No Stone Unturned, page 8
“Workin’ up in here, I see a lot of people.” Laronda nodded toward the hotel. “But I ain’t seen her, sorry.” She started to give the flyer back to Eric.
“Keep it, please, just in case,” Eric said.
Shrugging, Laronda folded the paper and tucked it into a small handbag. “All right, then. Nice meetin’ you, mister.”
“Wait,” Eric said. “So listen, Smokey told me why he fired you.”
Her face darkened as if a thundercloud had taken up residence on her countenance.
“I got a good thing goin’ on here,” she said. “I ain’t doin’ none of that shit no more. And you said you ain’t a cop anyway, so why the hell do you care?”
“Who’s running credit card scams in Grisby?” Eric asked. “I don’t care about what you did. I need to know who’s in that circle now.”
“What’s that gotta do with your kid?” Laronda popped gum in his face. “You don’t make no damn sense.”
Eric pulled up the digital mugshot of Clive and showed it to Laronda.
“Have you seen him before?” Eric asked. “He’s my daughter’s boyfriend. He’s here in Grisby. He moves in those shady circles, whatever you want to call them.”
Laronda squinted at the photo. “Hmph. I’d say I didn’t remember him, but . . .” She tapped the screen with a lacquered fingernail. “He had that red spot on his face and now I do. I seen him.”
Eric’s heart clutched. “When?”
“Checked in here maybe a week ago?” Laronda squinted. “Yeah. ‘Bout a week ago.”
“I heard he came here last Friday. Was it before that?”
“Oh, yeah.” She popped her gum.
“Then he’s made at least two trips here.”
“I only saw him a week ago. He stayed here. Shit, he was flirtin’ with me.”
“Of course he was,” Eric muttered.
“Excuse me?” Laronda’s eyebrows arched. “Men flirt with me all the time.” She looked him up and down as if taking the measure of him. “Yup, men like you, too, even though you tryin’ to act all professional and whatever. Y’all all wanna piece of this fineness.”
“That wasn’t what I meant, sorry.” Eric pinched the bridge of his nose. “Did he say anything that stands out? Do you know who he might have been here to meet—if he’s into scams?”
“I told you, I ain’t into that anymore. I ain’t giving you no names, fool!” She cackled as if he were a clown, glanced at her phone. “Hey, your time is up. I gotta get back to work or Viola’s gonna snitch on me.”
“Wait a minute, please.” Eric was desperate, but he didn’t have any leverage. She was right—he wasn’t a cop. He couldn’t force her to share any information. “Can I pay you for a name or two?”
“Hell, no—I ain’t no snitch.” She strutted away.
He raced to keep up with her. “What room did he stay in?”
“I don’t know, man.” She gave him an annoyed look. “What difference does it make to you?”
“Can you book me the same room you gave him?”
“All right.” She tossed her hair over her shoulder. “Come to the desk in a few minutes. I’ll see what I can do.”
Ten minutes later, Eric had rented a room for one night on the hotel’s second floor. He took the exterior stairs to the upper level and used the keycard to unlock the door.
It was an utterly unremarkable room, exactly what you would expect from a hotel at that price point. A basic place to stay for a short duration.
He had no idea what he was doing there, or what he would do next. He had thought, perhaps in vain, that renting the same room that Clive had stayed in might spark some inspiration.
But he only felt tired. He unbuttoned his shirt, took off his shoes, and sat on the king-size mattress.
Within a few minutes, he had stretched out, lying on his back. A couple of minutes later, he drifted off to sleep.
Maybe being back in Grisby triggered it, but Eric dreamed about his accident. A rainy night. Country music on the radio of his granddad’s pickup truck. A massive deer streaking across the road. Eric punching the brakes . . .
When he awoke, the bedroom was immersed in shadows. He had no idea where he was or how he had gotten there, and for a moment, he panicked. He reached out, fumbled for a lamp, clicked it on.
The folder full of flyers lay on the nightstand. It all surged back to him like bile climbing up his throat.
Wouldn’t it have been great if losing Destiny had been a dream, too? He thought. He couldn’t believe he had tumbled into this situation, searching desperately for a daughter he barely knew.
He had been sacked out for nearly six hours. The duration of his nap wasn’t surprising. Since Destiny’s disappearance, he had been accumulating a severe sleep deficit and operating in a perpetual state of exhaustion. It had finally caught up with him.
He found a text message on his phone from Alyssa, checking up on him. There were no messages from anyone else.
In the bathroom, he splashed cold water on his face, and started to feel grounded again. He shuffled back into the room.
What am I doing here? What’s next? Think, dammit.
He stepped to the window. It provided a view of the busy state highway and a string of restaurants, their neon signs glowing in the twilight gloom.
One bar-and-grill called “Jimmy’s Spot,” had a big, well-lighted sign advertising five-dollar chicken wings and two-dollar beers.
Eric thought about Clive, and what Deacon had shared of his run-ins with the law. The guy had two DUIs, didn’t he?
Eric hadn’t brought a change of clothes, so he freshened up as best he could, headed out. Jimmy’s Spot was within walking distance of the hotel. Eric crossed the street and went inside.
Inside, he found a bar, tables in the middle, leather booths along the walls. An Atlanta Hawks game played on a few flat screen TVs hanging from the ceiling.
The place was nearly empty on that Monday evening. Eric sidled up to the bar.
The bartender turned. He was a Black man, heavyset, and in his mid-forties, with a mole on his cheek. Eric immediately knew him.
“Brian Houston, right?” Eric said.
“Hey.” The bartender’s eyebrows lifted. “Hey, Newton, right! We went to high school together. Freshman hoops, yeah? I thought I recognized you, man.”
“We were on the B team,” Eric said. “That was when I realized my NBA dreams were never going to happen.”
Brian chuckled. “But it was fun, right? Good to see you, man.”
They shook hands. Brian had a gigantic, fleshy hand and a firm grip.
“What brings you here?” Brian asked. “I haven’t seen you around in a minute.”
Eric took out his flyer. Although his muse had struck him about Clive, it seemed important to show the flyer to everyone he met.
“Haven’t seen her, sorry.” Brian wiped the counter with a towel. “And I remember faces, and names. Part of the job. We get a lot of regulars in here and they expect it.”
“Do you remember this face?” Eric showed him his phone with the mugshot of Clive on the screen. “He’s my daughter’s boyfriend. I think he knows where she may be.”
“Sure do.” Brian tapped his face. “He had that birthmark. Yeah. He was in here last week, I think.”
Score another for the home team, Eric thought.
“Was he alone, or meeting someone?” Eric asked.
“Funny you ask that,” Brian said. He nodded toward a booth across the dining room. “He was sitting right over there with Maurice Turner.”
A shudder passed through Eric. Maurice Turner. He knew that name. He had seen it on Destiny’s DNA profile. Turner was listed on her profile as a probable first or second cousin, and had to be on Destiny’s maternal side.
“Who is Maurice Turner?” Eric asked.
“He’s with the Cannons, man.” Brian frowned as if this should have been obvious to Eric. “I mean, he was like ten or twelve years ahead of us, but he’s with the Cannons. I think his mama was a Cannon.”
Another, deeper chill settled into Eric. The Cannons—the huge family that had a lock on so many businesses in Grisby. Their empire included the nursing home that Eric’s own grandmother had been living in for the past six months.
If Maurice Turner was a Cannon, that meant Destiny could be related to the Cannons via her mother. Or Destiny could be linked to Turner’s paternal side. Eric knew nothing about any Turners in Grisby.
He didn’t know what it all meant. But he decided the Cannon connection was impossible. He had never dated a woman from that family. Ever. Sure, he knew plenty of them. But dated? Been intimate with?
Never.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost, man,” Brian said. “You all right?”
Eric looked up, wiped his lips.
“I need a drink,” he said.
18
While Eric was sleuthing in Grisby, Alyssa was investigating, too. She believed that answers awaited somewhere that he was reluctant to explore: the past.
She began her work in earnest after Eric left the house that Monday morning. Their kids were at school, and she had taken the day off from work—that was a simple call to her assistant asking her to reschedule her appointments.
Her plan was to finish everything she needed to do before the school buses arrived that afternoon. But if things took longer than expected, she’d already asked her mother to be on stand-by to watch over the children at the house.
Alyssa went downstairs into the basement, her sneakers thumping down the steps. She switched on the lights.
It was so quiet down there. Destiny hadn’t lived with them for long, but already, Alyssa missed her. They had begun to bond, one woman to another. She saw a glimpse of herself in the young lady: a fierce streak of independence, yet a thirst to be loved by all, especially by a father. Alyssa had a complicated relationship with her own dad that had taken years for her to understand and to make peace with after his untimely death shortly after she’d completed undergrad. Sometimes, despite her background as a psychologist, she still felt like that anxious little girl who would never be quite good enough to earn her daddy’s full approval.
Alyssa hoped Destiny was okay, wherever she might be.
Alyssa didn’t move toward the bedroom they had designated for Destiny; she went to a door on the opposite side of the basement: the storage area.
The door opened with a soft creak, dust drifting into her nostrils and nearly making her sneeze. Usually, they opened this door only a few times a year, to either add items or remove them. If not for Alyssa’s mission, she would not have ventured into this space until it was time to haul out decorations for the holidays.
She turned on the light switch. It was a windowless room, measuring about ten by twelve. Modernist shelving stood along the walls, and a handful of large boxes lay on the cement floor. No loose items lay about. Alyssa had insisted to Eric that if they got a basement and used part of it for storage, they had to resist heaping junk all over the place.
What they had in here, see, was organized junk.
Well, it wasn’t all junk. There were some items they kept in there that had real value: family pictures they hadn’t gotten around to framing and hanging; keepsakes from prior vacations that didn’t find their way into the rest of the house; beloved baby toys the kids couldn’t bear to part with; old documents that might prove useful someday.
One of the boxes had “Eric’s Stuff” written in black marker along the side.
Alyssa doubled back to the main area of the basement, found a chair, and carried it into the storage room. She eased onto it, then peeled open the flaps of the box, dust fluttering away.
She had never looked inside of it and was unprepared for what she would discover. At first glance, she was disappointed.
The box contained a dizzying array of totally unrelated items, and she wondered why Eric had saved these things. A stapler—why would you keep a stapler? A Rolodex that a casual flip through revealed to be empty of names, and who used a Rolodex anymore? A college textbook that Alyssa thought she could probably sell, but it was so outdated it might not bring anything worthwhile on the resale market.
“Junk,” Alyssa muttered. As she examined items, she placed them on the floor beside her. She decided that since she was going through the effort of cataloging and rating these things, she was going to throw many of them away.
She found Eric’s yearbook from his senior year at Morehouse College; the publication was called “The Torch.” She flipped through the glossy pages until she located the photo of him. He wore a black tuxedo like the other graduating seniors, and looked dapper, healthy. But she could clearly see the jagged scar on his forehead that he’d acquired from his car wreck earlier that year.
Underneath the yearbook, she found a bulky Hewlett Packard laptop, the power cord wrapped around it like a dead tentacle. The computer had to be at least twenty years old. An artifact from the time before she and Eric had met.
Alyssa set aside the machine for later examination.
She dug through the rest of the items and found nothing of interest. She gathered the laptop and left the storage room.
In the sitting area section of the basement, she found an electrical outlet next to an end table that held a lamp and a vase of silk flowers. She plugged in the computer and settled onto the sofa with the computer on her lap.
The laptop took ages to boot up and was nearly as loud as a leaf blower. She was worried it would stall on some hard drive issue and never complete the start-up cycle, but after several minutes, she was rewarded with a view of an obsolete Windows desktop.
She guessed this was probably the same computer Eric had used in his final year of college. She could almost understand why he had kept it. She was reluctant to part with old machines, too, worried about data theft and wasn’t knowledgeable enough to extract the hard drive and dispose of it properly.
She found the Windows Explorer icon and clicked it.
“Interesting,” she said.
There were folders named for various subjects Eric had been taking in college: Accounting Assignments; Finance Assignments; Management Assignments; Math.
There was also a “Photos” folder. She selected it, her heart drumming.
The laptop gurgled and coughed for about a minute, and finally revealed the files contained therein. All of them were .JPEG files, with last modified timestamps of about eighteen years ago, but none of them had descriptive names.
She clicked on each of them. Each file took an eternity to load.
The first one looked like a simple family photo. She recognized the faces: Eric, Val, his grandmother, and his late grandfather, Earl. They were gathered on a patio and smiling for the camera.
A nice picture, and probably it should have been printed and framed. But it told Alyssa nothing useful about the period of Eric’s life that most interested her.
She searched all the photo files. All of them were family pictures—some older than others, indicating Eric had been intent to scan old pics—but none of them showed her faces that she didn’t already recognize. Mostly, they featured his grandparents, kind souls who had raised him and Val as their own children.
She was searching for pics of old girlfriends, but she didn’t see any photos of such women on this computer.
She was about to close the laptop when she noticed the Microsoft Outlook icon. The laptop wasn’t connected to the Internet, but wouldn’t old email messages be stored on the hard drive?
Like every program on this ancient machine, Outlook took several minutes to open. The program tried to connect to the Internet and flashed an error message. Despite the error, it yielded a treasure trove of old messages.
Her heart rate picked up.
It was at that moment that she truly felt as if she were snooping. As if she was reading Eric’s old diary. She looked up from the laptop.
She was alone in the house but imagined how she would feel if Eric were watching her. She could clearly envision his frown of disapproval, his brows furrowing in that distinctive way they did when he was upset.
You don’t trust me, do you, babe? When have I ever lied to you?
She reminded herself that she wasn’t looking for evidence of past sins. This was for a just cause. She was trying to find his child, and that meant identifying the mother of said child. He said he couldn’t remember any prior, meaningful interactions with women outside of his girlfriend at the time, and she believed him.
But: the answer might be stored in these old messages.
She moved on.
The most recent email was from eighteen years ago. It looked like correspondence between Eric and an HR recruiter who had reached out to him to schedule a job interview at a bank.
She scanned every message in the Inbox. The oldest message was dated twenty-one years ago. It was in regard to a school project, an email to the professor about the guidelines.
There were about a hundred and forty emails, total, still residing on the machine; that included sent messages and the received ones. Alyssa scanned the subject lines and recipients.
She found, at last, an email from Rachel Watts.
Rachel Watts was his girlfriend during that period. Apparently, she was a student at Clark Atlanta University because the email domain referenced the school, cau.edu.
Alyssa sat up straighter and read the email.
I get the message, Eric. Why can’t you be a man and admit you want to move on? I don’t have time for games. I’m worth more than that.
“Uh oh, sounds like a breakup,” Alyssa said.
The message was dated in June, twenty-one-years ago. It matched what Eric had already confided to her. He said he dated a woman he referred to as Rachel, and that they had broken up twenty-one years ago. And that she was not the mother of any child of his.
Nevertheless, Alyssa used her phone to snap a photo of the message.
She didn’t find any more email correspondence with Rachel, or any other women, besides a couple messages to his sister, Val. If Eric was dating frequently during that period of his life, he wasn’t using email as his primary form of communication.
