Losing Hope (27 page)

When I pulled up to the aged Cape Cod on Ivanhoe Road in the Govans area of Baltimore City, I wondered if I'd finally reached a dead end. The house looked only partially renovated, as if a rehab job had been started but never completed. Most of the windows were boarded shut, and tall grass and weeds made the front yard look more like a jungle than a lawn.

Obviously, since it had been listed as one of the residences where the Monroes formerly housed foster children, it had to have once been minimally livable.

It was anything but that now.

I parked my car and headed up the crumbling cement steps and walked across the large front porch, where some of the wooden planks that made up the floorboards were rotting. One of the glass panes that surrounded the front door was broken. I stuck my hand through the jagged opening and reached for the inside doorknob.

Turned out that one gesture was more than what was needed. The door was already unlocked. I opened it and stepped in cautiously and immediately saw why the home had been abandoned.

Some of the walls were black with soot, and the hardwood floors had burned into a gray ash in the rear of the house.

There had been a fire.

I could not see it from the street, but the back of the house was clearly charred.

Though the house had most likely been condemned, it was clear that I had not been its only visitor since its fiery fate. Broken bottles, cigarette butts, and hypodermic needles littered the floor in the front rooms and the bare wooden stairs. I looked up the steps, wondering if I should take the trail of trash on them as a sign that the house was sturdy enough for me to continue my tour.

I did.

One by one I went up the dark steps, realizing that the lower floor had been well lit only because a couple of the windows had not been boarded up. The same was not true for upstairs. With the exception of a small skylight in what looked like a gutted-out bathroom just off the landing, all the windows were covered with wooden planks, making the interior of the vacant home feel more like nighttime than noon.

I looked back at the staircase. I remembered stepping over a discarded lighter in a pile of cigarette butts at the bottom of the steps. I headed back to it, and using a tissue I had in my pocket, I picked it up.

I tried a couple of times to light it, to no avail. The third time it worked, though I knew it did not have that much fuel left. I had to make my tour of the upstairs quick.

From the little flame in my palm, it looked like the house had three bedrooms on the second floor. The back room was charred as much as the rear of the house downstairs was. Perhaps the fire had started in the kitchen, I surmised, as I studied the blackened walls of what looked like a master suite. I turned around to check out the other two rooms, putting my faith in the continued trail of broken bottles and trash from previous visitors that the floor was sturdy enough to hold up under my feet.

The hallway was narrow and got darker as I moved away from the trickle of light leaking from the bathroom skylight. Using the single flame as a guide, I peered into the other two bedrooms. Nothing but more bottles, trash, and needles.

Why was I in this place? I shook my head at myself as I turned back around. Yes, I wanted answers, but what kind of information was I expecting to get from a run-down, partially burned-out vacant house?

I paused to think about what I knew at this point. Clearly, the Monroes had some kind of connection to Dayonna and her siblings, though I could not say for sure what that relationship was—or why it had been kept hidden. The couple was childless, I remembered Mrs. Monroe saying, so they weren't Dayonna's grandparents, I reasoned, trying to come up with a scenario that made sense. That did not rule them out as distant relatives of some nature—an aunt, a great-uncle, a second cousin, something like that. I wondered who Dayshonique's caregiver, the woman who I'd run into that morning, was. And what role did Tremont play in all this? He said he would call me sometime today, but I had yet to hear from him.

As I stood there, holding the lighter, trying to figure out what to do next, I heard a scratching noise.

Mice.

I did my best not to scream as I turned the lighter over to the wall where the critters were scurrying. Only it wasn't a wall where the scurrying was coming from. It was from under a door.

This house has four bedrooms?
Or maybe it was just a closet.

I stepped over more trash and headed toward the closed door.

How many mice are in there?
I stepped back, not certain that I wanted to enter a room full of rodents.

But I had come this far.

And had been in worse places.

Images of walking beside RiChard in villages where rats ran free like stray dogs flashed in my mind. I shut my eyes and pushed on the door to block out the sudden stab of pain that cut through my heart.

The day's adventures had been a perfect distraction from my unclosed past. I pushed my weight into the wooden door, as if opening this new door would somehow shut off all the old and broken passageways in my life that had led to nowhere.

The door was heavier than I expected, as if stuck or impeded. I threw my weight once more on it and it gave way—but the lighter fell from my hand.

Darkness swallowed me. I scrambled for the lighter and quickly flicked it back on. The scurrying became a stampede. And not of mice, I realized as large shadows bounded down the dirty hallway.
Rats.
I jumped back, stifling a scream, and then backed into the doorway I'd just opened. I turned around to see what the closed door had kept hidden, waving the flame in front of me.

A man stared back at me.

I dropped the lighter again, and the room went back to black. In another desperate scramble, I bent over, running my fingers over the floor, terrified that I would connect only with broken glass or dirty needles or worse, waiting for the man I had just seen to grab me, choke me, or worse.

I thought about Roman.

Nobody would ever know what had happened to me. Who knows when my body would be found.

All these thoughts and it had been only seconds.

Frantic, I stumbled in the darkness, ready to kick, punch, head butt, whatever it took to get out of there, too terrified to even get out a scream. My fingers kept sweeping the floor, feeling nothing. I thought for a second that given the disarray of the rest of the house, it was odd that I had not felt even so much as one bottle cap on the floor of this newly opened space.

And aside from me stumbling through the darkness, there were no other noises. No rats, no footsteps.

The silence terrified me more than the darkness. Was he waiting for me in the corner, watching me trying to get away?

Finally, my pinkie fingertip touched the lighter. I flicked it back on just to see my way out of there, but I jumped back instead.

A full-sized poster of a rapper who'd been popular a year or so ago was taped to a tall chest of drawers right next to the bedroom door.

A poster of a man, and not a real one, had been the cause for all my terror, and the dresser had been the reason for my difficult entry into the room. I wanted to laugh at myself, but my heart had not calmed down enough to appreciate the humor. Indeed, as I pointed the lighter in every direction, I realized the poster and the chest of drawers were not the only things in the room.

It was furnished, fully furnished, the only room in the house that was.

This bedroom was at the front of the house. I walked over to the sole window and pulled off the wooden board that was hanging on by two loose nails. I'd never been so happy to see sunlight. The darkness that had been there milliseconds earlier dissipated into clean, fresh sunshine.

I took a better look around the room, amazed. In addition to the chest of drawers, there was a long dresser with a cracked oval mirror that hung overhead, a rocking chair that sat motionless in one corner, and a dirty queen-sized mattress lying in the center of the floor. A twin-sized pink comforter struggled to cover it. All the furniture, and even the dull brown area rug that lay underneath, was old, dilapidated, and falling apart. But clean. Despite the condition of the house, with its trash, needles, broken beer bottles, there was no trace of dust or trash anywhere in this room.

Except for one corner.

The remnants of a child's fast-food meal lay half eaten on a paper plate: a hardened cheeseburger on a moldy bun, dried-out and browned apple slices, spoiled chocolate milk. The rats had been feasting on this buffet, I realized, noting that even the pink unicorn toy that had come with the meal looked gnawed upon.

“Hope.” I whispered the name instinctively, though I could not imagine that a child would have really been living in this house. And with whom? And why?

It did not make sense. Something still did not add up.

All of Dayonna's sisters I'd come across thus far lived in nice homes, rehabbed row houses or apartments that gleamed with new life in worn neighborhoods. The Monroes had somehow managed, for reasons still unknown, to ensure that the treasure trove of sisters had been housed appropriately. There was no reason to think that any one of them would be subjected to this rat-infested, fire-damaged place.

Unless the Monroes did not know about her . . . But why would they have run off? Unless they left against their will . . .

I was back to Tremont. What was his role in all of this?

I walked back to the window and peered down at the street below, as if just looking out into the sunshine would somehow offer light on the whole situation.
Lord, I need some more answers. None of this makes sense.

Even as I prayed, I had to do a double take. From my perch above, I noticed the house directly across the street. Blue shingles covered it, and a large orange swing rocked gently in the fall breeze on the front porch.

“
Déjà vu?
” I blinked, trying to figure out why this scene felt so familiar. Where had I seen that blue house and orange porch swing before? Then it came to me.

When Dayonna had supposedly run away from the Monroes last Tuesday, Elsie Monroe had produced a picture for the police officer. Both she and her husband had looked uneasy about the whole thing.

The blue house and orange porch swing
. They were in the background of that photo. I could see the picture clearly in my head now, Dayonna standing in the middle of the street. I remembered that she'd looked much heavier and extremely unhappy.

And surprised.

As if she had been caught off guard.

Maybe
she
was the last person in this house, I concluded. Maybe
she
was the child who slept and ate in that room. She did go missing, apparently, for several months. Five, to be exact, her former DSS caseworker Deirdre Evans had confirmed.

Once again, and to my disappointment, I realized my wish that there was a Hope to be found met bitter deflation.

I was tired of the wild-goose chase. I had been all over Baltimore City and had talked to no one. I'd been to church, found out the name of a business, but no more than a P.O. Box address. The lines were not connecting, and I was tired of following the dots. If a picture was coming through, I wasn't getting it.

I picked up my cell phone to call Ava. I wanted to tell her that I was done with the whole disaster. I had too many issues in my personal life to be walking through burnt houses and trying to figure out when to make a trip to an unknown destination on the Eastern Shore to find the Monroes.

But I had one more address, I reminded myself, putting my phone back down. If this last residence did not offer any more clues to the Monroe-Tremont-Dayonna connection and/or validation about the missing Hope Diamond, then I would call it quits.

For real.

The last address I punched into my GPS system took me to a row home not far away. Still in Northeast Baltimore, the neighborhood of Chinquapin Park was less than a ten-minute drive from the vacant home in Govans. I pulled up to the row house, which sat across the street from a hilly green park, and smiled. I might actually get to talk to someone, finally.

An elderly woman wearing a wide black and orange housedress was sitting on the porch, reading a steamy romance. A little girl of about seventeen or eighteen months toddled nearby, a sippy cup and a play cell phone dangling from her hands. I walked up to the iron gate that closed off the porch, keeping the little one from tumbling down the stack of cement steps that led to the tidy-looking home.

The little girl noticed me first and offered me a five-tooth smile.

“Daymonica, come back here,” the woman called out, her eyes still glued to her book. “Daymonica, what did I . . .” She finally looked up. “Oh, hello.” She eyed me suspiciously, and I knew I had to win her over quickly.

“Hi, ma'am.” I smiled. “I'm sorry to bother you, but I'm trying to locate the family members of Hope Diamond.”

The woman wrinkled up her face and scratched the top of her head. She had mostly black, wavy hair pulled back into a curly ponytail. One large streak of gray passed down the center of her head.

“Who?”

“Do you know a Hope Diamond?”

The woman raised an eyebrow. “Are you one of Dayvita's friends?” Her suspicion was growing. She gently grabbed the little girl and pulled her close to her wide bosom, as if I was going to suddenly snatch her away.

“No, no.” I shook my head, then thought to fish in my purse for my job badge. Ava had told me to get information, so I was there on official business, as far as I was concerned. “Again, I'm sorry to bother you. My name is Sienna St. James, and I am a social worker with Holding Hands Agency. I have a client who I think is related to you, and I am trying to get information about her family. Do you have a second to talk?”

The woman stared at my badge and looked me up and down. Finally, she said, “Let's go inside. Too many nosy ears out here.”

Her kitchen was tiny and smelled like vanilla wafers and mildew. We were sitting around the small butcher block table because Daymonica, her seventeen-month-old granddaughter as I learned, needed her afternoon snack. The toddler sat in a high chair between us, happily munching on Cheerios and a chopped-up banana.

“This here is my heart.” The woman, named Nellie Richmond, beamed at the little girl, whose face was covered with sticky crumbs.

I wanted to be careful not to disclose any more names or information than what was necessary. Fortunately for me, Nellie liked to talk.

“My son Ricky has a lot of children, mostly from women I ain't never met and probably never will. I wish he wasn't like that, 'cause all it means is that I don't get to know my own grandchildren, you know?”

A bag of doughnut holes sat in front of her. She tossed one into her mouth and offered me one. I declined. She continued.

“I have five or six grandchildren. I've met three of them besides Daymonica. I even started to raise one—Conya was her name—but the state got involved, and when it was all said and done, I lost her to her crazy mother. Conya was with me for the first three years of her life. Then, in one day, gone, and I haven't seen her since. That's why I decided the moment I got Daymonica that I was going to make sure to keep her completely out of the system. This grandbaby is all mine. Aren't you, sugar?” The elder lady made silly faces at the toddler, who flashed her five-tooth smile and squealed.

“Do Conya and Daymonica have the same mother?”

“Oh, no, child. All my son's children have different mamas. I don't know why he was like that, because that certainly was not the way I raised him.”

The reference to him in the past tense did not escape me. Nellie popped another doughnut hole in her mouth and then clicked on the small television set in her kitchen. An
Oprah
rerun was on. Nellie paused to watch a few moments before turning her attention back to me. “Now, Daymonica's mother, she's the hottest mess of them all.”

I decided to take a chance. “You're talking about Dayvita, right? Dayvita Topaz?” Hers was the last unchecked name on Dayquon's list.

“Yeah.” Nellie looked at me sideways. “So you do know her? Where did you say you were from again?” The unease on the woman's face grew more distinct.

“I work for Holding Hands, a therapeutic foster care agency. You seem a little uncomfortable talking about Dayvita. Why is that?” I asked casually.

“Humph.” Nellie crossed her arms and frowned. “Like I said, she's the worst of all of Ricky's children's mothers. She messes with them drugs. She's so addicted that she keeps getting in trouble for the things she does to support her habit, if you know what I mean. That's why I didn't even believe at first that Ricky was the father, all the men she was with. It didn't help none that she called me from the hospital five months after Ricky was buried, talking about could I come get my grandbaby. That's the one and only conversation I ever had with the girl about her own child. Not once has she even called to check in on Daymonica. Ricky never even told me she was pregnant, but the moment I looked into Daymonica's face, I knew I was going to raise her, no questions asked. She's in jail now, serving a five- or six-year sentence, from what I heard.”

“Really?”

“Oh yes. I used to feel sorry for her, but not no more. That's the life she chose. That's the consequence she'll have to deal with.”

“That's sad.” I nodded along. “Do you know anything about Dayvita's family?”

“No, not really. I heard she has a bunch of sisters who for the most part turned out better than her. She takes after her mother, with the drugs and all.”

“You've met Dayvita's mother?” I tried not to sound too curious about the woman who'd given birth to Dayonna and all her sisters.
Maybe even Hope.

“Yeah, Crystal, Chrissy, something like that. She showed up at my door once, talking about she was going to file for custody of Daymonica. She was so high, I knew I had nothing to worry about, but just the same, I moved out my old house in Cherry Hill and came all the way up to this side of town so she couldn't find me again. Like I said, I don't want the system getting any hints about this here child. I take good care of her, and I don't want her exposed to the drama of either her mother or other grandmother.”

“So Crystal wanted custody of Daymonica.”

“Yeah, but I'm not too worried. From what I understand, she never had custody of her own children. Family stepped in to take in her daughters, and when that didn't work, the state took over. I don't want my grandbaby to go through any of that, so I moved just the same after that woman came banging on my door, screaming and crying that she wanted a child to raise. The way I see it, she had many chances and blew it. She is not getting my grandbaby.” Nellie bent over and kissed the giggling Daymonica on the forehead.

A thought occurred to me. “You said you moved here after Dayvita's mother, Crystal, came knocking at your old place. How did you find this house?”

“A letter in the mail,” Nellie answered promptly. “About two days after Crystal came to my old house, demanding I give her Daymonica, I get this letter in the mail from some company renting out rehabbed homes for dirt cheap. I tell you, it was like God heard my prayer and sent an answer right on time.”

“What was the name of the company?” Of course I knew, but I needed Nellie to confirm it—and offer any other information without resurrecting her guard.

“I forget. Something about Jewels, Hiding Jewels. I don't remember.”

“Did you meet anyone from the company?”

“I never met the owner, or nothing like that. I just dealt with the agent who showed me the house and had all the paperwork for me to sign.”

“You still have any of those forms?” It was a risky question. What would I say if she wanted to know why I wanted to see the paperwork? Fortunately, she seemed happy just to have an audience over the age of two. She reached for a drawer in a cabinet next to her.

“I mail a rent check to somewhere on the Eastern Shore.” She shuffled through a stack of papers in the drawer. I could tell from her efforts it was going to take a while to find something useful in that stack.

“A P.O. Box?” I asked to hurry things along.

“Yeah, except once they sent me a letter and it had a real address. I remember because the envelope and the letterhead were different, like they had run out of their usual forms and had turned to personal stationery just that once. Oh, here it is.” She miraculously fished out a single white envelope that was decorated with yellow floral blooms.

H
IDDEN JEWELS OF THE CITY
was handwritten across both the envelope and the top of the personal stationery—along with a street address. A lapse in the sender's judgment, but a break for me.

1119
WATERPOINTE ROAD, CAMBRIDGE, MD
21613
.

I took the letter and copied down the address.

“The agent who showed you the house, do you remember anything about him?”

“Do I
ever
remember that agent.” Nellie's face wrinkled up again, as if she had just smelled a spoiled boiled egg. “First off, it was a woman, not a man.”

Mrs. Monroe, I assumed.

“Kind of petite, dark-skinned, real thin, slightly bald?” I used my hands to emphasize my description.

“Not at all. This woman was short but heavy, and not that pleasant to look at. She told me that she had retired from the state to take on a better position with this company. I remembered praying that I would age more gracefully than she had, and that was putting it nicely.”

“Yeah, here's her name.” Nellie pulled out another sheet of paper and pointed. “Deirdre Evans.”

Dayonna's old DSS worker?
Now I was thoroughly confused.

“She owns the company?” I was trying to keep up.

“No, she was just an agent. If I remember correctly, she hadn't even met the owner but took on the job because she was offered good money. Retirement in this day and age ain't no joke. You do what you got to do, you know?”

“And you haven't talked to anyone else in the company? Or even heard from Crystal since then?”

“Nope. I send my payment in the mail every fifth of the month and go on about my business.”

Our conversation had to stop for a moment as Nellie took Daymonica out of her high chair and wiped mashed bananas off her cheeks, arms, and hands and out of her tightly curled hair. The toddler laughed again, and so did Nellie. As she cleaned her, a thousand other questions came to mind, but once I had her attention again, I could think of only one.

“Ms. Richmond, have you heard from or seen Deirdre Evans anymore?”

“Sure did. Yesterday, as a matter of fact.” The elder woman brushed Cheerios crumbs off the little girl's shirt. “She came here asking the same question as you, but left right after I answered it.”

Now I was the one with the wrinkled face. “What question was that?”

“Did I know a Hope Diamond? That's what she asked me. That's the only reason I let you in. I don't know about no Hope. What I do know is that I ain't giving up my grandbaby here for anybody or any reason.” She planted a kiss on top of Daymonica's head. “That's all I know, and that's all I care about.”

There was really nothing else for me to add, ask, or say. I thanked Nellie for her time, waved good-bye to Daymonica, and headed back to my car.

Just as I started to pull out of my parking space, Nellie's front door burst open and she came bustling down the steps, Daymonica in her arms.

“Wait a minute, Sienna! Wait!” A single paper flapped from her free hand.

I put my car back in park as she approached my window.

“I almost forgot,” she huffed, out of breath. “Once I was a couple of weeks late for my rent, and someone called me. I was not home at the time, but they left a message. It was a man, if I remember correctly. Or maybe it was a woman. I don't remember. Anyway, I wrote the phone number that showed up on my caller ID down in case I ever needed it. I'm not really sure what's going on here, but I trust you, Sienna, so I'm giving you this number too. Find out what you can about whatever is going on. If you think there's even a chance that someone will try to take away my grandbaby, you let me know!”

She handed me the slip of paper with the handwritten number on it.