He thanked Roland and asked him to give his best to Patricia, Ricky, Buddy, and Hector, signaling he was most likely not coming to any get-together in Austin.
Then he let Roland get back to work. And Darren did the same.
He went back over everything, retracing his digital steps. Sera Fuller did not exist anywhere online in the documented world of the Rho Beta Zeta sorority other than the one photo he’d found on the university’s website of her smiling during a Pledge Week event a year ago.
In the picture one day, and then she was just gone.
Darren stayed at his kitchen table for a long time, sitting with this thought. What it said about his mother and her capacity for truth-telling and what it meant for him, a former Ranger, to be in possession of this knowledge. What was his responsibility to Sera Fuller, who had reported not feeling safe? He looked up the address for Rho Beta Zeta on Steen Drive, a Greek row that housed most of the school’s sororities. He wrote it on the back of the hardware-store receipt. It was the last thing he did before he grabbed the keys to his truck and started for the door, doubling back at the last second to detour to his bedroom. It still smelled like Randie, and he took a deep breath, storing some of her in his cells. The part of her that saw the best in him. He’d come back for the Colt .45 in his nightstand, the leather of its tobacco-colored holster cracked and patinaed with time, years the weight at his side carried the authority of the Texas Rangers. He hesitated a moment before grabbing it as a private citizen. But then he remembered his lawyers’ warning: All it takes is one idiot with a gun. That was the trouble with violence, though — it only responded to further escalation.
Outside, he got in his Chevy and followed his compass north.
Part Two
7.
TO GET to Nacogdoches on Highway 59, you passed through Lufkin first, its country cousin to the south. The towns were like fraternal twins for whom genetics hadn’t entirely played fair. Oh, they both had a certain undeniable beauty, surrounded as the municipalities were by the big thicket of East Texas, forest-rich land of pine trees and cedar oaks, hickories and maples. Each town, bereft of its initial timber economy, had diversified over time. There was manufacturing in both towns now, and Lufkin had lucked into a few military contracts. But Nacogdoches had the status of being the “oldest town in Texas,” a point of pride that encouraged preservation in a way that frankly just made the town prettier, with its charming brick streets downtown, the old courthouse, and storefronts dating back centuries, little bits and bobs of Texas history on every corner. What’s more, it was a university town. Stephen F. Austin might not have been Harvard. Hell, it wasn’t even Vanderbilt or Emory. But it was a good school that attracted professors and students from all over the country. It had curricula in engineering, agricultural studies, political science, and the arts. It lent a cosmopolitan air to what might otherwise have been just another Podunk on the way to Marshall or Dallas.
The university sat right off the highway, north of the shopping district in the historic town square and the county courthouses. Darren drove past the wide stone wall that announced the entrance to Stephen F. Austin State University, traveling past the familiar markers of most college towns. Fast-food joints and laundromats, bars and chain restaurants, and a bowling alley. Larger than any in which he’d worked a case in some time, it was a sweet town that seemed sure of itself and its purpose — protecting the history of Texas as its stated oldest town while also envisioning the state’s future as it educated the minds of its next big thinkers. Or at least turned out decent accountants and nurses, business majors on the road to middle management, plus the young men and women who sought careers in agriculture and the environment, the latter being an area of academic study in which SFA shone. With the university as much a part of the town’s identity as its tourism sector that taught all comers about the history of the state (how it went from Caddo hands to the white men who wrested it from the Mexicans), Nacogdoches knew its gifts the way an admired committee chair of a church bake sale knows her pecan pies keep the building fund flush. It had an aura of self-assured pride that never dipped into smugness.
From what Darren had gathered, the school’s fraternities were scattershot across the town and its environs, housed in falling-down rentals with sagging front porches or couches inexplicably dotting their roofs, front yards with burn marks in the grass, young men content to live in ramshackle quarters as long as everyone else was made to do it too, as long as they were plenty in number, safe in the womb of their togetherness, their shared professed love for beer and sports and women. But the school’s sorority houses — and to be clear, that meant only the white ones; as far as Darren could tell, no black sorority or fraternity had a house of any kind near campus — were all on a spacious, well-maintained circle drive about a mile north of the university. They sat like a row of cake-top confections on display, Tara-shaped sweets iced a blinding white. The columns and trim and snowy-white shutters were set against bricks the color of caramels (Delta Theta Tau), strawberries (Chi Omega Theta), honeycombs (Pi Gamma Phi), cinnamon (Kappa Iota Mu), and butter-yellow vanilla sheet cake (Rho Beta Zeta), the facade of the last flanked by twin live oaks. A better educated man might call the houses’ identical architectural style by its correct name: Greek Revival. But to Darren, they would only ever look like a row of plantation mansions.
The front door of Rho Beta Zeta was unmanned and unlocked, so he simply walked inside. Beyond the heavy oak door, it was downright frigid in the house, the air as cold as a glass of sweet tea. And perfumed by a massive floral arrangement that sat on a circular table in the foyer. Pinkish roses and peachy carnations, pale blue hydrangea and hyacinth, colors that Darren recognized as coral blush and cornflower blue. Surrounding the floral centerpiece were two dozen or more tiny picture frames, each barely bigger than an international postage stamp. Encased in each gilded frame was the smiling face of a member of Rho Beta Zeta. He didn’t see a single black face.
He heard footsteps and looked up to see two young women rounding the base of a staircase on the other side of a sitting room that lay beyond the foyer where he stood. He recognized one of them from the home page of the sorority’s website. She was tying up her honey-blond hair with a scrunchie as she approached. She was short and compact. “Um, excuse me?” she said, tightening her ponytail. Her voice was somehow husky and shrill at the same time so that she sounded a bit like a wounded seal.
The girl with her smiled politely. She had dark brown, almost black hair, which immediately set her apart from the Rho Beta women he’d seen on their website and Instagram. Thus individualized, she seemed real to him in a way the other girl didn’t. Remarkable, at least. Like a ruby resting in a handful of rocks. Whatever unspoken rules about appearance gripped this sorority, they didn’t apply to her. She had the patient air of someone with only a cursory interest in the events unfolding before her, the calm of the incurious, of one privileged enough to assume no danger from a stranger walking into her home, for surely he was there to deliver some object for her entertainment or pleasure or to cart away a thing she no longer wanted. She deepened her smile. “Is there something I can help you with?”
The shorter one moved in front of the dark-haired girl, as if displaying a willingness to take a bullet for her. “You want me to see if Ms. Marsh is still here?” Her voice rose with a note of solicitation.
“No,” the dark-haired girl said in a tone quietly reproachful. “I’d like to know if there’s something I can help this gentleman with.” Darren stepped forward, closing the distance between himself and the young women, which meant walking into the lushly carpeted front parlor that smelled of damp wood and lavender, acrid in its artificiality. Darren spotted a plug-in air freshener near the base of the maple staircase. He returned the dark-haired girl’s smile and told them he was looking for Sera Fuller.
The blond girl’s eyes widened ever so slightly.
And the dark-haired girl’s smile faltered for the first time.
Darren felt a rush of intuition. He reached for an old arrow in his quiver, impulsively sitting on one of the cream-colored couches in the parlor as if it were a given that he would be invited to stay awhile. Texans, he knew, could be vicious, but they were rarely rude. It was a truth and a lie at the same time, the state’s storied friendliness. It masked all kinds of bad deeds. But it was a tool, he’d found, pressing people to confront their ideas of themselves as nice, good people. He’d left his Colt in the glove compartment of his truck. He was unarmed and polite. Were these two young women going to risk how they would feel about themselves if they kicked out a mild-mannered, well-dressed black man? Half the state and the country were bent over backward these days trying to prove they weren’t racist. So, great. Prove it. He stretched out his long legs before him, crossing them at the ankles, a show of settling in. “Uh,” the shorter one said, her tone more circumspect now, “are you, like, her dad or something?” She looked over at the dark-haired girl, checking to make sure it was okay that she had asked this. The dark-haired girl nodded. Darren opened his mouth to answer, wishing he still had his badge. He debated just saying the words anyway, repeating the lyrics to a song stuck in his head — I’m Darren Mathews, and I’m a Texas Ranger, ma’am. But he had no real authority here, could not compel them to answer any of his questions. In the brief silence in the room, he heard the whine of an opening door.
He turned and saw, of all people, his mother.
She stood in the door that led to the kitchen. She was wearing a smock and was carrying a broom and a bucket of cleaning supplies. She looked smaller, seemed to be purposely stooping in front of two of the women she worked for — girls a third her age whose rooms she cleaned, whose hair she pulled out of the bathroom shower drains. They called her Miss Bell, and she answered to it, saying she didn’t realize anyone was using the parlor, and she would be on her way upstairs. Darren felt a peculiar sadness witnessing her meek manner, the way she cowered in front of them.
Some charge in the air that passed between Darren and his mother told the two girls to pay closer attention. Their eyes moved in perfect synchronicity, as if choreographed, as they looked back and forth between them. Darren could practically see them making quiet calculations in their minds, coming to a split-second decision about whether it would seem rude or inappropriate to ask if these two random black people somehow knew each other. Bell saw the inquiry coming and got in front of it. “I’ve seen him here before, on move-in day last month. He come with the black girl’s people,” she said, nodding as she answered a question the dark-haired girl was smart enough to realize she hadn’t asked. The girl’s lips pursed ever so slightly.
“I’m her uncle,” Darren offered quickly, going with the lie.
“I’m Kelsey Piper, president of the Gamma Phi chapter of Rho Beta Zeta,” the dark-haired girl said. “Can I get you some water, a can of Coke or something for your ride back?” It was a Southern woman’s way of saying that this would be a quick visit, that despite her cheery tone, he wasn’t welcome here. “Brit, would you go see what we have in the kitchen to offer Mr.…” She paused, waiting on him to identify himself.
Darren ignored her attempt to get his name. “Is she here? Sera?”
“Sera moved out last Saturday,” Kelsey said.
Last Saturday was the fourteenth, Darren thought, two days after she’d filed a police report stating that she was being bullied and was miserable living with these women.
Brit narrowed her eyes at Darren.
Kelsey read her mind. “Which you would think her uncle would already know.”
“Her parents asked me to stop by and grab the rest of her things,” he improvised. Bell smiled, pleased, it seemed, with her son for being quick on his feet, pleased with the way this put Sera’s sorority sisters on the spot. The moment was dislocating for Darren, who felt himself floating out of his skin, hovering over a scene that was as darkly absurd as a bad dream. If you had told him three days ago that he would be in the same room with his mother, he might have laughed till he cried. Tears that ran hot with wild wonder at her gall. For the past three years, he had blamed her for his living forever on the edge of being indicted for a felony. And now the two of them were working in concert to find information about a missing black girl?
He felt lightheaded and in great need of a drink.
He wanted something that might melt him back into himself.
“If you’ll show me the way to her room,” he said, trying to move this along.
Kelsey eyed Darren for a beat, deciding something.
“She took everything with her,” she said. “And I’m afraid men aren’t permitted upstairs for any reason. Miss Bell can tell you that’s not allowed even on move-in day, which I’m assuming is the reason I don’t remember meeting you.”
“Must be,” Darren said.
“Right.” Kelsey stared at him, unbowed by his persistence. She maintained the same preternatural calm, had not so much as flinched since she’d reacted to hearing Sera Fuller’s name. But he caught the slightest curl at the corner of her mouth, a clear indication that she didn’t believe a word he was saying. The ruse amused her; she wanted him to know that she at least held a grudging respect for Darren for trying.
“Miss Bell,” she said, eyes darting from Darren to his mother in her maid’s smock standing in the doorway to the kitchen. “I don’t believe the bathroom in the president’s suite has been cleaned yet.” Then she gave her an even bigger smile and said, “I’ll thank you now for getting on that, so it’s cleaned before dinnertime.”
Bell didn’t move right away.
Darren watched a slideshow of micro-expressions — umbrage and humiliation and then fury — flitter across her face with the speed of a zoetrope, tricking one into seeing a single fluid movement that gave the appearance of obeisance. She nodded once and carried the broom and cleaning supplies up the staircase, the bucket tapping against the railing every third step, until she seemed swallowed up into the rest of the house. It was the first he’d noticed how quiet the place was. He heard no music or voices through the walls. No footsteps padded overhead that he could tell. It felt more like a nineteenth-century boardinghouse for unmarried women than a sorority house in the new millennium. The air in the room felt tight and controlled, like a collective breath held.
