Hold the phone.
“She may have found another way to get money,” he said slowly.
“How?”
Myron stayed quiet for a moment. The head gears were churning again. He checked his rearview mirror. If there was a tail, he didn’t spot it. But that did not mean much. A casual glance rarely gave it away. You had to watch the cars, memorize them, study their movements. But he could not concentrate on that. Not right now.
“Myron?”
“I’m thinking.”
She looked like she was about to say something but then thought better of it.
“Suppose,” Myron continued, “your mother did learn something about the death of Elizabeth Bradford.”
“Didn’t we already try this?”
“Just stay with me a second, okay? Before, we came up with two possibilities. One, she was scared and ran. Two, they tried to hurt her and she ran.”
“And now you have a third?”
“Sort of.” He drove past the new Starbucks on the corner of Mount Pleasant Avenue. He wanted to stop—his caffeine craving worked like a magnetic pull—but he pushed on. “Suppose your mother did run away. And suppose once she was safe, she demanded money to keep quiet.”
“You think she blackmailed the Bradfords?”
“More like compensation.” He spoke even as the ideas were still forming. Always a dangerous thing. “Your mother sees something. She realizes that the only way to guarantee her safety, and her family’s safety, is to run away and hide. If the Bradfords find her, they’ll kill her. Plain and simple. If she tries to do something cute—like hide evidence in a safety-deposit box in the event she disappears or something like that—they’ll torture her until she tells them where it is. Your mother has no choice. She has to run. But she wants to take care of her daughter too. So she makes sure that her daughter gets all the things she herself could never have provided for her. A top-quality education. A chance to live on a pristine campus instead of the bowels of Newark. Stuff like that.”
More silence.
Myron waited. He was voicing theories too fast now, not giving his brain a chance to process or even to inspect his words. He stopped now, letting everything settle.
“Your scenarios,” Brenda said. “You’re always looking to put my mother in the best light. It blinds you, I think.”
“How so?”
“I’ll ask you again: If all that is true, why didn’t she take me with her?”
“She was on the run from killers. What kind of mother would want to put her child in that kind of danger?”
“And she was so paranoid that she could never call me? Or see me?”
“Paranoid?” Myron repeated. “These guys have a tap on your phone. They have people tailing you. Your father is dead.”
Brenda shook her head. “You don’t get it.”
“Get what?”
Her eyes were watery now, but she kept her tone a little too even. “You can make all the excuses you want, but you can’t get around the fact that she abandoned her child. Even if she had good reason, even if she was this wonderful self-sacrificing mother who did all this to protect me, why would she let her daughter go on believing that her own mother would abandon her? Didn’t she realize how this would devastate a five-year-old girl? Couldn’t she have found some way to tell her the truth—even after all these years?”
Her child. Her daughter. Tell her the truth. Never I or me. Interesting. But Myron kept silent. He had no answer to that one.
They drove past the Kessler Institute and hit a traffic light. After some time had passed, Brenda said, “I still want to go to practice this afternoon.”
Myron nodded. He understood. The court was comfort.
“And I want to play in the opener.”
Again Myron nodded. It was probably what Horace would have wanted too.
They made the turn near Mountain High School and arrived at Mabel Edwards’s house. There were at least a dozen cars parked on the road, most American-made, most older and beaten up. A formally dressed black couple stood by the door. The man pressed the bell. The woman held a platter of food. When they spotted Brenda, they glared at her and then turned their backs.
“They’ve read the papers, I see,” Brenda said.
“No one thinks you did it.”
Her look told him to stop with the patronizing.
They walked her to the front door and stood behind the couple. The couple huffed and looked away. The man tapped his foot. The woman made a production out of sighing. Myron opened his mouth, but Brenda closed it with a firm shake of her head. Already she was reading him.
Someone opened the door. There were lots of people already inside. All nicely dressed. All black. Funny how Myron kept noticing that. A black couple. Black people inside. Last night at the barbecue he had not found it strange that everyone except Brenda was white. In fact, Myron could not recall a black person ever attending one of the neighborhood barbecues. So why should he be surprised to be the only white person here? And why should it make him feel funny?
The couple disappeared inside as though sucked up by a vortex. Brenda hesitated. When they finally stepped through the doorway, it was like something out of a saloon scene in a John Wayne film. The low murmurs ceased as if somebody had snapped off a radio. Everyone turned and glowered. For a half a second Myron thought it was a racial thing—he being the only white guy—but then he saw the animosity was aimed directly at the grieving daughter.
Brenda was right. They thought she did it.
The room was crowded and sweltering. Fans whirred impotently. Men were hooking fingers into collars to let in air. Sweat coated faces. Myron looked at Brenda. She looked small and alone and scared, but she would not look away. He felt her take his hand. He gripped back. She stood ramrod straight now, her head high.
The crowd parted a bit, and Mabel Edwards stepped into view. Her eyes were red and swollen. A handkerchief was balled up in her fist. They all swung their gazes toward Mabel now, awaiting her reaction. When Mabel saw her niece, she spread her hands and beckoned Brenda forward. Brenda did not hesitate. She sprinted into the thick, soft arms, lowered her head onto Mabel’s shoulder, and for the first time truly sobbed. Not cried. These were gut-wrenching sobs.
Mabel rocked her niece back and forth and patted her back and cooed comfort. At the same time, Mabel’s eyes scanned the room, mother wolf-protective, challenging and then extinguishing any glare that might be aimed in the direction of her niece.