Free Those Bones Are Not My Child by Toni Cade Bambara

resting her cheek on her knuckles, her elbow on the edge of the enamel table, was dozing on the back porch. Her stockings were rolled to her shins. She wore men’s slippers. Wet wash hung over her head from a wooden rack. The door that led to her kitchen stood open. A shotgun house; every room was exposed by the APD flashlight.
    “Look at that.” Officer Hall shook his head, sending the light down to the house where the blue wading pool lay wrinkled and flat in the yard. The door there was ajar. She could make out the handlebars of a child’s trike on the back porch. Then he focused the light on the house immediately behind Zala’s. The ladder had been left up at full stretch against the side of the house. The screens in the windows were the slot-in kind.
    “Lot of break-ins in this neighborhood recently. Getting worse every day. We got a call on the way over here. That’s what took us so long.”
    “You get many calls like this? Children missing?” The spit in her mouth was pasty.
    “Runaways? A fair amount.”
    “No, I mean … The papers say somebody’s kidnapping children and killing them.” She got the same response they’d given her at the curb: nothing.
    He seemed determined to wake up the old woman, shining the light right in her face. He stepped a few times to the side, and now Zala too could see straight through the old woman’s house all the way to the plants lined up on her front porch rail. They were sturdy, colorful plants in buckets, pails, and large cans.
    Juice cans, Zala was thinking. Grapefruit juice, the lining of her mouth acid. At the Boys’ Club they served the waiting parents grapefruit juice poured from large tin cans into plastic cups that were collapsible.
    “I fault the new airport,” Hall was saying. “Building an international airport as huge as Hartsfield is like putting the welcome mat down for organized crime. It’s a whole new ballgame now.” He strolled over to her back steps. “When you get major drug trafficking, you get an increase in petty crimes too.” With the side of his shoe, he gathered scattered cherry pits into a heap.
    “You think these murdered children were involved in drugs?”
    “I’m saying that drug traffickers’ve got no compunction whatsoever about recruiting youngsters. We can’t arrest a minor for possession, and the courts can’t prosecute. Dealers depend on that.”
    “But the children …” Zala couldn’t keep her mind steady. Hall kept looking from the cherry pits littering the back steps to the rope wrapped around the dogwood. A girl, she remembered reading, had been found strangled in a wooded lot not far from Spence’s apartment complex. She’d been tied to a tree with an electrical cord. “Is that what they say about the child murders? That they were working for a drug ring?” It seemed far-fetched. Wasn’t it easier to pay an adult to be quiet than to kill a child?
    “My partner looked into the case and he feels it’s a reporter using a sensational story to try to make the grade. There’s actually nothing to make a case. Different MO each time.”
    She waited for him to ask about the cherry pits. She would keep her answer short. She would say only that they’d sat on the back steps two nights ago, she and Sonny, sharing a bowl of Bing cherries. It had been a peace offering, but she wouldn’t say that. Sulking, he wouldn’t come in to dinner. She’d burnt the salmon croquettes. But at least she’d gotten Dave to leave.
    She dragged herself behind Officer Hall. He’d taken an interest in her garden plot. She was mostly interested in going to sleep, but Paulette’s newspapers were scattered all over the sofa.
    “The papers say the police chief’s got a special unit to investigate. So there must be something to it,” she pressed him, and followed him over to her garden.
    “The commissioner formed a special investigation team, yes,” he said, “because—just between you and me—a group of parents were