The colored folks wouldn’t stop talking about the murders. Nobody could figure out why Odell had been in the house that night in the first place. One neighbor suggested that Yvonne and Milton had fought over money, Odell had intervened, and got stabbed by accident. A few speculated that Milton had suspected Odell was after Yvonne and Milton had stabbed him in a jealous rage. Then Milton must have done or said something to provoke Yvonne and she’d battered his head with the hammer. He’d overpowered her, got control of the hammer, and killed her with it before he died from his injuries. “Joyce, you the best thing that ever happened to Odell, so he didn’t have no reason to lust after Yvonne,” another neighbor said. That almost made me throw up again. The only woman Odell had been fooling around with—that I knew of—had been Betty Jean. The same neighbor came up with the notion that Odell might have been there to commit a robbery. Everybody knew that all the bootleggers kept their profits somewhere on their property. But Odell robbing somebody was ridiculous. He already had more money than he could spend. The stories got more and more outlandish. The bottom line was, nobody knew what really happened.

One theory I had was that Odell had killed Yvonne and Milton because he’d found out they’d brought me to the restaurant while he was there with Betty Jean. That theory didn’t stay on my mind long. If that had been the case, how come he hadn’t mentioned it before he died? And he seemed genuinely surprised when I told him I’d seen him with Betty Jean. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t figure out any other reasons why Odell would want to kill Yvonne and Milton. Random thoughts kept entering my mind. Had he said or done something they didn’t like that was so offensive it had set them off? As flimsy as that was, it was a possibility. Another random thought entered my mind. Maybe they had tried to make him pay them off so they wouldn’t tell me about Betty Jean. I dismissed blackmail right away. Even though they had criminal backgrounds, those two had been too stupid to commit a crime as sophisticated as blackmail. If they had tried, I knew Odell wouldn’t have paid them a plugged nickel. I was convinced that we’d never know what really happened.