“Covina isn’t Riverside. Maybe they traced Marian through her dead sister who lived in Riverside for years.”

“Maybe they found out where Norman was.”

Thelma’s face went a ghastly gray, and she nodded. “They found out where Norman was, and they waited for Marian to show up, and they followed her home.”

“That’s why we haven’t seen Popeye. They found out where Max was. That’s what they wanted.”

She reached in her desk drawer and took out her purse. “I’m going out to Riverside to get her, to take her to my place. You want to close up, and come with me?”

“No. I have to telephone Terrence and apologize for having a hissy fit.”

Oh yes, I now knew what that was. Roiling with self-recrimination, kicking myself for how I had gotten everything wrong, I called the Challenger but I could not get through to Terrence. I called so often even the paper’s operator lost patience with me, declaring that she had given him the message and would I please quit calling. The Challenger was beset with important calls. I wanted to say, hey, my call is important, but I didn’t. I canceled my appointments for the rest of the day and waited for Terrence to phone.

When finally he did, late that afternoon, I could hear all the noise of the newsroom in the background and I knew he couldn’t really talk. It was a short conversation. Even though I apologized at tearful length, I did not whine or ask when he was coming home. Terrence said I shouldn’t worry about a little spat. He had to go.

“All right,” I said, “I love you.”

He said he loved me too, but his voice was neither rich with emotion, nor urgent with lust. Wistful, maybe.

Chapter Thirty-two

Terrence Dexter was a returning hero. A photograph of Terrence and Mr. Branch ran two columns across the pages of the Challenger, along with a long, eloquent thought-piece about what the bus boycott had achieved, even though no immediate victory was in sight. The president of the LA chapter of the NAACP came to thank him personally; that photograph too was splashed across the front page, with an article about the boycott and its political and social significance written by none other than C. Vann Woodward, a famous historian. A two-column photo accompanied the Challenger piece about Jefferson High School students honoring him with a certificate of merit, and pastors of a dozen churches extolled him from their pulpits and in print. He recorded many radio interviews with those stations that played black music, talking about the appeals going through the courts, about the people still walking to work, the necessity of the Shoe Drive, the moral and civic strength of the Montgomery Improvement Association and their commitment to change. The major LA dailies, the Times and the Herald-Examiner, interviewed Terrence.