Minotaur Books, November 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-58020-9, ISBN10: 0-312-58020-7,
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches, 304 pages

Chapter 1

It was a few minutes after mass on a hot summer morning, and silence filled the cathedral as if the Lord himself had said, “Peace. Be still.”

The quiet didn’t last for long. As a breeze slipped between the cracks in the centuries-old walls, and the sun shone through the angels that adorned the stained glass windows, the priest’s heavy footfalls marched toward the confessional booth.

Father O’Reilly always walked with purpose to hear confession. He thought it was his most important duty as a priest. In helping his parishioners deal with their sins, he was more than a cog in the church’s wheel. He was an instrument in God’s holy symphony. That was why he loved to take his place in the confessional booth. It was there that he felt closest to heaven.

As he opened the sturdy wooden door and sat behind the screen, Father O’Reilly brushed his gray, thinning locks away from his eyes, fully prepared to play his part in the dance between sin and mercy.

By the time he closed the door, he could see that the first confessor was already sitting on the other side of the screen. His face partially obscured, the man spoke before Father O’Reilly could even greet him.

“Bless me father, for I have sinned,” he said in a thin, gravelly voice. “It’s been five years since my last confession, and …”

The words drifted off into an awkward silence. Father O’Reilly glanced through the screen at a young man whose face was a mere shadow beneath his wide fedora. There was something familiar about him—something so other-worldly that it turned the sanctuary’s whispering breeze into a chilling wind.

Father O’Reilly shivered in spite of himself. “Please, go on,” he said, trying to sound reassuring. “It’s all right.”

“Is it really?” the man said, his tight smile evident in his voice. “Well, since it’s all right, these are my sins. I’ve lied to those who’ve tried to help me, and hidden myself from people who love me.”

Father O’Reilly felt uneasy about whatever was beneath those words. He folded his hands to keep them from shaking, and asked the question whose answer he already knew. “Is there more?”

The man chuckled. Then a loud burst of laughter escaped his lips before he suddenly went silent.

Father O’Reilly went from uneasy to fearful. “Listen, perhaps you should—”

“Let me guess,” the man snapped, the sound of his voice growing darker by the moment. “Seek professional help? Is that what you’re suggesting, Father? Well, that’s not what I need. I need forgiveness. Can you give me that?”

“Well, I—”

“Can you grant forgiveness!” the man yelled, his voice echoing through the sanctuary as he slammed his fist against the confessional wall.

The commotion got the attention of the sexton, who started toward the confessional booth from the other side of the vast cathedral. The priest, hearing the faint sound of the approaching footsteps, was relieved, and at the same time, anxious.

“God can grant forgiveness, if you confess,” the priest said, his voice shaking as the sexton came closer.

“Then these are my other sins,” said the man in a tone that was eerily calm. “I cut off a man’s finger while he slept on a park bench. I sliced a child’s leg when he wandered away from his mother at a playground. I’m sick, Father, and I don’t know what to do.”

“You’re doing the right thing now,” the priest said nervously. “You’re confessing.”

“That’s not the problem, Father,” the man said as the sexton drew near.

“Then what is?”

The man stood up and pulled open his jacket, revealing a sawed-off shotgun. “The problem is … I’m the angel of death.”

The sexton opened the door and was about to speak, but the man never gave him a chance. He whirled on him and fired, the blast spattering the walls with the sexton’s blood-soaked innards.

Father O’Reilly tried to make his way around the wall that separated him from the killer. As he did so, the gunman confronted a man and a woman who had just arrived to give their confessions.

When they saw the gun, they both tried to turn and run. Both of them were too late.

The gunman shot the man in the back. The impact of the shell threw him into the woman, who fell, face first, to the ground. By the time she pushed the man’s dead weight from her back and stood up to run toward the door, the gunman was upon her.

“Please!” she said as she turned and looked at the killer’s eyes. “Have mercy!”

“Mercy is God’s job,” the gunman said coldly.

The final gunshot echoed through the sanctuary as Father O’Reilly watched in horror. When the woman fell to the ground, the killer dropped the gun and walked slowly toward the cathedral’s massive doors.

Father O’Reilly ran to the spot where the gunman dropped the weapon. Then he knelt down and picked it up. As he held it and looked at the bodies sprawled on the floor of his beloved cathedral, he was filled with a rage he had never known before.

Raising the weapon until he had the killer in his sights, the priest slowly squeezed the trigger. The angels looked down on him from the stained glass windows. A statue of the blessed virgin watched closely through hollow eyes. The hammer clicked. The gun was empty. So was Father O’Reilly.

He dropped to his knees as grief overwhelmed him. Though he pursed his lips and squeezed his eyes shut, neither gesture could hold the pain inside. Tears poured down his face and he screamed in anguish as the reality of the moment set in.

When the police arrived, he deliriously whispered that the gunman was the angel of death. They took the gun from his hands and lifted him to his feet. They shook his shoulders to stir him from the shock. However, the more they tried to rouse him, the deeper he seemed to fall. It was as if the floor of the sanctuary had opened and hell had risen up to swallow him.

He cried out to God as he fell into the enemy’s hands. He yelled for his father to save him from the torment he faced. He looked up to heaven as the tears poured down his cheeks. Then suddenly, someone reached down and snatched him up.

That’s when Michael Coletti awakened. As always, the nightmare left the detective disoriented. He looked around expecting to see the cathedral, but there were no marble statues, no magnificent arches, and no stained glass windows. There were only the threadbare furnishings of his one-bedroom apartment and the odors of stale smoke and sweat.

He ran his hands over his face and felt the wetness of the tears he’d cried in his sleep. He wondered what had snatched him from his nightmare and transported him back to his own reality. More importantly, Coletti wondered if being saved had done him more harm than good.

Pushing his sweat-soaked hair back from his face, Philadelphia’s most senior homicide detective flipped the covers off his naked body, propped himself up on his elbow and looked at his alarm clock. It was five-thirty a.m., August 25, 2009. Summer would be over in twenty-eight days. His career would be over in three.

He grabbed his Marlboros from his nightstand and lit one with shaking hands. The hiss of the burning tobacco filled the room as Coletti pulled the smoke into his lungs. He exhaled slowly and reflected on the things he’d seen in his twenty-five years on the force: crime scenes covered with the blood of children; women brutalized by men who claimed to love them; adulterous lovers shot dead in the throes of passion. None of it had affected him like the Confessional Murders.

For ten years, his dreams wouldn’t let him forget the crime. He wasn’t dreaming now, though, so Coletti did what he’d done every day for the last decade. He went on with his life.

Groaning as he got out of bed, he turned on the news, tramping through the pile of dirty clothes that led to the bathroom. Once there, he pulled the string that lit the lavatory’s single light bulb, and absently listened while a weatherman predicted a breezy late summer day with temperatures reaching the mid eighties.

He puffed his cigarette once more before flicking the butt into the toilet, and flushing away the evidence of his one cigarette a day habit. Splashing his face with cold water, he looked at his image in the mirror that hung haphazardly above the sink.

At a stocky five foot-eleven, with a craggy face and ample lips, he was almost, but not quite handsome. His features were dark, and distinctly Mediterranean, from his brown eyes and sculpted nose to his curly mop of salt-and-pepper hair. His body wasn’t as hard as it had been when he was younger, but his jaw, lined with stubble, was just as rugged.

As he stared into the mirror at the wear and tear of fifty eight years, the light struck the tiny gold crucifix dangling against his chest, and his tired eyes wandered to his slight paunch. Coletti looked a mess. He didn’t care, though.

He wasn’t looking for a woman. After thirty-one years on the force, his job was his mistress. He’d be leaving her in less than a week. After that, he planned to spend time with the only other companion that mattered: himself.

Coletti looked away from his image and began brushing his teeth while relishing the thought of being alone. Then he heard something on the television that stopped him cold.

“The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has refused to hear defrocked priest Thomas O’Reilly’s final appeal in the Confessional Murders,” the newscaster said in a tone of mock-concern. “That means O’Reilly, who has always maintained his innocence in the decade-old triple murder, is scheduled to face execution this Friday—three days from now. In the words of his lawyer, ‘only a miracle can save him.’”

Coletti wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as a sick feeling bubbled in his gut. He remembered being the first cop to arrive at the cathedral. He remembered taking the weapon from the priest’s quivering hands. He remembered hearing O’Reilly’s repeated claims of innocence. Most of all, he remembered trusting fingerprints over feelings.

Now the priest who’d haunted his dreams for a decade was scheduled to be put to death the day Coletti was to retire.

As the light bulb in his bathroom began to flicker, Coletti fingered his crucifix and wondered if the priest’s execution would make the nightmares stop. Or if perhaps, like O’Reilly, Coletti would need a miracle, too.

* * *

At seven a.m., a well-dressed man stepped onto the platform of the Chestnut Hill Regional Rail station in Philadelphia’s diverse and affluent northwest. He looked to be about twenty-five, and he carried an almond-colored briefcase that was monogrammed with the letters, CLM.

Standing on the crowded platform in the cool of the morning with his neat black dreads, and sleek, athletic build, Charles Leonard Mann looked every bit the young businessman. Having finished graduate school five years before, the persona fit him, but it was just a charade.

Charlie Mann was a cop, one who was able to blend into environments that other officers couldn’t. He could adjust his style from Brooks Brothers to FUBU, or his dialect from Ebonics to Geek-speak. He was a new kind of policeman, and he was Homicide’s fastest rising star.

Mann had been selected to go to the train station when Homicide received a tip about a meeting between a suspected hitman and the drug dealer who employed him. The State Police would be assisting on this one, and Homicide couldn’t afford any screw-ups, especially with hundreds of commuters on the platform and on the trains.  Mann knew that, and while he wasn’t about to violate the trust that they’d placed in him, he didn’t intend to let the suspect get away, either.

Pulling his iPhone from its case, Mann opened his pictures folder, and clicked on the mugshot of the person he’d come to arrest.

The suspect didn’t look like a killer. His freckled face was framed by stringy red hair. He sported a silver stud nose ring. His lips were thin and chapped. From the look of him, he would be more comfortable with a skateboard than with a gun. Yet there was something haunting about his lifeless and cruel gray eyes.

Beyond those eyes was an addict who’d traveled to Philadelphia for the purest heroin on the east coast, and learned along the way that drug dealers paid well for murder. Once he was armed with that knowledge, it was easy to transition from killing himself with needles to killing other people with guns. Over the last six months, he’d killed five times, and each time he was paid with drugs and cash, he’d come closer to dying himself.

As Detective Mann stared at the suspect’s picture on the screen, the iPhone began to vibrate. The mugshot disappeared and was replaced with the words, “Incoming call.” He reached up to his ear and tapped the button on his Bluetooth headset.

“Hello?”

“I think our boy’s walking up to the platform,” a woman’s voice said in a calm whisper. “Jeans and a blue T-shirt, about thirty yards to your left.”

“Yeah, honey, I miss you, too,” Mann said, speaking in code as he moved through the crowd to get a better look at the suspect.

The blond-haired woman who was feeding him the information was sitting on a bench at the far end of the platform. In her pantsuit and heels, with Styrofoam coffee cup in hand, she looked to be just another passenger. In truth, Mary Smithson was the state police profiler who’d spent months studying heroin addicts from Philadelphia’s drug-infested Kensington neighborhood, eventually narrowing the list down to a single suspect. She was there to provide technical support for the operation.

“So what are the kids doing?” Mann asked.

“We’re in position,” said the Homicide lieutenant who was on the line with them. He was one of two officers hiding on the opposite platform. There was also a sharpshooter on a rooftop nearly fifty yards away.

“Where’s Joey?” Mann asked, using the code name for the drug dealer.

“He’s not here yet,” the lieutenant whispered into the phone. “But we can’t wait anymore. We’ve gotta move now.”

“Okay, honey,” Mann said, reaching into his jacket and gripping the butt of his gun. “I’ll see you when I get home.”

A train’s flickering light rounded the bend, prompting most of the commuters to move toward the edge of the platform. Mann darted between them, pushing ever faster toward the suspect.

“Hey, watch it!” a woman said when Mann stepped on her foot.

“Sorry,” he said, moving faster as the train approached the station.

The woman was about to turn away when she noticed Mann’s hand in his jacket. She watched in horror as he dropped his briefcase, drew his weapon, and started toward the suspect.

“He’s got a gun!” she shouted, and the platform exploded in chaos.

Women began screaming as Mann broke through the crowd. Men started pushing toward the arriving train. The suspect looked around, his face contorted into the pitiful expression of an addict in need of a fix. When he saw Mann charging toward him, his drooping eyes grew wide and he bolted in the other direction.

The detectives on the opposite platform were trapped in their positions when the train pulled into the station. The sharpshooter on the roof was unable to get a clear shot. The commuters on the platform were screaming and running toward the train.

Mann was their best hope to catch him.

He sprinted after the fleeing killer, who reached into his waistband and grabbed a .38.

Mann took aim and hoped for a clean shot, but Mary Smithson had already beaten him to the punch.

“Stop!” Smithson shouted as she stood and aimed her weapon at the suspect.

Trapped between Mann and Smithson, the hitman did as he was told. He stopped, and as terrified commuters looked on, he held the .38 at his side.

“Drop the gun!” Mann bellowed from behind him.

A smile spread across the hitman’s face. He closed his eyes and slowly raised the gun toward Smithson. As he did so, Smithson’s finger tightened on her trigger, but Mann fired first.

The bullet exploded through the back of the hitman’s head. As he fell to the ground, Mann fired another round through his torso.

There was a moment of tortured silence as the commuters absorbed what had just happened. Out of the hundreds of people who had witnessed the shooting, Mann was the first to speak.

“Are you all right?” he asked Smithson as the killer lay dead between them.

“I’m fine,” she said, but her quivering hands said otherwise as she lowered her weapon.

With blood pooling against the platform and dumbfounded commuters watching in shocked disbelief, Mann and Smithson walked slowly to the body.

“Why didn’t you shoot?” he asked without looking at her.

She was quiet for a few moments, trying to come up with an answer that wouldn’t betray her fear. Then she remembered the information she’d gathered on the suspect’s psychological profile.

“The mindset of a man who’d kill for drugs is the same as one who’s suicidal,” she said, masking her raging nerves with her matter-of-fact tone. “When he raised that gun, he wasn’t trying to kill me. He was trying to kill himself.”

* * *

An hour after the shooting, a disheveled Mike Coletti walked into Homicide and sat behind his scarred metal desk. His mind racing with the news of Father O’Reilly’s impending execution, he loosened his tie while drinking coffee from an old cracked cup.

The steaming brew was part of a morning ritual that he’d observed for the past thirty-one years. On days like this one, it helped him to quiet his mind and remember what was truly important, just like his father used to do.

Even now, more than three decades after his father’s death, the detective still remembered him clearly. A no-nonsense butcher who migrated to South Philly from Naples, Italy, Michelangelo Coletti Sr., would begin each morning with a cup of his wife Gloria’s freshly brewed espresso. He’d leave the house at sunrise to open his Ninth Street shop, and butcher meat until well after dark to provide a good living for his wife and his only son, whose name they shortened to Michael.

The Colettis were simple people with an abiding sense of pride in their heritage, and a core set of values that came from their native land. Honor and tradition, family and respect were enforced with Michelangelo’s iron fist, encouraged by Gloria’s velvet glove, and reiterated every Sunday at mass.

But even with all he learned at home and at church, the streets of South Philly taught young Michael the most. Living near the Italian Market, where blocks of rickety shacks brimmed with meats and cheeses, and hucksters sold everything from fresh milk to ice, he learned the value of hard work early on. However, there was a flipside to the neighborhood.

There were men who lived just blocks from his home who twisted the values of honor, family and loyalty, and applied them to lives of crime. These mobsters convinced boys he’d grown up with to abandon childhood games in order to join South Philly’s Mafia.

Michael resisted that temptation, graduating from South Philadelphia High School in 1968—a year that embodied all the turbulence of the Sixties. Vietnam escalated. King and Kennedy were assassinated. Riots burned neighborhoods in Philadelphia and other cities.

For a year, Coletti watched it all on a black and white TV with rabbit ears as he worked in his father’s shop. He wasn’t picked in the draft lottery when he turned eighteen, thus avoiding the trip to Vietnam. But he couldn’t avoid the internal war that determined the man he’d become.

He saw his father, Michelangelo, toiling for their home and family. He saw Frank Rizzo, the police commissioner from nearby Rosewood Street, fighting to maintain the status quo. He saw the mobsters killing and conniving for their piece of the pie. Then one day, he looked at himself.

He was twenty-three by then, and he didn’t have a thing. He didn’t want to live that way, so he began weighing his options. He hated the mundane life of his father. He didn’t want the responsibility of a cop. He was intrigued by the notion of taking what he wanted, so he contemplated joining the mob. When Michelangelo Coletti found out, his response was anything but mundane.

“You wanna shoot?” his father said in his heavy Italian accent as he marched him to the recruiter. “You shoot for your country.”

Coletti always smiled when he thought of that day. That day was what allowed him to see a bit of the world during his four year tour of duty as a supply clerk on bases in Italy and Germany. That day was also one of the last times he saw his father as he’d been.

When he came back to South Philly from overseas, his father’s once-strong voice had been ravaged by throat cancer. In seven months, Michael Coletti’s hero was gone. Five months later, his mother died from what could only be described as a broken heart.

After he buried her, Coletti sold the butcher shop that his father had spent his life building up, and something inside him changed. He got angry. He withdrew. Then he set out to keep his parents memories alive by finding a way to enforce their values. He chose to do so by pursuing the very job he’d initially tried to avoid. He became a cop.

For most of his career in the police force, he tried to serve with the honor and integrity he’d learned from his mother and father. He’d slipped a few times and made some mistakes, but he always worked hard to earn everything he ever got, just like his father before him.

In Coletti’s mind, not everyone embraced such values, and that, more than anything, set him off.

“You all right, Coletti?” said a detective with a thick brown mustache and heavy eyebrows to match.

“Yeah,” he said, taking another sip of his coffee. “I was just thinking.”

“Did you hear what happened up in Chestnut Hill this morning?”

“Yep, Charlie shot a suspect with a hundred commuters in the line of fire,” Coletti said, pausing for effect. “I wonder if he would’ve been that trigger happy if he was shooting at one of his own.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” a voice called out from across the room.

Coletti looked up and saw Mann walking in with a thin, blond-haired woman beside him. Mann looked angry, but Coletti wasn’t about to back down.

“You went to college and you don’t know what ‘one of his own’ means?” Coletti asked coolly.

“Yeah, I know what it means,” Mann said angrily. “It means you don’t think I belong here.”

“You belong if you earn it,” Coletti shot back. “But you don’t make Homicide just because somebody decides there’s a quota.”

A million answers went through Mann’s mind, ranging in tone from eloquent to ignorant. When he’d considered every possible verbal retort, and found them all to be lacking, he chose the only response he could.

His face clouding over with rage and his fingers curling into fists, Mann bolted across the room.

Coletti stood up, prepared to fight. Three detectives came between them a second before the first punch could fly.

As Mann and Coletti grunted and struggled to get past the peacemakers, Mary Smithson walked to Mann’s side while carefully studying Coletti.

“Who the hell are you?” Coletti asked in an agitated tone.

“Lieutenant Smithson, State Police,” she said, nodding toward Mann. “I’m one of his own.”

As she spoke, Mann jerked his arm away from the men who were holding him. A few seconds later, Coletti did, too. When they were sure that both had calmed down, the detectives who had restrained them stepped aside.

“What do you mean, you’re one of his own?” Coletti asked while rubbing his arms where his colleagues had gripped them.

“You implied that he looks out for his own,” she said in a level tone. “Well, I’m the one he looked out for today. As far as I’m concerned, he’s the reason I’m still alive.”

“Look, lady, I—”

“My name’s Mary,” she said, extending her hand.

He looked at her eyes. They were blue and bottomless, filled with curiosity and intelligence. It took everything within him not to stare.

“I’m Mike Coletti,” he said, shaking her hand while forcing himself to look away.

“We came to fill out the paperwork on what happened this morning,” Mann said, his eyes scanning the room. “But I guess there’s no need for that since I don’t belong here.”

There was an awkward silence as the other detectives tried to decide who would answer first.

“Coletti doesn’t speak for me,” said the one with the bushy mustache. “As long you do your job, I don’t have a problem with you or anybody else.”

A few piped up in agreement. Several more mumbled placating words. Then Coletti spoke.

“Look, kid,” he said, clearing his throat as he searched for the right words. “I didn’t mean it to come out that way. I’ve got a lot on my mind, and—”

“Save it,” Mann said, stalking angrily to his desk as Commissioner Kevin Lynch walked in.

There were half-hearted greetings as the man who’d rocketed from Homicide to the top of the department crossed the room and stopped at Mann’s desk.

Lynch smiled, his bald brown head shimmering nearly as brightly as the stars on his shoulders. Unlike Mann, he relished the resentment of his former squad. It drove him to succeed.

“Mann, Smithson, I need to talk to both of you,” he said, beckoning for them to follow him out to the hallway. “You too, Coletti.”

Wearing a bewildered expression, the old detective walked out behind them. When the door closed, the commissioner turned to Mann and Smithson.

“Internal Affairs, Homicide and the state folks are gonna need to interview the two of you about the shooting. Mann, you’ll be reassigned to desk duty for a few days, and Smithson, I’m sure you’ll be glad to get back to your desk out in Dunmore after all this is over.”

“Actually, Commissioner, I was hoping to hang around here for at least a day or so,” she said, smiling nervously before casting a furtive glance in Coletti’s direction.

Lynch caught the look. Mann did, too, but he had more pressing matters to attend to.

“Sir, if I’m going to be strapped to a desk,” he said, his jaw tight with anger, “I’d just as soon have it be in another unit, especially since Homicide will be investigating.”

“Angels from heaven could be investigating, Detective Mann. It won’t make a difference. A suspect pointed a gun at a fellow officer. You shot to kill. Case closed. But if it’ll make you feel better, you’ll be on loan to the Delayed Police Response Unit—D.P.R. You’ll take stolen car and theft from vehicle reports over the phone for a couple days, but you’ll still be attached to Homicide.”

“Commissioner, I—”

“You think you’re the only one who’s ever had a hard time in Homicide?” Lynch snapped. “Well, I’ve got news for you, Detective. You’re not. When I came to Homicide, I was the college boy who was rising a little too fast, and everybody hated me, too, right Coletti?”

“Nobody hated you,” Coletti said to the commissioner before nodding toward Mann. “And nobody hates him, either. The kid just rubs me the wrong way.”

“Why? Because I’m black?” Mann asked as Smithson shifted uncomfortably.

“No, because you’re just like I was when I got to Homicide. A smartass who thinks he’s got it all figured out.”

“Racists always have an excuse,” Mann mumbled.

“Look, I’m not a racist,” Coletti said, shifting his gaze from Mann to Lynch and back. “But I shouldn’t have said what I said, and I’m man enough to admit I was wrong.”

Clearly, Mann wasn’t prepared to accept Coletti’s apology. It was Lynch who broke the silence.

“Everything isn’t always what it seems, Detective Mann. If you’re gonna be a good cop, you need to learn that.”

“Not from him,” Mann said, staring angrily at Coletti.

“Oh, I think he’ll be a fine teacher,” Lynch said. “That’s why I’ve decided to make the two of you partners. Mann, you’ll make your appearance in DPR. After that, you’ll partner with Coletti. He’s gonna share all the lessons he learned back when he was the young hotshot, and before he retires, he’s gonna show you what it takes to be the top detective in this unit.”

“And if I don’t?” Coletti said.

“Somebody might lose your paperwork. I’ve heard pensions get held up for years when that happens.”

Coletti was speechless as the commissioner turned to Mann and Smithson.

“You two need to get up to Internal Affairs now, and I need to get to a press conference about the shooting.”

Lynch started down the hall, then stopped and turned around. “I almost forgot, Coletti. I heard they rejected Father O’Reilly’s appeal. I know you’ll be glad when that’s finally over.”

Coletti watched as Lynch walked to his press conference. A second later, Mann headed up to Internal Affairs. Coletti didn’t notice that Smithson was still standing there. He couldn’t. The commissioner’s mention of the Confessional Murders had taken him back to the nightmare from that morning.

“Are you all right?” Smithson asked, sounding concerned.

“I’m fine,” he said, but the thin film of sweat on his suddenly pallid face said otherwise.

Her eyebrows crinkled as her eyes moved from his chest to his face. “You don’t look so hot.”

“Thanks for the compliment,” he said sarcastically.

Smithson chuckled. “Just calling it like I see it.”

“Well I wish you wouldn’t see it so clearly,” he said. “It’s bad for my ego.”

She smiled at his quick wit, and as Coletti tried to think of a way to end the conversation without making a fool of himself, she said something he didn’t expect.

“Listen, I’ve got to go up to give my statement about this morning. But since we’ve both had a bit of a rough day, I was thinking we could take a walk down to Second Street after work.”

Coletti looked at her quizzically. “For what?”

“I heard there were good exhibits here and I’ve always wanted to see them. We don’t really have many art galleries in upstate Pennsylvania, and it’d be great if—”

“I’m not really the art gallery type,” Coletti said, turning to walk away from her.

“Okay, I’ll make a deal with you. I won’t drag you in and out of every exhibit, but there is one I want to see that I read about in the paper. It’s at the Old City Art Gallery.”

“I don’t think so.”

She placed a hand on his shoulder and he turned to face her. Before he knew it, he was once again lost in her eyes.

“If you’re too embarrassed to be seen with me …”

“No, it’s not that.”

“Good. I’ll meet you outside on the corner of Eighth and Race at five o’ clock,” she said.

Coletti opened his mouth to protest, but she silenced him by placing a finger against his lips.

“I promise you’ll like the exhibit,” she said, her tone low and convincing.  “It’s called Confessions.”

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Excerpt:

The first orange light of sunrise left a flush of rose and lavender on Betty’s hands as she fingered the likenesses of her children. There were tears she was holding back and cocks crowing, as well as her granddaughter’s shouts, “Nana, you ready?” Betty sighed and closed the album reluctantly. Time had come for the last of the Mayfields to leave Sweet Tamarind, the plantation they’d known as home for generations. Talk was some carpetbaggers had bought all the land and paid the white Mayfields a smidgeon of what it was worth and left the poor blacks high and dry. A rough white man, whip and rifle in hand, had passed by a few days before, warning Betty and hers to be off the land by evening of this very day. So off they planned to be, not wanting to know another moment of the whites’ wrath. The colored Mayfields were familiar with what that meant, and with no slavery to hold them back they were off to Charleston, where others awaited them.

There was nothing odd about two colored women racing the rhythm of cicadas and the tides at first light, busying themselves with order, a sense of the day to come and dreams of what it might bring, yet this day felt different. This day the cicadas were louder, purposely taunting Betty and her grandchild with their steadiness. Betty set her album down for a second and went to the window to be sure what she was hearing wasn’t a band of washboards and gourds being played by some fool-ass folks with tongues in they cheeks. There was no one there. Only the density of Betty’s imagination, the palms, some lily o’ the valley and nightshade-snugglin’ magnolia and giant oaks.

Well, music is not a bad omen, Betty thought to herself. Then she wondered did God mean for her to hear the glory of Gabriel in the morning machinations of insects, the breeze caressing dew on leaves left to themselves all the dark night, waves breaking how the drum popped if African Jeremiah wanted to change the gait of the ring shout, change the dancers’ direction with three strong beats and a quick run of his palms on the face of the skin before beginning another rhythm demanding other movements, other oblations, and peace in the energies of the spirits spilling from his fingers to their bodies through the rings of soft clouds round the dawn moon. Sometimes the drums, fiddles, and washboards saluted the giant rose-orange sun, taking up the whole of the horizon like nobody had anywhere to go but to the center of the universe. Yes, the Lord’s set the gulls to calling over the ocean’s irrepressible going and coming, midst the cicadas’ crescendo, to let her know to listen to this blessing, before she and Eudora made this wild—some would say this wild and thoroughly foolhardy—change in their lives. Moving to Charleston.

Why, on Sweet Tamarind everybody understood everybody else. The mélange of Yoruba, Wolof, Portuguese, French, Spanish, and a hint of English left the words of men, free or slave, soothing the air from mouth to mouth, left history in place, content with the comings and goings of her children. Nothing was lost, no one madly pounding gainst a vacuum of silence, nothingness that comes of being of nothing, nothing in particular. When she looked out from her tabby hut, oyster and clam shells cemented with sand thick enough to withstand the might of a cyclone, Betty saw the ruins of the Big House of Sweet Tamarind. She kicked something, not knowing what, thinking to herself, I got no call to leave here. I belong right up there. We all do. Belong right here where I stand.

And what was to become of the graves, the bittersweet memories of her mother, sisters who had been fortunate enough to pass over to the other world before the rigors of this island beat them down, smashed their spirits, left them but ghosts of themselves before it was time. She would have to go to their final resting place before she went anywhere. Sacrilege was not only the province of the white, but could fall upon the unmindful of any of God’s children. This Betty believed with her whole body, her body knowing no separation from her soul, ever close to the breath, past and present, of all those whose blood was her own.

But she would have to hurry to pay her respects secretly and gather strength from the loved ones who were no more. Her grandchild Eudora had no sympathy for any who’d come before and had managed to find some joy in the throes of bondage, those who’d thrown away the rigid color codes and property laws to find warmth, love, passions too rich to suppress, so fertile that Eudora owed her own life to them. Perhaps it was this debt of her very being with which she was yet uncomfortable that led Eudora to reject all Betty held so close. Don’t for the life of me know why. What for? She ’most white, ain’t she? How could all of Africa get so deep in her granddaughter when Mayfield blood flowed just as readily in her veins? How’s all this come to be? And if she not all niggah, why not rejoice in that? Eudora’s cheeks had known the back of Betty’s hand more than once for voicing her defiantly blasphemous thoughts. No matter. Both women were deeply rooted, like Carolinian cypress wondering and massive, to views of themselves that knew no connections other than the words Grandma and chile.

Slipping quietly from the house, Betty hid in her bosom her precious album of daguerreotypes and photographs from wandering carnival sideshow artists. She’d searched futilely for her apron pockets, but she wasn’t in an apron. She wasn’t going to be cooking in her very deliberate way in her own home anymore. She kept forgetting her future, but refused to forget her ancestors.

Betty swept by purple and white globe amaranth that clung to her skirts like weeping toddlers. She pushed further into the wooded areas she knew to be the resting places of her mother and sisters. Of course she didn’t know for sure which of the mounds overgrown with wildflowers and weeds. Were wildflowers weeds? Betty’d asked herself that a thousand times. Was she a wildflower? Was her mother wild? Was she beauteous? Was she full of life like good soil, or empty like dirt? There’s a difference tween soil and dirt. There’s a difference from coming from nothing and coming from something simply not known. Betty’s mother, Monday, was not known to her but she’d clearly come from something. It wasn’t true that there was an emptiness. She felt her mother in the fiddle’s melody, in the dried gourds ancient women shook until the spirits of somebody from somewhere drove secret sounds from mouths twisted in foreign shapes, squealing and growling a birth of a soul that had no choice but to shout. Then those shouts corralled the bent women and young heifers into a circle that shuffled along, weaving something like Spanish moss around some unseen skeleton the size of God’s toe. Or she saw her mother possessed under the arch of God’s foot, beating the air with her hips, the soles of her feet afire with the rhythm of the forbidden. Betty knew about the forbidden, therefore she knew her mother. She’d just picked a grave site and called to her. Ma . . .

When the azaleas or camellias rose up from the earth for the white folks to pick and pretend love of nature, Betty’d covered her mother’s grave with flower petals and danced the dance of longing that became sated only when her body fell, fingers digging for arms to hold her, digging for a womb to bury her tears. But the grasses cut her face, left her limbs grimy with wishing for the impossible. Yet Betty made that real enough to hold sacred, to hold as her beginnings. She sang her mother. Betty let her fine dark hair hang from her head like a mantle of audacity.

She sang her mother when leading other blacker ones through the marshes cross to a safe boat on the way from where she belonged. The darker ones weren’t left suspect of their very being. Least that’s what Betty imagined. She had to imagine a lot because once she was free and then she was not. Once she wore satin and the finest lace, then she washed someone else’s. Betty tried to imagine a reasonable world. She found that harmony by the graves she chose to call her family. She was entitled at least to that. All the others had kin, some that died or were sold away, but they existed somewhere. They knew the smell of magnolias and dogwood blossoms. They knew the songs she sang with them to calm the spirits, to move God’s foot in time to the gourds, especially the fancy dangerous ones that woke glory in the tiniest child, the oldest mammy, the fastest picker, chopper, all succumbed to the glory gourds in their gleaming colorful beads, their white feathers and blessed frog’s legs. Betty let the music make her belong. She knew her mother. She knew her God danced.

That’s what Eudora never found, a place she belonged, and now she was going to force the world to just accept her. Eudora could not bring herself to feel the fiddler’s lyric, the gourd’s invitations; her own limbs resisted harmony with anything that quelled the dissonance she knew to be herself. Betty jumped once, no twice, round and about the place where she knew her mother’s bones waited for her words of love and reverence. She was saying good-bye in silence which broke her heart. Betty became the multitude of sounds and gestures she knew to be safe for those who’d crossed over. The music of a people tumbled from her till only sobs and a writhing body grabbed to hold on to her life. Betty rose weaker than she’d ever been when a child fell from her. Barely breathing she knew the song of her was, indeed, so much a part of her she’d be humming it in her own grave one day. So averse to silence she’d become, the butterflies were clapping bout her head, only no one else could hear them.

Her own daughters’ graves were a bit more trouble to identify. Elma, so fair and pampered by the Mayfields she took to despising her mother and her mother’s mother, simply disappeared one day. No more than seventeen, she determined that green eyes and silken hair made her ready for whatever the world had to offer. Heavens, no! Not the world of her mother and her mother’s mother, but the world of the father, who thought her beauty set her free. Pity. How Betty saw her child’s life or death depended on her mood when she looked at the clouds over the horizon. If the clouds were thick, white, billowing, Betty figured the white world was treating her daughter good. It was those thin fast-moving wisps of cloud that troubled Betty. Didn’t leave enough for a soul to hold on to. The world was moving too fast and free with Elma, which to Betty signaled a mighty probability of stillness, the silence of the unmourned. And she’d just have to wait to get to Charleston to visit with her dear Blanche. Juliet, her youngest, was lost to her. Juliet, Eudora’s mother, who simply had no song. She’d let love fly off with her voice and she had nothing to say to Eudora. Now Eudora was going to Charleston to set something straight that wasn’t crooked, going to Charleston to make herself known to the world, when the world was full of young gals like her and dealt them no easy hand, no dance cards or honor.

Shame, Shame. She had to steal away, play half mad to get to the grave of her lover and owner, her master and partner, Julius Mayfield himself. How could he die fighting to keep his own enslaved, children he played with, inspected and vowed never to sell, but own was no contradiction. What kind of man had she shared so much of herself with, did he know she’d done that? Laid open her womanhood and soul as much as any wife anywhere ever had. Over and over she’d gifted him with healthy, never before seen children. Girls whose eyes suggested fog-laden dawns, whose skin was opalescent, whether bronze or ivory. Girls so wantonly free a sane soul couldn’t conceive of them as some white’s slaves. Yet they were property, like chattel or so much hog entrails, these girls, begat with joy sometimes, from power other times. Either way, how could he at the mere suggestion that she, Betty, the one who laid naked gainst the blond hair silken on his chest, whose legs entangled themselves with his arms and calves, have their mother re-enslaved because he, Mayfield, the planter, heard something about a wench close to him aiding troublemakers to make their way north? He’d heard. He’d heard her screams at childbirth. He knew her sighs of pleasure or terrible release from ecstasy. But what he’d heard from some anonymous white man or maybe a niggah was enough to take those same soft hands of hers that pulled the damp hair on his neck late in the night, holding on for a different kind of glory call, those same hands could now be shackled and set back to boiling lye, washing the undergarments of the white lady who thought she was his wife.

It was not right. It was not wrong. It was. Like stars are. There. Like men and women are. No different from rivers or ravines, caves, hills. Betty didn’t care about notions that divided men and women from rocks and fish. It was. She was. Her children were blessings because she had them. She couldn’t watch her offspring with disdain the way she’d seen other women look at their master’s broods. The pain of carrying hatred round in her body, in the hair that flowed down her back, was too ugly to leave any room for her. She had to be because her girls were, because the wind blows and stars decorate the night, sometimes falling into the laps of lovers, the currents of twisting creeks, the moist black of dream, and the song of her mother. Crepe myrtle spread over the grave of the father of her children like her arms and hair use’ta cover them after the act. He never touched her mean then, with the stinginess folks assumed. There was no hate between them. There was a chasm of fate, cowardice, and the inevitability of men and women seeing nothing but one another, smelling nothing but the scent of the other. That’s all Betty understood. It was enough for her to curl neath the flowing crepe myrtle and let the pulse of his breath calm her. He was good for that.

She carefully laid the pictures of their children over the granite carved with the letters of his name, Julius Mayfield, and told him all she could about each child because he would hear from her no more.

I’m still amazed how somebody standing way from me that I never seen before, with his head under some black cloth, bad luck there for sure, makin’ poofs, puffs, whatever, some dusting of the sky with soot, with smoke, with my soul maybe, hope not. Stranger come and we give up hard-earned money to look at pictures of ourselfs. Like mirrors wasn’t enough. Like the reflection of you in my eyes to your eyes wasn’t the Lord letting our insides out into the other. There are ways to remember and put back together whatever it was you want to recollect. Seems to me a laziness come over folks preventin’ them from going deep down to the gut of all they ever been and tellin’ somebody, if somebody want to know.

Don’t know why Julius was so taken with these here whatchu call em, oh, photongraphs, no daguerrographs. Oh, who in the Lord’s world want to know what they callt? All I know is Julius went to Paris, France, as a young man and came back besotted with this newfangled invention. Done built hisself a black room to fiddle around makin’ em, an invited every wandering ’tographer on the road to the house to make more, talkin’ bout they “art” all night long. But I found a path through them black-and-whites thinner than pastry dough, less supple than bark, more costly than lace, I say I found me a way to put some blood life back in the still of my children’s eyes, they limbs caught in the air like dead folks shaped the way a fool wan to remember, with they smiles pained or pushed way past a lie. Oh, yes, Saints be praised, I can read some life into these pictures, make my family come back to life. Only funny thing bout it, they still coming back in black and white, that the only true thing bout em. Black n white. Niggahs n peckawoods. Enough to make me find some dark funny in all this. Can’t get through my children’s eyes. If you can’t make your way through black and white in a heap of entanglement and haints, good and evil, always nearby to help us, or at least me, find my way through what all I done or what done come up with me. No matter.

Whoa! That’s a tellin’ one, this one with all them niggahs and white folks favorin’ one nother. We relatives, but cain’t tell nobody. All them fancy white women—they all cousins or aunts or some kin could be named for sure. The black one to the right in the muslin skirts, that’s my Ma, but she paid for them skirts what was given to her by the white man, yes, the one in the center with authority like he God, he reignin’ over the land. That’s the world of a plantation, Sweet Tamarind, where this was took. My chirren there, too. His chirren, but cain’t tell nobody (like you cain’t tell by lookin’). Anyway, Ma she paid for all them slips and the lace by her wrists with plenty strap marks down her back. Some so raw the cloth stuck to her flesh where it turned inside out from the lash and the weft of the cloth liked to growed into her like she was a new kinda crop they playin’ round with to see what’s more productive. Well, you can see lookin’ at her, lookin’ at me and my young ones, we was sure nough productive. Shame. Shame on a man who is Grandpa and Pa to his own kith n kin. Then goin’ to turn round an ignore em, like she wasn’t his daughter cause she was dark like indigo, like the night quiet ringin’ with sounds of water courtin’ the winds, tree limbs rockin’ niggahs to sleep or shakin’ em wake if they gotta gal to visit fore sun-up. Keep tellin’ myself ain’t no sin in bearin’ no child when there ain’t no choice. And the Good Lord know, I got respect for the living and the dead. Cain’t nobody come sayin’ my babies ain’t gotta right to live. Slave or free, they’s the bounty of God. That makes em worth lovin’ and lookin’ after, whether you, Julius Mayfield, ever come to realize you wasn’t the Almighty or not. My chirren deserved respect cause they alive. How could that be such a hard idea to get to? Even if we was jus’ a pack of hounds. Folks love they dogs. I love my daughters. My ma loved me when she could, fore that witch Master Mayfield callt a wife most beat her to death and left her in her good dress bleedin’ blue and no more a distraction to her than some dust on a table leg. Said she didn’t notice no bleedin’ negress nowhere. Couldn’t recall any colored woman missin’ that mornin’ neither.

That’s what threw my Pa, my lover, over the line, so he finally found some of himself in me and mine. That’s why I saved this here picture of everybody. Cause everybody didn’t last till the next harvest. That’s a sad thing to say. It’s a sad thing for me to remember, but it’s the truth. Buried my ma and took her place for the next white man with black cloth over his head and flashes like bits of God’s wrath come to capture our souls. Pa-lover said wasn’t true, was darkie legend that souls end up in these here pictures. But if that’s so, why am I cryin’ now?

Gotta go on ahead and find myself somethin’ else to do. Get tired visitin’ the way back times, I do. Yet I cain’t get to the nowadays less I go way back. Sides, I done enough for one woman in two or three lives of anybody. I guess I got me a right to set here and look at what I come from and what I beget to this world.

Now look at that stirrin’ young gal! That ain’t no show turkey vaudeville somebody. No. That ain’t nobody’s outside woman, either! That’s me in my calico matchin’ with my girls. Didn’t mean to look over em so at first, just I surprised myself, so good-lookin’ I forgot, anyway all three of those lil beauties is mine. Mayfields to the bone, I say. They all look so different I worry sometimes that a body might not put em all together as one. And that there hurts a woman’s feelin’s. I know. I seen folks peekin’ to check if they all favor Julius Mayfield or not, or even if they favor me! I swear for glory I take for a wonderment a child God’s done let out the heavens. Got no time to be creepin’ bout the Devil’s doorway, seein’ if he been up to mischief or not. Besides, a Mayfield’s a Mayfield however they turn out. Can spot em a mile away if you close to the right circle and got any idea of what blue-bloods is.

Look at how that rose from the sleeve of her dress bring out the red in Elma’s lips, look to be painted but they not. I got me a mind to get me a brush or an embroidery needle so I can show all the colors them dresses bring out in my daughters’ hair, they cheeks, even they eyes take on different kinds of lavender if they wearin’ rose at dusk. There’s always been more to my girls than black n white, else they faces wouldn’t look chiseled like a Ethiop one day and flat like a Cherokee the next. They changin’ constant, sorta how no one day come out jus’ like some other day, but more like one day slips into another with a slower rhythm or a brighter sound to it. I live some muffled days now, when I barely hear anybody even when I listen close. Then I got days I could hear a stranger’s dreams like they was my own. My girls are like that. One day Blanche the whitest niggah wench I ever set eyes on. Next day I find myself callin her “missie,” cause I ain’t sure if she French or Irish or whatever else kinda white done took to these parts. Now, Elma can look tawny, her eyes blue or purple dependin’ on the time of day. And Juliet is a deep bronze with a set of veins all different colors pulsin’, filled up with the spirit of her blood so she look like one of them twirlin’ mirrors at the travelin’ medicine show. But don’t none of that matter cause I getta swellin’ in my heart which is what the ol’ folks say is truly a African heart if I hear any one of my chirren a-callin’ for me. Ma, Mawmaw, Mama, I answer to everythin’. Girls gotta way of callin’ for they mother let you know if they happy, in trouble, in love, or foolin’ with the haints or a wish they done felt crawl from they toes to they mouth and out comes the call for me. Ma, Mawmaw, Mama, and off I go without even turnin’ my head round to see who might be about. Slave or free, my girls got the best of me. If somebody don’t like that they can whup me later, if they dare. And sometimes, one of them evil niggahs or a white trash beyond they station might very well go on ahead and do that very thing. All I got to say is nigh everythin’ close to God can be beat out a soul, but they cain’t whip the Ma outcha. I know that.

I’m just gonna sift through these here pictures a bit longer to see if anything jumps out at me. Jesus knows my body’s a vehicle for the Holy Ghost or any other kind of somethin’ we cain’t actually see but can get right up on ya and change your whole life. I never know what or when some creature from the other side gonna need me to get somewhere or tell somebody somethin’. That’s why I keep those bottles hangin’ round my porch, sometimes I want just a little warnin’ if a body from the other side or a African borned soul needs to speak through me. Hard on a body to be in this world and the next world, goin’ back n forth at a stone’s throw, like I ain’t got enough to do. Oh, I found me somethin’ to be right proud of. Wish time didn’t make sucha brittleness in my bones and these here pictures. Life ain’t like that, not really. Well, got fits and starts, but memories don’t break off at the edges, crack up the middle leavin’ scars where they weren’t none. Pictures sure nough do damage to a body’s recollections, even though I could see how sometimes they help me go back quicker to what’s no more, yet close as breath. So, I guess I’ma do my best to handle em more gentle. Cause this one right here got a big markin’ comin down Blanche’s face, like a knife been took to her. My chirren may have lived some full and dangerous lives, but that you cain’t tell by lookin’. Real seein’ is a art, but like everythin’ else you got to have a gift. This is Blanche with her beloved Roswell Sr. A woman dressed in lace that fine and coiffed just like somethin’ from a New Orleans magazine don’t have no knife scar down her face. Look at my Blanche! Did so well for herself! Though Roswell was a mite older than what I woulda picked, they’s benefits to taking up with a man what’s settled. Got everybody in Charleston respectin’ the ground he walks on. There is somethin’ could be said for that.

Oh my, cain’t hide from the gaze of a sorrow-filled child. It shouldn’t be but it is, my sweet Juliet with that Willie, Willie Chisolm to be exact. He didn’t mean her no harm in the beginning, but the Lord’s got a way of undoin’ deceit. I tried to tell my chile that, but she trusted in guile, not the truth. I know I couldn’ta laid up next to a man so all the time angry with me, hurt and wild with suspicions, while my lil one, Eudora, was there in the next room, never imagining her presence was like a venom nobody took the time to stop from poisoning . . . Oh, Juliet, however could you believe gainst the truth so much, or want the lie to be the truth so much, you’d write “Eudora is Happiness” neath that child’s face. A Ma can set her eyes on only so much pain in her chirren, then comes time to do somethin’ else. Leave em in the Lord’s hands. Ask the ancestors for guidance. Tend to what I got cookin’ in the kitchen. That works most of the time for me. Fussin’ with my pots, turnin’ down the fires.

Betty cupped her hand and swept a fistful of soil from Julius’s grave into her purple satin pouch, tied it closed, and tucked it into her bosom. Then she slowly gathered up the pictures, inspecting them carefully to make sure nothing that didn’t belong in there was there and wrapping the album back up in the cloth. With head held high she gazed at the headstone of Julius Mayfield, for whom she still held both an indignant passion and mightily felt connection. Then off she sauntered toward the shouts of her granddaughter, whom she had left shouting in the first place. Betty shook her head, chuckling about how a body could shout about the same thing with the same words for so long when it didn’t bring an answer. Finally, Betty yelled back, “Heah I’ma comin’. Put your bonnet on. I’ma comin’ to ya now.”

“Good Gracious, Nana! Where on the earth have you been? Don’t you know we’ve got to get a move on or the ferry’ll go right on without us? All this packing I’ve done, all this planning up to this very minute, and off you go without so much as a how-de-do.” Eudora was vexed.

“Well, a body can’t just up and leave without some good-byes here and there. A couple of thanks for years of friendship and such.”

“Grandma, you didn’t have time to go so far as to find a soul. Next folks downstream are more than an hour away, but judging by how you lookin’ right now, maybe you did go crawlin’ through the marsh to say a fare-thee-well to somebody. Don’t know who. Don’t know who’d receive you in a mess of briars and weeds as a bustle. Less you got a beau back up in them woods who don’t know he’s free yet.”

“Young lady, mind your mouth first off. I got rights to go from hither to yon, if that’s my choosin’, and whatever kinda courtship I got goin’ on is more than the one you ain’t got goin’ on anywhere.”

Eudora smarted from her Nana’s words, but pride pulled the pout of her lips back to her teeth, let the red blush fade fast enough for her to regain her composure. “Now, see here, Grandma, we’ve no call to taunt one another today. Why don’t you make yourself presentable again. Then we’ll be off to Charleston.”

Betty pulled some of the red amaranth still tangled in her slips away from her comely but scarred legs. “I was lookin’ just fine, and I wasn’t tauntin’ you. I was simply speakin’ the truth. In the ol-timey days, a gal with your blessed health and keen smile’d be surrounded by young bucks hankering after a wife.”

Eudora was losing her patience. “Nana, the ol-timey days, as you see fit to call them, were slavery days. And those young men, bucks as you choose to call them, weren’t lookin’ for a wife. They were lookin’ for a good breeder. So they’d be more valuable to . . .”

“Julius Mayfield, that’s who.” Betty glanced at Eudora’s frantic attempts to create order, seeing only a mass of confusion. “Can’t bring yourself to say his name, I see. Well, huh, that surely tells me somethin’.”

“And what might that be?” Eudora’s anger was slipping out of her control. Her greatest desire at this moment was to pull her skin off and suck the Mayfield out of herself. Yet the best she could muster was to clamp her teeth like a hound on a niggah.

“You can’t get very far, can’t get nowhere, without takin’ all your self. From the way you soundin’ to me, looks like you plannin’ on leaving your grandpa out of who you are. You telling me you some creature made outta smoke and mirrors? You best check yourself again, gal. If all this talk proves anything, proves you a Mayfield.”

“Nana, please stop. They owned us. They owned us. That’s not a family. It’s . . . like harvestin’ niggahs ’steada rice or cotton. Don’t you see that, Grandma? We’re some by-product of nights when decent white women would have not a thing to do with the likes of Julius Mayfield.”

Before Eudora could get another word out, Betty grabbed a switch, took it to her granddaughter’s cheeks, hands, any visible flesh. Thinkin’ to finally break this girl of disrespect, living in a dream where folks was not folks just cause they allegedly belonged to somebody. Don’t a soul belong to nobody but God. Betty knew that. She just been visitin’ with her gods, her companions, the only family she knew about. The switch landed on Eudora more ferociously, but Eudora wouldn’t give up insultin’ her Nana. “Is this how he loved you, Nana, with the threat of the whip, a fist, being sent downriver? Am I here because you believed love and violence could sleep in the same bed?”

Betty raised the switch up once more. This time to teach this gal a lesson in respect, but somethin’ held her hand back. She almost believed she felt Julius grab her wrist to stop her, sayin’ Enough is enough, my dusky love. Everthin’ the chile says is not untrue. Betty dropped the switch. Her eyes sought out the darkest corners of the room, not Eudora’s eyes waitin’ for her Nana to hold her. Too much’d been said, more razor-thin scars set to swellin’ up. Betty’s anger was spent. Her body seemed to shrivel right in front of Eudora, who reached for her grandma. A gesture of reconciliation, but Betty’d have none of it.

“Don’t touch me, gal! I ain’t got the strength to carry your misery away from what I love. Get yourself lookin’ like somethin’. We can get on our way like you say, but you still takin’ yourself and all this land, whatever come with it is in you, you takin’ that to Charleston, too. All anybody’ll have to do is look at you sideways and know you a Mayfield. You don’t know you a loved one. You the only one don’t know.”

A diffident Eudora disappeared to tend to her wounds. Betty chuckled to herself. That chile don’t even know what a good beatin’ is.

Lijah-Lah handled his canoe like a woman’s body he knew well. The weight of the Mayfield ladies’ goods was a challenge, especially with Eudora all the time fidgeting this way and that, like her looking round would wind her in Charleston’s harbor any sooner than the way folks always go, no faster than the breeze, no slower than the tide allowed. Lijah-Lah knew his waters from the Ashley to the Cooper rivers. His knowledge was formidable. Was born under the light of a different God, folks said. Lijah-Lah came out his mammy praising the Infidel, but not the Devil. The Infidel made his mark on him and gave Lijah-Lah a firm hand on an oar, direction, and a quiet confidence that too many times nearly undid a white wanting to go someplace. Somehow Lijah-Lah could only understand where the whites wanted to go. After that he didn’t respond to anything they went on about. Went back into his mother’s spirit, they whispered, where the tongue of the Infidel had never been silenced, brought to praise the name of the Lord Jesus, Almighty, son of God and Savior of us all. No, Lijah-Lah was one of the last to know the other Holy Book. The one he read five times a day, prayed on and beseeched the souls of his ancestors to show him the true way. Lijah-Lah was, therefore, a man prone to long periods of introspection and meditations; the less he opened his mouth, the longer he would live to find his fate. There were only a few of his kind left, who didn’t eat crab or pig’s meat, who shied away from the jamborees likely to seduce every other river soul. Eudora found him peculiar, but Betty’d ride with no one else. Betty’s reasoning was questionable, but consistent. “I like being in the company of those whose God protects em. Long as the oars in Lijah-Lah’s hands I’ma get wherever I’m fixin’ to be goin’.”

Somehow, Eudora became the one who didn’t speak or listen, least not to Betty and Lijah-Lah. Today, of all days, Eudora was full of voices in her head, smells of the marsh, the blackness of the water. If she could help it, she’d never come back here again so long as she lived. No matter the mystery of the whiteness of the lily pod, or was it truly white with its honey-colored center where its sweetness lay, in the sepia sway of the creek, rippled with shadows of ancient cypress, the surprise of silver moons winding toward the sun. Eudora felt herself part of all this, and that caused the auburn hair on her arms to stand on end. She was only from these islands, not of these patches of sand begging the salt marsh, rivulets, the rills, to let them join.

“Hey now! Hey!” swept through the air like the dance of dragonflies. Mama Sue-Sue ’long with all her kin were waving Betty and Lijah-Lah toward them. Eudora snapped, “Ignore them, just keep rowing.”

“What you want I do, Mah Bette?” Lijah-Lah erased Eudora.

“I say we say good-bye to our neighbor folk, that’s what I say.” Betty almost got the canoe tipsy with her excitement.

“Mah Bette, please, let me get us there,” replied Lijah-Lah. Betty had nothing to say to that. Her eyes, old as they were, wandered the glistening blue of Lijah-Lah’s veins pulling the oars. Betty was enough of a woman to imagine Lijah-Lah pulling her toward him through the night, through sweat and weeping that blessed women are familiar with. Shaking her head, getting Lijah-Lah out of her bones, left Betty with nothing to concentrate on but Eudora, pouting so she competed with the Spanish moss, lips ’most dangling from her face.

“What on earth is on your mind, chile? We all set here to do what you got your heart set on and look at you. You look meaner than dirt.”

“That’s exactly what I’m talkin’ bout, Nana. How’re we going to have a new start if we carry all this back here with us? We don’t have time to visit every soul you know on these islands if we want to get to Charleston at a decent hour. Brother Diggs and Blanche should be happy to see us, not come draggin’ from their beds to greet their vagabond relatives.”

“Speak for yourself, missy. Blanche presented her little blue-veined behind to me in the middle of the night. And she coming out backwards weren’t no delight of mine either. I’m that girl’s mother. The two of you may forget that, but God Almighty and I sure haven’t.”

“We most there, now. Mah Bette, don’t worry yourself.”

“Not me worrying, Lijah-Lah. It’s this gal here thinks she can catch up to her future or outrun the past, I don’t know which. Anyway Charleston’s not going anywhere, and neither is Blanche, bless her poor shallow soul.”

“Don’t talk like that, Nana.”

“Lijah-Lah, do you hear this, now my gran’s gointa tell me I can’t call upon the Lord for one of mine I know needs His help. Ain’t that something?” Betty was amusing herself again with Eudora’s anxiety, her fear of what to do with herself. They were doing just fine, the Lord saw to it. They were breathing. What else that girl want?

Long strokes and a few grits of his teeth, Lijah-Lah brought the overloaded canoe into Sue-Sue’s landing. They made a number of other stops ’long the way to Charleston. Betty greeted her weaver friends, her basket-making sisters, and the woodworkers who’d been kind enough over the years to fill her house with all manner of cypress and walnut furniture. Betty stopped to sanctify the kindness shown to her for so long. No matter what her children looked like, no matter who their pa was.

Eudora imagined herself in Brother Diggs’s grand house in Charleston with Blanche, her aunt, to show her the finer way to live. To know the opera and the ballet that Charleston boasted before any other colonial center. Why, her Aunt Blanche was cultured, had escaped the sin of her birth, she thought. All I have to do is refine my outside qualities and no one will ever know. They’ll never know. Not thinking, Eudora answered Sue-Sue’s daughter, Maribel, in Gullah. She didn’t even hear herself. The part of her that was the islands spoke at will, with ease. Eudora actually smiled every once in a while when they passed a tabby hut she recognized, but she’d never tell her Nana. Nothin’ rushes water but the water alone. Eudora was no fool, simply a girl aching to feel dreams she could hold, that she could touch.

And there was a whole lot of holding of folks and plucking and beating of instruments every time Betty and Lijah-Lah stopped at a half-hidden old place set behind loping magnolia trees dressed in wax myrtle and nestled in circles of spartina and palmetto. The music’d get to going and Betty’d set to dancin’ with young men and old, blue black and ivory, toothy or toothless, limbs whole or withered. The whole of the waterways knew something was up or over. The last of the Mayfield colored women was gettin’ on away from here. The swamp sang ’long with the folk, and Eudora, still as she was, was singing because the choice was no longer hers. It was up to the growing things, the flying and biting creatures, now. Hurricane time come soon enough. Though brooding, Eudora knew she too was a force of nature like all the Mayfields. Time would come when the winds would sing her song.

Lijah-Lah whistled to Max, the oyster man. Max, upon hearing, cocked his head and cooed back smiling to himself, knowing it was his friend Lijah-Lah even before he could see him. Through the darkness he made out three figures. By Gawd, one was Betty Mayfield, whose outline he knew as well as his own hand. So they were the cargo, the Mayfields. Max would be taking the last of the Mayfield clan from Tamarind to Charleston. No wonder Lijah-Lah had not mentioned who or what he wanted Max to carry. Betty Mayfield was leaving Tamarind!

On Emilena, the oyster man’s bateau, the strange mixture of salt water and fresh gave the air Eudora huddled in a depth like a blanket everywhere she moved, stretched, arched her back. Max the oyster man was an industrious fellow, finding a way to make himself a bit more independent any old way he could. Folk talked bout that. Max was a bachelor, one past his prime, so what was he making a legacy for, who was to benefit from all his work beyond what had to be done? Max’d reply in his slow and sly way, never letting on whether he was joshing or no, “Can never tell who’ll be in need, I looks at it this way.” Betty knew Max most of her life and all of his, she wasn’t surprised. If the Yankees could wipe clean the riches of planters, who knew what could disrupt a niggah’s fortune? Best to have more. Wasn’t nothing to be said about having enough.

Betty couldn’t help herself. She started counting, picking out the green growing things she loved and might never see again. You could tell, she thought, almost exactly where you were by the growing things lacing your path, flirting with the tides, murmuring honest “forget-me-nots” to the bateau and her passengers. Betty wanted to share her good-byes with Eudora, but the child had decided to absent herself from her own life’s turning-point, too full of tomorrow to pay homage to yesterday. Betty, missing conversation, decided to let her graying hair down out its braid. When she was through slowly unwinding the heavy mass rarely seen in public, never by menfolk, even Max, who paid women no mind at all, believing they didn’t have any, was hankering to get his thick knobby fingers to running through that fine-looking old gal’s head of hair. What nets he could design with the like of black and white strands Betty shook atop the water so they set the water lilies to dancing, got the wax myrtle giggling, the spartina and star marsh to putting on airs. Azaleas backed up gainst palmetto looking to mask themselves in the face of such wanton abundant growth. All this was goin’ on, Betty smiling, feeling the energy from the river in the pit of her groin.

St. Martin’s Press, September 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-19899-2, ISBN10: 0-312-19899-X,
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches, 576 pages

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There’s not a whole lot happening in Gary, Indiana. That is, until nationally renowned relationship expert Lance Montgomery bursts onto the scene. Twice divorced, Montgomery is now on a mission to perfect the art of being single. His tantalizing book The Playa’s Handbook, is causing quite a stir. His rules include:

• Never give a woman the key to your apartment.
• Playas “have sex”; they don’t “make love.”
• Don’t be afraid not to commit, no matter how hot the sex is.
• A woman can’t use you if you use her first.

One night, while watching a game and drinking beer, three friends, Marcus Lowery, Samuel Gunn, and Phillip McKenna, all admit to having bought Montgomery’s book. Recent divorcés, Phillip and Sam are looking to unleash their hidden playa. And after being a widower for a year, Marcus is ready to cautiously ease back into the dating scene. So they decide to put the rules to the test. . .and end up going on the wildest ride of their lives.

Excerpt:

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304 pages
$7.99
Mass Market (Reprint)
Pub Date: 9/28/10
ISBN: 978-0-312-99955-1

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The Fat Smash Diet is not a gimmick or short-term fix. It is a four-phase diet that starts out with a natural detox phase to clean impurities out of the system. Once this nine-day phase is completed, the next three phases encourage the addition of everyday foods that promote significant weight loss. In just thirty days, most dieters will complete all four phases and be on their way to a thinner lifetime of good health. Best of all, there is no calorie counting, and Dr. Smith guarantees there never will be. As an added bonus, there are over fifty easy-to-cook, tasty recipes that make it easier to stick with Dr. Smith’s plan. The Fat Smash Diet is unlike any other program on the market. In fact, it’s the LAST DIET YOU’LL EVER NEED!

For more information on this book, please visit us.macmillan.com/thefatsmashdiet

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His models are pros and he figures they can handle the pressure, until one drops out and Bentley asks his protégé Jah, a beautiful kid who Bentley treats as if he were his own son, to substitute. Suddenly, the stakes are much higher, particularly when Jah falls in love with the hottest African American movie star in America. Seth Sinclair is very handsome, very famous, and very married—and his closeted gay life makes him very dangerous as well. Can Bentley’s fatherly guidance save Jah from making a fatal mistake?

St. Martin’s Press
304 pages, $24.99
Hardcover
Pub Date: 6/22/2010
ISBN: 978-03-312-94191-0

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Read an Excerpt:
P R O L O G U E
There are a couple of questions I’ve been pondering lately. What is the price of true love? Is it honesty, loyalty, or head-banging sex? What is the cost of success? Is it how much money you make or how much respect you earn? For me, Bentley Laroyce Dean, I found the answers at one of the most lavish parties I’ve ever attended.

I peddle the beautiful life and there is no better place to do that than the city of Miami. So that’s where I’ve been the last three years and that’s where I’ve discovered the answers to my questions. Now before you get the wrong idea, I own a modeling agency that I was trying to make bigger than any of those in New York and Los Angeles. And this party was going to help my agency, but then I met him in that beautiful mansion. That’s when he walked into my life and everything changed.

Like most nights in Miami, it was beautiful. A perfect night for a party and even though I had a few reservations about the event, it was simply just too much money to turn down. This was the one engagement that would send my agency, Picture Perfect, soaring into the stars of Miami.

But sometimes it rains in South Florida and it is surrounded by shark-infested oceans. From the moment I stepped out of my car and handed the valet my keys, bad karma covered me tighter than the expensive suit I’d purchased for the party. Th e sharks, it seems, had come inland that night and ended up on Star Island.

It’s when seemingly simple decisions sometimes have a way of snowballing into huge catastrophes. When life becomes like a bad dream, unfolding slowly.

On that night I learned some clues to my questions, but it’s not
where the daily chronicles of my life begin.

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ALIYA S. KING, a native of East Orange, New Jersey has been writing professionally since 1998 and has written features and music profiles for a bevy of magazines. Keep The Faith, her collaboration with singer Faith Evans, is a New York Times bestselling title.

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Miles, Gus, Elvis, and Sonny have become the best bandits in the business. With more than their fair share of cash, cars, and girls, only the sky is the limit…until a jewelry heist goes from bad to worse. To worst. Now someone’s got to take the fall—or else. Decisions will have to be made—deliberately, ruthlessly, and fast…before life as Miles knows it comes crashing down. For good.

St. Martin’s Paperbacks
208 pages, $7.99
Mass Market
Pub Date: 6/29/10
ISBN: 978-0-312-94971-6

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