Keisha makes a fist and bangs it softly on the scarred surface of the picnic table. “No civil suit, either. No money for one. Black News got up a fund, but it won’t be enough to hire a good lawyer. Old story.”
“Too old,” Holly murmurs.
Keisha shakes her head, as if to clear it. “As for finding Bonnie, go with God’s love and my good wishes. I mean that with all my heart. Find whoever did it, and… do you carry a gun, Holly?”
“Sometimes. When I have to.” It’s Bill’s gun. “Not today.”
“Well if you find him, put a bullet in him. Put it right in his motherfucking ballsack, pardon my French. As for Maleek? Nobody’s looking for his justice. And nobody’s looking for Ellen Craslow, either. Why would they? Just Black folks, you know.”
Holly is thrown back to the Dairy Whip parking lot, talking to those boys. The leader, Tommy Edison, was redhaired and as white as vanilla ice cream, but what he said then and what Keisha said just now are voices in two-part harmony.
You want to know whose mother is worried? Stinky’s. She’s half-crazy and the cops don’t do anything because she’s a juicer.
She thinks of Bill Hodges, sitting with her one day on the steps of his little house. Bill saying Sometimes the universe throws you a rope. If it does, climb it. See what’s at the top.
“Who’s Ellen Craslow, Keisha?”
3
Holly lights a cigarette as soon as she gets back to her car. She takes a drag (the first one is always the best one), blows smoke out the open window, and pulls her phone out of her pocket. She fast-forwards to the last part of her conversation with Keisha, the Ellen Craslow part, and listens to it twice. Maybe Jerome was right about it being a serial. No jumping to conclusions, but there is a pattern of sorts. It just isn’t sex or age or color. It’s location. Deerfield Park, Bell College, maybe both.
Ellen Craslow was a janitor, swapping her time between the Life Sciences building and the Bell College restaurant and rathskeller. The Belfry is in the Memorial Union, a central spot where students tend to get together when they’re not in class. Keisha’s library gang gathers there for their coffee breaks, lunch hours, and often for beers when the day’s work is done. It makes sense, because the Reynolds Library is nearby, making it a quick walk on those winter days when the snow and wind come howling off the lake.
According to Keisha, Ellen was bright, personable, probably a lesbian, although not one with a partner, at least currently. Keisha said she once asked if Ellen had thought about taking classes, and Ellen said she had no interest.
“She said life was her classroom,” Keisha says from Holly’s phone. “I remember that. She said it like she was joking, but also not. Do you know what I mean?”
Holly said she did.
“She was happy with her little trailer in a trailer park on the edge of Lowtown, said it was just fine for her, and she was happy with her job. She said she had everything a girl from Bibb County, Georgia, could want.”
Keisha got used to seeing Ellen sweeping in the Belfry or buffing floors in the lobby of Davison Auditorium, or up on a ladder, changing bulbs, or in the women’s bathroom, filling the paper towel dispensers or scrubbing graffiti off the stalls. If she was alone, Keisha said, she always stopped to talk to Ellen, and if all of them—the library crew—were together, they always made room for her in their conversation if she wasn’t working in Life Sciences or too busy. Not that Ellen would sit with them, but she was happy to join them for a little talk, or maybe a quick cup of coffee, which she would drink on her feet, standing hipshot. Keisha remembered once they were arguing about No Exit, which the theater club was putting on in the Davison, and Ellen said in an exaggerated Georgia accent, “Ah dig that existential shit. It be life as we know it, my homies.”
“How old was she?” Holly asks from her phone.
“Maybe… thirty? Twenty-eight? Older than most of us, but not a lot older. She fit right in.”
Then one day she wasn’t there. After a week, Keisha thought Ellen must be on vacation. “I never thought about her that much, though.” Her recorded voice sounds embarrassed. “She was on my radar, but out toward the edge of the screen, if you know what I mean.”
“Not a friend, just an acquaintance.”
“That’s right.” Sounding relieved.
After a month or so Keisha asked Freddy Warren, the Union’s head janitor, if Ellen had been switched to Life Sciences full-time. Warren said no, one day she just didn’t show up. Or the next. Or at all. One lunch hour, Keisha and Edie Brookings dropped into the college’s employment office to find out if they knew where Ellen had gone. They didn’t. The woman they spoke to said that if Ellen got in touch with Keisha to get an address. Because Ellen had never picked up her last check.
“Did you follow up? Maybe check her residence?”
A long, long pause. Then Keisha said, low: “No. I guess I assumed she just wasn’t up for another winter by the lake. Or went home to Georgia.”
“When did this happen?”
“Three years ago. No, less. It was in the fall, and had to’ve been right around Thanksgiving, because the last time I saw her—or one of the last, I can’t be sure—the tables in the Belfry all had paper turkeys on them.” A long pause. “When I say no one looked for her, I guess that includes me. Doesn’t it?”
There’s a little more—Holly showed Keisha the photo of the earring and Keisha also confirmed it was Bonnie’s—but nothing of substance, so Holly shuts off her phone. She’s smoked her cigarette down to the filter. She mashes it out in her portable ashtray and immediately thinks about lighting another one.
Keisha hadn’t connected Ellen Craslow with Bonnie Dahl, probably because they disappeared years apart. The connection she made was Ellen and Maleek Dutton, because both were Black. And she was embarrassed, as if telling the story about a woman suddenly being not there made her realize that she wasn’t so different from the people—probably most of them in the city—who didn’t care much about one more young Black man shot at a traffic stop.
But there was a huge difference between a young man shot dead in his car and an acquaintance who just dropped out of the mix. Holly could have told Keisha that, but she had been too full of her own thoughts—troubled thoughts—to do more than thank Keisha for her time and tell her that she, Holly, would get in touch if she had more questions or if the case resolved.
There’s probably a perfectly reasonable explanation for Ellen Craslow’s disappearance. Janitorial work is a skill, but Holly thinks it’s probably a high turnover job. Ellen could have moved on to someplace warmer, just as Keisha said—Phoenix or LA or San Diego. She could have gotten an urge to see her mama again and eat some of her mama’s home cooking. Except she never picked up her last check and Peter Steinman disappeared around the same time. Ellen lived in Lowtown (on the edge), but she worked at the college, which is only a couple of miles from the Dairy Whip. Less, if you cut through the park.
As for Bonnie Rae Dahl, her bike was found in front of an abandoned repair shop approximately between the college and the Whip.
Holly starts her car, makes a careful U-turn, and drives past the campground, where summer vacationers are enjoying themselves beneath the benevolent gaze of Chief Smoke-Um Peace Pipe.