The Hollow Ones(11)
“Agent Solomon.”
“Agent Solomon, who shares the name of a wise and wealthy king of antiquity, deserves a chance to prove himself as a man of justice. I am going to step back inside God’s house, and in the event anyone has any insight to share with him, they should feel free and unfettered to do so.”
With that, the pastor stepped back inside the church and closed the door. Solomon thought it strange that the man seemed reluctant to bear witness to what those among his flock might have to say. The reason for this became apparent after much quiet consultation among an extended family huddled near the older woman in the blue dress—who regarded them with a look of cutting disapproval only one’s elder can muster.
A man in his thirties pulled off his straw hat, revealing a glistening bald head and the sweat-yellowed band inside the crown of the hat. He wore a tie pin with a small cross containing a glass jewel where the silver lines intersected. He gave one long look at the lawmen waiting anxiously across the street, before turning his attention back to Solomon.
He said, almost in a whisper, “You maybe need to know about the boy.”
The white agent, whose name was revealed to be Tyler, drove, with SAIC Macklin in the passenger seat, Solomon sitting alone in back. They followed the sheriff’s official car, a tan-on-white hardtop station wagon with the county star emblazoned on the door.
They rode along a soft country road past miles of sugarcane fields. With the windows down for ventilation, Macklin had to shout his questions back at Solomon over the gusty hot air and road dust and cigarette smoke, but Solomon had no answers for him. He didn’t know what awaited them at the address, whether it was a potential suspect, a witness to the crime, or something else altogether. The straw hat man wouldn’t say any more, having been silently shamed into submission by his fellow churchgoers.
The sheriff’s car slowed to a stop, asking directions from a boy of thirteen or fourteen, walking shirtless and barefoot, whacking at road grass with a thin switch of cut sugarcane. The boy pointed up the road with the stalk, telling them where to go. Solomon noticed Tyler’s eyes watching him in the rearview mirror the way an agent dead-eyes a suspect or a complainant.
The sharecropper’s house was a low-slung, rambling structure with no foundation, set back from a path in the field. It was constructed of unpainted wood that seemed better suited for tinder than shelter. The structure itself was decades old, though it seemed to Solomon that one good summer storm would shred it to matchsticks.
Solomon looked out his window. No toys in front of the house. A laundry line wired from the rear corner of the house to a tree was empty but for two bobbing black crows. No television antenna on the roof. Curtains in the first-floor windows but no shutters outside. The windows, strangely for this heat, were closed.
“I should go alone,” said Solomon.
“Ain’t no other way,” said Macklin.
Still, Macklin stood out of the car when Solomon exited. Tyler remained sitting in the driver’s seat, smoking. The sheriff and others got out of their wagon but only to fan themselves and wait.
Solomon went to the door and knocked. It was opened almost immediately by a young girl wearing a stiff cotton dress, blue with white lace hanging from the raw hem.
Solomon said, “Hello there. Are your parents home?”
She looked at him with large brown eyes, her head barely upturned. “You a doctor?”
“No, miss.”
She turned and walked inside. Solomon waited, expecting to hear her call for a parent, but no voice came. No footsteps, either. The hallway inside split left and right, but it was dark, and his eyes wouldn’t adjust from the harsh sunlight unless he stepped inside.
The floor was dirt. There was wood flooring farther ahead. A young man stood there with a wax sleeve of saltines, chewing. He was maybe twenty years old.
“You the man of the house?” asked Solomon.
“No, sir.”
“Your daddy home?”
“He’s out in the fields.”
“This is the Jamus house, is it not?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Your name, son?”
He selected another saltine. “Coleman, sir. Cole.”
“Is your mama home, Cole?”
Cole nodded and turned, starting away, looking back over his shoulder for Solomon to follow him into a side room with a thickly braided oval rug and a few pieces of furniture around it. Near the corner, seated before a window looking out at the sugarcane, was a woman in her forties in a beige housedress, her face in one hand, weeping. She had cried a stain of tears on her waist, more tears running down her wrist and forearm.
Solomon’s mouth started to form the word Ma’am, but he never uttered it. Getting any information from this grieving woman was a lost cause. She was better left to her emotions.
He looked to Cole, chewing another saltine, looking at his mother like he was used to this.
“He’s in the back room,” Cole said to Solomon, his eyes still on his mother. “He’s chained up.”
Solomon found his way there, passing three other children on the way. He came to a closed door next to a back pantry. Solomon heard the unmistakable clinking of a chain, and the creak of a bedspring. A sound he thought was a voice let loose a startling CAW, but he realized it was one of the crows on the laundry line outside. He was in that back part of the house now.