.
When she first sees the girl’s face, Lonette Kay Phillips is sitting in the front room of her duplex on Marshall Street in Montrose, in a run-down, redbrick colonial that rests directly behind the West Alabama Ice House, where Lonnie passed a good amount of time the previous night, drinking her way through the world’s weirdest blind date. It’s a high school graduation picture, black gown and fingers cupping her chin, the whole deal, surrounded by three inches of copy, more than Lonnie would have thought the Chronicle would spare for the occasion. Back when its rival, the Houston Post, was still alive, the Chronicle had ignored the stories of the two girls who had disappeared off the streets of Pleasantville, their bodies found less than a city block from where Alicia Nowell was last seen. Lonnie, who had a Shiner Bock and two arsenic-white Hostess Donettes for breakfast, wipes the powdered sugar from her fingers onto the thighs of her jeans and lights a Parliament, staring at the Nowell girl’s face.
She’s pretty.
But they all are at that age.
Seventeen, eighteen, god don’t make much ugly, not for girls like these, with mothers and fathers who check their beds at night, make sure the front and back doors are locked. In Lonnie’s experience, it’s time and circumstance that sully a complexion. She must have aged ten years the first time her daddy let her walk out of the house and into the car of some boy who couldn’t be bothered with more than a honk from the driveway, the dented tail end of his Le Mans already pulling out into the street. “She looks like the others,” she says, exhaling smoke. On his desk, Jay has the newspaper open to the same page. He called Lonnie first thing this morning, hoping she could help, remembering that she’d written about the other girls when she was still at the Post. “You know her?”
Jay shakes his head. “She wasn’t from the neighborhood.”
“Yeah, I read that.”
The article was written by Gregg Bartolomo, a beat reporter she used to see here and there around the offices on Texas Avenue, back before she unceremoniously jumped over to the Post in ’92, at the promise of, among other things, a promotion and an expense account, both of which she’d happily trade now for the chance to be gainfully employed again. She hasn’t landed anything solid in the year since the warm day in April when the venerable Post folded, catching the city of Houston and the paper’s staff by surprise. The Chronicle piece says that the girl was raised in Sunnyside, and that she lives with her mother and stepfather, Maxine and Mitchell Robicheaux, both of whom were questioned by law enforcement. It’s more information than came out at the neighborhood meeting last night, Jay tells her. Either there are aspects of the investigation that the Hathornes were purposefully keeping from the folks in Pleasantville, or there’s information the cops are purposefully keeping from them.
A graduate of Jesse H. Jones High School, Alicia Nowell has a part-time job at a Wendy’s on OST, just east of 288. She was not scheduled to work on Tuesday, November fifth, but she’d left her apartment that afternoon. The information about her clothing is repeated here, that she was last seen in a long-sleeved blue T-shirt and jeans. There is no mention of the Hathorne campaign or whether the missing girl has any connection to its staff. The cops are treating this as a missing person case, but because the girl is eighteen, it’s suggested that she could have simply walked off somewhere of her own volition. A boyfriend is mentioned, a young man who is a student at Lamar University in Beaumont, some ninety miles away.
“Sad,” Lonnie says.
“Folks in Pleasantville think it’s starting up again.”
“You talk to Arlee Delyvan?”
“Last night.”
“She took it hard, Arlee.”
“They’re scared.”
“Ought to be.”
Through the phone line, Jay hears her exhale, working up to something.
“Look, I was going to call you,” she says.
“One of these days.”
“How are the kids?”
“Fine,” he says. He never knows how to answer that question.
“Maybe I’ll come by sometime.”
“You should.”
There is a pocket of silence between them, deep enough to hold regrets for both of them, their relationship having thinned over the past year or so. Jay is unable to remember who stopped calling whom first. She came to the funeral, of course, but they’d barely spoken, Jay sitting with Ben and Ellie all the way up front by the cherrywood casket, a few feet from where Jay had recited his wedding vows. It was the first eulogy Bernie’s father, Reverend Boykins, had declined to deliver in his own church; he’d woken that morning barely able to stand. Jay wouldn’t wish this life on anyone, the nights he sits in his backyard, staring up at the sky, wanting, stars and all, to pull the whole thing back like the lid of a tin can, anything to see his wife again. It’s the reason he drove to Pleasantville last night, the reason he called Lonnie this morning.
“How much do you remember about the story?”
“Deanne Duchon,” Lon says, starting with the first girl. Jay scribbles the name on a legal pad, taking notes. “She was walking home from a friend’s house. Four blocks, after sunset. But she never made it. Her dad had told her not to drive. She had a brand-new Mustang, but he told her it was a waste of gas to drive it just four blocks. He must have told me that story ten times.”
“They have a suspect?”