“What?” Myron said.
She reached toward him and took the ball from his hands. She held on to it as though it might grow wings and fly off. “It’s so like my mother,” she said. “First the clothes gone. Now the money.”
“Your mother took money?”
“Every dime.”
Myron looked at her. She kept her eyes on the ball. Her face was suddenly so guileless, so frail, Myron felt something inside him crumble. He waited a moment before changing the subject. “Was Horace working before he disappeared?”
One of her teammates, a white woman with a ponytail and freckles, called out to her and clapped her hands for the ball. Brenda smiled and led her with a one-armed pass. The ponytail bounced up and down as the woman speed-dribbled toward the basket.
“He was a security guard at St. Barnabas Hospital,” Brenda said. “You know it?”
Myron nodded. St. Barnabas was in Livingston, his hometown.
“I work there too,” she said. “In the pediatric clinic. Sort of a work-study program. I helped him get the job. That’s how I first knew he was missing. His supervisor called me and asked where he was.”
“How long had Horace been working there?”
“I don’t know. Four, five months.”
“What’s his supervisor’s name?”
“Calvin Campbell.”
Myron took out a notecard and wrote it down.
“Where else does Horace hang out?”
“Same places,” she said.
“The courts?”
Brenda nodded. “And he still refs high school games twice a week.”
“Any close friends who might help him out?”
She shook her head. “No one in particular.”
“How about family members?”
“My aunt Mabel. If there is anyone he’d trust, it’s his sister Mabel.”
“She live near here?”
“Yeah. In West Orange.”
“Could you give her a call for me? Tell her I’d like to drop by.”
“When?”
“Now.” He looked at his watch. “If I hurry, I can be back before practice is over.”
Brenda stood. “There’s a pay phone in the hallway. I’ll call her.”
On the ride to Mabel Edwards’s house, Myron’s cellular phone rang. It was Esperanza. “Norm Zuckerman is on the line,” she said.
“Patch it through.”
There was a click.
“Norm?” Myron said.
“Myron, sweetie, how are you?”
“Fine.”
“Good, good. You learn anything yet?”
“No.”
“Good, okay, fine.” Norm hesitated. His jocular tone was a little off, forced. “Where are you?”
“In my car.”
“I see, I see, okay. Look, Myron, you going to go over to Brenda’s practice?”
“I just came from there.”
“You left her alone?”
“She’s at practice. A dozen people are there with her. She’ll be fine.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.” He didn’t sound convinced. “Look, Myron, we need to talk. When can you get back to the gym?”
“I should be back in an hour. What’s this about, Norm?”
“An hour. I’ll see you then.”
Aunt Mabel lived in West Orange, a suburb outside Newark. West Orange was one of those “changing” suburbs, the percentage of white families sinking bit by bit. It was the spreading effect. Minorities scratched their way out of the city and into the nearest suburbs; the whites then wanted out of said suburbs and moved still farther away from the city. In real estate terms this was known as progress.
Still, Mabel’s tree-lined avenue seemed a zillion light-years from the urban blight that Horace called home. Myron knew the town of West Orange well. His own hometown of Livingston bordered it. Livingston too was starting to change. When Myron was in high school, the town had been white. Very white. Snow white. It had been so white that of the six hundred kids in Myron’s graduating class, only one was black—and he was on the swim team. Can’t get much whiter than that.
The house was a one-level structure—fancier folks might call it a ranch—the kind of place that probably had three bedrooms, one and a half baths, and a finished basement with a used pool table. Myron parked his Ford Taurus in the driveway.
Mabel Edwards was probably late forties, maybe younger. She was a big woman with a fleshy face, loosely curled hair, and a dress that looked like old drapes. When she opened the door, she gave Myron a smile that turned her ordinary features into something almost celestial. A pair of half-moon reading glasses hung from a chain, resting on her enormous chest. There was a puffiness in her right eye, remnants of a contusion maybe. She gripped some sort of knitting project in her hand.
“Goodness me,” she said. “Myron Bolitar. Come in.”
Myron followed her inside. The house had the stale smell of a grandparent. When you’re a kid, the smell gives you the creeps; when you’re an adult, you want to bottle it and let it out with a cup of cocoa on a bad day. “I put coffee on, Myron. Would you like some?”
“That would be nice, thank you.”
“Sit down over there. I’ll be right back.”
Myron grabbed a seat on a stiff sofa with a flowered print.
For some reason he put his hands in his lap. As if he were waiting for a schoolteacher. Myron glanced about. There were African sculptures made of wood on the coffee table. The fireplace mantel was lined with family photographs. Almost all of them featured a young man who looked vaguely familiar. Mabel Edwards’s son, he guessed. It was the standard parental shrine—that is, you could follow the offspring’s life from infancy through adulthood with the images in these frames. There was a baby photo, those school portraits with the rainbow background, a big Afro playing basketball, a tuxedo-and-date prom, a couple of graduations, blah, blah, blah. Corny, yes, but these photo montages always touched Myron, exploiting his overtuned sensitivity like a sappy Hallmark commercial.
Mabel Edwards came back into the living room with a tray. “We met once before,” she said.
Myron nodded, trying to remember. Something played along the edges, but it wouldn’t come into focus.
“You were in high school.” She handed him a cup on a saucer. Then she pushed the tray with cream and sugar toward him. “Horace took me to one of your games. You were playing Shabazz.”