Cat and Mouse

honey. Roni Murphy, are you in here? Roni?”
    “Roni!” Sampson joined in, his deep voice just as loud as mine, maybe louder.
    Sampson and I covered the downstairs, throwing open every door and closet as we went. Calling out her name. Dear God, I was praying now. It was sort of a prayer anyway.
Gary — not your own little girl. You don’t have to kill her to show us how bad you are, how angry. We get the message. We understand.
    I ran upstairs, taking the creaking wooden steps two at a time. Sampson was close behind me, a shadow. It usually doesn’t show on his face, but he gets as upset as I do. Neither of us is jaded yet.
    I could hear it in his voice, in the shallow way he was breathing. “Roni! Are you up here? Are you hiding somewhere?” he called out.
    “Roni! It’s the police. You’re safe now, Roni! You can come out.”
    Someone had ransacked the master bedroom. Someone had invaded this space, desecrated it, broken every piece of furniture, overturned beds and bureaus.
    “You remember her, John?” I asked as we checked the rest of the bedrooms.
    “I remember her pretty good,” Sampson said in a soft voice. “Cute little girl.”
    “Oh, no —
nooo—”
    Suddenly I was running down the hallway, back down the stairs. I raced through the kitchen and pulled open a hollow-core door between the refrigerator and a four-burner stove.
    We both hurried down into the basement, into the
cellar
of the house.
    My heart was out of control,
beating, banging, thuding
loudly inside my chest. I didn’t want to be here, to see any more of Soneji’s handiwork, his nasty surprises.
    The cellar of his house.
    The symbolic place of all Gary’s childhood nightmares.
    The cellar.
    Blood.
    Trains.
    The cellar in the Murphy house was small and neat. I looked around.
The trains were gone!
There had been a train set down here the first time we came to the house.
    I didn’t see any signs of the girl, though. Nothing looked out of place. We threw open work cabinets. Sampson yanked open the washer, then the clothes dryer.
    There was an unpainted wooden door to one side of the water heater and a fiberglass laundry sink. There was no sign of blood in the sink, no bloodstained clothes. Was there a way outside? Had the little girl run away when her father came to the house?
    The closet! I yanked open the door.
    Roni Murphy was bound with rope and gagged with old rags. Her blue eyes were large with fear. She was alive!
    She was shaking badly. He didn’t kill her, but he had killed her childhood, just as his had been killed. A few years before, he had done the same thing with a girl called Maggie Rose.
    “Oh, sweet girl,” I whispered as I untied her and took out the cloth gag her father had stuffed into her mouth. “Everything is all right now. Everything is okay, Roni. You’re okay now.”
    What I didn’t say was,
Your father loved you enough not to kill you — but he wants to kill everything and everyone else.
    “You’re okay, you’re okay, baby. Everything is okay,” I lied to the poor little girl. “Everything is okay now.”
    Sure it is.

Chapter 36

    O NCE UPON a long time ago, Nana Mama had been the one who had taught me to play the piano.
    In those days, the old upright sat like a constant invitation to make music in our family room. One afternoon after school, she heard me trying to play a little boogie-woogie. I was eleven years old at the time. I remember it well, as if it were yesterday. Nana swept in like a soft breeze and sat next to me on the piano bench, just the way I do now with Jannie and Damon.
    “I think you’re a little ahead of yourself with that cool jazz stuff, Alex. Let me show you something beautiful. Let me show you where you might start your music career.”
    She made me practice my Czerny finger exercises every day until I was ready to play and appreciate Mozart, Beethoven, Handel, Haydn — all from Nana Mama. She taught me to play from age eleven until I was eighteen, when I left for school at Georgetown and then Johns Hopkins. By that time, I was ready to play that cool jazz stuff, and to know what I was playing, and even know why I liked what I liked.
    When I came home from Delaware, very late, I found Nana on the porch and she was playing the piano. I hadn’t heard her play like that in many years.
    She didn’t hear me come in, so I stood in the door way and watched her for several minutes. She was playing Mozart and she still had a feeling for the music that she loved.