«Where the scholarship money originated from?»

«Right. My guess is, if we can trace that back» – again, tread gently – «we would find something very interesting.»

«Can we do that?»

«I’m not sure. The attorneys will undoubtedly claim privilege. But I’m going to put Win on it. If it involves money, he’ll have the connections to track it down.»

Brenda sat back and tried to digest all this. «Do you think my father traced it back?»

«I doubt it, but I don’t know. Either way your father was starting to make some noise. He hit up the lawyers, and he even went so far as to start questioning Arthur Bradford. That was where he probably went too far. Even if there’d been no wrongdoing, Bradford would not be happy with someone poking into his past, raising old ghosts, especially during an election year.»

«So he killed my father?»

Myron was not sure how to answer that one. «It’s too early to say for sure. But let’s assume for a second that your father did a little too much poking. And let’s also assume the Bradfords scared him off with a beating.»

Brenda nodded. «The blood in the locker.»

«Right. I keep wondering why we found the blood there, why Horace didn’t go home to change or recuperate. My guess is he was beaten near the hospital. In Livingston, at the very least.»

«Where the Bradfords live.»

Myron nodded. «And if Horace escaped from the beating or if he was just afraid they’d come after him again, he wouldn’t go home. He’d probably change at the hospital and run. In the morgue I noticed clothes in the corner – a security guard uniform. It was probably what he changed into when he got to the locker. Then he hit the road and-»

Myron stopped.

«And what?» she asked.

«Damn,» Myron said.

«What?»

«What’s Mabel’s phone number?»

Brenda gave it to him. «Why?»

Myron switched on the cell phone and dialed Lisa at

Bell Atlantic. He asked her to check the number. It took Lisa about two minutes.

«Nothing official on it,» Lisa said. «But I checked the line. There’s a noise there.»

«Meaning?»

«Someone’s probably got a tap on it. Internal. You’d have to send someone by there to be sure.»

Myron thanked her and hung up. «They have Mabel’s phone tapped too. That’s probably how they found your father. He called your aunt, and they traced it.»

«So who’s behind the tap?»

«I don’t know,» Myron said.

Silence. They passed the Star-Bright Pizzeria. In Myron’s youth it was rumored that a whorehouse operated out of the back. Myron had gone several times there with his family. When his dad went to the bathroom, Myron followed. Nothing.

«There’s something else that doesn’t make sense,» Brenda said.

«What?»

«Even if you’re right about the scholarships, where would my mother get that kind of money?»

Good question. «How much did she take from your dad?»

«Fourteen thousand, I think.»

«If she invested well, that might be enough. There were seven years between the time she disappeared and the first scholarship payment, so…» Myron calculated the figures in his head. Fourteen grand to start. Hmm. Anita Slaughter would have had to score big to make the money last this long. Possible, sure, but even in the Reagan years, not likely.

Hold the phone.

«She may have found another way to get money,» he said slowly.

«How?»

Myron stayed quiet for a moment. The head gears were churning again. He checked his rearview mirror. If there was a tail, he didn’t spot it. But that did not mean much. A casual glance rarely gave it away. You had to watch the cars, memorize them, study their movements. But he could not concentrate on that. Not right now.

«Myron?»

«I’m thinking.»

She looked like she was about to say something but then thought better of it.

«Suppose,» Myron continued, «your mother did learn something about the death of Elizabeth Bradford.»

«Didn’t we already try this?»

«Just stay with me a second, okay? Before, we came up with two possibilities. One, she was scared and ran. Two, they tried to hurt her and she ran.»

«And now you have a third?»

«Sort of.» He drove past the new Starbucks on the corner of Mount Pleasant Avenue. He wanted to stop -his caffeine craving worked like a magnetic pull – but he pushed on. «Suppose your mother did run away. And suppose once she was safe, she demanded money to keep quiet.»

«You think she blackmailed the Bradfords?»

«More like compensation.» He spoke even as the ideas were still forming. Always a dangerous thing. «Your mother sees something. She realizes that the only way to guarantee her safety, and her family’s safety, is to run away and hide. If the Bradfords find her, they’ll kill her. Plain and simple. If she tries to do something cute – like hide evidence in a safety-deposit box in the event she disappears or something like that – they’ll torture her until she tells them where it is. Your mother has no choice. She has to run. But she wants to take care of her daughter too. So she makes sure that her daughter gets all the things she herself could never have provided for her. A top-quality education. A chance to live on a pristine campus instead of the bowels of Newark. Stuff like that.»

More silence.

Myron waited. He was voicing theories too fast now, not giving his brain a chance to process or even to inspect his words. He stopped now, letting everything settle.

«Your scenarios,» Brenda said. «You’re always looking to put my mother in the best light. It blinds you, I think.»

«How so?»

«I’ll ask you again: If all that is true, why didn’t she take me with her?»

«She was on the run from killers. What kind of mother would want to put her child in that kind of danger?»

«And she was so paranoid that she could never call me? Or see me?»

«Paranoid?» Myron repeated. «These guys have a tap on your phone. They have people tailing you. Your father is dead.»

Brenda shook her head. «You don’t get it.»

«Get what?»

Her eyes were watery now, but she kept her tone a little too even. «You can make all the excuses you want, but you can’t get around the fact that she abandoned her child. Even if she had good reason, even if she was this wonderful self-sacrificing mother who did all this to protect me, why would she let her daughter go on believing that her own mother would abandon her? Didn’t she realize how this would devastate a five-year-old girl? Couldn’t she have found some way to tell her the truth – even after all these years?»

Her child. Her daughter. Tell her the truth. Never I or me. Interesting. But Myron kept silent. He had no answer to that one.

They drove past the Kessler Institute and hit a traffic light. After some time had passed, Brenda said, «I still want to go to practice this afternoon.»

Myron nodded. He understood. The court was comfort.

«And I want to play in the opener.»

Again Myron nodded. It was probably what Horace would have wanted too.

They made the turn near Mountain High School and arrived at Mabel Edwards’s house. There were at least a dozen cars parked on the road, most American-made, most older and beaten up. A formally dressed black couple stood by the door. The man pressed the bell. The woman held a platter of food. When they spotted Brenda, they glared at her and then turned their backs.

«They’ve read the papers, I see,» Brenda said.

«No one thinks you did it.»

Her look told him to stop with the patronizing.

They walked her to the front door and stood behind the couple. The couple huffed and looked away. The man tapped his foot. The woman made a production out of sighing. Myron opened his mouth, but Brenda closed it with a firm shake of her head. Already she was reading him.

Someone opened the door. There were lots of people already inside. All nicely dressed. All black. Funny how Myron kept noticing that. A black couple. Black people inside. Last night at the barbecue he had not found it strange that everyone except Brenda was white. In fact, Myron could not recall a black person ever attending