Page 51 of Hanging and Burning

“Will you tell him where he can find her?”

“I’ll leave that up to her.”

“Are you telling the truth?” she asked. “Or simply what you think I want to hear?”

I explained to the maybe foster mother about my Grandma B, who she was, and why she wanted me to take Babylon’s case.

“She sounds like an amazing woman, your grandmother.”

“She is.”

“And Arman told you that he was Twyla’s grandfather?”

“He did.”

“And you believed him?”

“He seems to be the right age.”

“Are you being fair, Mr. Oliver?”

“No more than those people scrawling on walls.”

She smiled and said, “He is her father. His girlfriend had her and then he brought her to me when her mother had a nervous breakdown. He promised to pay a decent stipend if I’d feed and rear her, send her to school, tell her that I found her in a ditch.

“I would have turned him down, but… Well, I was a woman alone in the world. My husband had died, leaving me with a daughter not yet two. I needed the help.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” I commented.

“Twyla means as much to me as my own blood,” Mara said, weeping a little. “She could see that I wasn’t a Black person, that her older sister, Blythe, was white as an elephant’s tusk. She knew that there was another part to the story. But—but it wasn’t my right to tell her, it wasn’t.”

“So, have you told her that Arman is her father?”

“No. Maybe I should have, but I needed the money and Twyla needed a home.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“If I thought on it enough, I might be able to figure it out.”

“How long would that take, do ya think?”

“Are you a patient man, Mr. Oliver?”

“Not by nature, Miss Mara, but I’ve spent enough time looking for people and things that I’ve had to slow that roll so far down that it hardly looks like it’s movin’ at all.”

Mara Macintosh opened the drawer to the wide desk and took out a hand purse covered with coral-colored glass beads. From the purse she took a card, which she handed to me.

Glancing at the card face, I said, “This is Estella Person’s card.”

Nodding, Mara said, “They don’t let us have phones in the rooms. I guess some of the ladies, late at night, kind of lose their awareness of where and when they are. At times like that, they call some kind of emergency service or other trying to save long-dead family and friends.

“But you hold on to that card and call Estelle tonight around seven.”

When she said the name Estelle, I noticed that that was the spelling on the card.

“Why does Mr. Pollander call you Estella when your name is Estelle?” I asked my guide.

We were standing outside the entrance of the main office.