Eight Months in the Morgue

Prologue

Tucker crouched in the window frame, one foot pushing off a high turquoise bureau, the other dangling outside the cement block wall of their bedroom. His brother stood quietly, looking up at Tucker already half gone. Jimmy's face was round and pale in the dark. His blue pyjamas were printed with little red trucks: new button-up-the-front pyjamas that had come wrapped around a sheet of cardboard and sealed in cellophane. They smelled like plastic and gave him a rash, but neither boy told their foster mother the new pyjamas made Jimmy itch. Tucker and Jimmy had never had new pyjamas before. “But I always go with you.”

It was a whisper.

“We always go together.”

“Not this time Jimmy. I got to go alone.”

Tucker’s voice was harsh. He realized he sounded angry. He didn’t want Jimmy to remember him angry. That was why he was leaving. His anger was going to mess up Jimmy’s life. It was going to destroy this new beginning for his brother.

Jimmy pushed a ratty stuffed elephant up at Tucker. Their mother had given Jimmy the stuffed animal long ago.

“For my baby elephant,” she said, settling under the covers as he drifted toward sleep. “Because elephants remember everything, just like you do.”

Babs the elephant had shimmered with love then: its floppy ears downy with plush gray fuzz, its toenails outlined with creamy silk cords. Now the plush was rubbed away into a greasy sheen. The elephant was blind, one foot was patched with denim, and stains traced a map of the boys’ travels across its back. There had been seven foster families, not counting the temporary placements where they stayed for a night or five — locked doors, fluorescent lights. They had climbed through a lot of windows together, Tucker dropping out first, then reaching up to help Jimmy down. Then into the forest to stay with Old Bob or, sometimes, to the truck stop to try to stow away. They made it as far as Jacksonville once, but they were always returned to Tallahassee. Tucker didn’t know why. There was no one who wanted them there: no one who even knew them.

This time Tucker had turned them in himself, scooping up Jimmy and holding him tight when the six-year-old recognized the building and tried to flee. The placement took eleven days; they were considered very high risk because the boys had been wrongly blamed for a fire they didn’t set in the last home. But Jimmy needed to go to school, and Tucker couldn’t figure out how to make that happen if they weren’t in the system. He carried Jimmy into children’s services against his will, his brother beating him on the face and shoulders with his little fists as hard as he could.

Tucker had decided to trust the new foster mother on day thirteen. It wasn’t that she bought them new pyjamas. It wasn’t that she cut the crusts off Jimmy’s grilled cheese sandwich. It wasn’t even that she almost never asked them questions. It was how she treated Babs, as if the elephant were a third brother.

“Who is this?” she had asked of the animal in Jimmy’s hands when she came in to say goodnight. That was on day five. Neither Tucker nor Jimmy had answered and she had not pushed. On day seven, she asked Jimmy if she could mend the elephant’s foot. At that time, the animal’s right foot was wrapped in duct tape. Jimmy shook his head: no. “Fine,” she said, but Tucker was sure they would come back from school and Babs would be all sewn up, that the elephant would be touched and changed by this stranger. But he wasn’t. His foot was still wrapped in duct tape, and he still smelled bad. That’s when Tucker began to relax. The foster mother took to putting Babs on Jimmy’s pillow after she made his bed. Eventually the woman had started mending other plushies (she called them “wounded ones”) in front of Jimmy. On day twelve, Jimmy brought her Babs and said, “His foot hurts. Can you help him?” She nodded. Jimmy and the woman picked out the denim patch together from a tub of fabrics in the laundry room.

Tucker gave it two more weeks. Jimmy started to eat. He let the woman read to him almost every night. But just because Jimmy needed school didn’t mean that Tucker did. He had already been in three fights — and one drew blood. He had mostly stopped showing up for classes. If he didn’t leave soon, he’d get them both kicked out.

Jimmy held Babs up toward Tucker and grunted. Tucker knew that Jimmy wanted him to take Babs because Jimmy believed that Babs would always come back to him.

Tucker shook his head and looked down at the elephant in his brother’s outstretched hand. He didn’t want Jimmy to be alone without Babs. And he didn’t know if he was ever coming back. Jimmy grunted louder, pushing the elephant toward his brother.

“OK Jimmy.”

Tucker folded the soiled toy under his arm.

“I’ll try to find you again, Jimmy. I promise. I will try.”

And then he was gone.

Chapter One

Tucker Finally at Rest by Grace A. Power Beacon Staff Writer June 4, 1986

Grace Anderson Power tilted back her boss’s big leather chair, plunked her Adidas on his secretary’s bare desk, and aimed. The dart landed with a tiny squeak in the small red circle at the very center of the board. Bullseye. Three more darts were lined up beside her. It was midnight and she was alone. Grace didn’t even seem to notice her perfect shot — a shot taken from a tipping chair, a shot no one had seen, a shot so good that no one would have believed it if she told them. But she wouldn’t tell them. She didn’t care. She reached for the next dart, twirled the hatch-marked metal shaft between her index finger and her thumb and considered the board.

The drone of a vacuum cleaner broke the silence behind her, but she didn’t turn around.

This is what she did when it got bad. She picked the lock on the door of the editor in chief’s office, wheeled his huge ugly chair into the newsroom, retrieved the dart board from behind the copy machine, took down the framed photo of President Ronald Reagan that hung on her boss’s door and replaced it with the battered circle of cork. She lined up the darts on a filing cabinet, put her feet up on his secretary’s desk, and took aim over and over and over again. She didn’t keep score. She didn’t try to remember how she did. She didn’t try to improve her aim. She just picked up the pointed shafts and threw. It was what she did instead of drinking. Privately, to herself, she sometimes admitted that drinking was better. Solo darts was not an adequate substitution for oblivion.

It had been a great day by any professional measure.

The vacuum cleaner edged closer and then clicked into silence.

“Gracie-Anne, what are you still doing here?”

The night cleaner stood beside the desk, hands on her hips, and glared at the reporter.

Grace nodded at the dartboard and wiggled the shaft in her left hand.

“Gracie, you did a good thing. You brought that boy home Gracie. You did good.”

Grace twirled the dart slowly.

“Did I Patrice? Did I really?”

“You did Gracie. You told his story.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“You always say that.”

“I do? Maybe. But this time.”

“You told the whole world who he was Gracie, and you told them how he died.”

“But not why Patrice. I still don’t know why he was here in Port Lee, why he was walking along Jackson Avenue at night all alone in the rain. I don’t know why that child died.”

She had found a measure of justice for the boy. She had given him back his identity and then exposed all those people who were supposed to take care of him, but did not: his father, who gave him up sixteen days after his mother died; the social worker who forgot to look for him when he was reported missing; the sheriff’s deputy who failed to check the list of missing children when he logged the teenage accident victim; the medical examiner who failed to raise holy hell when nobody came to claim the body of a thirteen-year-old boy months after he was first stuffed into a drawer.

Well, Grace had claimed him. From the moment that rookie deputy told her there was an unidentified child in the morgue until today, when he was lowered into the dirt at Memorial Gardens, far away from any place or people he knew, under a sky piled high with summer thunderheads. She had claimed him, and he was finally settled. His casket was cardboard, but his marker was stone: Tucker Randall Dawes 1972 — 1985 He was loved

She didn’t know by whom, but by all that was sacred, he must have been loved by someone. She hoped so. Ordering the inscription was an act of faith, but also, maybe, an act of cowardice. She had discovered a lot about the boy’s misery. She needed to imagine he also had love. He was two months cold when Grace first heard the rumor of him. It took her six months to give him back his name and today she had helped bury him. She had finished polishing his life story for the public hours ago. The presses were already rumbling, spitting out papers that showcased the short brutal life of the teenager Beacon readers had come to know as the “boy in the drawer.” She had claimed him and now it was time to let him go. But leaving the newsroom felt as if she were abandoning him just as everyone else had.

Grace loosed another dart. It too hit the small red circle at the heart of the dartboard. That had never happened before.

“Huh.”

She picked up a third metal shaft.

“Go home Gracie.”

“Why was I the only one looking Patrice? I still don’t understand why nobody cared — not even the sheriff. A boy lay in that morgue for months and months and nobody — nobody! — lifted a finger.”

“You don’t work for Frank Cooper Gracie; you don’t work for the sheriff. You work for Robert Gluckenberg at the Beacon. And you did tell that boy’s story. You did, Gracie. What more do you want?”

What a foolish, dangerous question. It wasn’t what you asked someone. It wasn’t even what she asked herself. The night cleaner leaned over the filing cabinet, waiting for an answer.

Grace’s job hurt, but usually not too much. She spent every day chronicling the errant desires and stupid mistakes that turned into arrest sheets, hospital records, and court files. Crime was like the tide: complex, shaped by forces mostly out of anyone’s control, but ultimately both predictable and inevitable. And Grace was very good at charting that tide. Everyone makes mistakes and everyone gets trapped by desire somewhere. Victims left doors unlocked, bragged about a new boat at the wrong bar, hitchhiked at night, insulted a biker’s wife, tried cocaine on a lark at a party full of strangers. That didn’t justify the consequences. Not at all. No one deserved to lose their jewelry, their boat, their faith in humanity, their life, but Grace found solace in the fact that most had a hand in their own demise. Grieving human desire and stupidity was like grieving sand shifted by the tide. Except children. She had not found a way to blame children for their own pain, nor found a buffer to keep their misery from haunting her dreams.

Her sobriety buddy, Tamara Green, had asked Grace after the service how many children’s funerals she had attended on the job. Grace had shrugged as if she didn’t know, couldn’t remember. But of course she remembered. All of them, from the very first case when she was just three weeks at the Beacon: the Soltana twins left strapped into car seats in the back of their mother’s Chevy Nova for four hours under an August sun; then Patty Ford killed by a baseball to the temple during what was supposed to be a routine early morning practice; Chuck Wagner beaten to death by an uncle; Amos Tutton who discovered his father’s stash, then drove his dad’s new pickup into a Silver Waters canal; Caliope Bailey who was playing with her sister, Samantha, when the gun went off, and Samantha, who killed herself ten years later; the Pingott children, all five of them, who died in a house fire when their mother was away partying with her cokehead friends. Forty-two children in nineteen years of covering crime. That’s if you only consider the ones who died before their sixteenth birthday. Grace could list them chronologically or alphabetically, but she didn’t. Not to Tamara Green, not to herself.

The third dart sailed out of Grace’s left hand, flying wide of the bullseye, wide of the entire circle of cork and landed deep in the polished mahogany of her boss’s heavy office door.

“I want fewer dead kids.”

Chapter Two

Calusa Growth Rate No. 1 in U.S. by Delilah Perkins Beacon Staff Writer June 4, 1986

The tiny reporter burst through the double doors of the Beacon lobby the following morning, spun on one toe, threw her arms wide and sang out: “I’m here!” Two women behind a high front counter rolled their eyes. One gave Grace a thumb’s up, which confused a customer who thought the clerk was gesturing to him. The lobby was crowded with people hoping to advertise a car, an apartment, a job in the big Sunday paper. Only a few regulars recognized the miniscule woman in dark blue jeans, black polo shirt, and cropped brown hair as the Beacon’s crime reporter.

Grace performed the same ritual every morning: she shot through the front door with a dance and a song. None of the other reporters or editors ever came in through the lobby; they all used the private newsroom entrance at the side of the building. But Grace was dedicated to beginning each day by announcing herself to an assembly of strangers.

“Morning Grace,” the clerks said in unison. Grace held up the newspaper as she twirled past. One clerk pointed to the headline “Tucker Finally at Rest”, pumped her fist and grinned. Graced bowed low, like an opera singer acknowledging a standing ovation.

Grace had played solo darts from her boss’s chair until long after the presses stopped rumbling. The parking lot was empty when she finally left the building — every Beacon truck out delivering the long-awaited life story of the mysterious boy in the morgue. A hint of light rimmed the world to the east as she finally headed toward home under a thin slice of vanishing moon. But there was no trace of her gloom when she returned to the Beacon a few hours later. Grace gave an extra twirl in the lobby, then danced down the corridor tapping the rolled paper against the wall to the beat of her personal anthem — Fleetwood Mac’s Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow. The Life Section editor emerged from the cafeteria halfway down the hall and held her hand up for a high-five.

Grace slapped her palm.

“Hell yeah, girl!”

“Thank-ee!” Grace wiggled the rolled-up paper as she passed.

She stopped at the end of the corridor where the linoleum gave way to a shabby brown carpet that marked the entrance to and boundary of the newsroom. The carpet was an artefact of the national chain that had bought the paper a decade ago. Grainery Media liked to standardize things: sections, layout, staffing, point of view. Didn’t matter if you were in Bloomington Indiana or Richmond Virginia, the papers looked the same. They even smelled the same, all printed with an ink that smelled like dish soap and cardamom. Fourteen L-shaped desks squatted on the brown carpet like animals frozen in fear, their tops coated with a fuzzy hide of random trash: marked up city council agendas; fast-food wrappers; torn phone books; bent note pads; small plastic Disney toys missing an ear, a foot, a smile; broken blue pencils with jagged tin tops; and small aluminum ashtrays crusted with soot. At one end, a striking woman guarded the office of the editor in chief from behind an enormous, immaculate desk, an IBM Selectric with a ball head humming softly beside her. June Stuart arrived at 8:50 sharp every morning with her nails perfectly shaped and lacquered, her hair swept into a French knot, and her blue eyes lightly rimmed in brown. The secretary’s domain was an island of order and cleanliness in the ocean of newsroom grime. June Stuart caught her eye and pointed to her boss’s door.

Grace strode into Robert Gluckenberg’s office, dropped into the swivel chair in front of his desk and resisted the urge to spin around yelling, “Wheeeee!” She put her ankle on her knee, laced her fingers behind her head, and said, “So, Boss-man, what can I do for you?”

The editor in chief was smiling, leaning back in his big chair. Good sign.

“That was excellent work you did on that boy from Tallahassee,” he said. “Really excellent.”

Grace waited for him to qualify the compliment, but Gluckenberg kept smiling. “You were right about that story and I was wrong.”

Grace dropped her hands, put both feet on the floor and leaned forward in attention. Her series on missing children that might be a match for the boy had made Gluckenberg look good in Grainery’s Akron headquarters. Then two national networks copied the story when Dawes was finally identified, and one used a photo of the Beacon’s front page in the nightly news. Grainery’s vice president of news had seen that broadcast while on vacation in California and sent Gluckenberg a note of congratulations. Of course she’d been right, but Grace was surprised to hear Gluckenberg say it. Surprised he even let himself know it.

“I’ve learned something from this,” he continued. “I think I have. I need to listen more. I need to take the time to understand other points of view, maybe expand my news judgment a bit.” He paused as if waiting for her to respond. She didn’t know what he expected her to say. She finally grunted, “Uh huh?”

“Anyway, I wanted to thank you, both for doing the story and for pushing the story. We will enter it in the investigative division of the regional APAs next January.” Grace winced. She didn’t like journalism awards. She had given up arguing against having her work entered. It didn’t matter. She never won anyway. If she ever did make the short list, she told herself she wouldn’t go to the gala.

“I’d also like you to have this.” Gluckenberg handed her an envelope. For a brief moment she thought it was cash, but it was a gift certificate to a fancy restaurant on Isabella Island that catered mostly to visitors staying at one of the region’s first full-service resorts. The Pom Pom Room was opened by two retired insurance adjusters from Michigan who moved to Calusa County to escape the snow. Grace liked how open the men were about their relationship. That might be common in Ann Arbor, but it was not in Port Lee. Grace would never expose herself life like that to the public; she couldn’t even imagine it. The two men from Michigan had bought a shack near Arlo Brick’s old fishing pier and filled it with whimsy: painted it pink; ran a toy train near the ceiling that whistled as it circled the small dining room; installed a bubble machine that showered patrons with iridescent orbs as they walked up a long ramp to the door. They imported an excellent chef and had some of the best food and wine in the county. Still, it wasn’t her kind of place. Her favorite meal was a grilled cheese sandwich and a Dr. Pepper.

Grace stared at the gift certificate but said nothing. Did Gluckenberg have any idea how it felt to be rewarded for showcasing a child’s pain? A kid died and Grace got to stuff herself with fancy food. The gift certificate was worse than a journalism award. It was obscene.

“Unlimited.”

“What?”

“The gift certificate. It’s for dinner. No limits.”

Gluckenberg clearly didn’t know that the Pom Pom Room had a three-hundred-dollar bottle of Dom Perignon on its wine list. Twice in twenty-four hours that she wished she were still drinking. She would have to find out if the gift certificate was transferable. Someone needed to order that champagne.

“Thanks,” she said.

“So, Grace, what do you have on the go now? What’s next?”

She leaned forward again, hands back on her knees. “I want to find out why Tucker Dawes was in Port Lee. He’d never left his brother before — and there was that guy who went to the morgue who said he was Tucker’s father but wasn’t. And we really haven’t nailed why the medical examiner didn’t…”

“No!” Gluckenberg slammed his fist on the desk.

“No Grace, you did seventeen stories on this kid. Seventeen! You’ve done a great job.” His voice was dropping, no longer yelling. “You’ve done a really great job, and I know sometimes it’s hard to move on from a story — believe me, I know — but you’ve got to let this one go. Tucker Dawes is in the ground. He’s at peace.”

Grace realized it was the first time she had ever heard the editor use the boy’s name. He had always referred to him before as “the dead kid” or “the boy in the drawer.”

“Your next story is going to be great. I don’t know what it’s going to be, but it’s going to be great. As long as you’re fixated on Tucker, you aren’t working on that next story. And that story needs you.”

“But.”

“No! We only have eighteen reporters in this newsroom — including Sports and Life. We have a whole region to cover. We can’t have a reporter working all the time on one story. I’d love to let you just do whatever the hell you want, but I can’t do that.”

“But.” She had been going to point out that she filed five or six crime stories a week — more stories than any other reporter at the paper, but he cut her off.

“No. I’ve got a responsibility to make sure all the news gets covered, not just your pet projects. And I’m sure you’ll come up with something great. In the meantime, I have a few ideas.” He handed her a stiff white card rimmed in gold: Clayton and Melinda Jones request the presence of Phillip Morton at the house-warming of Casa de Flores 732 Pineapple Drive, Dahomey, Sunday, June 8, 2 p.m.

Grace raised her eyebrows, holding the invitation by its edges as if it were a piece of evidence found at a crime scene. “You want me to cover a party at Clay Jones'?”

“Not a party, an open house. Look, we need to be celebrating the success of the African-American community in Port Lee.”

“What?”

“Yes, the Beacon has done good work on the wrongs the Black community faced here: the voter suppression, the discrimination, historic segregation. I know I’m not from here, but even I can see things have changed. Time to celebrate local success stories, you know?”

Gluckenberg paused, waiting for his reporter to say something, but she remained silent. “Clayton Jones' new house is news. Also, I’m authorizing Sunday overtime.”

Grace stood up when she realized Gluckenberg was done. “I’m sure you’re right, Boss-man. After all, you’re the one in the big chair.” She nodded at the leather throne where she had sat just hours before shooting darts. “I’ve got a few stories cooking on the back burner. I’ll look them over and tell you which one is ready for more heat. In the meantime, I’ll stop by Clayton Jones' open house on Sunday.”

Grace crossed her boss’s wide office, opened the heavy door and was stepping back into the newsroom when Gluckenberg called out for her to stop.

“Yes, Boss-man?”

“There are a lot of new scratches on my office door. There was a really deep chip in it this morning.”

Grace examined the door. A sliver of mahogany veneer had peeled away when she yanked out her final dart the night before, leaving a pale yellow gash in the dark red wood. “Huh. Yeah, there’s some damage here.” She ran her small palm over the stippled dart marks and gouges.

“You know anything about that Grace?” Gluckenberg asked.

“Why would I know anything about your office door?”

“I’m under the impression that you know just about everything around here.”

Grace smiled. It was a genuine, sincere beam of gentle amusement directed at the editor whose name she refused to use. “Man, I wish that were true.”

Chapter Three

Cocaine-smuggling Skydiver Dies in Tennessee Grainery Media Wire Services June 6, 1986

Grace tapped the invitation on the chipped enamel surface of her old metal desk. The open house was in an hour. The card was stiff as plywood, printed on paper so thick she could have used it to cut the birthday cakes the society columnist used to make. She was perplexed. Why would Clayton Jones invite her publisher to his house?

Clayton Jones and Grace were the same age. Their fathers had both worked at the flower farms outside town back when Calusa County billed itself as the Gladiolus Capital of the World. Clay’s father was a crew boss; Grace’s father ran the cold storage in summer and the packing house during harvest. Grace knew Clayton from the loading bays at the depot where both were sometimes left as children on weekends when the fields were busy.

Grace was eight years old when Clay taught her to draw. They usually spent their mornings on the southeast side of the packing house in the warmth of the winter sunshine. They scratched hopscotch boards onto the parking lot pavement with a stone or hunted snakes lazy with cold in the weeds at the edge of the field. By afternoon they circled around to the northwest side of the packing house where they bashed a red rubber ball back and forth in an alcove formed by the building’s high concrete foundation. But one morning Clay headed to the northwest side of the building first thing and Grace followed. He pulled a tin from the pocket of his overalls. Four burned sticks were lined up inside. He started sketching gladiola on the cracked concrete foundation: leaves like spears guarded the extravagant stacked lips of each bloom. Grace tried to copy him, but her charcoal wouldn’t follow his smooth lines. Clayton showed her then, one line at a time, patiently. Clay’s father chanced across them drawing on the third day, glanced at the delicate pistil his son was coaxing from his charcoal, grunted in appreciation, and then added: “Try drawing buildings instead.”

Grace could still tease the shape of a gladiolus from a pencil the way Clay had taught her more than three decades before; but the fields had long ago been tilled into condo towers. Clayton went to the all-Black Paul Laurence Dunbar High School. Grace went to the all-white Jefferson Davis High School. Neither went to college. Grace worked at a bar on Port Lee Beach after graduation, then she started kicking around the newspaper. Clayton was a Marine for a while. When he came home, he started pouring concrete for companies servicing the influx of cold northerners eager to own a piece of the sun. By age thirty-two, he had his own company. Ten years later he was one of the most successful contractors in Calusa County with a business built first on home renovations for wealthy northerners and then government jobs. Jones had recently bought the block in Dahomey where he grew up, torn down every house and built a sprawling two-story hacienda of stucco archways, red tile roofs and trailing bougainvillea. There were lots of rumors about the mansion — that it had gold toilets, a pool in the shape of a scrotum, and a gun room that rivaled the sheriff’s armory.

The mansion enraged Grace’s father and his friends. Clement Power would drive ten minutes out of his way just to avoid a glimpse of Jones' place, but Casa de Flores was hard to ignore. Its red-tile roof stood out like a navigation buoy in the sea of grey shingles that lapped the shore of downtown. Every morning when Grace’s father crested the midpoint of the bridge over the Oklawahatchee River on his way to work, there it was, demanding his attention.

When he heard that his daughter was going to write about the mansion, he exploded. “That man put your friends out of work Gracie. And now your Yankee bosses want you to paint it all up nice? Make Clay seem like a fine upstanding man?”

“He did not put anyone out of business, Dad.”

“The hell he didn’t. Buddy Malone hasn’t worked a day since that damn law was passed by those jokers in Tallahassee.”

“One, that’s not true. Buddy has worked plenty. Still has his company. He just didn’t get the contract for the new jail, so his company didn’t grow.”

“Which it should have. It was his turn, Gracie. He put in his time. He waited years for that opportunity.”

For generations, local contractors had taken turns winning contracts. They decided in advance who would put in the lowest bid, and everyone knew the winner would add thirty per cent to the job in cost overruns. It was a clear, well understood system. Then the state passed a law requiring that ten per cent of all city, county, and state-funded construction contracts go to local minority-owned firms. Jones had the only minority-owned construction company in Calusa County that met the requirements for government contracts, so the city and county were forced to work with him. Buddy Malone thought it was his turn to pour concrete when the new Justice Center contract went out to bid, but Jones won the job instead. His bid was much higher than Malone’s, but he finished the job on time and on budget.

“He’s charging twice what we used to charge. He’s ripping off the taxpayers.”

“Who’s we, Dad? You don’t have anything to do with construction.”

“You know what I mean. He’s stealing from us Gracie, stealing from you and me and his own neighbors too.”

Grace enjoyed teasing her father, enjoyed watching him work himself up over some imagined slight or historic wrong. But she was suddenly out of patience with his predictable anger, tired of the treadwheel of imagined slights. “So what Dad. So what if Clay Jones is padding his bids? Your friends ripped off the taxpayers for generations.”

Grace lay the invitation flat and ran her finger over the embossed printing. She noted that Clayton’s invitation listed his address as Dahomey, not Port Lee. Dahomey wasn’t a town. It didn’t even have a zip code. It was an enclave: a retreat for people who had never been fully safe nor fully welcome anywhere else in Calusa County. Clayton was really rubbing it in. She suspected that Gluckenberg had it wrong. This wasn’t a public open house; it was a private party. Why did Clay Jones want her publisher Phillip Morton there? And what did Clay’s house really look like? She accepted the assignment because she was twice curious. And because she never turned down Sunday overtime.

Clayton Jones opened the door himself. He was a tall man with a square face and broad shoulders. He had the same build as his younger brother who had played offense for Tampa Bay. Grace had expected a housekeeper to answer the door, or maybe Clayton’s wife, Melinda, or one of his many cousins.

“Gracie, what are you doing here?”

He made no move to welcome her in. A murmur of voices and the clink of delicate china wafted from somewhere beyond the empty hall behind him.

“Well, that’s a fine howdy-di-do,” she said. “Hello to you too Clay.”

She pulled the invitation from the back pocket of her jeans. “I’m here to cover your open house.”

Jones stiffened and Grace recognized a familiar sadness settle over his face. “Oh Jiminy Cricket, you aren’t having an open house, are you? This is a private party, huh?”

Clayton nodded. “I invited your publisher.”

“Who fudged it up,” she said. “Gave it to the editor, who misunderstood and gave it to me, told me to come do a story.”

They faced off on his threshold, neither speaking: the tiny reporter in the sun on his wide front step, the tall, broad entrepreneur filling the shade of his doorway. The high-pitched squeak of the mayor suddenly cut through the silence. “Kumquats and watermelon!” The mayor was out of sight, in a room deep in the mansion. Grace looked around and recognized the mayor’s new Chrysler sedan. There were only six other cars in the wide circular driveway, including her own. One had a red and blue bumper sticker with a picture of a castle. Another had a bumper sticker from the Calusa Conservation Society. It was a small party, she realized, not even Jones' relatives had been invited. Grace pulled a slim reporter’s notebook from her back pocket and reached for the black ballpoint pen still wedged behind her left ear.

“And you still want to do a story,” Jones said. It was a statement, not a question.

Grace shrugged.

“Sunday overtime?” he asked.

She nodded. “Double time.”

Jones sighed. “Why would the paper want to do a story about an open-house here?” he asked. “I don’t get it.”

“I don’t get it either,” Grace replied, and then repeated what Gluckenberg had said about focusing on positive stories about the African-American community.

A shadow of anger flickered across the face of her childhood friend. Dahomey leaders had been asking the paper to change the nature of its coverage for years. They complained that the only time the newspaper wrote about Black people was in the context of crime and poverty. It was sort of true, but Grace didn’t think helping a local guy show off his new mansion was what the Dahomey leaders had in mind. Neither, clearly, did Jones.

“Oh, so he thinks everything’s all right now for us Black folks? No more sad stories? No need to worry anymore?”

Grace said nothing.

“Been more than sixty years since Tyson and Jeremiah were lynched and we got a Black lady on city council now so it’s all cool?”

Grace flinched. She knew about the 1924 lynching of two local teenagers, but she had never heard the boys’ names said out loud. She had asked her grandfather about it once. She raised it over breakfast on the Sunday before Easter when she was sixteen years old. Her grandfather put down a fork still piled high with scrambled egg, stood up from the table and walked out the backdoor without saying a word. He hadn’t returned until nightfall.

Jones ran a large hand over his head and neck and stared out at the town. “Story in the Beacon is not going to win me any points with my cousins, you know? Especially the ones I haven’t had over yet. They aren’t going to like that Gracie Power got to see my house before they did.”

Grace thought for a moment that Jones was going to turn her away, but then he stepped back and opened his door wide. “OK.”

He led Grace across an elaborately tiled front hall, up a wide wooden staircase and along a mezzanine that circled the foyer. Jones strode through a bedroom that was twice the size of her living room and into a bathroom that was roughly the size of her boss’s office. He stopped and gestured to the soft pink tile, the walk-in shower, the track lighting, and the double sinks.

“Clay, why are we in your bathroom?”

“Isn’t that what you came to find out Grace? See if I have gold-plated toilets? Isn’t that what your paper wants to run, what your readers want to hear? Black man shits into fancy toilet paid for with taxpayer funds?”

“You think that’s what I came here to write?”

Grace stared at Jones, waiting for an answer. He stared back, then sighed again and his shoulders dropped. “No, I guess not. But I don’t think you want to be writing about any open house either. And your paper? The Beacon? I don’t know what they’ll write anymore.”

“This is just a story about a local guy who’s made good.”

“You mean a local Black guy who’s made good, Grace. Local Black guy who unexpectedly makes good. You wouldn’t be here if I were white.”

“Yeah. Well, it is what it is Clay.”

“Yeah, but Grace, it’s nineteen-fucking-eighty-six, not nineteen fifty-four. One Black man getting rich should not be a story. Not that I’m rich.”

“Like I said, it is what it is. So, you going to show me your pool?”

He didn’t answer as he led her back through the bedroom. “You going to introduce me to your guests? It would be great you know, get a few quotes from them.”

“No.”

Grace chuckled. “Didn’t think so.”

They were silent as he led her through a series of rooms toward the front of the house. “At least this editor isn’t pushing me to write about Black-on-Black crime all the time. Remember that one? And besides, you did make good.”

Jones took Grace’s arm as they passed a half-open door on the mezzanine, but she twirled away from him and into the room he was trying to avoid. “And boy, you made goooooood!” she said, staring. The walls were dark green, the windows shuttered. A large gray abstract oil painting hung on one wall and three framed sketches hung on another. A leather couch and chair were positioned to view the art.

“Holy cow, man! Real?”

Jones nodded. Grace moved toward the large painting. It was thick with texture, pieces of wood and bone embedded in the paint. “Rauschenberg?”

“Yeah.”

Jones had lost all his bluster. He reminded her now of the shy, smart boy who taught her to draw when she was eight years old. “I did the addition on his place on Captiva up in Lee County and we kind of hit it off.”

“I heard he’s a jerk,” said Grace.

Jones shook his head. “No. Not a jerk.”

“And those,” she pointed to the three sketches that were a riot of mixed-up lines, images jumping and fading as if in motion. “Picasso?”

“Basquiat.”

“Never heard of him, but wow. Color me purple, Clay. This is, this is amazing.”

“Grace, please don’t write about this.”

“What? But it’s a great story. Why?”

Jones shifted his weight twice, started to speak, stopped, and started again. “This room is private.” Grace didn't reply right away. She let the silence bloom, then stuck her pen back behind her ear and grinned. "Okey-Dokey then. Gold toilet seats it is."

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