As the Wicked Watch(36)

“Okay, um . . . this is Scott Newell. And, um, he’s going to film us today. He needs a few minutes to set up. Okay?”

Keep it together, girl.

“Yes. That’s fine. I have some pictures here that you can shoot,” she said, pointing to a manila folder on the table. “Cynthia, can you bring me a bottle of water, please? Would you like one, Jordan? Scott?”

“Uh, no thank you,” I said.

“No, but thank you very much,” Scott said.

I searched Pamela’s face for a sign of the woman I had gotten to know over the last few weeks. She simply wasn’t there and might never be again. Yet she appeared remarkably composed. There was no evidence of tears. In fact, there was something stately about her. When Pam and I first met, she was frightened and desperate, pleading for someone to pay attention to the fact that her little girl didn’t come home. I didn’t have any answers for her, but I’d always had something to say. Now I was unsure of what to say to her. I was discombobulated, thrown off my game. What do you say to someone who’s lost everything? Especially when that loss didn’t come as a result of a disease or an accident? I knew only what I dare not ask, which was “How are you doing?” It’s an innocuous conversation starter that’s appropriate in most circumstances, but not in this one.

Then it dawned on me: Pamela was wearing the blouse Masey took her ninth-grade school picture in. I decided to start there. “Your blouse . . . it looks like the one Masey wore in her school picture,” I said.

“This is it. Remember, I told you she stole it out of my closet. Well, she borrowed it. She was always in my closet,” she said. Right then, an unnatural expression froze on Pamela’s face for a few seconds. It was the first sign of emotion, and it was terrifying. Pam wore the expression of a mother who just learned that her missing daughter was dead—without sound. Then, as quickly as it came, she snapped out of it.

“I was going through some photos and I couldn’t believe it, Jordan—out of all these, I only found two pictures of me and Masey together. I guess I was always the one taking the pictures,” she said, emitting a laugh that wasn’t really a laugh. She reached across the table and picked up a five-by-seven picture frame and rubbed her hand affectionately across the glass before turning it around to show it to me. It was an image of Masey and her with mountains in the background. They were both wearing boonie hats, drawstrings dangling beneath their chins, and had fanny packs around their waists, standing shoulder to shoulder, hands on hips.

“This is us at the Grand Canyon,” she said.

“Ahhh, how old was she?” I asked.

“She was eleven on this picture. We had our family reunion in Vegas that year, and a few of us took a tour of the South Rim. Malcolm was too little to go, so he stayed behind at the hotel with my mother. That was the last trip we took together before she died.”

To evoke her deceased mother’s memory in this terrifying moment without collapsing into tears—I was in awe of her.

“Where is Malcolm?” I asked.

“Oh, he’s here with me,” she said. “He’s in the basement watching TV.”

I picked up on her emphasis of here with me. When you lose one child, there’s no way you’re trusting the one you have left with anybody else, not for a while at least.

I pointed to an image on the dining table of a little girl playing on a swing set wearing a Scooby-Doo T-shirt and cutoff denim shorts. There was a man standing directly behind her and a playground full of children and equipment, a sharp contrast to the crime scene.

“Who’s this with Masey?”

“That’s her father,” Pamela said, resting her chin against her left hand. “She was about three, I think, in this picture. This wasn’t taken in Chicago, though. We were visiting his side of the family that summer in Memphis. Whew, it was hot! I remember that.”

Pamela had previously told me that Masey’s father is an electrician who lives in Seattle with his girlfriend. The two were high school sweethearts who continued to date postsecondary. He attended Dawson Technical Institute on the Near South Side and she was enrolled in Chicago State University. Pamela had just started her sophomore year when she became pregnant with Masey. They never married, but she gave Masey her father’s last name. She told me everybody in her family expected her to go back and finish college, but she never did.

Stephanie dropped out of college after she became pregnant with Drucilla her freshman year. Like Pamela, we all thought she’d go back, but just as she was planning to reenroll, she got pregnant with Jaden. I remember hearing my aunties, uncles, and older cousins lamenting her decision. “What a shame.” “She’s too smart to waste her life.” Not finishing college didn’t make Stephanie any less intelligent, but admittedly, I too, questioned her decision to put her romantic relationships above everything else in her life. Pamela reminds me a little of Stephanie. Both were naturally smart, but the breaks don’t always line up for people like them. Pam, even without a degree, worked her way up to general manager within the Omni grocery chain and helped open its Ultra Foods store in Ashburn a few months ago. She had more time to find herself. I wonder what Stephanie might have done if her life hadn’t been interrupted.

I wanted to ask Pam whether Masey’s father had been an active part of her life but felt it was none of my business and, frankly, had nothing to do with anything that mattered anymore. So, instead, I asked, “What’s his name?”