Nickel City Crossfire by Gary Ross (children's books read aloud TXT) 📕

near and saw Winslow and his wife step into the dining room. Mona was a full head shorter than her husband and clad in a dark maroon winter pantsuit that made her look wider than she likely was. She had a pleasant dark face and short permed hair. Her smile was a stark contrast to the grief in her eyes. Transferring a small notebook to her left hand, she extended her right as she came toward me. “Mr. Rimes, I am so grateful to meet you.”

“The pleasure is mine, Mrs. Simpkins.”

“Call me Mona,” she said, shaking my hand and then holding it to lead me to the sectional. I laid my jacket on one end and sat in the middle. She didn’t let go of my hand until she sat beside me. “Win says you agreed to help find my Keisha.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, as Winslow sank into the recliner on the opposite end. “I’ll find her and let you know how she is. But I’ll bring her home if and only if she wants me to.”

She took a deep breath and nodded. “Win told me that too. I know you can’t force her but long as I know she’s okay, I’ll be happy.” She patted my hand. “Real happy.”

I took out my notebook, a pen, two business cards, and my cell phone. “I want you to tell me about Keisha. Anything you can. You never know which details will prove helpful.” I handed her the cards, and she passed one to her husband. Then I held up my phone with the picture Winslow had given me. “If you have any other pictures of your daughter on your cell phone, you can text them to the second number on the card.” Returning the cell to my jacket pocket, I opened the notebook and uncapped my pen. “So?”

For a moment husband and wife looked at each other as if unsure what to say. Then the dam cracked. Leaked. Burst. For the next hour, as I took notes, the tension of the past month drained out of them in reminiscences that painted a portrait of a devoted honor student and daughter whose accomplishments were her parents’ greatest delights. An early reader with limitless curiosity, Keisha had excelled at everything and had been drawn to medical studies by helping to care for her now-deceased great-grandmother.

“Couldn’ta asked for a better child,” Winslow said. “When she skipped fifth grade, the teacher said she might grow up to be a doctor, but we kinda knew right then she’d wanna be close to folks she helped. She said bein’ a nursing doctor was the best of both worlds.”

“Even when she was only ten, she had a special understanding of how people hurt,” Mona said. “The way she would help me with Granny. The way she would say things like, ‘Mama, if we turn her this way instead of that, it won’t cause her so much pain’ or ‘If we put it through the blender one more time, it won’t hurt her throat so much going down.’ It’s like she knew without anybody having to tell her. Like her life’s work was right out there for everybody to see.”

Her father nodded. “She got scholarship offers from lots of schools, even Columbia in New York, but she decided to stay right here at home and go to UB. When she finished and started workin’, we said she oughta get her own place. She did for a while but then moved in upstairs when our last tenant left.”

“How long ago was that?”

“About five years,” Mona said. “She doesn’t make that much working for a non-profit but she pays us a little rent. We tore up our mortgage a long time ago so we got no house payments to make. Win and me, we don’t need a lot, so we keep most of Keisha’s money in the bank. You see, she said she was saving up to have a brand-new house built for all of us, and for the family she hoped to have one day. When the time was right, we planned to give it all back to her, to help.” Briefly, Mona smiled, as if anticipating Keisha’s reaction to their surprise or maybe the grandchildren she might now never see. Then her eyes welled and she made no effort to wipe them.

“But if we need that money to help her get through this...” Winslow began.

“Or to help you find her,” Mona added.

For a moment I was quiet, wondering if the pressure to succeed had pushed Keisha off the straight and narrow. Or had it been her involvement with Odell Williamson? Her father thought the teacher was responsible for his daughter’s undoing but was it likely the overdose had been their first time out of the gate together? Surely there had been some hint that things were not as they should have been.

“Tell me how she was when she was seeing Odell,” I began as gently as I could. “Before she ended up in the hospital. Was she her usual self? Or was she somehow different? Maybe stressed or tired or distant?”

Without even glancing at each other, Winslow and Mona shook their heads in unison.

“She was fine,” Mona said. “Working hard as ever but not at all bent out of shape about it. If anything, she was happier than usual. She’d been seeing Odell for ten months or so and liked him a lot. She didn’t think much of most of the men who tried to get with her. Too many with no job, no prospects, nothing they could talk about. But Odell was different. A nice young man from a good family. A gentleman. A professional, she called him.”

Winslow snorted. “Professional criminal.”

“We didn’t know, Win.” Mona shook her head. “Truly we didn’t, Mr. Rimes. We had no idea. I’m sure Keisha had no idea either.”

“What about Odell’s family? I wonder if they had an idea.”

Winslow sucked his teeth.

“We wouldn’t know,” Mona said.

“Of course not,” I said. “I’m just thinking