Leah sets the coffee in front of Walter, who picks it up and grins. “I keep an eye on you,” he says. “I know you sneak off here when you want to be alone.”
“You follow me?”
“Sometimes. Don’t worry; it ain’t creepy.”
“When did that start?”
“Believe it or not, your mom likes to know you’re okay. Be a little harder to track you, now that I told you.”
“I’ll make it easy. You have my permission.”
“Listen,” Walter says, “you saw the marks on Frankie’s arm, right? When they were fresh?”
“Yeah.”
“How bad?”
“Dark, swollen. Pretty big. Not as bad as Sheila’s face.”
“And you think it was this last boyfriend, Butch something. . . .”
“His name doesn’t matter,” I say. “They’re all the same guy. Love and assault are the same to Sheila.”
He sips his coffee, thanks Leah. “He best not let me catch up to him.”
I ask, “What’s going to happen, Walter?”
“I don’t know. I went over to the police station to see if I could add any information; you know, told them I spend time with the kid’s grandmother. They weren’t all that interested. Don’t guess I carry a lot of weight anywhere near the courthouse. They file me under ‘vagrant.’”
Leah says, “Vagrant?”
“I’m an old biker,” Walter says. “Only way my opinion could mean less is if I could be identified as black.” He catches himself. “No offense.”
Leah just shakes her head. “You ain’t tellin’ me nothin’ new, Mr. Multicolored Biker. Even rich black chicks with four-point-oh grade averages who could save their kids from drowning get stopped by the cops more often than coincidence should allow.” She glances at her phone. “Tim’s on his way to pick us up—five minutes.”
“Walter, do you think it would help if we went to the police and backed you?”
“Wouldn’t hurt,” he says. “This thing’ll only be hot awhile. Best give them ever’thing we can. I was impressed they were right on top of it.” He finishes his coffee and stands. “I’ll leave you young ladies to your rat killin’. Got a bit of a hike home. Thanks for the coffee.”
Leah stands with him. “We’re done here, Walter. Tim will give you a ride.”
“’Preciate it,” Walter says, just as Tim pulls up outside.
We drop Walter at his place instead of at Nancy’s because he needs a breather before connecting with Nancy again. After you hear the ten ways Sheila has of calling Nancy a bitch once or twice, it just gets tedious.
Before he walks into his place, he puts his hands on my shoulders and says, “Don’t you worry too much, Annie. Got a feelin’ this’ll turn out in the long run.” It doesn’t seem realistic, but I appreciate it.
I tell Leah and Tim I’d treat them to a movie or something, just because I don’t want to go home, but Leah’s heard enough from me about my struggles with Pop to know I’m stalling.
“That would be cool,” she says, “but all you’d be doing is putting off a conversation with your foster dad that you’re going to have sometime; plus Tim and I swim early.”
“Way too early,” Tim says.
“Look,” Leah says, “when he starts in about your messed-up family, just tell him later and get to your room. I don’t know about you, but my room is the safest place on the planet, and I’m not at war with anyone.”
Pop asks where I’ve been before I can even close the front door.
I say, “With Leah and Tim.”
His eyes narrow. “It would have been nice had we known where you were.”
I say, “And Walter.”
“Walter? The Hells Angel? What were you doing with Walter?”
“Planning our next big ride. C’mon Pop, he’s not a Hells Angel. We ran into him at Revel.”
He sets his jaw.
Marvin sits on the end of the couch, nose buried in a book, which he closes with a pop! and says, “Bedtime.”
Smart boy, and I take his cue. “Pop, can we do this tomorrow?
“What will be different tomorrow?”
I don’t know, Pop your better angel will visit in your sleep. “Maybe they’ll find Frankie.” I walk toward my room, avoiding all the ways this conversation could go bad.
I’m staring at what would be the ceiling if it weren’t so dark in here, voices from this crazy day fading in and out, struggling to make sense of all that doesn’t, when a sliver of light cuts across the ceiling. “Hey. You awake?”
“Yeah, Marvin. I’m awake.”
“Can I come in?”
He sits on the end of the bed. “I’m really sorry about Dad,” he says.
I say, “He’s not your fault.”
“Yeah, but I should stand up for you when he attacks like that. I always bail.”
“There’s nothing you could say that would make it one bit different.”
“How about, ‘Why is everything about you, Dad?’ Or, ‘Why aren’t you hurting for Frankie?” He sighs. “Do you think he’s . . .”
“Dead?”
He grunts like someone kicked him. “Yeah.”
“I can’t let myself think that. Everyone there saw more than I did. I came out of the water to all kinds of crazy.”
“I was mean to him.”
“Don’t you think like that, either. Frankie’s really hard, Marvin. Everyone gets irritated with him.”
“Yeah, but I knew that. I knew he couldn’t help it, like, he has obsessions. You can’t be mean when you know stuff.”
“Marvin, whatever was going on with Frankie was about Sheila and the rest of my weird-ball family. He likes you and me better than anybody. You think he would have played like he was playing the other day when I snuck up on you guys, if he was within a hundred miles of Sheila? Or any of her so-called boyfriends?”
“I guess . . .”
“And stop talking about him in the past tense. Us being afraid he’s dead doesn’t mean he is. Cops are banging down doors of all the registered sex offenders in town; they’re the ones that usually kill kids. It’s been all over TV that anyone in the park who took pictures or videos on their phones should contact the police. Somebody had to think of YouTube with all that going on.”
“But the
