Page 45 of Hanging and Burning

In the morning, we got acquainted in different light, again.

“I need to go down to Philly,” she said after a breakfast of sourdough bread and cherry preserves bought at Manzo’s across the street.

“Luwanda okay?”

With a nose twitch and a minor lift of her left shoulder, she said, “I could be back by tonight.”

“She need you longer?”

“Maybe.”

“Then stay there until it feels good to come back.”

“I love you,” she replied.

After Leaf left, I climbed through the floor down the rope ladder to my office. There I spent some hours looking up names.

The first was Connie Babylon, née Trampus. She died of pancreatic cancer on July 3, 2013, at the age of sixty-six. Constance had been a florist in the Bronx and then retired after marrying Arman. There wasn’t much else about her, or her family, that might have helped me find Twyla.

Dalia Shorts was pronounced dead in 1996, seven years after she’d probably been murdered.

There was no one named Lonnie Fredricks, as far as I could see, that could have possibly had anything to do with Arman’s granddaughter.

Mara Macintosh was a resident at Turnings Rest Home, a retirement home in Rego Park.

There were seven Twyla Mann entries, four for Twyla Macintosh, and every one of those a dead end in my cursory searches.

“Dad?”

“In here.”

She came in through the door of my small office, an offshoot of her larger working space.

Aja-Denise, my daughter, looked pretty much the same as she always had. Tall, always beautiful in my eyes. She was dark-skinned, with my chin; the only difference was that, now past twenty, her cheekbones were more prominent, showing me, for fact, that she was no longer a child; but, like most healthy human beings in the modern world, I denied the obvious on a daily basis.

She wore a gray dress suit that was both feminine and all business. She’d trimmed and straightened her dark hair, now teased with copper highlights.

“When’d you get in?” she asked, flopping down into the visitor’s chair before my desk.

“Yesterday afternoon.”

“Leaf called,” she said suggestively.

“She came over last night.”

“She upstairs?”

“No, went down to Philly.”

“Oh right. I forgot about that.”

“About what?”

“Granddad says that Luwanda has a growth that they need to cut out.”

“Cancer?”

“I don’t think they know yet.”