Page 75 of Jar of Hearts
“Washington plates?”
“I didn’t look.”
“Color?” Kaiser couldn’t imagine Calvin would still be driving the red Trans Am he’d had back in the day.
“Black,” she says. “I think.”
Not the same car, then. But Calvin James did like his American muscle cars. He’d been driving a blue Mustang the day Kaiser had arrested him near the Canadian border.
Caroline Robinson stands, heading into the living room. She motions for Kaiser to follow her, and he does. On the living room end table is a framed photo, and she hands it to him.
“I know you saw Sasha dead,” she says. “This is what she looked like in life. She was only eighteen here, in her second trimester, andcompletely clean. She was beautiful.” There are tears in the woman’s eyes, and her hands shake. “Unfortunately, I don’t have any recent photos of her.”
She isn’t exaggerating; if anything, she’s understating. Sasha Robinson was gorgeous. Tall, maddeningly curvy, her tawny skin tone the only hint of her black ancestry. Her eyes were dark, her hair long and brown. She appears to be sitting on one of the picnic tables in the courtyard outside the trailer, long legs crossed, her flowy dress disguising whatever pregnancy bump she might have had. Kaiser stares at the photo, his breath catching in his throat.
Sasha Robinson is a dead ringer for Georgina as a teenager. The resemblance is not only striking, it’s… uncanny.
Come to think of it, Claire Toliver resembled Sasha, too. Long dark hair, golden complexion, voluptuous.Lushwas the word Kaiser remembered thinking to himself. Like Sasha Robinson.
Like Georgina Shaw.
“She was beautiful,” Kaiser finally says, and he means it. “Again, I’m so sorry for your loss. I won’t keep you any longer, Mrs. Robinson. Thanks for your time.”
He heads back to the kitchen, finishes his coffee in one gulp, then quickly washes his mug in the sink, placing it on the dish rack to dry. When he turns back toward Mrs. Robinson, she’s smiling.
“Your mama raised you right.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He smiles back.
“You’re a lot more polite than the other person who came around the other day, asking questions about Sasha. Actually, when you knocked on the door, at first I thought you were him.”
Kaiser frowns. “What other person?”
“Oh, it was a week ago, maybe a little longer,” she says. “Some young man knocked on the door, said he worked for social services and was doing a follow-up on Sasha and how she was doing. She’d been to state-sponsored rehab twice and had recently reapplied for welfare, so I wasn’t overly surprised at the visit. He got a bit rude when I told him she wasn’t home, and when I refused to tell him where she was, he acted like I was personally trying to inconvenience him. Ididn’t like his attitude and told him so. These millennials, I tell you. They don’t know how to move in the world, if that makes any sense.”
“Had you seen him before?” Kaiser asks, his mind churning. It couldn’t be Calvin, the woman would have said so. Plus, she just said he was younger. “What did he want to know specifically?”
“He asked a little about her drug use, and I said she was clean. Mainly he wanted to know about the baby. He wanted to know where it ended up, whether it was a boy or girl, said that the records didn’t show those things. I asked him why any of it mattered if Sasha was no longer the parent. After all, she’d been claiming welfare as a single person, not as a single mother. It surprised him; he didn’t know Sasha had given the baby up for adoption. He asked for the name of the agency, and I gave it to him, hoping he’d leave. In hindsight, maybe I shouldn’t have. Sasha had no legal claim to her child, so the adoption wouldn’t be any of his business.”
“Did he leave a card?”
Mrs. Robinson shakes her head. “No, and I forgot to ask for one. I don’t know, maybe I’m reading too much into it. He was strange, and I didn’t like him, and it made me defensive.”
The whole thing sounds weird to Kaiser. The woman was right to be suspicious.
While it was common practice for the state to check up on a woman who’d had a baby applying for welfare, Sasha had given her child up. And according to her grandmother, she hadn’t lied about that on her application.
“Did he tell you his name at least?”
She shakes her head again. “I’m sure he did at the beginning when he introduced himself, but I couldn’t remember it by the end of the visit. You think this is related to Sasha’s and Emily’s deaths somehow?”
“I’m considering every angle.” It’s all Kaiser can tell her. He opens the screen door and takes a step out into the cool afternoon air.
“By the way, Detective,” Mrs. Robinson says, her voice soft. “How are Emily’s parents doing?”
“They’re coping,” he says.
“I imagine in their line of work, being surgeons and all, they deal with death every day. But not like this. Not so close to home.” She sighs. “When can I see Sasha?”
