Page 83 of Hanging and Burning

She stood up and said, “I don’t know why I came here.”

“Sit down, Twyla. You need to hear what I have to say.”

“Why would I?” she said, lowering once again into the chair.

“Because I’m the only one who knows most of the story and who doesn’t wanna protect you from the truth.”

Her sneer would have been a snarl if it had a voice. Her grimace on a feline would have borne fangs.

“What truth?”

“What do you know about Melton Lamming?”

The question seemed to physically move her, like an unexpected wave butting up against a peacefully napping waterfowl.

“He,” she said and stopped. “He… My godmother, Aurilia, told me that he killed my father. She said that my dad and him were in business together and they had a falling-out. She said that my mother went to the police, but they told Malto, and he came after my, my real mom. That’s why she had to give me up, to keep me safe. After that my mom was murdered.”

In a way, I thought, the story was true, but instead Malto had obliterated Dalia, not some made-up mother, and her father, a Black man who never existed, had been created and then discarded on the same day. This way she could solve a child’s curiosity and, at the same time, keep the little girl quiet because that silence would protect her real mom, who pretended to be a godmother.

“Is what my godmother told me true?” she asked.

“More or less. Malto wanted to kill your mom. If he knew she was alive today he’d be after her still.”

“Why? All of that was so long ago.”

“You’re right about that. But I think we can be sure that they both have their reasons.”

“So you’re telling me that my godmother, Aurilia, is actually my real mother?”

“Yes. She had been born Dalia Shorts, but after she’d been assaulted by Melton Lamming she went to the police. Then Malto hired a man to kill her. But that man, Arman, couldn’t do it.”

“And—and so my real father is the man I always knew as my grandfather?”

I nodded and said, “But if you didn’t know all that, then why did you and David try to get to Paulie Jr.?”

“How do you even know about that?”

“Because Paulie Sr. was your father’s partner in the nightclub business—”

“Don’t call him that,” she demanded.

“Look,” I said. “I can’t be involved in some lie that your mother and father, stepmother and step-grandmother, created because they thought it was gonna keep you safe. You aren’t safe. You’re tough, I’ll give you that. You got balls for sure, but I was hired to find the girl-child of a man who based everything on her never knowing her real name, her real origins.”

That’s when the fight went out of Twyla. I don’t think my convoluted explanations had anything to do with this surrender. It was more likely that the mere act of discussing suspicions that had been years writhing at the back of her mind forced her to accept the hint of truth that had been the source of this decades-long torment.

Her lips parted. She rubbed her forehead with her left hand, unseating the broad-brimmed sun hat, causing it to fall to the floor. She didn’t move to pick it up.

“Grandpa is really my dad?”

“Yeah.”

“They all lied to me? All of them?”

I left those questions alone.

“And you,” she said. “How you ever even get that deep into these, these things?”

“Like I said, Arman hired me, playing the role of grandfather. He wanted me to tell you a part of the truth—the part you mostly knew. When I looked into it I realized about Malto and your dad.”