After Vera heard that, she walked out the front door to see uniformed and suited men ambling through Miss Waters’s bungalow. She watched for a time. Then she friended up a man unscrewing the hinges of Miss Waters’s screen door. He worked for the County Medical Examiner’s Office. After their chat, Vera sneaked under the tape around the back yard, looked for a window, and listened in on men dusting jams and sills. That night, she sat on the porch the police claimed Miss Waters had charged across. She tried to see what this lady saw. She stood where officers saw this lady. She remembered Miss Waters’s metal cane, the silvery stick she needed to walk.

We call for help and we get killed. A few days after the shooting, the rally whooped and umphed down the boulevard near Vera’s aunt’s house. Vera didn’t join. She was sidelined by fascination, caught up for the first time ever with something not herself. It was the only relief she’d gotten since her dancing career evaporated.

What really happened to Nola Waters? How could it? Maybe even: why?

Vera called the county medical examiner. She left message after message. Finally, the Examiner’s assistant got back to Vera, after a grand jury exonerated the cops.

The assistant told Vera it came down to the screen and the cane. He said when they autopsied Nola Waters they found pieces of the screen in her chest. The bullets pushed the screen bits into her. The screen door was between her and the bullets. That meant Nola Waters was behind her screen door when police shot her. She may have charged across the porch before they shot her. But at the moment they shot her, she was in her house. That wasn’t conjecture. The police had lied when they said she was charging across the porch at the moment they fired.