But then he saw her.
He’d stumbled on a photo of an event that a large banner told him was held during Pledge Week last year. The caption informed him it was taken last fall. Instead of pearls and sweater sets, it was khaki pants and button-down shirts, all rolled identically mid-forearm, showcasing silver James Avery–style charm bracelets. The shirts were all either cornflower blue or coral blush, with matching headbands on most. The aggressive sameness, the power, or oppression, in numbers reminded Darren of a platoon photo. The picture was taken in what appeared to be the sorority house living room Darren had seen on Rho Beta Zeta’s website, with girls sitting in threes and fours at the many tables, which held papers and some textbooks and also party decorations, so it was hard to tell if this was a study session or an event-planning committee.
At a table in a back corner, at the very edge of the image, he saw a dark-skinned black girl with hair that was neither natural nor straight but some confused halfway point. She couldn’t ever make hers lay down quite right. Despite the crassness of his mother’s words and the dated expectations for black women’s hair they suggested, they told Darren that he was looking at the SFA student his mother had talked about. She was pretty, but a slip of a thing. Frail was the word that came to mind. She seemed to have looked up just as the shutter clicked. But he could find no trace of her on Rho Beta Zeta’s official website or their Instagram page, which had hundreds of pics of the Robees’ smiling, all-white membership. It seemed the black girl was in the picture one day, and then she was just gone. Just like his mother had told him.
His phone started ringing across the room.
The walk to the kitchen counter gave him time to hope that it was Randie.
But it was Roland Carroll calling, even though Darren had sent the email not even twenty minutes ago. How could Roland have gotten his hands on any missing person information from the Nacogdoches Police Department or the county sheriff that fast?
“Darren,” he bellowed, a huff of good humor in his voice. “Now I know you was drunk when you called last night.” This caught Darren up short. Confused, he said nothing for a few seconds. He had called Roland last night? The idea of it trilled in the back of his mind, like the ring of a distant church bell. There was a pinch of melancholy in Roland’s voice, pained disappointment too. “I can’t believe I had to hear from Wilson that you quit the department. I know it’s been hard, with the separation from Lisa —”
“Divorce.”
There was a sigh from Roland. “Aw, man, I hadn’t realized it was final.”
“It’s fine.” Darren tried to sound, if not breezy, then at least calm and accepting.
“Still,” his friend said, about divorce, “it’s hard, man. It’s almost like a death.”
“It’s not,” Darren said quickly and left it at that.
“Worried about you, man, is all I’m saying. Buddy, Ricky, and Hector too. Patricia said you’re still welcome when we get together at her place in Austin next month.” His tone had taken on the lilt of a careful inquiry. “I happen to know for a fact that your paperwork hasn’t been fully processed. I think Wilson is stalling, hoping —”
Darren quickly cut him off, choking off this line of thought. “I’m fine, Roland. Really.” Then, trying to move away from talk of his broken life, he asked a question that boomeranged right back to it. “You say I called you?”
“About the missing SFA student,” Roland said. “You don’t remember?”
He didn’t, which gave him an odd feeling of dissociation. His heart had done something his mind could not recall. Even though he’d been blackout drunk and angry — at his mother for trying to manipulate him with her lies and at Randie for pressing him to take Bell Callis seriously — his soul had been awake to what they were both saying. There was a young woman who might be in trouble. Even while intoxicated, he’d started investigating the missing student; he had behaved like a Texas Ranger.
“Remind me, please,” he said to Roland as he grabbed a slip of paper and a pencil from a kitchen drawer.
There was a long pause on the other end of the line, a desk phone somewhere in the Rangers’ office ringing a shrill alarm in the background. Finally it stopped, and in the silence that opened up between the two men, Roland said, “You know, we’ve all been struggling. We’ve all fallen down, leaned on a few things we shouldn’t have, trying to cope with the insanity of the past few years. Ricky had to start talking to a head doctor after the shootings in El Paso. Patricia still ain’t got over all those people that man shot up in Sutherland Springs. And Charlottesville, man, you know that took the wheels off for me.” Darren did know. That summer in 2017, Company A was on high alert, had been since the election, had assisted in the investigation of several hate crimes in the eastern part of the state, had feared exactly what was happening in Charlottesville happening here. “Klan marching in broad daylight down the street,” Roland said. “Worse than the Klan.” With their Scout-like precision, their pressed pants and buttoned shirt collars, they had none of the id-fueled bacchanal feel of the OG Klan, men whose bonfire-like rage burned with at least a modicum of shame, hence the hoods, the midnight ramblings. These boys and men had their faces open to the sun. And even a rookie law enforcement officer knew that any criminal willing to show his face was not likely to leave any victims alive. Watching footage of the riot in Charlottesville in the pained silence of the conference room at Company A headquarters in Houston — where they’d all been called in to work that Saturday as a national emergency unfolded — they turned to each other, stunned over what this meant for the country’s future, the state’s. If the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas ever got that organized, if they too chose a rebirth in this new political climate — in which the sun shone on them from on high, warmed their pinkish cheeks with the certainty that they were protected all the way up to the White House — then they were done for, men like Darren who had given their careers and lives to the work of racial justice, to righting the ever-listing ship that was this country. You couldn’t take your hands off the wheel even for a second. Roland had had to excuse himself. Darren found him in the men’s room, gray with worry.
“It’s too much, man,” he now said. “For all of us. The lies, the violence, the stone-cold hatred that’s actually starting to grow, like a nasty mold. It’s too much to hold.” He paused for a long while, and when his desk phone rang again, Darren heard him pick it up and immediately slam it back down. “But I’m worried about you, man. I know it feels like the country is trying to annihilate folks like us, but please, man, don’t try to race ’em to it. Get some help with the drinking, man, or, hell, call me if you need to sometime. Just to talk. We need you, Darren. We need you.”
Darren felt a thickness spread in the back of his throat, felt a salty sadness there.
“About the missing girl, Roland. Let me just get down the information.”
Roland sighed, as he felt the emotional opening between them whisper closed.
“Get down what? I told you last night, there are no missing person reports involving any SFA student, not with the university’s police, not with Nacogdoches PD, and not with the sheriff’s department. No student has been reported missing.”
“Right,” Darren said, looking down at the blank slip of paper. It was the back of a receipt from a hardware store two towns over. Darren had bought chicken wire as a stopgap to keep out the feral hogs that came onto his land from time to time, until he could figure out a better fencing system. He set the pencil down, feeling a tad foolish for getting worked up over something his first instinct had told him wasn’t even a real story.
“But I was going to call you even before I saw your email,” Roland said. “Buddy of mine at Nacogdoches PD got back to me with something curious about Rho Beta Zeta.”
“What’s that?”
“There’s been no report of anyone missing, but turns out one of their members, a girl who lived in their house off campus, filed a police report.”
“Hmph.”
“And get this… she’s black.”
“Name?” Darren asked, falling so easily into a familiar investigative rhythm.
“Seraphine ‘Sera’ Renee Fuller was the full name on the report.”
Darren wrote the name on the receipt. “What was she reporting?”
“Bullying was the word she used. Though the report doesn’t get more specific than that. But apparently, it got so bad she told the desk officer she didn’t feel safe living there. ‘Complainant reports she is miserable.’”
“What date was this?”
“September twelfth.”
So, over a week ago. Darren wrote this down as well. “And did anyone ever follow up on this?” he said.
“Nacogdoches PD forwarded a copy of the report to campus police, but I don’t know that it went much further than that. There was never any other report filed by Sera or any other student living at the Rho Beta Zeta house, not this year, at least.”
“And this Sera… she’s black? You’re sure?”
“I’m looking at the report now,” Roland said. “Listen, I don’t know the whole story, of course, but damn if it ain’t a coincidence, you asking about a missing black girl in that sorority, and we got a black girl living out there who filed a police report saying she doesn’t feel safe. And you know what Wilson says about coincidence —”
“God tapping you on the shoulder,” Darren said, repeating his former lieutenant’s words, as if cops and God were partners on any case, men like him an extension of His hand. It suggested a level of power that didn’t feel safe in a single man’s hands, not even his own. Especially not his own. It’s not that he necessarily regretted what he’d done, pinning a homicide on a white supremacist who was already a murderer a few times over. But it unnerved him how easy it was.
