Page 91 of Hanging and Burning

Silence.

I liked the old guy, but he was lost in the attempt to maintain control. We both needed him to release the reins.

“Listen, Arman, this shit is serious.”

“There wasn’t any shit before you got involved.”

Ignoring my employer’s intimation, I said, “Like I told you, Twyla had a druggy boyfriend name of Randolph David Blass.”

“I know all about him. Mara kept me updated on the important things goin’ on in Twyla’s life. I might not have been around, but I made sure she was okay.”

“But not lately.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay. That’s why I hired you.”

“If you had been a real parent, you’d’ve known that mama and daddy never know everything.”

“I’m her grandfather,” he said, quiet as the night.

“No, you are not. You’re spinnin’ lies while I’m tryin’ t’save her life.”

Arman had nothing to add, so I continued. “Blass was a close friend to Twyla. There’s too much to explain right now, but Paulie was on his ass. I got that looking for your daughter.”

“How would Paulie know anything about Twyla’s friends?”

“I don’t know how it came about,” I continued. “But somebody came to you asking about a woman named Aurilia Fox, her and Twyla Mann. They didn’t know that Twyla was your daughter, and you didn’t know that Ms. Fox was Dalia Shorts. On top’a that you were laid up with cancer and on chemotherapy. There was no way that you could go out there to protect anybody.

“One thing I do know is that when Grandma B got one look at you she saw that you had troubles. She asked a few questions, and when you said you were worried about your granddaughter she told you about what I could do. She knew I was comin’ out there and put us together. The only problem was your tentative relationship with the truth. You gave me all this shit about you were dying and just wanted to say goodbye.”

“Okay, all right. That Rouche guy came to me a week and a half ago, asking about Twyla.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that?”

“I thought I was givin’ you all you needed to know,” he admitted. “I didn’t know who he was, but I could tell that he was serious. And nobody was supposed to know about Twyla.”

“Paulie did.”

“Yeah,” he whispered, “Paulie did. But why would Paulie send somebody to ask about Twyla? He could have asked me himself.”

“He didn’t want to know about your daughter. He wanted to know about Aurilia.”

“Dalia.” The depth of the problem was dawning on the old man.

“David Blass went to Paulie’s people asking about Dalia Shorts.”

“How the hell he even know that name?”

“Doesn’t matter how. Paulie is in league with Melton and now Melton knows that Dalia’s alive and that Twyla is her daughter.”

“And—and this Aurilia, who is also Dalia, how does she know anything about Twyla?”

“Connie,” was my double-barreled one-word reply.

“Connie? The fuck you mean?”

Sometimes silence contains the best argument. I could almost hear the older man remembering things that were implied and that went unsaid in his decades-long marriage.

When enough time had passed I went on with the inquisition. “No one ever told Twyla that she and the woman named Aurilia were blood, but she could feel it. She told Blass about these feelings, and he went with her out west and found the resurrected Carnelian Oyster out there. A year later this Kenneth Rouche got involved, and Blass ended up dead… All this happened before I ever talked to you. You can’t blame me for somethin’ happened before we met.”