His semilatent prejudices had twisted on him like a snake seizing its own tail. Mabel Edwards. The sweet old black lady. Butterfly Mc-Queen. Miss Jane Pittman. Knitting needles and reading glasses. Big and kind and matronly. Evil could never lurk in so politically correct a form.
"You told me you moved into this house shortly after Anita disappeared. How did a widow from Newark afford it? You told me that your son worked his way through Yale Law School. Sorry, but part-time jobs do not pay that kind of money anymore."
"So?"
He kept the gun trained on her. "You knew Horace wasn't Brenda's father from the beginning, didn't you? Anita was your closest friend. You were still working at the Bradfords' home. You must have known."
She did not back down. "And what if I did?"
"Then you knew Anita ran away. She would have confided in you. And if she had run into a problem at the Holiday Inn, she would have called you, not Horace."
"Could be," Mabel said. "If you're talking hypothetically, I guess this is all possible."
Myron pressed the gun against her forehead, pushing her onto the couch. "Did you kill Anita for the money?"
Mabel smiled. Physically it was that same celestial smile, but now Myron thought he could see at least a hint of the decay looming beneath it. "Hypothetically, Myron, I guess I could have a bunch of motives. Money, yes - fourteen thousand dollars is a lot of money. Or sisterly love - Anita was going to leave Horace brokenhearted, right? She was going to take away the baby girl he thought was his. Maybe she was even going to tell Horace the truth about Brenda's father. And maybe Horace would know that his only sister had helped keep the secret all those years." She glared up at the gun. "Lots of motives, I'll give you that."
"How did you do it, Mabel?"
"Go home, Myron."
Myron lifted the muzzle and poked her forehead with it. Hard. "How?"
"You think I'm scared of you?"
He poked her again with the muzzle. Harder. Then again. "How?"
"What do you mean, how?" She was spitting words now. "It would have been easy, Myron. Anita was a mother. I would have quietly shown her the gun. I would have told her if she didn't do exactly as I said, I would kill her daughter. So Anita, the good mother, would have listened. She would have given her daughter a last hug and told her to wait in the lobby. I would have used a pillow to muffle the shot. Simple, no?"
A fresh flash of rage surged through him. "Then what happened?"
Mabel hesitated. Myron hit her with the gun again.
"I drove Brenda back to her house. Anita had left a note telling Horace she was running away and that Brenda wasn't his child. I tore it up and wrote another."
"So Horace never even knew that Anita had planned on taking Brenda."
"That's right."
"And Brenda never said anything?"
"She was five years old, Myron. She didn't know what was going on. She told her Daddy how I picked her up and took her away from Mommy. But she didn't remember anything about a hotel. At least that's what I thought."
Silence.
"When Anita's body vanished, what did you think happened?"
"I figured that Arthur Bradford had shown up, found her dead, and did what that family always did: threw out the trash."
Another rage flash. "And you found a way to use that. With your son, Terence, and his political career."
Mabel shook her head. "Too dangerous," she said. "You don't want to stir up those Bradford boys with blackmail. I had nothing to do with Terence's career. But truth be told, Arthur was always willing to help Terence. Terence was, after all, his daughter's cousin."
The anger swelled, pressing against his skull. He wanted so much simply to pull the trigger and end this. "So what happened next?"
"Oh, come now, Myron. You know the rest of the story, don't you? Horace started looking for Anita again. After all these years. He had a lead, he said. He thought he could find her. I tried to talk him out of it, but well, love is a funny thing."
"Horace found out about the Holiday Inn," Myron said.
"Yes."
"He spoke to a woman named Caroline Gundeck."
Mabel shrugged. "I never heard the woman's name."
"I just woke Ms. Gundeck out of a sound sleep," Myron said. "Scared her half to death. But she talked to me. Just like she talked to Horace. She was a maid back then,