Bad Moon On The Rise by Katy Munger

act like it
mattered much to her.
    I bought a supply of diet sodas, pork
rinds and a consolation pack of Hostess Sno-Balls, then claimed a
bench outside the store and settled in for a long afternoon’s worth
of work. I had my system down pretty well. I’d wait until a older
student drew near, let them go into the store, then accost them as
they were leaving and ready to rip into whatever pack of junk food
they’d just bought. I’d show them the best photo I had of Tonya,
recite her class schedule during her last semester and wait for
them to insist they’d never seen her before in their
lives.
    Most of them were lying, of course. Or
at least a good quarter of them were. They figured I was a
determined bill collector or a process sever or someone who worked
for The Man. Some of the ones from foreign countries, and there
were quite a few, wouldn’t even talk to me. They scurried away like
I was with Immigration. But I knew that if I kept it up, and stayed
right where I was, I’d flush out a friend of hers sooner or later,
someone who’d be alerted by one of the dozens of people I had
talked to first before they’d come marching over to find out what
the hell I wanted with Tonya.
    Sure enough, a little after three
o’clock, a friend of Tonya’s who was willing to go on record as
such, came stomping up the brick path toward me. Even for me, she
was a little intimidating—close to six feet tall, skin as black as
coffee, muscles as prominent as most of the WBA. She was in her
late thirties but she moved like a panther and I was pretty sure
she was prepared to kick my ass if I so much as looked at her
sideways. Her braids danced and swung as she marched up that path
toward me.
    “ What the hell do you want
with Tonya?” she demanded before I could say a word.
    There was only one way to play it.
“Tonya’s dead,” I said.
    That stopped her in her
tracks.
    “ I’m sorry,” I
added.
    She sat on the bench and folded her
hands in her lap. She didn’t seem too surprised. “How?” she
asked.
    “ Drugs.”
    “ No way. You sure it was
her?”
    “ I saw the body. And now
her son is missing. I’m trying to find him.”
    “ Her son?” The woman
looked relieved. “We’re talking about two different people. Tonya
didn’t have a son.”
    Now I was the one who was surprised.
Tonya had bragged about Trey to a lot of people. He was the best
thing she’d ever done. I knew she’d have told people here about
him.
    “ I’m talking about her,” I
said, showing the woman Tonya’s photo. She looked at it for a long
time.
    “ That’s Tonya all right,
but I didn’t know she had a son.” She sounded hurt. “Why wouldn’t
she tell me about him?”
     “ I don’t know. But
it’s probably important. His father wants to find him. I’m trying
to find out where he may have gone.”
    “ I didn’t even know he
existed,” she said sadly. I held out my bag of pork rinds and she
took a few absent-mindedly, her chin propped on one of her hands as
she chewed thoughtfully. “I lived with her and I didn’t even know.
You think you know someone and then…” She shook her head and
sighed. But then she told me a lot about Tonya that I didn’t know.
That she was a neat freak and thoughtful and paid her own way and
never bogarted anyone else’s groceries. That she was funny and
watched a soap opera every day at four and wasn’t gay but didn’t
seem to have a problem with women that were—but who would after
spending time in a women’s prison? Which she knew Tonya had. And
she said that Tonya had a wicked sense of humor. “But she wasn’t
mean,” she added. “She never made fun of other people for a laugh.”
She stared at me for a long time, as if she had just noticed me.
“Are you sure it was drugs?” she asked.
    “ I don’t know,” I said
honestly. Then, because she had been so honest with me, I told her
all about how I had found Tonya and how the scene had somehow
seemed staged. “I’m not sure I buy it,”