بخش 02 - فصل 19

19

The girls are on the couch. Barbara is black and her friend Tina is white. His first amused thought is Salt and pepper in matching shakers. Only the shakers don’t quite match. Yes, they are wearing their hair in almost identical ponytails. Yes, they are wearing similar sneakers, whatever happens to be the in thing for tweenage girls this year. And yes, each of them is holding a magazine from his coffee table: Pursuit, the skip-tracing trade, hardly the usual reading material for young girls, but that’s okay, because it’s pretty clear that neither of them is actually reading.

Barbara is wearing her school uniform and looks relatively composed. The other one is wearing black slacks and a blue tee with a butterfly appliquéd on the front. Her face is pale, and her red-rimmed eyes look at him with a mixture of hope and terror that’s hard on the heart.

Barbara jumps up and gives him a hug, where once she would have dapped him, knuckles to knuckles, and called it good. ‘Hi, Bill. It’s great to see you.’ How adult she sounds, and how tall she’s grown. Can she be fourteen yet? Is it possible?

‘Good to see you, too, Barbs. How’s Jerome? Is he going to be home this summer?’ Jerome is a Harvard man these days, and his alter ego – the jive-talking Tyrone Feelgood Delight – seems to have been retired. Back when Jerome was in high school and doing chores for Hodges, Tyrone used to be a regular visitor. Hodges doesn’t miss him much, Tyrone was always sort of a juvenile persona, but he misses Jerome.

Barbara wrinkles her nose. ‘Came back for a week, and now he’s gone again. He’s taking his girlfriend, she’s from Pennsylvania somewhere, to a cotillion. Does that sound racist to you? It does to me.’

Hodges is not going there. ‘Introduce me to your friend, why don’t you?’

‘This is Tina. She used to live on Hanover Street, just around the block from us. She wants to go to Chapel Ridge with me next year. Tina, this is Bill Hodges. He can help you.’

Hodges gives a little bow in order to hold out his hand to the white girl still sitting on the couch. She cringes back at first, then shakes it timidly. As she lets go, she begins to cry. ‘I shouldn’t have come. Pete is going to be so mad at me.’

Ah, shit, Hodges thinks. He grabs a handful of tissues from the box on the desk, but before he can give them to Tina, Barbara takes them and wipes the girl’s eyes. Then she sits down on the couch again and hugs her.

‘Tina,’ Barbara says, and rather sternly, ‘you came to me and said you wanted help. This is help.’ Hodges is amazed at how much she sounds like her mother. ‘All you have to do is tell him what you told me.’

Barbara turns her attention on Hodges.

‘And you can’t tell my folks, Bill. Neither can Holly. If you tell my dad, he’ll tell Tina’s dad. Then her brother really will be in trouble.’

‘Let’s put that aside for now.’ Hodges works his swivel chair out from behind the desk – it’s a tight fit, but he manages. He doesn’t want a desk between himself and Barbara’s frightened friend; he’d look too much like a school principal. He sits down, clasps his hands between his knees, and gives Tina a smile. ‘Let’s start with your full name.’

‘Tina Annette Saubers.’

Saubers. That tinkles a faint bell. Some old case? Maybe.

‘What’s troubling you, Tina?’

‘My brother stole some money.’ Whispering it. Eyes welling again. ‘Maybe a lot of money. And he can’t give it back, because it’s gone. I told Barbara because I knew her brother helped stop the crazy guy who hurt our dad when the crazy guy tried to blow up a concert at the MAC. I thought maybe Jerome could help me, because he got a special medal for bravery and all. He was on TV.’

‘Yes,’ Hodges says. Holly should have been on TV, too – she was just as brave, and they sure wanted her – but during that phase of her life, Holly Gibney would have swallowed drain-cleaner rather than step in front of television cameras and answer questions.

‘Only Barbs said Jerome was in Pennsylvania and I should talk to you instead, because you used to be a policeman.’ She looks at him with huge, welling eyes.

Saubers, Hodges muses. Yeah, okay. He can’t remember the man’s first name, but the last one is hard to forget, and he knows why that little bell tinkled. Saubers was one of those badly hurt at City Center, when Hartsfield plowed into the job fair hopefuls.

‘At first I was going to talk to you on my own,’ Barbara adds. ‘That’s what me and Tina agreed on. Kind of, you know, feel you out and see if you’d be willing to help. But then Teens came to my school today and she was all upset—’

‘Because he’s worse now!’ Tina bursts out. ‘I don’t know what happened, but since he grew that stupid moustache, he’s worse! He talks in his sleep – I hear him – and he’s losing weight and he’s got pimples again, which in Health class the teacher says can be from stress, and … and … I think sometimes he cries.’ She looks amazed at this, as if she can’t quite get her head around the idea of her big brother crying. ‘What if he kills himself? That’s what I’m really scared of, because teen suicide is a big problem!’

More fun facts from Health class, Hodges thinks. Not that it isn’t true.

‘She’s not making it up,’ Barbara says. ‘It’s an amazing story.’

‘Then let’s hear it,’ Hodges says. From the beginning.’

Tina takes a deep breath and begins.