Magnus Carr is a seventy-six-year-old retired postal worker whose eldest daughter, Jackie, a dentist who married and moved to Chicago right out of college, bought her father the four-bedroom, two-bath, one-story faux-colonial with union blue shutters on Ledwicke so that her kids would have a place to stay when they visited their paw-paw. His wife, Shirley Carr, never got to see the house, one of the last built on the street; she died when their kids, Jackie and her kid brother, Darryl, were still in their teens. Mr. Carr had raised them on his own, in a one-bedroom apartment not far from Hobby Airport. He lives alone now, on a comfortable pension. “Come on,” he says to Jay. “It’s back this way.” Lonnie follows the two men, staring at the photos on the dusk-colored walls, straining to make out faces behind the glass. The light is dim in the hallway, in the whole house in fact; a gold-plated floor lamp in the living room is the only spot of cheer in all seven rooms. The curtains, thick rolls of wheat-colored linen, are pulled shut, and the air is still. It smells of sweet onion and pickled chowchow. Mr. Carr was reheating a plate of chicken for his lunch when Jay and Lonnie arrived at his front door. Elma Johnson’s view from her kitchen window was at an angle of about forty-five degrees from the south side of Ledwicke, but the window in Mr. Carr’s study faces the street directly. He had the radio on that night, following the election returns. He had made a last-minute switch inside the white cubicle at Pleasantville Elementary where he’d voted that morning, impulsively pulling the lever for Ross Perot, and forty-five minutes after the polls closed in Texas, he was regretting it terribly. He’d never in his life voted for a Republican, so Dole was out, but there had to be a better man than Clinton to sit in the White House, a good Christian and a decent husband. “I was fixin’ to put in for the night, had a little hot tea and then I went to close the curtains, in the back bedroom and this room,” he says, as they walk into his study, a pristinely kept room without a desk or a book, just the radio on a pedestal table next to a putty-colored recliner, and a neat stack of magazines on the floor. “And I did just like this,” he says, pulling on the cord for the curtains. “And there she was, right there.” He points to the south side of Ledwicke, where the corner is empty except for a gathering of flowers and notes left on torn pieces of poster board and a small white cross, all of it damp from the rain.
“You saw a man?”
“I saw a man,” Mr. Carr says, nodding. “He was pulling at her, like this.”
He turns and for the purposes of reenactment uses Lonnie in his demonstration, pulling on her wrist and twisting the arm a little as he goes. “She wasn’t hollering or nothing, but it looked to me like they were in a struggle of some sort. At the time I didn’t think much of it, a lovers’ quarrel or something like that, something that wasn’t my business no way. Not until the cops came.”
“And you told the detectives it was Neal Hathorne you saw?”
“No, I said just what I told you now, and I gave a description. It was a black man, looked like it to me. Maybe your height,” he says, nodding to Jay, eyeing him, “maybe a little taller. He was bigger than the girl, that’s for sure.”
“How’d you get from that to Neal?”
“It was later, when they said they were going to have me to testify for the grand jury. It was a man from the D.A.’s office come around–”
“Matt Nichols?”
“No, it was an investigator with his office. He showed some pictures and, well, excuse my language, but hell if it didn’t look like Neal.”
“And you’re sure it was him?”
“I’m sure it looked like him, that’s all I said to the grand jury, all I’m willing to say if they put me on the stand again.” He sighs. “I hate to speak anything against Sunny,” he says, referring to Sam by his old nickname. “He’s a good man, but I don’t really know the young ’un, Neal, and you can’t judge a man by his last name. I got kin of mine I don’t hardly recognize, not down in their souls.” He looks out at the corner, the makeshift memorial. “I never heard of nothing like this in my day,” he says, the words rolling over the gravel in his voice. “But things is changing, even in Pleasantville.” He shakes his head. Outside, damp flower petals litter the sidewalk, ink runs on the poster board. In a pale yellow windbreaker, Arlee Delyvan comes walking down Ledwicke, cradling a small box of pink camellias clipped from her garden, headed with great purpose for the makeshift memorial. She kneels at the gathering, taking time to pick away dead leaves, to set upright a pink teddy bear with a red ribbon, its fur spiked into thorns from the rain. Magnus clears his throat. “I hate to do this, Mr. Porter, god knows it’s bad timing. But I need to tell you I’m moving on.”
He appears vaguely ashamed, to quit on a man. But resolved, nonetheless.
He starts with a familiar refrain. “I like you, son.”
“For a guy who’s so well-liked, I sure am losing business left and right.”
“It’s just we’ve waited and waited, and time you decide to step back into a courtroom, it’s over this here,” he says, gesturing with his ashy brown knuckle toward the windowpane, the memorial for the missing girl on the other side. “I don’t know if Neal did this thing they’re saying, and I guess he’s as entitled to a lawyer as anybody, but I don’t know why it had to be ours. I’m seventy-six, I’m tired of waiting for ProFerma to pay for what they did. I don’t need the moon and the stars, just something fair. They’re saying this other fella can deliver.”
“Aguilar.”
“I was hesitant at first, figuring Jelly Lopez is getting too big for his britches, thinking he’s running everything now. But now I just want it done.”