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“You always do.”
She laughed a little at Derrick’s comment. “I was a fighting fool back then. Shelby taught me how to handle myself, so I pushed right into those boys, went after the meanest one—you can always tell. Take him out, I figured, the rest’ll run off. And that’s how it was. Then I took her to Sebastian because she was alone.”
She ran a finger over the edge of the photo. “She’s one of them, too. In the building.”
“Yes. You tried to help her, but she didn’t stay with Sebastian.”
“Mean as a snake,” Lonna repeated. “But she was just a kid. She hung with us a little while—mostly with Shelby—but she left, and I didn’t see her around anymore.”
“Did she leave before or after Shelby?”
“Oh, let me think about that. It must’ve been after. I snuck back to Sebastian’s a couple times, hoping to find Shelby there, but she wasn’t. It seems to me this girl was, then she wasn’t.”
“Okay. How about this girl.”
At Eve’s signal, Peabody put Shashona’s photo on the table.
“Not one of us,” Lonna said slowly. “Maybe I saw her around—she’s sharp-looking, isn’t she? I wonder . . . did she sing?”
“Yeah.” Connection, Eve thought. “Yeah, she did.”
“That’s it then. Sharp-looking girl, good voice. We sometimes snuck off to Times Square, and I’d sing for the tourists. They’d put money in the box. This girl here, I remember how she came by, sang with me. Just picked up the song—don’t remember which—with the harmony.
“Shelby, Mikki, they couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. T-Bone was okay at it, but he wouldn’t sing out on the street. But this girl stopped—I’d seen her around before, but more up our way, I think. And she’d seen me. I could tell, the way you do.”
“You’d seen her before,” Eve pressed. “Near The Sanctuary?”
“Seems like it. Always with a pack. Girlfriends, laughing, talking, going home or out somewhere. I envied that. She had nice clothes, seems they all did. I hated wearing those hand-me-downs, and I noticed clothes on girls around my age.”
“Then you ran into her in Times Square.”
“That’s right. I was set up with my box, and truth be told Shelby was working the crowd for wallets. Telling the truth, back then it was fun, an adventure. We didn’t have many. But this time, this sharp-looking girl here, she stopped, and we had ourselves a little duet. Then another, before she went off with her friends. I remember because it felt good to sing with somebody, and because I offered her part of the money, and she wouldn’t take it. She said she hadn’t done it for money, but for the song. And damned if she didn’t put five dollars in the box.
“Good, clear voice,” Lonna murmured as she studied the photo. “Gone now, too.”
“She has a grandmother, who raised her, who loved her,” Eve said. “It’s going to mean something to her when we tell her that.”
“Tell her . . . her girl could sure sing, and she had a kindness to her. Lots of girls that age with nice clothes? They’d look down on someone dressed like I was. She didn’t.”
“I’ll tell her. Tell me a little about The Club. Sebastian’s.”
“Well, Sebastian saw we got food. I was getting fed just fine by the Joneses. They saw to it you ate healthy and didn’t go hungry. But some of the girls in The Club would’ve gone hungry without him. You need to know that.”
“Okay.”
“We learned to street snatch, pick pockets, learned a few cons. It was exciting, and I was pretty good at it. I liked having a little secret money of my own, even though it belonged to somebody else. I’d never had my own. Couldn’t do the bjs, and Sebastian wouldn’t have liked it anyway. But I couldn’t do them the way Shelby did, even though she tried to teach me that, too.”
She laughed a little, gave Derrick a wink out of watery eyes. “Not then I couldn’t. I was a little younger, and I told Shelby no way I was doing that. It was nasty. She just laughed, said I should think of it like medicine. Just get it done. But I wouldn’t.”
“Did you ever get caught?”
“Nearly, lots of times. It added to the thrill, I guess. Mr. Jones and Ms. Jones ran things pretty tight, but most of us had had some street time—and I was getting more of it—so we found ways around and through. And we always had each other’s backs.”
“Do you still? Do you know where T-Bone is?”
“He did the same as me, got his name changed. Then he lit out. He wanted to see the world, that’s what he wanted. And he has. He got some education, and that’s thanks to Mr. Jones and Ms. Jones and the rest. He got on a boat, worked on the crew and went all the way to the South Pacific. He’s still seeing the world, and I hope you’ll let him be. We talked after I heard about the girls, and he said he’d come back if I needed. I don’t want him to have to.”
“We’ll let that stand for now. If it turns out he’s needed, I’ll want you to tell him, or give me a way to contact him, to talk to him.”
