Triptych

Six children. A comfortable house. Plenty of clothes and food and parents who took care of you. What would it be like to grow up in a family like that? Why had Aleesha turned her back on all of this?

Of course, Will had been in law enforcement too long to take all of this on face value. He knew from experience that drug addicts didn’t generally start out as the happiest people on earth. They turned to drugs for a reason, whether it was the desire to fit in or the need to tune out. The absent father could be some kind of sadist. The brothers could have looked no farther than the hallway for their first sexual forays. The older sister could have been an overachiever who cast the kind of shadow in which nothing could grow.

But Will was not here to rattle the skeletons in the Monroe family closet. He was here to tell this woman that her daughter, lost so long ago, was finally lost forever.

He asked, “You haven’t seen your daughter in twenty years?”

“At least.”

“No phone calls? No cards or letters?”

Miriam recalled, “A few years ago we got a call. She was in jail. She wanted money.”

Michael had said that Aleesha listed only Baby G as a contact when she’d been arrested, but the duty officer would have made a notation of who she called while she was inside, who visited her if she was kept more than a day.

He asked, “Were you the one who spoke to her?”

“Yes,” she answered. “The conversation didn’t last more than a minute. I told my daughter that I was not going to give her any money and she slammed the phone down on me.” Miriam explained, “That was the last time we heard from her. I don’t even know where she lives now.”

“Do you have any idea who she associated with? Who her friends were?

She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Officer. I warned you I would be little help in finding her.” She looked down at her hand, which was still resting on the piano. “Could you tell me what she’s done? She hasn’t…” She glanced up at Will, then back down again. “She hasn’t harmed someone, has she?”

Will felt a lump rise in his throat. “Do your other children live close by?”

“Not close enough,” she told him, a smile playing at her lips. “Mason is just down the street, but that’s never close enough when you’re a grandmother with three grandbabies to spoil.”

“Maybe you should give him a call.”

Her smile faltered. “Why would I need to do that?”

“Mrs. Monroe, I really wish you would call your son, or somebody who could maybe come and sit with you.”

She sagged against the piano much as she had done at the front door. The dog gave a low growl as Will stood up.

Miriam’s throat worked. “I suppose you’re going to tell me that she finally took too much.”

“No, ma’am.” Again, he indicated the couch. “Would you please sit down?”

“I’m not going to faint,” she told him, though her chocolate complexion was a marked shade lighter. “Tell me what happened to my daughter.”

Will should have just told her and left her with her grief, but he couldn’t. To his surprise, when he spoke, he sounded as if he was begging. “Mrs. Monroe, please, sit down.”

She let him lead her over to the couch and sit beside her. He should take her hand, do something to soothe her, but Will didn’t feel equipped to comfort her. He did know that prolonging the inevitable was one of the most selfish things he had ever done in his life.

He said, “Aleesha was murdered Sunday night in the stairway to her apartment.”

Miriam’s mouth opened as she gasped for air. “Murdered?”

“Someone killed her,” Will provided. “I think she probably knew her attacker. I think that she followed him out into the stairway and he injured her…” He faltered. “He injured her in such a way that it led to her death.”

“ ‘Such a way,” “ Miriam echoed. ”What does that mean? Did she suffer?“

He was supposed to lie-it did no harm telling a mother her child had died quickly-but he could not. “I don’t think there’s any way to know if she was aware of what was happening to her. I hope she wasn’t-” He stopped. “I hope there were enough drugs in her body so that she had no idea what was going on.”

She gasped suddenly. “I saw it in the paper. A woman was murdered at Grady Homes. They didn’t list her name, but… I never thought, I just assumed…”

“I’m sorry,” Will told the poor woman, thinking he’d said that phrase more times in the last few days than he had in his entire life. He took out the photocopy of Aleesha’s letter. “We found this in her mailbox. It was returned because there wasn’t enough postage.”

The mother grabbed the letter like it was a lifeline. Tears fell down her cheeks as she stared at the words. She must have read it a dozen times before she murmured, “The pariah.”

“Can you tell me what she was talking about?”

Miriam held the letter in her lap, her hands trembling. “There was this house across the street-three doors down and a world away.” She stared out the window as if she could see it. “We were the only black family in the neighborhood back then. Tobias and I laughed about people saying, ”There goes the neighborhood‘ when they already had the devil living in their own backyard.“

“Does the family still live there?”

She shook her head. “There’s been about ten different families in that house since the Carsons moved out. It’s been added onto, turned into some kind of palace, but back then, it was just this little house where bad things happened. Every neighborhood has that, don’t they? That one bad house with that one bad kid?” Yes, ma am.

She looked back out the window. “Parties every weekend. Cars racing up and down the road. That boy was poison to everybody he came into contact with. We called him the Pariah of Paisley Street.”

Will thought of the letter, the way Aleesha had referred to herself as a pariah.

Miriam continued, “His mother was never home. She was a lawyer, if you can believe that.” She turned back to Will. “I suppose I could blame her until I was blue in the face, but the fact was that she was just as incapable of controlling her child as we were.”

“Aleesha ran off with this boy?”

“No,” the woman said. “She ran off with a thirty-nine-year-old man named Marcus Keith. He was one of the advisors in her treatment program. We found out later he had already served time for interfering with a minor.” She gave a humorless laugh. “They might as well put a revolving door on every prison in America.”

Will tried to tread carefully. “In the letter, she seems to be blaming you for something.”

Miriam gave a tight smile. “When Aleesha was eleven years old, I left my family. There was a man. Like mother, like child, I suppose.” She held up the letter. “Or, ”the sins of the parent,“ as my daughter so eloquently put it.”

“Obviously, you came back.”

“Tobias and I worked it out, but things were very rocky for a long while. Aleesha got lost in the shuffle, and then she fell in with that boy up the street.” She put her hand to her collar, pulling at a small cross that hung from a gold chain around her neck.

Will reached into his pocket and took out the cross from Aleesha’s letter. “We found this, too.”

Miriam looked at the cross but did not take it. “All my children have one.

He did not want to tell her that Aleesha had sent it back. The letter was bad enough. Still, he had to ask, “Is there any significance to the cross?

“Tobias bought them when I returned home. We all gathered around the table and he passed them out one by one. It signified our unity, our faith that we could be a family again.”

Will put the cross in her hand and folded her fingers around it. “I’m sure she’d want you to have this.”

He left her alone in the room, walking down the hall, past the artwork, the photographs, everything Miriam and Tobias Monroe had accumulated over the years to turn their house into a home. There was a tall table by the door, and Will was leaving her one of his cards when he heard her speaking in the other room. Her tone was muffled by distance and grief. She was obviously on the telephone.