Angie’s tone changed. “When was she last seen?”
“Yesterday afternoon.”
“Do you have any leads?”
“None.”
“How old is she?”
“Fourteen.”
Angie let out a soft breath. “Is anyone downtown taking this seriously?”
“Yeah, they’re bending over backward to help the GBI.”
She tried to take up for them. “They’ve got a lot of work to do down there.”
“I’m not saying they don’t.”
“Has she run away before?”
“Twice.”
“It’s not something I’d put at the top of my roster if I was working in missing persons. Teenage girls run away all the time. We both know that. They’ve probably got hotter cases right now.”
“Her home situation’s not that bad.”
“People run away for other reasons.” Angie would know. She’d run away so many times that even Will had lost count.
He looked at the copy he’d made of the letter Aleesha had written to her mother. She’d used pencil on lined paper, so the reproduction wasn’t that good. He tried to pick out some words but his eyes couldn’t focus. Aleesha had probably run away from home, too.
Angie offered, “I’ll talk to some people I know downtown and see if I can light a fire under them. They might take it better from me than some cocksucker from the GBI.”
“Thank you.”
Will closed the phone and looked at the display.
It was time to pay Aleesha Monroe’s mother a visit.
Will seldom drove his car to work unless he knew that he would be on his own that day. Most of the time, he took his motorcycle in so that whoever he was partnered with had to drive. Unless he was going to one of his usual haunts-the grocery store, the local Cuban restaurant, the movies-putting him behind the wheel of a car was an invitation to get lost. He could read street signs eventually, but only at the expense of the other cars behind him. Maps, with their tiny print that skipped across the page, might as well have been written in Swahili and when he got frustrated, which tended to happen when the horns started blaring, Will quickly forgot how to tell left from right.
Driving to Miriam Monroe’s house was an exercise in patience. Will ignored the angry stares and nasty shouts as he slowly made his way up DeKalb Avenue. The Monroes lived in Decatur near Agnes Scott College, a pricey little area with old Victorians and the sorts of houses most people could only dream about. Fortunately, the neighborhood wasn’t large and with a little trial and error, he would find her house before the sun went down.
Will tapped his foot on the brake as he followed the fork across the railroad tracks and onto College Avenue. He tried not to take it personally when a skinny old woman in a powder blue Cadillac sped past him, her fist shaking in the air.
With great effort, Will had managed to push Angie from his mind. He needed to work the case from the beginning to see if there was anything he had missed. There had to be some detail, some clue, that he just wasn’t picking up on.
Thirty-two Paisley Avenue was a grand old home with a wraparound porch and a massive weeping willow draping its branches across the front yard. The house was sandblasted brick on the bottom and darkly painted shingles along the top. The tile roof was covered with pine needles, and Will imagined with the large number of trees in the yard, the Monroes had a constant battle on their hands just keeping the gutters clean.
He parked his car on the street and double-checked the mailbox, making out the name MONROE in bold black letters. Still, he checked the street number against the address from the envelope.
The doorbell was the old-fashioned kind that was an actual bell mounted to the center of the heavy front door. Will twisted the bow-tie piece of metal and could hear the shrill ring echoing in the house.
Footsteps clicked on tile; a woman’s as well as a dog’s.
“Hello?”
Will assumed a wary eye was pressed to the peephole in the door. This was a nice neighborhood, but they were still close enough to Atlanta to make the residents careful about opening their doors to strangers.
“I’m Agent Will Trent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation,” Will said, holding up his identification. “I’m looking for Miriam Monroe.”
There was a hesitation, maybe a sigh, then the bolt was turned and the door opened.
Miriam Monroe looked just like her daughter. At least, her daughter would have looked like this had she lived a different life. Where Aleesha had been malnourished, almost skeletal, her mother was a robust woman, with long curly hair and an open way about her that seemed to invite people in. There was a glow in her cheeks, a sparkle in her eyes, and even though her mouth was pursed as she stared at Will, her expression guarded as she waited for him to speak, he could tell that she was the sort of woman who sought out the positive in life.
He looked down at the black poodle standing at her feet, then back up at the woman. “I’ve come about your daughter.”
Her hand went to her chest. She grabbed the door to steady herself. “Ashley…?”
“No,” he assured her, reaching out to hold the woman up. He’d never considered she had more than one daughter. “Aleesha,” he told her. “I’ve come about Aleesha.”
She blinked several times, looking confused. “What?”
Will had a confused feeling himself. Had he read the mailbox wrong? Was he on the wrong street? “You’re Miriam Monroe?”
She nodded. The dog barked, sensing trouble.
“I’m sorry,” Will apologized to the woman. “I was told you had a daughter named Aleesha.”
“I did have a daughter,” she agreed. Her voice was faraway, as if she had lost her child long ago, which by her next words was exactly how she felt. “Aleesha left us when she was a teenager, Officer. We haven’t seen her in nearly twenty years.”
Will wasn’t sure what to say. “May I come in?”
She smiled, stepping back from the door, gently moving the dog with her foot. “I’ve forgotten my manners.”
“It’s fine,” Will assured her, thinking that no matter how many times he did this, he would never be able to predict how a parent would react to news of their child being lost.
She suggested, “Shall we go into the parlor?”
Will was trying not to gawk at the foyer, which was the largest he had ever seen in a private home. A huge staircase spiraled up to the top floor and a chandelier that looked as if it belonged in an opera house dangled above his head.
“We got it in Bologna,” Miriam explained, leading him into the adjoining room. “My husband, Tobias, is an amateur collector.”
“Oh,” Will said, as if that made perfect sense. He thought about the homes he had visited over the last few days, Aleesha’s shabby two rooms, the cramped apartment where Eleanor Allison raised her grandchildren. This was a mansion, plain and simple. From the thick rugs on the floors to the colorful African folk art on the walls, this was the type of place you lived in when money wasn’t a concern.
Miriam sat back in a comfortable-looking chair as the dog settled at her feet. “Would you like some lemonade?”
“No, thank you,” Will told her, sitting on the couch. The cushions were hard and he guessed they didn’t use this room much. He wondered if the grand piano tucked under the bay window was just for show. He also wondered what the hell he was doing. Will had learned a long time ago that giving a parent the news that their child was dead should be done quickly. Dragging it out only made it harder when the information finally came. Will wasn’t Miriam Monroe’s best friend; his job was simply to tell her the truth, then leave.
So, why wasn’t he?
Maybe it was because there was something soothing about the woman’s voice, her presence. Her face could have been the illustration dictionaries used for “mother.” When Will was a kid, he had assumed that black kids were more loved than whites for the simple reason that of the hundred or so kids at the Atlanta Children’s Home, there were only ever two African-Americans. Funny how stereotypes got stuck in your head when you were little.