I grabbed her wrist and led her down the shallow stone steps. “Maybe he’s ninety-three, but he’s not too old to learn how to cope with frustration. Where can we sit where you’ll be comfortable?”

She looked back at the house but finally muttered that there was a coffee shop on Langley where she often stopped for breakfast on her way home from the hospital. We drove over to the Pullman Workers Diner in my Mustang, where the waitresses greeted Rose by name and looked at me with frank curiosity. Rose ordered coffee and blueberry pie. I had a slice of rhubarb to keep her company.

“I don’t even know where to start,” she murmured when we’d been served. “It’s all so wrong. Steve, Harmony, I don’t believe that. But even if he did kill her, Lamont—oh, he and Steve were best friends growing up—Lamont would never have turned him in to the police.”

“Did Harmony live in your neighborhood?”

“She and her family, they were up the street from us, but they went to a Baptist church that Daddy said wasn’t a true church. And they were rich. Mr. Newsome, he was a lawyer. And Harmony’s brother, he went off to law school and became a professor out east someplace. Harmony was in college down in Atlanta. She got involved in the civil rights movement down there, and, when she came home for summer vacations, she talked it up in her church’s youth group. She talked at a lot of the churches in our neighborhood, but not at Daddy’s church, because he thinks women don’t belong speaking up in church, like it says in Saint Paul. And, besides, he doesn’t think church people belong marching on the streets. We belong in the pews.”

She bent over her coffee, stirring it as fiercely as if it were her father, or her own life, she were attacking. “I shouldn’t say this, but I was so jealous of Harmony. She was so pretty. She got to go to a fancy college, Spelman, while I had to scrimp to put together money for nursing school. And, then, the boys were all spellbound by her. When I first heard she was dead, I was glad.”

I reached across the table and pressed her free hand. “You didn’t kill her by being jealous of her, you know.”