As the Wicked Watch(39)

“Is that close to, um, what’s that street? Sangamon? I’m bad with streets here. I’m from Texas,” I said.

“Yeah, Sangamon is in the next block,” Cynthia said.

Interesting.

“Do you know Louise?” I asked.

“Not personally,” she said.

Hmm. But something tells me Yvonne does.

I returned to the living room to say goodbye to Pam, who was still sitting at the table staring at the Grand Canyon photo. I noticed Scott wasn’t packing up. He was still filming! I might be glad for the footage of Pamela poring over the image of her and her daughter in the larger scheme of things, but right now it felt wildly inappropriate. I shot Scott a look and reached down and shoved the camera bag in his direction.

Thank God Pam hadn’t noticed.

“Pamela? I approached her and leaned down to meet her at eye level. “I’ll see you later, okay?”

She nodded and mouthed the word okay without a sound.

*

Scott was quiet back in the news truck. I should have been grateful he didn’t call me out for getting handled in that interview, especially after my visceral reaction to catching him filming unbeknownst to Pam.

“Look, Scott, I totally get why you were doing that, filming her, but I didn’t want to come off as disrespectful. She clearly wasn’t doing well.”

Scott shot me a look but didn’t say a word. The day had been marked by an unusual level of tension between us. But when you spend as much time together as Scott and I do, you’re bound to have some off days.

“Can you drop me back at my car?” I asked.

“Sure, but we don’t have much time before we have to be at Tanya’s,” he said.

“I know. I’ll meet you there.”

I needed time to beat myself up over the interview with Pam and get over it before I had to be back on again for the roundtable. I wanted so badly to ask Scott, “Was what I said that horrible?” but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

I never would have imagined that asking, “When was the last time you saw your daughter?” would have set Pamela off the way that it did. I wasn’t questioning her attentiveness as a parent. No way! Did it sound that way to her?

Scott dropped me off in the District Diner’s now-empty parking lot. It felt good to be by myself and back in the driver’s seat. I didn’t bother to ask Scott to check in with the producer to schedule a boom mic and an intern for tonight’s roundtable. I texted the producer myself.

I had a little over an hour to kill before Tanya’s, and I knew exactly how to spend it. Pamela had said that Yvonne’s house was pretty much a straight shot from hers at 82nd Street and Damen in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood. I needed to retrace Masey’s journey. If she did, in fact, ride home that night, I wanted to see what she saw just before night fell. Was it a straight shot? Did Masey take a detour or a shortcut that cost her her life?

If Masey did, in fact, ride her bike home, it would be good to know what time she left Yvonne’s. I’m guessing that if Pam was still at work when Masey called to ask if she could go to the mall with her cousin, and Pam didn’t get off that day until four o’clock, she could’ve been heading home between four and five-thirty, right around this time of day.

I typed 71st and Peoria into the GPS and jumped on the Dan Ryan southbound. On the way, the more I thought about Pamela’s outburst, the more I became convinced that her raw outrage encapsulated how I think a lot of people in her position would feel over the police’s mischaracterization of the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of such a dutiful child. Once edited, her anger wouldn’t come across as directed toward me.

Traffic was thickening on the Dan Ryan just as I exited at 71st Street, aka honorary Emmett Till Road, and headed west. About a quarter mile or so down I came upon Peoria and, sure enough, a block later, Sangamon, Louise’s street, with the blue-and-white bus sign Scott had missed earlier near the corner. Cynthia said she didn’t know Louise personally. Now I am convinced that Louise’s connection to the family must be through Masey’s cousin, Yvonne.

I circled back around to Peoria. I didn’t know which house was Yvonne’s, but the street looked like so many others to the north and south of this street renamed in honor of a Black child who also was brutally murdered. About 40 percent of the houses on the block, almost all of them made of brick, were either boarded up or severely damaged by fire. I’d seen similar styles of properties on the North Side of the city that went for half a million dollars or more.

So, Masey, what route did you take from Yvonne’s house?

I entered Pamela’s address into my phone’s GPS. Within a few blocks, it directed me to turn left on Racine. I thought there were a lot of churches on 71st Street, but Racine was a whole other level of ecclesiastical landscape. For half a mile, there was at least one church per block, sometimes two located across the street from each other or side by side. Some are large, formidable structures like Shiloh Baptist and St. Sabina, but the majority are one-level storefront churches with magnanimous names such as Prince of Peace, the New Revelation of Holiness Missionary Baptist Church, and Holy Miracle House of Prayer of Apostolic Faith.

Racine is a wide but well-traveled street. Considering the volume of traffic on a Saturday evening, it was quite possible that Masey rode her bike up on the sidewalk. However, that would have been nearly impossible for her to do on 79th Street, where the GPS instructed me to make a left turn. The traffic was perpetual, both from motor vehicles pulling in and out of the White Castle drive-through on the corner or into the Dollar Store parking lot, and from pedestrians flowing in and out of retailers, restaurants, and micro boutiques selling hair extensions, cellular phones, and culturally inspired treasures. There was little room to ride a bicycle safely, not even on the sidewalk. Convinced this couldn’t be the route she took, I turned down the first residential street to my left, and circled back around to 71st and Peoria, reset the GPS, and assessed the side streets. Some homes are well kept, others boarded up or uninhabitable. Some lawns are well groomed; others are blighted patches of land dotted with abandoned cars and discarded furniture. Up ahead, there is a sign on a telephone pole that reads safe school zone. Ironically, the school I drove past looked shuttered, and not safe at all. Withered vines clung to the building’s facade and to the heavy metal bars that crossed the street-facing windows. The speed bumps on either side of the crosswalk seemed beside the point.