Jackal, page 20
“No details, just…clues. Like, two thousand Black folks left in less than a week. They say there was no violence, but that day the announcement was made, ten crosses burned in the hills. This place was listed with Tulsa and Saint Louis. When you put all that together, what do you get?”
I search my education for Tulsa and come up empty. I did learn about the Saint Louis race riots.
“This place has been an open wound since the flood. Probably before.” Latoya feels heavy next to me. “Two thousand Black and brown people already disappeared from this town overnight and it’s been forgotten.”
I’d always been taught the flood, never about this. “Farrah’s daughter was a dancer?”
“Best this town had ever seen.”
“Kylie and Kayla’s family?” I ask.
“Her parents organized for better school funding. They started to get it before she was taken.”
“You?”
“Kept that church open with my two bare hands. Kept the community together. We were active too.” She smiles. “I tried to get voter registration started before Morgan…” Her sadness takes the rest of her words.
Another kind of culling is happening. These aren’t random girls. A shadow calling their names isn’t a folktale. It was on purpose. These girls were targeted.
Latoya gets up. “This is why I don’t look. Searching for my girl, I understand. Digging into the hate that took her…no.” She walks back toward the street.
“Wait—” She doesn’t stop. I run after her down the steps. “Toya!”
“Even if you get a name, and if you find out what’s happening, and if you bring that girl home? Farrah is still broken. After all this time, I always thought I wanted to know why, that it might bring me some peace, but if it won’t bring Morgan back, I don’t want it.”
“What about justice?”
“You live in the same country I live in, child?” Her sarcasm bites.
“Please, I’m going to need help—”
“I’ve given you more than enough.” She gets into her car. My heart sinks as I watch her pull away.
EIGHTEEN
I open the door to my mother’s house and smell blood. Then mud. I wave my hand in front of my face to waft it away but a metallic tang hangs in the air. I reach for the light. I can’t find it. It has been too long since I’ve been home. Surprisingly, I move pretty well in the dark. I start with a hand out to feel along the wall. Soon find that I don’t need it. I deftly avoid the edge of the kitchen counter and move into the dining room without stubbing my toe. Before I can celebrate, I slip on something slick and cold. Trying to catch myself, my body wheels backward and slams into the wall. A framed painting crashes down next to me on the floor. The angle shatters the glass instantly. I grimace from the din of it.
“Elizabeth?” my mother yells, groggy from sleep. I scramble for the light switch. Now, painfully unable to navigate the dark, it seems my familiarity was just as fleeting as it was final.
“I slipped on someth—” Wetness takes my feet out from under me again. I’m slammed flat on my back before I know it. Breath goes out of my lungs. Gasping, I’m treated to an upside-down view of my mother’s dining room table. Hanging over the edge, a black unblinking eye, illuminated by moonlight, stares back at me. Brown fur surrounds gray lids and short black eyelashes. The fur builds out in little brushstrokes. The snout has deep dry cracks. A few ticks crawl across the table, fleeing their now-dead host. I see one venture across the eye. The gray lids don’t blink the insect away. I stand. When I get to my feet, I see nothing can make this creature whole again.
Before me, on my mother’s immaculate dining room table, is a deer. Or what’s left of it. The poor thing has been ripped open. Not gutted. Carved. The jagged ribs sag wide and the red insides glisten with blood. I expect to see a stew of intestines. Instead, I see one discernible organ. A heart. The rest of the creature is filled with what looks like bloody ball bearings. A few scatter out onto the ground. I pick one up and roll it in my fingers. It’s unpopped popcorn.
Five days ago, the sight of a mutilated mouse sent me racing outside. Caroline’s blood on my hands almost caused me to black out. A body in a bag on Doug’s table kept me at the edge of the room. The pictures of Brittany’s and Alice’s mutilated bodies overwhelmed me. Looking at the deer, I’m not afraid. I’m curious. I want to look at the inside of this creature. Cool white bone presses through flesh. I search the pink sinews and red muscles for something I can’t name. I get closer, knowing it’s there, somewhere. What exactly? I’ll know it when I see it.
“Liz?” My mother’s voice is close.
I turn to stop her. “Wait!” I’m too late. Her scream is something I’ve never heard before. I’ve only ever heard my mother raise her voice to protect someone, me or a patient or a foolish family member. This scream is riddled with genuine fear for herself. I run to her. Doing so, I get another angle of the scene. Nothing else is out of place. The back doors are shut. The windows are closed. Not even the rug is out of place. It’s like the deer materialized in our dining room.
I reach for my mother. She’s shaking. I grip her tightly and press her head into my shoulder. I shield her with my body. She trembles in a way I’ve never seen her do before. It rattles me.
This is a warning. The deer from the tarp is staged in my home. Waiting for me. For my mother.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“I am calling the police.”
“No! You can’t. They’ll think this is me.” I try to tell her about the tarp of intestines in the woods and the search for Caroline that I’ve been banned from. Instead, I grab some dish towels and start to scrub the blood away. It doesn’t belong here in my home. My mother grabs the towels from me. I start elsewhere and she stops me again.
“What?” I ask, baffled by her behavior.
“The rod,” she finally replies.
“What?”
My mother points to the sliding door. The rod sits to one side. “You forgot to put it back.” I feel sick to my stomach. I search for when I last went out through the back door. I can’t remember if I replaced the bar the other day or not. I was too concerned with impressing Chris. Idiot.
“Mom, why is it there?”
“I want to be safe,” she mumbles and starts to clean. “They have come here before.”
“What do you mean?”
She wipes the floor and gathers bloody kernels of popcorn. She wipes them down and shows me. My mind drifts back. The spare keys. I go to the kitchen and open the drawer. There, next to the keys, are bags of popcorn.
“The bags had flyers in them.” She takes a shallow breath. “Little recruitment flyers for some group. They showed up on our yard every few weeks after you left for college.”
Now I understand why she always visits me and has rarely bothered me about not coming home. It wasn’t safe. “And now?” I ask.
My mother won’t look at me. She is usually the one searching for me, figuring out what’s wrong, and making me face something. I try to meet her eyes. She refuses. While my mother doesn’t often choose silence or avoidance, she does when she wants to protect me. I noticed this first when my parents divorced and my father moved out. He left overnight. I remember him in our kitchen for breakfast one day, then never again. We all met in the park next to school a few days later for him to tell me he was okay and to explain that our home was changing. After that day, I made a list of his things:
His clothes.
Shoes.
A few books.
The large-screen TV.
His shoes disappeared first. When I told my mother, she didn’t say anything. Every day something of his went missing she did the same thing. Disengaged. Changed the subject. Finally, I figured out she was arranging times for him to come and move out when I wasn’t home.
I roll the hard kernels of the bags in my fingers. “Why are you keeping these?”
“Proof. A reminder. About what people say.” She starts cleaning. Her frenetic insistence reminds me of Mrs. Parker at the site. Two women, around the same age, hell-bent on making things right. Making things okay. Cleaning up the mess of a man who needed to express his rage. I grab her hands.
“Mom? I’m sorry. Okay?”
“I thank God that it is just this.” The waver in her voice is gone. She’s cool and clinical. She starts to sort through cleaning supplies under the sink, grabbing the best tools for the job.
“You were here! Someone came in—dragged that thing in.”
We’ve swapped moods. My mother refuses to match my hysterics. In fact, she doesn’t even look fazed.
“And, cherie? By the grace of God, I am still here.”
She snaps on her gloves and looks at the mess. I hear her mutter about setting and staining, but soon her words drift into Creole and I can’t keep up. My mother has been dealing with threats, small little threats, unknown to me, for years. The week I come home and start asking questions about the Black girls missing in the woods, this happens.
“Bondye mwen, kisa moun pral di?”
“People will what?” I ask.
She brushes me away, not wanting to have to translate. The message under it is clear. This is the price of living here. In America. My mother will suffer it. She apparently already has. I see Latoya in my mother. Both women of deep faith and women who have had enough. Latoya was done with me unearthing her daughter. My mother is done with me asking her about this. She will suffer this the same way Latoya suffers losing her child. This way, they decide how much they will hurt. Watching my mother work, she shows me there are sides to her that I’ve never seen at all.
We are good Black people. Good Black folks who don’t bring up race. We don’t make a fuss; we don’t make things uncomfortable; we are calm and cool and collected at all times. Even in the face of death. I think of how I couldn’t fight back. I think of how Garrett tolerated the slaughter of the deer.
“We have to get rid of this,” I say.
“How?”
Before, I would have asked Mel. I can’t involve Doug any further after asking him to risk his job. Also, I just got him on my side, this could be a reason not to trust me. I need to reach out to the last person I have.
I dial and look at the deer. He answers on the second ring.
“Hey,” I say. “It’s me. I need help.” Admitting that releases tension in my chest and back. I bend over and take a deep breath for the first time in minutes. I exhale and my mind finds what I was looking for in the deer’s insides.
More.
NINETEEN
“Holy shit,” Chris says when he sees the deer.
“Thank you for coming over this late.” I usher him through the back door. He was just getting done closing down the bar. He doesn’t have time to take off his shoes. Mud and blood are now all over my mother’s dining room floor.
“We have to get rid of this,” I say. “I know—it looks bad. You need to trust me.” I ramble. “Someone is trying to scare me or frame me or both— How do we do this?” I don’t give him the chance to say no or to get a question in. Not yet.
“I have something in my truck. We can wrap it up. I’ll dump it out by my place.”
“You have to burn it or something,” I insist.
“I’ve gotten rid of a deer or two.” Chris ducks back out the door.
I look at my mother. “It’s gonna be okay.” I see her looking at the mud on her floor. She needs to clean. I grab some paper towels and wipe up what Chris has tracked in. At the first swipe, the mud appears to be fresh. I stop. He just closed down the bar. Why would there be mud on his shoes?
The rumple of plastic announces Chris’s return. He carries a blue tarp into the dining room and starts to work one side under the deer. I’m frozen like a fool. Chris starts to debate rolling versus lifting the deer up. I don’t hear him.
“Where did you get that?” I ask.
“I don’t remember…” He thinks. “This one just kind of lives in my truck.” Chris finally notices my stillness. “What is it?”
Weighing all the options in front of me, I take the most obvious path. “Blue is a common tarp color, right?”
“Yeah. Why?”
The congealed blood against the blue. The tarp I found in the woods. He couldn’t run all the way to the woods and back to the bar? But the mud on his shoes—
“Liz?” he asks. “Help me roll this. It’s gonna be easier than lifting, don’t want to get any more blood on the floor.”
Right now, I need to get this out of our house. Before he touches it, I snap a few pics on my phone. Just in case. He tucks the tarp halfway under the deer and I push. The fur slides over the cold hard flesh. I ignore the sensation and get the deer into the tarp. It part rolls, part slides into Chris’s waiting arms. He wraps it up fast.
Why not me?
There’s that question again. I deny it. I need to stay present. I come around the other side of the table and help him fold in the sides.
“Ready?” he asks. He grabs the end with the head. I have the feet. “Keep it tucked, so nothing leaks out.”
When we lift the deer I flash to the crime scene photos. Was this how Brittany and Alice were transported, lugged into a body bag and roughly handled out of the trees?
“Liz?” Chris checks in with me.
I give a quick nod. We start walking the deer out.
He’s not bothered by any of this. He’s clutching his side of the tarp with one hand and cradling the deer with the other as he moves backward. When he takes the step down out the back door, he takes the animal’s weight. It looks like it pains him to do so. He quickly shifts the weight onto his forearms. I see that his hand is wrapped in a bandage.
“What happened?” I nod at his injury.
“I was helping Dad get an opossum out from under his porch yesterday. Perks of living off the grid. Once pests find a structure, they like to stay.” Chris flexes his injured hand. “Dad doesn’t kill ’em, outta spite. He traps them instead. He’s. Um. We don’t own the land we live on—not anymore. Been trying to save up and get it back for years, but it feels impossible. Dad gets his licks in any way he can. Like with the possums. If there are pests on the land it’s worth less. As long as they don’t take up in the house, he lets ’em run free. I helped him set up a trap. It’s an old metal thing. Cut me up pretty bad.” We make our way across the patio around to the front of the house where his truck is parked. Doug said that something in the remains was human. I’ve been stuck on Caroline’s remains, her blood. It could also be from the killer. From a cut. Chris’s looks deep. Probably bled enough for it to sink into the forest floor.
He’s here late, in pain, and helping me without a question or complaint. I haven’t become a bitter woman in my thirties as much as I’ve become a smart one. The kindness of strangers rarely applies to me, as a Black woman. And even when it does, I don’t trust it. This isn’t because of resentment or a lie someone told me. Over time, I’ve learned to suspect men who are kind without reason. No one operates from the goodness of their hearts.
We reach his truck, and he lowers the back of it to open the cargo bed. It’s clean. This deer is gonna ruin that. He places his half of the animal in before coming around to take mine. He shoves the carcass inside and my eyes fall across his back. I know when I’m attracted to someone because I enjoy the shapes they make. The way he organizes his body reminds me of my body in a way that makes me uncomfortable. I look up at the sky, finding an escape in the night.
“You hunt a lot?” I smile to hide how afraid I am.
“Yeah, with my dad. He loves it out there.” Chris gets the deer in and sits on the back of his truck. “He broke his foot a while back and it never healed right, but he doesn’t let it stop him. Just means I have to go with him every time to make sure he doesn’t get stuck somewhere.”
I’ve been so focused on looking for who took Caroline and killed the other girls, I haven’t thought about what it would be like to look at him. Now that I’m facing the possibility, I try to form some physical characteristics in my mind. To kill girls like this. To violate them and take them apart. Someone with that darkness in them wouldn’t be attractive. He’d have those strange, empty eyes. Looking at Chris’s green ones, he looks tired. A little shocked. He has emotions. A blue tarp and muddy shoes are common. It’s not him. It can’t be. My gut says it’s not.
“You ever hear the rhyme about the man and his shadow?” I ask.
“Hell, yeah,” Chris scoffs. “Dad and I whistle to each other when we’re out there. Never call our names. A whistle will stop a deer in its tracks, give you a clean shot.”
When Mel left me in the woods, whatever followed me whistled. If someone were hunting for a deer, that’s another basic explanation.
All this is too flimsy. Find something damning, Liz. “You remember Keisha?” I ask.
“I remember she smelled like gummy bears. I don’t know why.”
I do. “It was the gel she put in her hair.”
“What?”
This strange push and pull in me keeps me there, sitting next to him, assessing him and comparing him to the men I’m looking for. He said his father was a clerk; he was tipped off about Bonfire Night. But he doesn’t seem like a serial rapist and murderer. Then again, he doesn’t have to be, he could be keeping tabs on me for someone else.
I tap the edge of my hairline, hoping I haven’t sweated it all away yet. I offer my fingers to Chris. He looks at them for a second. I hold them up to his nose and he understands. He takes my hand. He smells my fingers. My stomach knots again. I’ve never broken down what I’m attracted to in men. I like to think it’s kindness. While sitting here, with a deer carcass behind us, I’m offering an intimate part of myself to a man who I haven’t decided is a murderer or not.
