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“They tied you up?” I said.
“Yes,” he replied.
“With your T-shirt?” I asked.
“Yes, sir.”
I squatted down next to him and gave the deputies a deliberate look. They walked to their cruiser with the black man and got inside and left the doors open to catch the breeze.
“Let’s see if I understand,” I said to the boy. “They tied you up with your shirt and belt and left you in the coulee and took Amanda into the trees? Guys in ski masks, like knitted ones?”
“That’s what happened,” he replied.
“You couldn’t get loose?”
“No. It was real tight.”
“I have a problem with what you’re telling me. It doesn’t flush, partner,” I said.
“Flush?”
“T-shirts aren’t handcuffs,” I said.
His eyes became moist. He laced his fingers in his hair.
“You were pretty scared?” I said.
“I guess. Yes, sir,” he replied.
“I’d be scared, too. There’s nothing wrong in that,” I said. I patted him on the shoulder and stood up.
“You gonna catch those damned niggers or not?” he asked.
I joined Helen by our cruiser. The sun was low on the horizon now, bloodred above a distant line of trees. Helen had just gotten off the radio.
“How do you read the kid?” she asked.
“Hard to say. He’s not his own best advocate.”
“The girl’s parents just got back from Lafayette. This one’s a pile of shit, bwana,” she said.
The family home was a one-story, wood-frame white building that stood between the state road and a cane field in back. A water oak that was bare of leaves in winter shaded one side of the house during the hot months. The numbered rural mailbox on the road and a carport built on the side of the house, like an afterthought, were the only means we could use to distinguish the house from any other on the same road. The blinds were drawn inside the house. Plastic holy-water receptacles were tacked on the doorjambs and a church calendar and a handstitched Serenity Prayer hung on the living room walls. The father was Quentin Boudreau, a sunburned, sandy-haired man who wore wire-rim glasses and a plain blue tie and a starched white shirt that must have felt like an iron prison on his body. His eyes seemed to have no emotion, no focus in them, as though he were experiencing thoughts he had not yet allowed himself to feel.
He held his wife’s hand on his knee. She was a small, dark-haired Cajun woman whose face was devastated. Neither she nor her husband spoke or attempted to ask a question while Helen and I explained, as euphemistically as we could, what had happened to their daughter. I wanted them to be angry with us, to hurl insults, to make racial remarks, to do anything that would relieve me of the feelings I had when I looked into their faces.
But they didn’t. They were humble and undemanding and probably, at the moment, incapable of hearing everything that was being said to them.
I put my business card on the coffee table and stood up to go. “We’re sorry for what’s happened to your family,” I said.
The woman’s hands were folded in her lap now. She looked at them, then lifted her eyes to mine.
“Amanda was raped?” she said.
“That’s a conclusion that has to come from the coroner. But, yes, I think she was,” I said.
“Did they use condoms?” she asked.
“We didn’t find any,” I replied.
