Triptych (Will Trent #1) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,115
she gasped for air. “Murdered?”
“Someone killed her,” Will provided. “I think she probably knew her attacker. I think that she followed him out into the stairway and he injured her…” He faltered. “He injured her in such a way that it led to her death.”
“ ‘Such a way,’ ” Miriam echoed. “What does that mean? Did she suffer?”
He was supposed to lie—it did no harm telling a mother her child had died quickly—but he could not. “I don’t think there’s any way to know if she was aware of what was happening to her. I hope she wasn’t—” He stopped. “I hope there were enough drugs in her body so that she had no idea what was going on.”
She gasped suddenly. “I saw it in the paper. A woman was murdered at Grady Homes. They didn’t list her name, but…I never thought, I just assumed…”
“I’m sorry,” Will told the poor woman, thinking he’d said that phrase more times in the last few days than he had in his entire life. He took out the photocopy of Aleesha’s letter. “We found this in her mailbox. It was returned because there wasn’t enough postage.”
The mother grabbed the letter like it was a lifeline. Tears fell down her cheeks as she stared at the words. She must have read it a dozen times before she murmured, “The pariah.”
“Can you tell me what she was talking about?”
Miriam held the letter in her lap, her hands trembling. “There was this house across the street—three doors down and a world away.” She stared out the window as if she could see it. “We were the only black family in the neighborhood back then. Tobias and I laughed about people saying, ‘There goes the neighborhood’ when they already had the devil living in their own backyard.”
“Does the family still live there?”
She shook her head. “There’s been about ten different families in that house since the Carsons moved out. It’s been added onto, turned into some kind of palace, but back then, it was just this little house where bad things happened. Every neighborhood has that, don’t they? That one bad house with that one bad kid?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She looked back out the window. “Parties every weekend. Cars racing up and down the road. That boy was poison to everybody he came into contact with. We called him the Pariah of Paisley Street.”
Will thought of the letter, the way Aleesha had referred to herself as a pariah.
Miriam continued, “His mother was never home. She was a lawyer, if you can believe that.” She turned back to Will. “I suppose I could blame her until I was blue in the face, but the fact was that she was just as incapable of controlling her child as we were.”
“Aleesha ran off with this boy?”
“No,” the woman said. “She ran off with a thirty-nine-year-old man named Marcus Keith. He was one of the advisors in her treatment program. We found out later he had already served time for interfering with a minor.” She gave a humorless laugh. “They might as well put a revolving door on every prison in America.”
Will tried to tread carefully. “In the letter, she seems to be blaming you for something.”
Miriam gave a tight smile. “When Aleesha was eleven years old, I left my family. There was a man. Like mother, like child, I suppose.” She held up the letter. “Or, ‘the sins of the parent,’ as my daughter so eloquently put it.”
“Obviously, you came back.”
“Tobias and I worked it out, but things were very rocky for a long while. Aleesha got lost in the shuffle, and then she fell in with that boy up the street.” She put her hand to her collar, pulling at a small cross that hung from a gold chain around her neck.
Will reached into his pocket and took out the cross from Aleesha’s letter. “We found this, too.”
Miriam looked at the cross but did not take it. “All my children have one.”
He did not want to tell her that Aleesha had sent it back. The letter was bad enough. Still, he had to ask, “Is there any significance to the cross?”
“Tobias bought them when I returned home. We all gathered around the table and he passed them out one by one. It signified our unity, our faith that we could be a family again.”
Will put the cross in her hand and folded her fingers around it. “I’m sure she’d want you to have this.”