“She’s dangerous, Randie. Always has been. And all that other stuff she brought up, the story she told about some missing girl up in Nacogdoches. You can’t believe a word of it.”
His mother had not stopped at her announcement that she was sober.
Darren had been seconds away from forcibly removing her from the house when Randie came out of the back bedroom to check on him. Bell had quickly started in on a story about a girl, a student at the college up in Nacogdoches where, first Darren was hearing of it, his mother had relocated. Her brother Pete had had a stroke — Can’t tie his shoes, can’t half hold a spoon in his right hand — and she felt she owed it to her big brother to help. He was the one got me out of this county way back when, tried to get me a chance at something. This was ’fore I had you, of course, which yanked me right back down to Camilla. She spoke rapidly, as crisp as he’d ever heard the edges of her words. Was it possible his mother hadn’t had a drink that day? Impossible to know for sure; he didn’t think, in his nearly fifty years of living, he’d ever been around his mother with a dry tongue. She was laying out the story she had come to tell — To get your help on it, son — with the speed of rocks rolling down a hill because she seemed to sense that she was on borrowed time with Darren, who had clearly not been wooed by her initial report that she’d finally quit drinking, that she hadn’t had a taste in nearly two years.
Randie had then introduced herself as Darren’s “friend.”
Glad to meet you, Bell had said, taking just Randie’s fingertips for a demure handshake.
“My mother is not to be trusted,” Darren said now.
“I see that,” Randie said. “I’m sorry if I didn’t let you know that I see that, that I see what you’re up against… going all the way back to the beginning.” She squeezed his waist and whispered softly into the cool, softly damp fabric of his shirt, “You suffered a trauma too, you know, being taken from your mother at such an early age.”
“My uncles did the right thing,” he said.
He took another sip of his Jim Beam and caught her watching him, a curious expression on her face, her sloe eyes crinkling in a kind of knowing sadness. “She gave you your first drink in more ways than one,” she said, followed by a warm sigh.
4.
THE SEX that night was awkward, rhythmically off.
Darren’s mind would not stay with his body, and Randie was also distant, so they seemed like two agitated souls floating above bodies making a valiant, even balletic, attempt at lovemaking. They had the dance moves right, familiar as they were, but one or both had a stone in their shoe, some lingering disturbance that interfered with the release each sought from the other, the exhilaration of being together again.
He was left unsatisfied and lay on his back after, turning over the nagging thought that there was more to his mother’s surprise visit than step nine of her professed process of sobriety. He was lying there, thinking about her purported real reason for showing up at his home — a girl she thought might be in danger — and how it might factor into some coming con of hers, the shape and time of its arrival he tried to divine by the way it set his teeth on edge. “Are you going to look into it, at least?” Randie asked. She had her left leg entangled with his right, but the rest of her body was turned toward the window, to the view of the picture-book moon, its silvery light dancing through the branches of the white oak along the side of the house. It lit up the damp on her skin, painted her beauty so that he felt stirred to try again, but the earlier agitation resurfaced, cooling the heat between them. “Look into what, exactly?”
His mother hadn’t had a name, not one she was sure of, at any rate.
Just said that she couldn’t think of who else to talk to about the girl, the college student. “Seems she just up and disappeared. Was just gone one day.”
Darren’s mother was still in the custodial business, these days working for a maid-service agency in Nacogdoches County — though she had her eye on moving to a live-work gated community just outside of town, if she could convince her brother to leave the home he’d rented for decades. They’d been housemates for the past year.
The missing girl lived in a sorority house off campus that Bell cleaned four days a week. The girl was black, Bell wanted that known straightaway, and with home training, she said. “Any time we seen each other, even just to pass in the hall, me with my bucket and her with her schoolbooks and such, she always give me a little nod, let me know that even if she living in a houseful of white girls, she and me still family in some way. She wasn’t stuck-up like the others. She was real nice, what I knew of her.”
“Which isn’t much,” Darren said. “Since you don’t know her name.”
“Naw, we never did get that far, and I don’t snoop around the girls’ rooms, don’t pick through their papers or nothing. Keep my head down, do my job, go to meetings.”
Darren huffed out a tight hot pellet of air. He was having a hard time swallowing this idea of his mother as a bastion of temperance. And anyway, what made Bell think something was wrong? Because a girl she worked for, or who lived in the sorority house that paid the maid service that Bell worked for, was no longer making time to say hi in the hallways? “She’s a college kid. Of age, I’m going to guess,” Darren said. “I don’t see what any of this has to do with you… or me.”
“She reminds me a little of myself at that age, to tell the truth of it,” Bell said.
“Weren’t you pregnant with me at sixteen? You never graduated high school.”
Bell shook her head, expressing disappointment in him.
“Something’s wrong, Darren. That girl moved into the sorority house not even a month ago, and I saw her every couple of days or so. She had a single room they put her off in by herself, no roommate like the other girls at the house, and then just this week, the door to her room was closed and locked up from the outside, and no one seems to know anything about it or where she went. I asked some of the other girls there what happened to the one that stayed in the small room on the third floor.”
Bell glanced across the room at Randie, sniffing out an ally.
“They act like I don’t know what I’m talking about, like maybe I had it wrong and there never was any black girl living in the sorority house. I thought for half a minute I had imagined the whole thing. That all the years of drinking scrambled my mind up some, made it so my own dreams were walking around outside my body.”
“Mama,” he said with a show of patience so exaggerated it was actually rude. “This is not anything that’s your concern. You don’t even know something’s wrong.”
“It’s a feeling I got,” she said, again glancing in Randie’s direction. “And you know how they do with missing black girls, how you can’t get no one to pay attention.”
“No one is missing.”
Randie, who’d been leaning against the cherrywood secretary that had been his grandmother’s pride and joy, said to him, “It couldn’t hurt to make a few inquiries.”
“Petey know a man in the Nacogdoches Police Department, but they say talk to campus security, and campus security say it’s off university grounds, and not a one of ’em interested in asking me any questions, wouldn’t even take a report from me.”
“Not without a name, I’m sure,” Darren said.
“Rho Beta Zeta. The sorority. That’s a name. They should start there, start with the fact that when I hauled trash out to their dumpster this week, I found a bunch of stuff from that locked room in the bins. I been in that room. Those were her things.”
“Hmmm,” Randie mumbled.
“Right,” Bell said, enjoying the telling, her big monologue in the third act. “Something don’t exactly seem quite right. Somebody threw that girl’s stuff in the trash. Her clothes and some pictures, makeup and a whole bunch of hair products. She couldn’t ever make hers lay down quite right. I don’t know why these young’uns don’t just keep a pressing comb handy, but then again, I can’t imagine the house mother would let a black girl down to the kitchen to heat up a hot comb anyway —”
“Mama,” he said. Because what the hell was she talking about?
“Now, I know the Rangers step in sometimes when local folks ain’t doing what they ought to, and I just can’t help feeling like this little girl is being ignored somehow. Why is no one looking for her?”
“Darren,” Randie said. His mother had struck a bull’s-eye.
He wondered how much Bell knew about Randie.
Her husband’s murder in the state had initially been treated with the least amount of care; she was sold half-truths and lazy obfuscations by the local sheriff.
