Page 38 of Devil and the Deep Blue Fish

And one floor above, up the rickety stairs—don’t lean on the wrought iron railing because it wouldn’t even support the scrawny fifth grader he’d been—there’d been the Camerons’ apartment. Same icky brown rug, but it had been vacuumed, and any stains had been scrubbed out. A couch and a stuffed chair and a—oh joy!—television set, but also curtains and valences that were bright and cheery. The couch was frayed at the corners but clean, and the table was battered but sound. The chairs might have been a little wobbly, but they were shored up with sugar packets, and nobody got scratched on metal edges that had been torn from the sides.

There were pictures on the walls—discounted art, but matted and framed—and Kaden and Jade always,always, had a test or a project on the refrigerator. There had been two bedrooms, one for the twins and one for Toni, and Kaden and Jade had homemade blankets, from on-sale fabrics, but stillhomemade, that were in their favorite colors with action figures on Kaden’s blanket and, well,femaleheroines on Jade’s blanket, because even then she’d been a fighter.

And art. And color. And clean clothes in battered dressers. And schoolbooks.

And care.

But all of that had been behind the same door of peeling paint that had hidden Celia’s squalor.

Jackson checked out the apartment number—#4—saw that it was a downstairs unit, and stopped leaning against Jennifer the minivan to go see what was behind door number four.

He gave the door an authoritative rap, and then, true to his history in law enforcement, he moved to the side. Doors were thinner and easier to shoot through. After a few moments, during which he could hear footsteps and swearing and then the chain being put in the slot, the door creaked open and he was eye to eye with a woman who was doing her thirties the hard way. She was thin, with about four inches of roots showing and a lot of brassy, teased hair below that. Once upon a time she’d had delicate features, Jackson thought, but her face showed fatigue now, poor diet choices, and the ravages of nicotine, which issued from the apartment in a cloud. She was wearing black yoga pants, pilled almost into transparency, and a tight once-white tank, and was clutching a battered plaid blanket around her shoulders in deference to the weather.

She regarded Jackson with unfriendly eyes through the crack between the door and the frame, and he watched the slow computer in her head as she tried to figure out who he was and what he wanted.

“Kenny’s next door,” she muttered, “but he doesn’t got anything until tomorrow.”

He rolled his eyes. “I don’t want your dealer,” he said, and her grimace proved him right.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“Where’s your kid?” He said it bluntly because he hated this place already, and he hated that Cowboy had lived here, and he really, really hatedher.

Her eyes darted back and forth, and he wondered how badly she hated that Kenny was out of product. “He’s not here,” she said. “Kid’s in school.”

“No, he’s not,” Jackson said. “Guess again.”

Her lower lip trembled. “He’s supposed to be in school,” she whispered. “Someplace to teach him, you know?”

“Do you remember the place’s name?” he asked.

She closed her eyes. “Moms for Clean Living,” she whispered. “They were at the place, the rehab place. I was talking in group about how my kid was a fag, and this woman came up to me, all official and everything, and said they had a school that would fix it.”

She met his eyes for the first time, hers a bruised and battered brown with an element of childish hurt in there.Not in her thirties,he thought.Barely thirty. Had him too young. Didn’t know what to do with him. All the places she went to for help only fixed one side of things, like paint on five pieces of a thousand-piece puzzle.

He gasped and tried to jerk his gaze away, but she went first.

“Is my boy all right?” she asked, her voice a husky rasp. “They said he’d write, but… but he ain’t written.” She studied her bare toes with not even a hint of polish and swallowed hard. “I miss him. But they said he had to get the devil out of him because he was a fag.”

“That,” he said, not sure where his emotions were going, “is a terrible word. Your son is kind, and he’s funny, and he’s brave. You had no right—no right—to throw him away because of who he wants to kiss.”

She tilted her head and gestured with her chin. “Mister, I don’t know if you seen their place in midtown, but it was like throwing him from a trash heap to a castle, you know?”

“Not if they were going to beat him into submission, Reba,” he said, and part of him was screaming that he needed to getinformation from this woman before he went off, and part of him wanted to turn around and run, not walk, back to Sean and Billy’s and beg them, beg Isabelle, to take this woman’s child and raise him in a circle of love he would never want to escape.

And part of him wished somebody would do the same for Reba Milton, because even he could see that this woman had once been a girl badly in need of help, and nobody had stepped up.

“They wouldn’t beat him,” she said, with so much certainty he had to remind himself that Cowboy had run away because the other kids had told him they were scared there.

“Whatever they’d do,” he said, “it had them all terrified enough to run away. Your boy’s been living on the streets for amonth,Reba. I mean, are you going to kick him out for kissing a boy when he’s sleeping on the sidewalk eating garbage?”

She squeezed her eyes tight. “Don’t lie to me, mister. I know what you do when you’re on the street. I did it so I could afford an apartment. My boy was staying in the family business, that’s all.”

Oh hell. Jackson needed caffeine, and sleep, and for Jade to remind him that he’d gotten clear of this apartment a long time ago. And he needed Ellery to ask him if he needed help so he could kick his feet and say no, he’d do it fine on his own, thank you, and he needed Henry to ask him what in the fuck he was doing there, and he neededHenry to be all right.

That last thought was what straightened his backbone.

“Reba, I’m not here to shit on you,” he said. “And I’m not going to report you to the cops. I need two things from you, and then I’ll leave you alone.”

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