6Aaron
Beverly Hudson and Laura Parker.The first thing I did was send their names to D to check out their backgrounds. It only took D a few hours to find out that each of the women had grown up in the Crestwood neighborhood on the outskirts of Houston, Texas. Each had also spent some time in the foster care system like Megan had claimed she had. Had they been her foster sisters at some point in her life or maybe friends? Had they gone to the same school?
D had also found an old address of Beverly Hudson’s that linked her to the neighborhood. Although D had given me their addresses, I didn’t feel the need to visit Beverly or Laura at their homes because they weren’t going to tell me shit.
The Crestwood neighborhood ended up being only miles away from the centers where the women operated and worked at. Could Megan have been from the neighborhood too? It was too much of a coincidence that money from her book sales supported the organizations these women ran.
Was I making too big a leap in thinking my Megan was connected to these women and this neighborhood? I didn’t know, but my damn instincts were telling me to check it out anyway.
The black bill of my cap sat low over my eyes as I cruised down a block that resembled one of the hell-torn strips I’d driven along when I was on deployment in Iraq. It was a bad idea, but I came to a stop in front of the dilapidated house of the address D had provided. It was Beverly Hudson’s old address.
My plan was to see if I could find someone willing to volunteer the information I knew I wasn’t going to get from Beverly and Laura. Thankfully, I didn’t see anyone that paid much attention to me as I approached the shotgun-style house.
The flimsy outer door to the place had a screen on the bottom, but none in the top portion of the door. You could stand on the weathered wood of the front porch and glance into the living room. The paint had peeled so badly off the outside skin of the house that you couldn’t tell what its original color used to be. The grayish color of the exposed wood was speckled with patches of mildew, and wild vines ran up the wood in certain areas.
The porch held two splintering rocking chairs, so worn they were likely one rock from falling apart. A ceiling fan hung over my head, wobbling and thumping with every turn. When I raised my hand to knock on the door, a woman materialized out of nowhere.
“What you want, white boy?” She leaned her head closer to the opening in the doorway and took a quick peek in each direction of her block before glancing back up at me.
“If the wrong person spots you, it’s gonna be trouble for you. They’ll crumble your cracka ass ‘round these parts. I hope you got good sense enough to be packing?”
After I raised my shirt to ease her mind, her gaze landed on the .45 I had tucked in my jeans.
“Beverly Hudson or Laura Parker. You know either of them?”
“What the fuck you want with them? Beverly is my niece.”
I could tell by her clipped tone that this lady didn’t care that I’d shown her a gun. If I meant any harm to her niece, she probably had somebody on speed dial that would come and take care of me.
“I don’t want Beverly or Laura, but do you know if they had another friend they used to hang out with?”
She fished a pack of cigarettes out of her bra. Thanks to my height, I was flashed a view of her flabby dark brown tits. She eased a cigarette from the pack, retrieved a small blue lighter from deeper within her bra, and lit the cigarette all while I waited for her to answer me. She took a long drag from the cigarette as she eyed me out of the corner of her eye.
“That kind of information is going to cost you. We don’t hand out information ‘round here for free.”
How the hell she was able to talk without smoke pouring from her mouth after the deep drag she’d taken from the cigarette was beyond me. Once she completed her statement, she twisted her bottom lip to the side and let the smoke shoot out in a long quick stream.
I understood how this world worked and had two crisp hundred-dollar bills waiting. I reached inside my pocket, eyeing her the same way she was eyeing me, and handed the bills over.
She jerked the bills from my hand and threw the cigarette back between her dry lips. I observed her eyes fly up in the air as she inspected the bills before slinging the raggedy door open.
“Come in ‘fore somebody see you. I don’t need nobody calling me a snitch.”
She pointed me towards a chair as she sat on a worn brown leather couch before me. The leather of the couch resembled the dry wrinkled skin of an old man. Although the woman appeared to be no more than in her late forties, she wore one of those old-lady gowns that my mother used to call a duster and a pair of those white plastic sandals like they issued prison inmates.
When I sat in the chair, dust flew up from either side of me. The chair was covered with one of those cheap, burnt orange, rug-type blankets. The place wasn’t nasty, but it was dusty as hell, perhaps the dust coming in through that missing screen from the front door.
The woman didn’t bother giving me her name although D had already told me the house belonged to a Violet Washington. She rubbed the bills between her fingers and raised them up again to make sure they were real. She took her time about it too and didn’t stop investigating the bills until she was sure about their authenticity.
“What you wanna know about this friend of my niece’s?”
I’d assumed as much, but this lady was confirming that there was a friend? Could that friend have been Megan?
“What’s her name…the friend?”
“Bev and Laura only hung around with one other girl and that was years ago. They used to hang with this poor girl named…” she snapped her fingers, trying to get the name out. Taking another long drag from that cigarette seemed to improve her memory.
“Daniels, yeah, her name was Lacey Daniels. The poor girl was being abused by her foster father and foster brother, and the crazy thing was they say the foster mother knew about it the whole time.”