Jackal, page 14
Moments later, a woman around my mother’s age, sharply dressed, enters. Her thick heels sound against the carpet. Her sunglasses stay on. Her glossy ponytail sways as she trots in. She doesn’t take any time to make introductions. She hangs her bag on the back of her chair and sits, crossing her legs at the knee.
“Hello, Tanisha,” Latoya says.
Tanisha simply raises a hand in greeting. I note the empty chairs—there are at least a dozen still, maybe more. Beverly strains to get a good look at the door.
“I called her, Beverly,” Denise says. “Told her someone was here to listen.”
“Hasn’t mattered to her before,” Toya cuts in.
“She’ll come.” That seems to silence the room for now. Beverly isn’t straining her neck anymore, but her eyes are still focused past the circle. Another glance reveals Latoya has situated herself nearest to the stack of extra chairs.
“How many are you expecting?” I ask Denise.
“I contacted everyone I could.”
I point to chairs. “This is—”
Latoya answers me. “The right number of chairs? Yes.” Denise told me the girls go missing in summer. I didn’t realize she meant every summer. That gets me to count. By the time I’m done, there are twenty chairs and at least another ten in the stack next to Latoya.
“Can we get started?” Tanisha speaks for the first time. “The girl is clearly not coming.”
“I left her a message,” Denise insists.
“Doesn’t mean she—”
One of the sanctuary doors slams open and a woman who could be my younger sister walks in. She has long blond braids. She wears black shorts and a black tank top. Tattoos curl down one of her legs. She sits far away from any of us. But, even from her distance, I can sense the anger in her.
She looks around at all of us. “This it?” We are outnumbered by empty seats.
Miss Beverly has found someone new to focus on. “Kylie, you couldn’t cover yourself before coming in?” She extends her lavender shawl to her. “Have some respect.”
Kylie gets up, grabs the shawl, and wraps it over her shoulders. She sits. Silence resounds. I look at this cross section of women and I’m stunned by how different we are and how we are all the same. If Beverly isn’t in politics, I’ll eat my tongue. She is as put together as any celebrity. Latoya clearly cares for this church and isn’t a stranger to a day’s labor. Tanisha must have moved here from the Midwest, I can tell by her vowels. They have a softness, not the slight twang people from here have. I used to have that. I worked to get rid of it when I left. And Kylie. She looks to be a few years younger than me. From the ages in this room, and the empty chairs surrounding us. All these women span a lifetime. For all of our differences, there is one striking similarity.
All these women are Black.
All the missing girls are Black.
Beverly starts. “Let’s open this with a prayer.” Everyone bows their heads. “Dear Lord, we pray for peace today and every day.”
Prayers make me uncomfortable. Not the private act, but the public use of them. They feel too intimate to me; it’s like wearing your heart on your sleeve. I don’t want to see it without warning. I know better than to be rude, but I feel like everyone can sense my unease.
“We pray for grace, strength, and understanding. All is part of your plan.”
Denise speaks loudly and firmly, driving the prayer for a moment. “And the safe return of Caroline. Be with her family at this time.”
Beverly nods and continues, “Yes, send her home unscathed. In your name. Amen.”
“Amen” echoes around. I swallow mine.
“Who are you?” Kylie pushes through the niceties.
“I’m Liz. I went to school with Keisha when she was at Westmont. I’m here to learn what happened.” I show them Caroline’s flyer. “Caroline has been missing for three days. We are running out of time.”
Tanisha clutches her keys in hand, ready to leave the moment this is over. “Alice was the first.” Her voice sits right outside her body, reporting the facts. “June twenty-first, 1985.” That’s way before Keisha. Same year I was born. Same year Mel was born.
“This place was— My husband and I came from Detroit after he got a job at the steel mill. Admin. The industry was drying up. He was here to help shut things down. We were supposed to be safe here. I didn’t lock my doors. Told my girl to play outside in the summer. In the city, I’d have been worried, but here…what could be out here?”
“Patrice. June twentieth, 1988.” Beverly doesn’t elaborate. It’s clearly still too painful for her to say any more.
Latoya speaks next. “My Morgan went missing June twenty-first, 1994.”
“Keisha. June twenty-first, 2002,” Denise adds.
We all look at Kylie.
“Kayla’s next,” she mumbles. “How are you going to help?”
“I’m putting together what I can.” I present the best of what I have. “So far, all of your girls went missing not just in summer, but every summer on the solstice, since 1985. It’s on a cycle. And they clearly have a demographic.”
Beverly raises her voice slightly, making a firm point. “Our girls are gone the same day, but not all of them go missing on that day.”
“Bev, the girl back in ’95 was a runaway,” Latoya says.
“And this girl now? Caroline? She went missing on the eighteenth, right?” Beverly asks.
“Right,” I answer. Just when I thought I had something, it’s gone.
Latoya cuts her eyes at Beverly. “Well, we’ll have to see if another girl goes missing today.” Her sarcasm bites, but her point is made.
Tanisha gets us back on track. “Whoever is doing this is connected to the police department.”
“It has to be trafficking,” Latoya interjects.
“I don’t know about that,” Tanisha contradicts.
“How else are they—”
Kylie cuts in, “I got my ass up at dawn for this?”
“Language,” Beverly scolds.
“Bullshit. You could have figured that out by sitting on the corner listening to the people down here talk for five minutes. I know you haven’t—I saw you lookin’ at all these chairs like…” Kylie mocks my shocked face. “This has been happening, it’s gonna keep happening until—” Her frustration gets the better of her. “What’s it like living up on the mountain where you don’t have to worry about this? Maybe all of us should move uptown, and when they start stealing white kids and eating their hearts, someone will finally give a shit!”
No one scolds Kylie for that. The whole room aches.
“How do you know their hearts are eaten?” I ask.
“Do you know any Black folks in this town?” Kylie lands right on a childhood wound and adds salt. Kylie smiles, happy to have gotten to me. “Say that you’re out in the woods, after dark, and you hear something, a broken branch, a whistle…?”
“I’d look—”
Kylie corrects me, “No, you didn’t.”
“What?”
“If something calls your name, if a branch breaks”—she snaps her fingers, the sound echoes—“if you think you saw something. No. You didn’t. Don’t give it any attention. You let it pass by you in the dark. Or it will eat you alive.”
“I heard stories growing up. The man and his shadow. But that’s all it is, a story,” I say. That was clearly the wrong thing.
“My sister told me not to, but I looked.” Kylie’s anger leaves her all at once and she sinks into herself. “It called her name.”
“The man?” I ask, all ready to ask for a description.
“There was a man. A hunter. But all I could look at was…” She goes away behind her eyes. “I thought it was a dog, didn’t look like any kind of dog I’d ever seen. Didn’t move like a dog.”
Before I can ask its size or shape or if it looks like the hound from my dreams or if it has the large dark teeth from my memory, Beverly cuts in.
“Could have been trained—”
“It looked up at me like it knew me. Like it had been watching. I heard it call her name, and I looked,” Kylie says.
Tanisha speaks up, “Don’t tell me that after all these years, you think your sister was taken by a”—gripping her keys, her frustration manifests in her fingertips—“thing in the woods.”
“Then what did I see— This is why I don’t come. No one ever wants to listen to me.”
“I refuse to listen to what you imagined as a child,” Tanisha replies. “The reality is, this is a sick man who has moved under the radar.” Tanisha turns to me. “Denise said you were working with a detective. Are you with the FBI?”
“Um. No. I’m just—”
“A private detective?”
“No.”
Tanisha levels a look of annoyance at Denise. “If this is another damn psychic, I’m going to—”
Denise defends me. “She’s helping. She’s a helper.”
I speak for myself. “I’m working with someone from the medical examiner’s office.”
Kylie laughs loudly. “Seriously? They’ve never helped before.”
She has a point. I remember how Doug was with Oswald versus the man I just saw. Be it justice or a promotion, he wants things to change. Then I’m reminded of what spurred this meeting.
“The police are listening to me. Instead of having to fight for every little step, I—we can get so much closer to figuring this out.”
“You trust him?” Kylie asks.
Doug has come through for me. Twice. I can’t say that I fully trust him yet, but I’m on my way.
“He knows there’s something shady going on and wants to find the truth.”
Latoya adds, “They been doing shady work.”
“I tried to cooperate with them,” Tanisha says. “The police could have taken evidence, samples, opened cases. Unless there is something staring them right in the face, they won’t do shit.”
Beverly shoots Tanisha a look. Tanisha half-heartedly crosses herself.
“We’re making a map.” I pull out my phone. I show them the Xs and explain them. “I’m trying to put everything we have together, to see the big picture.”
Kylie gets up and grabs my phone. I let her. She curls herself around the device and makes a few quick strokes. “Here.” She hands it back to me and points. “Kayla.”
She’s made a digital X on the location. I zoom back out. It’s between Keisha and Caroline. I now have a row of orange Xs. My chest sinks.
I summon all my bravery. “And where they found her?” She navigates again. Just as quickly, she scrolls out to a location near Keisha’s red X.
“Tell me their names?” I ask. “Please.” I know I don’t have everything they need, but I’m getting closer. After a beat, the names come:
Keisha Woodson.
Kayla Montrose.
Morgan Daniels.
Patrice Carter.
Alice Walker.
Judging by the number of chairs, there are many names missing. “Who else?”
“You never know what it’s like to lose a child until you do.” Latoya’s gaze drifts to the ground as she speaks. “Those who can leave, do. Some fall apart. Some deny it’s even happened.”
“We all fall apart,” Beverly adds.
“Some never come back together,” Latoya corrects.
I ask, “What about the community? Everyone—”
“Community doesn’t want any part of this.” Kylie sits back down. “You have any idea how many church ladies told me my sister was fast, and that’s why she disappeared? Or, when she was found the way she was, blamed my mother?”
“How long until they found Kayla?” I ask.
“A week,” Kylie says. “Said she was alive out there for a few days before.”
“Alice was found the same day,” Tanisha says.
“A week for Keisha,” Denise adds.
“I’m still looking for Morgan,” Latoya says.
We all turn to Beverly.
She doesn’t offer anything about her daughter.
Instead, she says, “I don’t like to think about why he keeps some of them.”
All the missing pieces and unanswered questions turn up the tension in the room. Looking at this small circle, there’s what these mothers think, then what the countless other families think, then the Parkers, the police. It’s chaos. Purposeful chaos.
“If no one can agree, no one can unite,” I say. “Try to get someone to agree to any piece of this: runaway, police negligence, possible trafficking.” I look at Kylie. “A monster.”
“You think you’re the first person to come sniffing around?” she says to me.
“Don’t scare her.” Latoya waves a hand at her.
Kylie fidgets in her seat. “My mother led the search for my sister in the woods. Dad nearly broke his leg out there. Then she…” The room shifts uncomfortably. Kylie doesn’t finish her thought.
Tanisha speaks. “It’s one sick man.”
“A funny man,” Beverly echoes.
Kylie gets up. “If you aren’t careful, your head will get to you.”
Denise’s sad voice comes in. “I called all the mothers I knew. Farrah was the last one to do something like this, to try to solve it.”
“Where is she?” I ask.
Kylie sighs deeply. “She lost herself. She said she saw a dog. Like I did but…” The words fall out of her like a spell, and she is afraid of conjuring what she sees in her mind’s eye. “She says she got a bad feeling in those trees over by the old Rosedale Coke plant. Like she was standing on a grave she knew nothing about. Like something was telling her to get out of the place.”
A hush falls over us all. We look around, seeing who believes that. I touch my scar. It looks too big to be made by a dog. It doesn’t hurt today. Just funny-feeling flesh, but I can already feel the panic mounting in the back of my neck.
“Where is Farrah now?” I ask.
“At her mother’s; only person who will take care of her,” Latoya says. “She can’t be trusted to be on her own.” She looks at my list of names. “Brittany Miller was her daughter.” I write her name down slowly, taking it in.
“Can I talk to Farrah?”
“Good luck getting her to see you,” Kylie scoffs.
Tanisha gets up, ready to go. “She’s gonna tell you what we did, just more crazy.”
The other women start to leave. Kylie rushes out the doors of the church into the morning light. I glance to Denise and she wordlessly indicates for me to follow Kylie.
By the time I exit the church, Kylie is encased in a veil of smoke. Her vape lights up as she pulls and exhales a plume. She leans against the side of the sanctuary and pulls out her phone.
“You okay?” I ask.
She doesn’t even look at me. “What do you want from us? Money?”
I tell Kylie the truth. “I want to help.”
She lets out a hollow laugh. “No one wants to help us.” Her impenetrable expression is well-practiced and unnerving.
“I’m sorry—”
“Did you do this?”
“No.”
“Then don’t say sorry. It won’t get you anywhere.” She frowns as she reads texts. The bubbles populate her screen in a flurry. She’s someone who is connected to the world in a way that I’ll never be. Her nails click against the screen.
I think about pushing on seeing Farrah, but I see the time. I promised Mel I’d be out there for her.
“Do you think you and Farrah saw the same thing? The same dog?”
“I never like telling them the second part of the story.”
“What’s that?” Not even I know that.
“If you get taken by this man and his shadow, anyone who looks for you loses it. They go crazy ’cause they’re looking for something that can no longer be found. His victims have become what’s eaten them.”
“The man?”
“No. The shadow.” She turns her phone over in her hand, but her focus is clearly on the text chain. “I couldn’t sleep at night, just sat up thinking. Looking.” That explains how she pulled up the locations on the map so fast. “When they found what was left of Kayla a week later, Momma took a bunch of pills. Didn’t work. A few years later, she tried again. Worked that time.”
“I’m…” My apology dies in my throat.
“Farrah and I think we saw a dog. Doesn’t matter if it’s the same dog, it’s…” Kylie’s in her own memories, searching the wound. “We looked for the truth and it killed my mother. It’s killing Farrah. We all saw something out there that we couldn’t make sense of. Whatever it was, a dog or a memory, it messed us up.”
It’s what my therapist told me, sometimes we put things in as placeholders to protect ourselves. I rest my hand on her shoulder. Kylie lets me. Maybe it’s her sadness or the residual tension from the mothers, but we share a chill. Beverly’s lavender shawl slides under my touch. As it does I see the strangest thing. Something dark slips under my fingertips and curls up into my palm. I pull my hand away. Nothing. A trick of the light.
I look back at Kylie’s shoulder and see what fooled me. On her deltoid is a black profile of a canine. Stylized, like a cameo. With two pointed ears.
“What’s that?”
“When Mom died, I went to one of the shops here. She hated tattoos. But when I lost her, I was so numb, I wanted to feel something, anything. There was a bunch of flash on the wall and the guy kept trying to get me to pick out a rose or some crap like that. I saw that one, and I knew. He said it’s Anubis. The Egyptian god of the dead. Judgment before the end. Caretaker of lost souls. Felt right.”
“Why?”
“I know more than enough about death, and I believe in judgment. Whatever took my sister and did this to all these girls? Man or beast, it will see justice before the end.”
