And Now She's Gone(95)

Elyse Miller had been born in the south. Did her parents—birth parents?—know where she was? That she was now someone new? Had she changed her name because of Tommy Hampton and his family’s threats to kill her?

Gray blinked to clear her head. “This. Is. Nuts.”

Good thing she was already packed. Good thing she was already headed to the airport. She couldn’t take the knife on the plane to Alabama, but she stood in the middle of Mail Boxes Etc. So she shipped the Miyabi Evolution slicer to her UPS box in Los Angeles. Then she purchased a new notebook and a sparkly purple pen. The ink smelled like grapes.





51


The taxi smelled of doughnuts and coffee and Jennifer’s perfume. Clarissa’s face was covered in confectioner’s sugar and Zadie had fallen asleep and was now snoring. Gray plucked her laptop from the backpack, which was lighter now without the Japanese knife.

“So, Detective Gadget,” Jennifer said.

Zadie snorted awake. She smacked her lips and rummaged through her big purse for another bottle of Dr Pepper.

“So, Isabel Lincoln is actually forty-six years old,” Gray said. “Not thirty.”

“She doesn’t look old in the picture,” Clarissa said.

“First of all,” Gray said, bristling, “forty-six ain’t ‘old.’ Second of all, black don’t crack.”

Isabel’s age changed the dynamic—a middle-aged woman had disappeared, not a scared kitten just starting to “adult.” Taking the man’s dog had been a gangsta “grown-ass woman” move. Kenny G. might even be dead, since, after forty, women kinda stopped giving a fuck.

Zadie asked, “Now what?”

Gray logged on to the People Finder database. “Now, I need to learn more about Ruth and Walter, her biological parents.”

Ruth and Walter Miller were alive and living on Till Street in Whistler, Alabama. He worked as a chief mechanic for Mobile County and she drove a bus for Mobile County Public Schools. They were both sixty-eight years old and they were still Negro, just like the clerk had recorded back in 1973, the year their daughter Elyse was born.

“You guys are so wack,” Clarissa whined, arms crossed. “I shoulda taken a later flight with Haley and those girls.”

Gray gaped at her. “Really? We just spent how much on you and—”

“Fucking millennials. I swear,” Jennifer mumbled.

“Why are you so goddamned pissy?” Zadie spat.

Anger blew like hot wind around the car. Time to go home.

Clarissa dabbed at her wet eyes. “We came together, we leave together. That’s the girlfriend code.”

Gray rolled her eyes. “Clarissa, it wouldn’t make sense for me to fly back to L.A., then turn around and fly to—”

“You don’t have to explain diddly to this girl,” Zadie said. “And you…” She pointed at Clarissa. “You need to grow the fuck up. Toot-sweet.”

Jennifer said, “Amen,” then enlarged the dick pic that Dylan had sent her. “Did I tell you guys he’s uncircumcised? A pig in a blanket. Yowzah.”

At McCarran Airport, hundreds of bleary-eyed travelers trudged from TSA to Starbucks to departure gates. Some sat at scattered banks of slot machines while others stretched out on seats and on the carpet. Everyone was over Vegas.

“You sure you don’t need me to go with you?” Jennifer asked Gray. “It’s not like you know what you’re doing in California. How will you handle Alabama?”

“She’s totally right,” Clarissa said. “Alabama’s, like, another country. And you just found out that you should fill your gas tank every—”

“Enough.” Zadie tapped Gray’s shoulder and winked. “You know where we are if you need us.” She paused, then added, “Well, where I am. Heckle and Jeckle here don’t have the sense God gave a goat.” She smirked at Clarissa. “Sorry, not sorry.”

Gray told her friends good-bye and strolled to Delta’s ticketing desk. She didn’t want to catch the Millers totally off guard, and she also wanted to ensure that they were truly alive and still living on Till Street. So, after she’d purchased a one-way flight, she called the phone number listed for them in the database.

The mechanic had never heard of Gray. He pressed the phone to his chest, then asked someone in his world, “You know some gal named Grayson?” His voice was thick as mucus.

“Who?” a woman shouted.

Gray pictured Ruth Miller at the kitchen sink, curlers in, scarf on, leaning back, head in the doorway.

“Grayson Sykes,” Walter Miller shouted.

“Naw.”

He came back on the line. “We supposed to know you, Miss Sykes?”

Gray forced light into her voice to say, “No. See. I’m friends with your daughter, Elyse.”

Walter Miller didn’t respond.

Gray stuck her finger in her ear to better hear his silence. “Hello?”

“Good day, ma’am.” Dead air. He’d hung up on her.

Seated way in the back of the plane, near the tiny bathrooms, Gray wondered more about Walter’s reaction. Elyse was a problem child now, but how had she been a problem in the years she had lived under the Millers’ roof? What pain was Gray about to cause?