Monday, November 16, 1981 You''re on the porch with the broom sweeping the same spot, getting the same sound -- dry straw against dry leaf caught in the loose-dirt crevice of the cement tiles. No phone, no footfalls, no welcome variation. It''s 3:15. Your ears strain, stretching down the block, searching through schoolchild chatter for that one voice that will give you ease. Your eyes sting with the effort to see over bushes, look through buildings, cut through everything that separates you from your child''s starting point -- the junior high school. The little kids you keep telling not to cut through your yard are cutting through your yard. Not boisterous-bold and loose-limbed as they used to be in the first and second grades. But not huddled and spooked as they were last year.

You had to saw off the dogwood limbs. They''d creak and sway, throwing shadows of alarm on the walkway, sending the children shrieking down the driveway. You couldn''t store mulch in lawnleaf bags then, either. They''d look, even to you, coming upon those humps in your flowerbed, like bagged bodies. A few months ago, everyone went about wary, tense, their shoulders hiked to their ears in order to fend off grisly news of slaughter. But now, adults walk as loose-limbed and carefree as the children who are scudding down the driveway, scuffing their shoes, then huddling on the sidewalk below. The terror is over, the authorities say. The horror is past, they repeat every day.

There''ve been no new cases of kidnap and murder since the arrest back in June. You''ve good reason to know that the official line is a lie. But you sweep the walk briskly all the way to the hedge, as though in clearing the leaves you can clear from your mind all that you know. You''d truly like to know less. You want to believe. It''s 3:23 on your Mother''s Day watch. And your child is nowhere in sight. You lean the broom against the hedges and stretch up on tiptoe.

Big boys, junior high age, are on the other side of the avenue, wrassling each other into complicated choke holds. You holler over, trying not to sound batty. Maybe they know something. A bus chuffs by, drowning you out and masking the boys in smeary gray smoke. When it clears, they''ve moved on. The hedge holds you up while you play magic with traffic, making bargains with God: if one of the next four cars passing by sports the old bumper sticker HELP KEEP OUR CHILDREN SAFE, then you will know all is well, you''ll calm down, pile up the leaves, make a burnt sacrifice, then get dinner on. Two cars go by, a mail truck, an out-of-state camper, then a diesel semi rumbles along. You can feel it thrumming up through your feet.

Your porch windows rattle, so do your teeth. An exterminator truck pulls up and double-parks by the cleaner''s. The familiar sticker is plastered on the side of the door, the word "children" under the word "pest." Your scalp prickles, ice cold. A stab of panic drives you onto the porch and straight through your door. You dial the school. The woman who answers tells you there''s no one in the building. You want to scream, point out the illogic of that, and slam down the phone.

But you wheedle, you plead, you beg her to please check, it''s an emergency. You can tell by the way she sucks her teeth and sets the receiver down that you''re known in that office. You''ve been up there often about incidents they called "discipline" and you called "battering." Things weren''t tense enough in Atlanta, teachers were sending "acting-out problems" to the coach to be paddled. In cut-off sweats, he took a wide-legged stance and, arms crossed against his bulging chest, asked, since it wasn''t your child sent to him for punishment, what is your problem? Exactly what the principal had wanted to know when the parents broke up the PTA meeting, demanding security measures in the school. Never enough textbooks to go around; students would linger after school to borrow each other''s, then, having missed the bus, would arrive home to an hysterical household. The men voted to form safety patrols. The principal went off: "There will be no vigilantes in my school!" City under siege.

Armed helicopters overhead. Bullhorns bellowing to stay indoors. The curfew pushed back into the p.m. hours. Gun stores extending sales into the a.m. hours.

Hardware stores scrambling to meet the demand for burglar bars, deadbolt locks, alarms, lead pipes, and under-the-counter cans of mace and boxes of pellets. Atlanta a magnet for every bounty hunter, kook, amateur sleuth, sooth-sayer, do-gooder, right-wing provocateur, left-wing adventurer, porno filmmaker, crack-shot supercop, crackpot analyst, paramilitary thug, hustler, and free-lance fool. But there should be no patrols on the principal''s turf. "Unladylike," you heard the gym teacher say when you led the PTA walkout. But how do you conduct a polite discussion about murder? The woman is back on the line and says again that no one is in the school building. You repeat your name, say again why you called; you mention the time, remark that you''re calling from home, and you add that your neighbor across the way is wearing a candy-striped dress and is packing away summer cottons. Then you hang up and interrogate yourself -- establishing an alibi in case something is wrong? It''s 3:28 and if grilled, you would plead guilty to something. It''s 3:29 and you''ve got to get a grip on yourself.

From the start, the prime suspects in the Atlanta Missing and Murdered Children''s Case were the parents. Presumed guilty because, as police logic went in the summer of ''79, seven or eight deaths did not constitute "an epidemic of murder," as the parents, organizers of the Committee to Stop Children''s Murders, were maintaining; because, as the authorities continued to argue after STOP''s media sit-in a year later, eight or nine cases was usual in a city the size of Atlanta; and because, as officialdom repeatedly pointed out, even as the body count rose from one to twelve, the usual suspects in the deaths of minors were the parents. Monstrous parents, street-hustling young hoodlums, and the gentle killer became the police/media version of things. In the newspapers, STOP''s campaign -- to mount an independent investigation, to launch a national children''s rights movement, to establish a Black commission of inquiry into hate crimes -- would be reported, invariably, on the same page as stories about parental neglect, gang warfare, and drug-related crimes committed by minors, most often drawn from the files of cities outside of Atlanta. And frequently, photos of Atlanta''s grief-stricken mothers would appear above news stories that featured "the gentle killer" -- a man or woman who''d washed some of the victims, laid them out in clean clothes, and once slipped a rock under a murdered boy''s head "like a pillow," a reporter said. Like a pillow. Another pattern you''ve noticed, having kept a journal for nearly two years and your hallway jammed with cartons of news clippings, bulletins, leaflets, rally flyers, and memorial programs: Whenever STOP members were invited to lecture around the country, the authorities would call the parents in for another polygraph. Then a well-timed leak to the press: "The parents are not above suspicion.

" A name dropped: one of the parents most critical of the investigation, most out-spoken about the lack of trained personnel on the Task Force. In ''81, as thousands were scheduled to board the buses for STOP''s May 25 rally in Washington, D.C., an FBI agent told a civic group down in Macon, Georgia, that several of the cases were already solved, that the parents had killed their children because "they were such little nuisances." The father of Yusuf Bell had been treated as a suspect for more than a year; his wife, Camille Bell, the murdered boy''s mother, co-founder and prime mover of STOP, was one of the more vocal critics of the authorities'' response to the killings. A friend of the family of murdered girl LaTonya Wilson had also been considered a prime suspect; it was LaTonya''s body that the civilian search team had found on its first outing, embarrassing the professionals, who''d maintained that they were not dragging their feet, were committed to an exhaustive search, were "leaving no stone unturned" in their efforts to find the missing children. The mother of Anthony Bernard Carter was arrested, released, tailed, questioned, dogged for months, and visited at all hours of the night until she was forced to move. The media kept harping on the fact that she was a poor, young Black woman who had only one child, "only one," as though that were sufficient grounds for suspicion, if not prosecution.

The sun is streaming in your hallway window. It''s hot on your face. Your house smells like cooked cardboard. A flap on one of the cartons has come loose and is imprinting a corrugated design on your leg. You can''t go on standing there by the phone, watching the second hand sweep around the dial. You need to get moving. You are trying. Trying not to think about the anti-defamation suit that the STOP committee, regrettably, dropped against the police, the Bureau, and the media.

Trying not to think about the rally STOP held in D.C. -- all the speeches, pep talks, booths, posters, buttons, green ribbons, T-shirts, caps, profiling, and blown opportunities to organize a National Black Commission to call a halt to random, calculated, and systemic assaults on Black people all over the country. Trying not to remember how swiftly the arrest came, the authorities collaring a man just as those back from the rally began clamoring for answers. What about the law-enforcement memo describing castrations? What about the mortician''s assistant who re-ported, back in the fall of ''80, the pr.