Eyes of the Innocent: A Mystery Read Online Free PDF Page A

exactly what you would call a kid-friendly environment.
    Akilah explained how she had gotten pregnant for the first time when she was sixteen, and the aunt—who was very religious and therefore very ashamed—basically disowned her. She dropped out of school to support herself and the child. With no other relatives in the area, she stayed with a succession of friends in Baxter Terrace. Then the baby died of a heart defect when it was less than six months old.
    Akilah got pregnant again when she was eighteen, which is how she got Alonzo; then again when she was twenty, which is how Antoine came to be. Akilah didn’t say anything about the father, which was hardly unusual. Dads didn’t always stick around in that part of town.
    Really, it seemed like Akilah had only caught one break in her young life. She managed to find a decent job. She said it was at University Hospital, and it “paid good”—which probably meant she was pulling down $30,000 a year, including overtime. That didn’t go very far in most parts of Northern New Jersey, one of the most expensive areas of the country to live in. But to a kid from Baxter Terrace, it could still feel like a lot of money.
    And, naturally, the first thing she wanted to do was get the hell out of Baxter Terrace.
    But that’s where things got complicated. About four years ago, not long after Antoine was born, she got connected with a guy—she was kind of vague about the details—who, in turn, connected her with another guy—she described him as “a Puerto Rican guy”—who, in turn, ushered poor, orphaned Akilah Harris into her very own home.
    “It was a chance to raise my children somewhere else besides Baxter Terrace,” she said. “I had to do it.”
    For a while, it worked out fine. Then, suddenly, she couldn’t afford it anymore. Sweet Thang—a guileless creature with the kind of naïveté that only the young possess—asked a few follow-up questions about how such a thing could even be possible and seemed genuinely confused. I would have to explain it to her later. Akilah Harris had gotten slammed with a pernicious form of subprime mortgage.
    People hear the term “subprime” and get confused, because the “sub” makes it sound like it’s some kind of good deal. It’s not. The “prime” refers not to the rate but to your status as a borrower. If you’ve got five years of perfect credit and a steady job, you qualify for a prime mortgage at a reasonable rate. Being subprime meant that something about you was less than perfect and you were going to get charged a rate that only barely failed to qualify as loan-sharking.
    Except, of course, they didn’t start out that way. Many of the subprime loans that floated around the ghetto a few years back had had introductory rates far below what the permanent rate would be. It made an otherwise unaffordable house suddenly fall into just about anyone’s price range. For a while. Then—surprise!—the real rate kicked in. Just like that, you went from 4 percent interest to 12 percent interest and your monthly payment doubled overnight.
    The Puerto Rican man probably told Akilah—and countless other dupes—not to worry about the interest rate reset. After all, it would only take a year or two before they had enough equity in the house to refinance to a regular loan.
    And that was true—as long as credit remained easy and the housing market stayed supernova hot. For a while, it did. I had written about Newark neighborhoods where the average home price, driven primarily by real estate speculators, was doubling every two years.
    The only problem is, nothing like that lasts forever. When the global credit crunch hit and the easy money stopped flowing, the bubble that was Newark’s real estate market experienced a big, messy burst. And people like Akilah Harris, who were led to believe the good times would never end, were finished. The foreclosures came in huge waves.
    Some people figured out pretty quickly their days