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“And she told you that I was Twyla’s mother?”

“No, she did not, and I was not looking for you at all. At least I didn’t think I was.”

“Make sense, Joe.”

I smiled then. The older I got, the less I found in common with my peers. It was truly a pleasure how easily this woman and I could communicate.

“I wasn’t looking for you but I should’a been,” I said. “I should’a been because everybody thinks that Dalia Shorts is dead and buried in a hole in the ground out in the woods somewhere, even though there was really very little to corroborate that fact. In my days as a cop, you would still be a missing person.”

Her lips parted slightly, and for probably the first time in many years she was a little lost in her skin, disoriented in the way her singing persona had been mystified by the love in her heart. She was Aurilia Fox, had been for more than half a lifetime. But here I was, inquiring after Dalia Shorts, her true identity.

I was sure that her pistol was close at hand and that there was a voice in her head that said it would have been easier to dispose of my body than to let me go.

I had a gun too. Its purpose was just as confused as was my host.

“How did you find out?” she asked.

“Nose to the ground, my butt up in the air.”

Aurilia/Dalia didn’t want to smile, but she could see the dog I was comparing myself to. She knew what it was to work at getting somewhere until, in the end, there was no place else to go.

“Arman hired you?”

“He did. To find Twyla before he died. I think he loves her. But like Mrs. Macintosh says, he can’t get far enough away from his beginnings to tell everything. He wants to pretend that looking for what he called his granddaughter wouldn’t bring the rest of his life into scrutiny.”

The tension went out of the singer’s shoulders and settled as sadness in her eyes.

“I was a child,” she said. “And he—he violated me.”

“Arman did?”

“No. Melton Lamming.”

“Melton,” I said as if it were a revelation. “He drugged you?”

“Did Arman tell you that?”

“No,” I said truthfully, and then I lied. “There’s been talk about him. I think he’s kept it up.”

Dalia’s body performed a little dance moving around in her chair, whipping the sadness into hate.

“I tried to stop him. I swear to God I did. I went to the police. Instead’a doin’ their job, they went to him and told him what I had said.”

“How’d you find that out?”

“Arman came to one of my performances and left a note that we should talk.”

“You were singing at the New York Oyster?”

“No. I left there after what Melton did. I was singin’ in one’a the new clubs in Greenwich Village.

“I tried to run out the back when I saw Arman’s note, but he figured that’s what I’d do and was waitin’ for me. He made me get into his Caddy and drove me out to Staten Island, to one’a the farms they used to have out there. I was sure that he planned to bury me in some cow pasture. But that wasn’t it. He told me that Melton had sumpin’ on him and he said that he’d forget it if he killed me that very night. Kill me and hide the body while Lamming was at some official function.”

We were silent for a while after that. She was looking down and to the side and I was watching her.

“What happened after he took you to the farm?”

“I was so scared I didn’t know what to do. Arman told me that I could stay on the farm for at least a few weeks. He promised to come back and see about me ev’ry week or so, but I wouldn’t let him leave.