The name was painted on the mailbox. I made a note of the spelling. The house stood a hundred yards from the C&O depot. I headed down Washington Street at a sprint. Sure enough, Poindexter was on the platform. His cap was askew and his eyes glistened with excitement.
“Did they tell you I seen the colored girl, Charlie, the one does the washing for the widow woman? Seen her walking fast toward Sam Howard’s store about 11 o’clock this morning. Why I reckon this is the biggest thing ever happened in my life.”
“No,” I said. “I’ll have to get your statement.”
“Couple guys loafing on the mail carts this afternoon heard some boys hollering and said there must be trouble.” He whistled. “This sure beats it, don’t it? Neighbor lady brought the girls in.”
“What girls?”
“The widow woman’s girls. Two of them. They’re sitting in there right now.”
I pushed open the swinging doors into the depot. The sun hung just above the rooftops and the air was getting chill. It swirled at my ankles as the doors shut behind me. A woman I would guess to be in her fifties was sitting on the bench. She was wearing a straw bonnet, the kind you’d expect to see in summer. It sat too far back on her head and the ribbon was untied. A pale, thin girl was leaning her head on the woman’s shoulder, and a younger girl was leaning hers on the pale girl’s. The younger girl had a pink peppermint stick in her mouth.
The woman on the bench sat forward when she saw two sheriff’s officers approaching from the platform. The girls raised their heads. The officer walking in front was a big man with sandy red hair and rosy cheeks. The other officer was smaller, wiry build, brown hair.
“Ma’am, I’m Deputy Leslie Curtis Jr.,” the officer in front said. “This is Officer R. D. Hope. Are these your children?”
“No,” she said. “These are Mrs. Belote’s children. I’m Mrs. Belote’s neighbor. This is her daughter Harriet,” she indicated the pale girl beside her, “and this is her baby girl, Sadie. Sarah Elizabeth.” She patted the knee of the younger girl. Harriet looked pretty calm. Sadie’s eyes and nose were red from crying.
Sadie took the peppermint stick from her mouth. “Is Momma all right?” she asked the deputy. “Did she get hurt?”
“She did, honey,” the deputy said. “We’ll just have to wait and see how bad. Do you girls remember your momma having trouble with anybody?”
“Uh-huh,” Sadie said. “Momma was mad with Virgie about taking her skirt.”
“Who’s Virgie?”
“Virginia Christian,” the older girl Harriet said. “She’s the colored girl who washes clothes for my mother. My mother thought she’d stolen her best black skirt. But we found it.” Harriet’s face hardly moved as she spoke. She sat rigid as a feral cat. Her voice seemed to come from somewhere else. Her eyes looked black as ink.
“Do you know where this colored girl lives?”
“Wine Street,” Harriet said. “Three hundred something.”
“Ma’am, has any family come round?” the deputy asked the woman on the bench.
“Not yet,” the woman said. “The girls have an older sister, Pauline Wright. She was married just this past year. Lives over in Newport News. I’m sure she’ll get here soon as she hears the news. Then there’s Mrs. Belote’s brother in Norfolk, a businessman.”
“I hate him,” Harriet said.
“Goodness!” the woman said. “You shouldn’t speak that way about your uncle.”
“I want Pauline to come,” Harriet said.
The woman nodded and stroked the girl’s hair. “She will, dear. She will.”
“Ma’am, could we ask you to look after the girls, then? Sheriff’s office ain’t really a fit place,” the deputy said.
“Of course,” the woman said.
“Well, R. D.,” the deputy said, “let’s tell Chas about this colored girl.”
“All right, Junior,” the other officer said. They tipped their hats to the woman on the bench. “We’re much obliged, ma’am.”
Passersby had joined the crowd on the street in front of the Belote house. A couple of saddle horses were tied to the fence. A freight wagon was parked in the street. The teamsters were smoking cigarettes with their boots propped up on the rail of the wagon. They were watching a pack of boys roll hoops in the street.
“You men get that rig moving!” the deputy hollered.
“All of you, move on!” the other officer said. No one did, except for the teamsters.
A hearse from Rees’ Funeral Parlor was parked where Dr. Vanderslice’s buggy had been. Two men filed out the back door of the house carrying a litter. A body was bound in a bed sheet. Dark splotches stained the sheet. Some of the women in the crowd gasped and put kerchiefs to their faces.
“Look yonder!” a white boy hollered. “That there’s a corpse!” His hoop banged into the picket fence and a woman shrieked.
“You boys don’t get on, I’ll haul ever one of you to jail,” the deputy said.
The white boy grabbed his hoop and dashed off.
The two officers from the depot entered the rear of the house. I stood outside on the little porch. Inside was Deputy Charles Curtis, the one the officers called “Chas.” I recognized him from a story I’d covered, a domestic disturbance in a Negro house. He was a good investigator.
He looked up from where he was crouched. “Looks like we had us one hell of a catfight in here, boys,” he said as the officers walked in. “Watch, Junior! Don’t touch that wall.” He pointed to a smear of blood at the door frame. Junior snatched his hand back.
“Sorry, Cousin,” he said.
Chas continued to examine something on the floor. He sighed. Then he stood and hooked his thumbs in his holster belt. He was a big man with the same sandy hair and florid complexion as his cousin, but taller. “One of them won’t be caterwauling no more, that’s for sure. You interviewed anybody, Junior?”
“Neighbor lady and two girls over to the C&O,” the deputy said. “The daughters. What they said, reckon we need to hunt up this colored girl on Wine Street does the washing.”
“Girl name of Virgie, right?” Chas asked.
“That’s right.”
Chas rubbed his chin. “Yep, figures. Lady out front lives across the street claims she seen the colored girl leaving in a hurry this morning. Near as we can make out,” he said, tapping a finger on his holster, “the daughters was the first ones in the house this afternoon. Doc V and me talked to them here. The little one’s eight. She come home from school about noon. Walked into the kitchen and called for her momma, got no answer. So she put away her books, she said, and went to Mrs. Guy’s, that’s the neighbor lady next door, to see if her momma was there. Mrs. Guy fixed her something to eat. Then she goes outside to play with some of the neighborhood kids. Then the older daughter shows up. She said she’s thirteen.”
“Looks like a preacher’s wife, don’t she, Chas?”
“Reckon she does, Junior, now you say it. Real stiff-backed. Anyway, she’s the second one in. Gets home from school right after three carrying loaves of bread she bought with the dime her momma give her in the morning. Puts the bread down on a stool in the kitchen. She calls for her momma, too. No answer. Goes to the front room to put away her books. Starts to feel uneasy. By the door she sees her momma’s hair combs on the floor. Figures that’s strange. Some of her momma’s hair’s in the combs, too. Long strands. Then she sees blood drops on the floor.
“So