Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
CHAPTER 1
WHEN I GOT TO WORK that Monday morning I knew something was wrong. Mrs. Idabell Turner’s car was parked in the external lot and there was a light on in her half of bungalow C.
It was six-thirty. The teachers at Sojourner Truth Junior High School never came in that early. Even the janitors who worked under me didn’t show up until seven-fifteen. I was the supervising senior head custodian. It was up to me to see that everything worked right. That’s why I was almost always the first one on the scene.
But not that morning.
It was November and the sky hadn’t quite given up night yet. I approached the bungalow feeling a hint of dread. Images of bodies I’d stumbled upon in my street life came back to me. But I dismissed them. I was a workingman, versed in floor waxes and bleach—not blood. The only weapon I carried was a pocket knife, and it only pierced flesh when I cut the corns from my baby toe.
I knocked but nobody answered. I tried my key but the door was bolted from the inside. Then that damned dog started barking.
“Who is it?” a woman’s voice called.
“It’s Mr. Rawlins, Mrs. Turner. Is everything okay?”
Instead of answering she fumbled around with the bolt and then pulled the door open. The little yellow dog was yapping, standing on its spindly back legs as if he were going to attack me. But he wasn’t going to do a thing. He was hiding behind her blue woolen skirt, making sure that I couldn’t get at him.
“Oh, Mr. Rawlins,” Mrs. Turner said in that breathy voice she had.
The adolescent boys of Sojourner Truth took her class just to hear that voice, and to see her figure—Mrs. Turner had curves that even a suit of armor couldn’t hide. The male teachers at school, and the boys’ vice principal, made it a point to pay their respects at her lunch table in the teachers’ cafeteria each day. They didn’t say much about her around me, though, because Mrs. Turner was one of the few Negro teachers at the primarily Negro school.
The white men had some dim awareness that it would have been insulting for me if I had to hear lewd comments about her.
I appreciated their reserve, but I understood what they weren’t saying. Mrs. Idabell Turner was a knockout for any man—from Cro-Magnon to Jim Crow.
“That your dog?” I asked.
“Pharaoh,” she said to the dog. “Quiet now. This is Mr. Rawlins. He’s a friend.”
When he heard my name the dog snarled and bared his teeth.
“You know dogs aren’t allowed on the property, Mrs. Turner,” I said. “I’m supposed—”
“Stop that, Pharaoh,” Idabell Turner whined at the dog. She bent down and let him jump into her arms. “Shhh, quiet now.”
She stood up, caressing her little protector. He was the size, but not the pedigree, of a Chihuahua. He settled his behind down onto the breast of her caramel-colored cashmere sweater and growled out curses in dog.
“Quiet,” Mrs. Turner said. “I’m sorry, Mr. Rawlins. I wouldn’t have brought him here, but I didn’t have any choice. I didn’t.”
I could tell by the red rims of her eyelids that she’d been crying.
“Well, maybe you could leave him out in the car,” I suggested.
Pharaoh growled again.
He was a smart dog.
“Oh no, I couldn’t do that. I’d be worried about him suffocating out there.”
“You could crack the window.”
