“Nah. Forget about it now. I’m good. I gotta go.”
The phone went silent.
“Sam? Sam?”
*
It was almost eight o’clock at night when I sized up the mountain of work still piled across my desk. Budgets to review, executive summaries to read, and a couple briefs I needed to look at because I couldn’t trust the judgment of some of the lawyers who worked for me. All of it would be here in the morning. I was spent so I decided to call it a day. As I packed up my things to leave, my cell phone buzzed. Grace.
“Hey!” Grace said. “What you doing?”
“Getting ready to leave work.” I heard the sounds of a crowd in the background and the thump-thump of a ball hitting the floor. “Where are you?”
“At my son’s basketball game and it’s not pretty. Lord, they need to fire this coach and the students, too! And that includes my son. Thank God he’s making straight A’s in chemistry. I don’t think the NBA will be calling anytime soon.”
I laughed. “Your maternal support is inspiring.”
“Hey, I know this kid’s strengths. I’m just leaning into it. Why are you working so late? By late, I mean later than normal.”
“That’s the story of my life these days.” I flipped the light switch and headed for the elevators.
“So how is the new job? Let me live vicariously through you.”
I stepped inside an empty elevator. “Ugh . . . I don’t know. There’s something strange going on around this place. Something about this place I can’t shake.”
“Strange how?”
“I don’t know. It’s something about my new colleagues. You know that weird vibe I told you I was getting at the party in Savannah? Well, it’s still there. More so. And then something fishy is going on with some of the work. Like a cover-up or something.”
“A cover-up? What are they covering up?”
“Some sort of business deal and maybe Michael’s murder.”
“Are you serious? Ellice, are you in some sort of danger?”
“No, I seriously doubt it. I’m their token Black person in the C-suite. Nobody will touch me, at least not until they can get rid of those protesters. I’m safe. But still the whole place gives me the creeps.”
“Like how?”
“I don’t know. Vera used to call it a God sense—it’s a feeling I get. It’s like they all operate on some secret wavelength or frequency I can’t quite catch.”
“Then you need to listen to that. Hang on, I think my kid just scored a basket.” I heard the crowd roar in the background. “Well, I’ll be damned! Okay, I’m back.”
“Listen, get back to the basketball game. I don’t want you to miss his next shot.”
“From your lips to God’s ears.”
“I’m almost at my car anyway. I can talk to you later.”
“Okay, I’ll call you when I get home.”
“Please, don’t. I’m so tired tonight, I plan on taking a hot shower and going straight to bed. If I’m lucky, by 9:30, I should be tucked in like a baby after a breastfeeding.”
We laughed. “Okay, talk to you later.”
I crossed the lobby and stepped into the frigid night air in the garage. I approached my car and squawked the key fob. The headlights blinked and the door lock clicked, echoing across the cavernous space. Most people had cleared out hours ago. I opened the door and tossed my tote bag and purse onto the passenger’s seat. I climbed inside and closed the door. Just as I hit the start button for the engine, I noticed it. A white envelope propped against my dashboard. An unsteady lump of terror rose up in my chest. Someone’s been inside my car! My doors were locked. I always locked my doors. I scrambled around and looked in the back seat. Empty. I looked around the garage. No one else. Only a smattering of cars at this late hour. I stared back at the envelope.
Typed across the front of the envelope: Some secrets are worth keeping.
I ripped it open. Inside, a photocopy of a 1979 newspaper article from the Tolliver County Register. The headline:
LOCAL INVESTIGATORS SEARCH FOR MISSING SHERIFF’S DEPUTY
Chillicothe, Georgia, November 1978
As far as I know, Martha and Willie Jay never officially married. At least they didn’t have a wedding ceremony or anything. Just a month after Willie Jay roughed up Mario Jackson, Martha packed up the few things we owned from the house on Periwinkle Lane and moved all three of us into his house like some happy little family. And it was the talk of Chillicothe, too—both in the white section of town and the Black section too. Some Black people wondered out loud how Martha and Willie Jay came to be a couple. A blond, blue-eyed monster living with an alcoholic Black woman and her two bastard kids kept people talking for months. White people who lived in the other section of Chillicothe said Willie Jay was trash and had done about the best he could do when it came to marriage material.