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For a moment the fight came back into Twyla’s eyes, but there it sputtered into helplessness.

“And Aurilia? She’s not my godmother?”

“She’s your blood mother.”

“Well then, I guess we better go see her.”

20.

I CALLED AURILIA Fox to ask if she was willing to see her daughter before we headed out to Mount Kisco.

On the way over, Twyla asked me if I could leave her and her mother alone that day and maybe come over to talk about her troubles later in the week.

“I think maybe my mother and I should talk about this stuff before… you know,” she said.

I did know.

After pulling up to the curb to drop her off, I turned to say good-bye, but before I could utter the words, she put a hand on my sleeve and asked, “Will you come in with me?”

Mother and child embraced for a very long time at the door. It was a heartfelt meeting even though they had known each other for many years. Aurilia had made sugar cookies and lemonade, both from scratch.

We sat and talked for maybe an hour and a quarter. Twyla and her mom sat side by side, holding hands. The conversation was pedestrian and bland, nothing that could get anyone upset. I realized that Twyla needed to be a perfect child in the presence of someone she knew and whom she was just getting to know. It certainly would have been unfair to upset that applecart with talk about murder and torture. So I said that I had to go.

“I’ll walk you to your car,” Twyla offered.

It had been little more than a day since we’d met, but already I could see the changes in her.

“You keep asking me about Mr. Antonucci and Randy,” she said, standing with me at the driver’s side of my tiny car.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

It was a good question. My job was over. It wasn’t my place to try to put the pieces together after so many years of lies and flight. But I’d made a mistake along the way, and even though I allowed for mistakes in my work, sometimes these gaffes were too grievous to overlook.

Because of this I said, “I figured out about the man that attacked your mom all those years ago.”

“Lamming?”

“Yeah. I figured it out but didn’t do anything about it. That might have been a mistake.”

Her bearing took on an aspect of gratefulness.

“I don’t know if it means anything,” she said. Then she hesitated—out of reflex, I suspected. “Randy—you know, David—had left New York a couple’a years ago. He was in trouble for this thing he said he didn’t do. And then, when he was living down in Santa Monica, he heard about this jazz nightclub called the Carnelian Oyster.”

“Why that mean anything to him?”

“I once saw a picture of Miss Fox, I mean my mom, in this scrapbook she had on the top shelf in her closet. She was young and standing in front of a club with the same name, only this Carnelian Oyster was in New York.”

“And how would Randy know anything about the Oyster?” I asked.

“I made up stories about Aurilia being my real mom and took all the little things I knew about her, you know, to make me feel good. I was just a kid.”

“But you didn’t know that she was your mother.”

“No, I didn’t. I just wanted her to be. I mean, she was so nice. She had told me about the troubles she’d had in New York. I was just a kid, but I wanted more than anything to save her.”

“And you told Randy about Aurilia and the Carnelian Oyster,” I coaxed.