Eyes of the Innocent: A Mystery Read Online Free PDF

among the landed gentry were over and accepted it graciously, slinking back to the apartments from which they came with their credit scores in shambles. Others tried to do short sales or loan workouts, hoping to emerge with the shirts on their backs—and often nothing more.
    And then, every once in a while, there’s a real hardhead, like Akilah. She was so determined to hang on to her house—in the face of a financial reality that dictated otherwise—she got herself another job. It was a second-shift job cleaning floors at a pallet-making company.
    She just couldn’t find any second-shift child care—not for anything she could afford, anyway. And with her mother dead and her aunt refusing to be part of her life, she had no family to leave her sons with. So each day, she worked at the hospital from 7 A.M. to 3 P.M. , picked up the boys from daycare, brought them home, and put them in her bedroom with the TV on.
    She left them snacks. And then she locked the door “so they couldn’t get in no trouble.”
    Which is why, when that fire started at 9 P.M. , they had no hope of escape.
    *   *   *
    Akilah finished up the details of how the previous evening unfolded for her. None of her neighbors knew she worked a second job or where it was, so no one from the fire department—or the police department or child protective services—had been able to notify her about what had happened. She was just walking back from work a little after 1 A.M. when she saw all the fire trucks and cop cars still jamming her street.
    A neighbor collared her before she could get to her house, explained what happened, and convinced her she would be arrested for child endangerment if the cops found her. Akilah spent the night weeping on the neighbor’s floor. When she awoke in the morning, the authorities had finally left. She went back to her house to collect some of the things that hadn’t been destroyed in the fire and get some items for her boys’ funeral.
    That’s when we found her.
    “I know I should have just let the police take me, but I just wanted to spend a little bit of time in the house,” she said. “I just felt like, I don’t know, like it was the only place I could be close to my boys. I knew I hadn’t been there for them in life so I wanted to be there for them in death. Maybe that sounds stupid, but that’s what I was thinking.”
    Akilah sighed.
    “So that’s my sad story,” she said.
    It was, I had to admit, an extraordinary interview. I couldn’t believe she had shared so much with such brutal candor. Most people couldn’t be that honest with themselves, much less with two strangers.
    At the same time, she was an orphaned only child who worked sixteen-hour days and didn’t seem to have a soul in the world she could count on. She was probably just desperate for someone to listen.
    And in two newspaper reporters, she had found a more than receptive audience. Sweet Thang had been mopping tears off her own face for most of the last hour. My eyes were dry, though I felt like my insides had been cleaned out by a canal dredger.
    “What do you think the police are going to do to me?” Akilah asked.
    The question had clearly been addressed to me, the white guy with the tie.
    “It depends on how hard-assed the prosecutor’s office feels like being,” I said. “If you had other children still in your care, there might be pressure to get the kids removed from you and put in foster care. And to make sure you never got them back, the prosecutor might throw the book at you—child endangerment, negligent homicide. But as it is, they might not feel the need to go after you as much. Do you have a record?”
    She shook her head.
    “Well, that’ll help,” I continued. “There’s a possibility if you cooperate with them, they’ll let you plead to something that’ll give you probation and nothing more.”
    “I deserve to go to jail,” she said, without hesitation. “For what I did? I hope they send me away for a