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it. I don’t think you’re supposed to come past the stairs, are you?” Officer Ken sounded uncertain.
Clarence gazed into the room through the windowless window. His first sight was the familiar needlepoint wall hanging made by his mother, with a green lettered quote from Martin Luther King. “We must spread the propaganda of peace.”
He squared up with the window frame and stared directly into the room. Glass and wood chips and chaos permeated it. Mama’s prize brocade chair lay splintered, one leg ripped off as if severed by the jaws of a monster. He saw Detective Chandler leaning over what appeared to be a mannequin lying on the floor.
“O God,” Clarence said. It was Dani.
He watched Ollie pointing to something, talking with Manuel. To the right he saw blood-soaked sheets on one of the two little beds tucked next to each other. It was Felicia’s. There by her bed sat her little lunch bucket with zoo animals and that big smiling-face giraffe. Clarence stared at the twisted and misshapen box. He noticed the giraffe had a strange black spot on his head. No, it was a hole. A bullet hole.
Clarence buckled, falling to the floor of the porch, knocking aside three of the yellow evidence markers.
“Take me, God, but not Dani. And not Felicia. You can’t have them. You can’t!”
Officer Ken stood uncertainly over Clarence, then put his hand on his shoulder and led him back to the stairs. Clarence sat down, oblivious to the raindrops now pelting him.
A tall middle-aged woman walked out Dani’s front door, gazing uncomfortably at Clarence. She wore a badge that said “Deputy Medical Examiner.” She gestured down toward the man smoking a cigarette outside the beige paneled van. The man stomped out his cigarette, wheeled a collapsible gurney out of the van, lifted the outer yellow tape, pushed the gurney under it, and made his way to the front steps.
Everything moved quickly now. Clarence heard sounds of lifting in the bedroom. Then the gurney came out, covered with a white sheet, crimson stains already soaking through. The medical examiner led the way, peering nervously at Clarence.
He got up and walked alongside the gurney, ducking under the police tape, until it was at the back of the van.
The man attempted to lift part of Dani’s body to better position it on the gurney before wheeling it up into the wagon.
“Let me move her,” Clarence said.
“No, I got it. Do this all the time.”
“She’s my sister.”
The man shrugged, looking at the medical examiner. “Okay.”
Clarence lifted his baby sister. As an eighteen-year-old she had been barely 100 pounds, now perhaps 140, but still a light load for arms so big. He remembered as a ten-year-old lifting six-year-old Dani in his arms and carrying her across that little creek off the Strong River near their home in Puckett, Mississippi. She was so vulnerable. She always needed him to watch out for her, just as he needed her to watch out for.
“You can put her down now.” The man’s voice intruded, scattering the memories to the wind.
Clarence lowered the body slowly, moved to the side, and watched the man wheel the gurney up the ramp into the van. He and the medical examiner got in. The van rode off into the darkness.
Another uniformed officer came to Clarence and without a word escorted him across the cordoned-off area to his car. The driver’s side window was still open. The soaking wet seat would normally have bothered him. He would have been concerned that the water might damage the plush champagne leather. Now it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He sat down in the car. The heavy smell of wet leather assaulted him. He watched the water drops on the windshield join together and gather momentum, creating a hint of a rainbow from the streetlights. A cheap imitation of a real rainbow, with none of the hope.
Got to get back to the hospital. Got to see Felicia. Got to call Geneva. Got to tell Daddy.
How would he tell them? What would he say? He stared at his