FEATHER AND JESUS came inside around six.
“Mail, Daddy,” Feather said when she saw me.
Jesus went to the console TV and grabbed a brown envelope that I’d failed to notice.
“What’s that?” I asked my son.
He shrugged his shoulders and said, “It was on the front step when we got home.”
He dumped the paper envelope on my lap and then went into the kitchen to make ready for dinner.
When I ripped the seam open, a sweet scent escaped. It was a black photo album. The cover was worn and stained, but the pages were all intact. I turned the pages, looking at all the Kodak snapshots neatly held by little paper divots built into the black leaves. Six pictures on each side of each page. Pictures of men, some of women. One woman appeared again and again. Etheline had been beautiful when she was alive.
“Who’s that, Daddy?” Feather leaned against my forearm and pointed, pressing her finger against Etheline’s dress.
“A pretty lady.”
“Uh-huh. She a friend’a yours?”
“L’il bit.”
“Is she gonna go to Knott’s Berry Farm with us?”
“No. She wanted me to look at this picture book and see if there was a picture of Uncle Raymond in it. You remember what Uncle Raymond looked like?”
“He looked funny,” she said, snickering.
She climbed onto my lap and the little yellow dog growled, peeking out from behind the drapes. There were over fifty pages of photographs in the bulging album. Feather made up stories about who the men were and what their relationship was to Etheline.
There were two pictures of Inez with men. She was lovely in those pictures. The thought crossed my mind that I could be with her for just thirty dollars.
“That one look like Uncle Raymond,” Feather said.
It did. A smallish man, not much taller than Etheline, with light eyes and
I studied the album for hours after Feather and Jesus went to bed, until I was pretty sure I knew who the murderer was.
I ENTERED THE DEEP LOT on 101st Street at nine-fifteen the next morning. Mrs. Boughman was sweeping the ground with a straw broom. I hadn’t seen anyone sweep bare earth since I’d left the South. It wasn’t a pleasant memory.
“Good morning, Mr. Rawlins. Cedric went to work this morning,” she said proudly.
“He did? That’s great. He must be feeling better.”
“I’ll tell him that you dropped by when he gets home,” she said. “You know, it’s funny. When you left the other day, he asked me who you were.”
“Yeah. I know. How are you, Mrs. Boughman?” I asked in a tone that was less than concerned.
“Fine.”
“You know I got a gift and a warning yesterday afternoon.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Rawlins.”
“One of the deacons from that department store you call a church dropped off an envelope at my doorstep. He left it because I asked for it. But the fact that he left it at my door meant that he knew where I lived; that was the threat.”
The elder Boughman shook her head as if nothing I said made sense.
“It was a photograph album,” I continued. “A woman named Etheline Teaman had put it together. It was full of snapshots of her and her friends. All the men she ever knew. All of ’em except for two.”
If Celia Boughman were thirty feet tall, she would have spun my head like a noisemaker and left my decapitated body to run around that yard bumping up against her leg.
“Missin’ is Medgar Winters and Cedric Boughman.”
“Cedric,” she said, with odd emphasis.
“She called you, didn’t she?”
“Who?”
“Etheline. She called you and left a message for Cedric. Or maybe she saw you at church Sunday last, and said something, a little too much. Maybe about wanting to see Cedric. Maybe about taking him on a vacation to Richmond. Whatever it was, you weren’t gonna lose your deacon son and he wasn’t gonna lose his soul to a whore.”
It was when Celia Boughman’s mouth fell open that I was sure of my logic.
“You stabbed her through the heart and took the evidence that your son had been so close to her,” I said. “And then when you couldn’t take it anymore, you brought the picture album and probably a stack of letters to Reverend
