Nobody walks in Tulsa. At least not to get anywhere. Oil built our houses, paved our streets, and turned us from a cow town stop on the Frisco Railroad into the heart of Route 66. My ninth-grade Oklahoma History teacher joked that around these parts, walking is sacrilege. Real Tulsans drive.
But today my car is totaled and I have an eleven-thirty appointment with the district attorney at the county courthouse. So I walked.
Mom and Dad wanted to come home and pick me up after their morning meetings. I convinced them the walk would help me clear my head, and it did. Especially when I got to the place where he died.
Honestly, I’d been a little worried that being there again would mess me up. So to keep myself calm, I imagined how things must have looked the night Will and Joseph and Ruby tried to survive. There’s this old map of Tulsa online, and the streets I walked along to get here are on it. In 1921, the Arkansas River cut them off to the south, just like it does today. But back then they ran north into trees and fields and farms. There aren’t any farms now, only highways and concrete.
It was probably quieter a hundred years ago, but that doesn’t necessarily mean better. I understand now that history only moves forward in a straight line when we learn from it. Otherwise it loops past the same mistakes over and over again.
That’s why I’m here, wearing one of Mom’s knee-length business skirts, sitting on a bench near the courthouse, waiting to tell the DA what happened. I want to stop just one of those loops. Because it’s like Geneva says: The dead always have stories to tell. They just need the living to listen.
Everything started the first Monday of summer vacation. It was my only chance at a real day off, because the next morning I was supposed to start the internship Mom had arranged. It was the kind of thing that would look good on college applications and get me recommendation letters from people with MD after their names. I didn’t especially want to be locked up in a sterilized research lab all summer, but I never bothered to look for something better. The way things stood, I had one day all my own to sleep late, eat Nutella with a spoon, and send James a thousand texts about nothing.
Only I didn’t get to do any of that.
At 7 AM on the dot, a construction crew pulled into the driveway and started slamming truck doors and banging tools around. Hundred-year-old windows do a crap job of keeping things out, so even though the men spoke quietly, I could hear their murmurs and smell the smoke from their cigarettes.
After a while, the side gate squeaked open and the guys carried their tools to the servants’ quarters behind our house. Just so you don’t get the wrong idea, that sounds a lot more impressive than it is. I mean, yes, we have money, but no one in my family has had live-in servants since my great-great-grandparents. After they died, my great-uncle Chotch moved into the back house. Years earlier, when Chotch was two, he’d wandered out of the kitchen and fallen into the pool. By the time the gardener found him and got him breathing again, he was blue and brain-damaged. He’d lived, though, and was good at cutting hair. Dad says he gave free trims to all the workers at the oil company my great-great-grandfather founded, right up until the day he died. That was in 1959.
The only things living in the back house since then have been holiday decorations, old furniture, Uncle Chotch’s Victrola, and termites. Then, last Christmas, Mom decided that even though there are three unused bedrooms in the main house, we needed a guest cottage, too.
Dad fought her on it, I think because he’s a nice liberal white guy weirded out by the idea that the back house was built for black servants. If it had been up to him, he would have let it rot.
Mom was not okay with that.
Her great-grandfather had been the son of a maid, raised in the back house of a mansion two blocks over. He’d gone on to graduate first in his class from Morehouse College and become one of Tulsa’s best-known black attorneys. Mom went to law school to carry on the family legal tradition and ended up owning a back house. For her, it mattered.
“I won’t stand by and let a perfectly good building crumble to dust,” she’d argued. There had been some closed-door negotiations between her and Dad after that, then a few days where they didn’t talk to each other at all. In the end, Dad started referring to the back house as his “man cave,” and while he shopped for gaming systems and a pool table, Mom interviewed contractors.
That was six months ago. The renovations started in May.
I lay there listening to the workmen’s saw, figuring I had maybe three minutes before our grumpy neighbor, Mr. Metzidakis, started banging on the front door to complain about the noise.
Only he didn’t have to.
The saw stopped on its own. The gate creaked open. Equipment clunked against the truck bed. And the men talked so fast and low that I could only catch four words.
Huesos viejos. Policía. Asesinato.
Which, yes, I understood—thank you, Señora Markowitz and tres años de español. And which, yes, was enough to get me out of bed and over to the window in time to see their truck back out onto the street and drive away.
Something strange was going on, and I wanted to know what. So I snagged a pair of flip-flops and headed for the back house.
It was a disaster inside. A week before, the workmen had demolished the ceiling and pulled all the toxic asbestos insulation. After that, they’d hacked out big chunks of termite-tunneled plaster from the walls and ripped the old Formica countertops off the cabinets. A gritty layer of construction dust coated everything, including Uncle Chotch’s old Victrola in the corner. At least they covered it with plastic, I thought, stepping around boxes of tile and grout on my way to the fresh-cut hole in the floor at the back of the room.
Only once I got there, I forgot about the Victrola completely and understood exactly what had sent the workmen running.
Huesos viejos. Policía. Asesinato.
Old bones.
Police.
Murder.