“You had no right to do that to her!”
“She’s fifteen years old, Ellie! She needs her mother, not me.” Which was the wrong thing to say to his daughter. He wants to take it back immediately, to say it with more grace, all of it, every word that’s come out of his mouth since her mother died. He takes a step toward her, but she backs away, tears pooling. If there’s an emotional place past devastation, he’s looking at it right now. More than hurt, she looks stunned. “Don’t touch me,” she says, fleeing. He follows, calling her name as he hears her bedroom door slam. He puts a hand on the door, but can’t bring himself to barge in on her. It’s a line he feels he can’t cross.
“Get dressed, we’re leaving in ten minutes.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“Then don’t do it for me, okay?” he says. “Don’t do it for me.”
Twenty minutes later, she emerges wearing a dark olive green dress.
She asks Ben, and not her dad, to help with the buttons, which tiptoe up the back of the silk bodice. It’s the dress she wore to her mother’s funeral, the only nice one she has. In silence, the three of them line up and go out the back door, Jay careful to set the alarm before they go. Outside, Ellie climbs into the backseat of the Land Cruiser, leaving Ben up front with his dad. This early, it’s still cool in the car, and Jay can see his breath all the way until they get to the 610 Freeway. He takes it north, heading toward the neighborhood of Pleasantville.
Lonnie is waiting outside the church.
Along with reporters from every TV station in the city, including Univision and the UHF channels, standing under umbrellas to block the rising sun, running through their lines ahead of the cameras starting to roll.
“Cool,” Ben says, seeing the media hubbub.
“Shut up, Ben.”
“What?”
Ellie kicks the back of his seat. “Someone died.”
“Oh,” he says, because he will never again hear those words and not know what they mean, the thorny path some family’s about to start down. He looks at his dad, next to him in the driver’s seat. “Is this the funeral?” he asks, sudden nerves showing. He’d had a terrible time at his mother’s service.
“No,” Jay says. “Just folks looking to gather. It’s Sunday, son.”
He pulls into the grass-and-gravel parking lot across the street from the Pleasantville Methodist Church, Pastor Morehead’s house of worship. Along the cracked concrete at the curb, there are campaign signs, bent and softened by yesterday’s rain, a cockeyed line of red-white-and-blue, waving like parade drunks at passersby. HATHORNE FOR HOUSTON! A WOLCOTT WIN IS A WIN FOR YOU! LEWIS ACTON MEANS ACTION FOR HOUSTON! Jay squeezes the Land Cruiser between a Ford and a white Pontiac, cutting the engine. The second he steps out of his car, buttoning his suit jacket, he hears the music, pouring through the open doors of the white clapboard church. The hymn is a knee buckler, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” daring God to say something about the organist’s secular, twelve-bar take on it. But blues is the only color for this solemn morning. Jay nods to the sisters in the parking lot. Decked out in feathered hats, decorated with plumes of purple and gold, bands of rose and coral, they walk quickly, making sure to get a seat for the ten o’clock service, their only chance to hear Pastor Morehead’s sermon. Young and unmarried, he does not have children of his own, but he had coached the other two girls who’d been killed, in intramural girls’ basketball and track, had held the hands of their grieving parents. Jay crosses Tilgham, meeting Lonnie at the edge of the church’s lawn. She sucks down the last of a Parliament, then grinds the spent cigarette against the heel of her shoe. She’s wearing a black pantsuit, too big through the shoulders. “Hey,” she says, following Jay and the kids up the church’s walk, whispering, “The boyfriend, he’s got no alibi, by the way.”
Jay sends Ellie and her brother ahead.
“Sit wherever you can,” he says.
“There’s no accounting for him Tuesday night,” Lonnie tells him, the two of them standing in the doorway to the church. “He skipped dinner in the dorm and his roommate didn’t see him until the following afternoon. And get this, the boyfriend, name of Kenny Ester, he had an eight A.M. statistics class Wednesday morning, but he never showed.”
“You talked to the school?”
“The roommate. I bought him dinner.”
“It would be something to look at those pager records again. Any sense from the roommate whether Kenny was in contact with Alicia on Tuesday?”