A Murder in Harlem
by G. Miki Hayden
"A Murder in Harlem"
by G. Miki Hayden
Copyright 2011 G. Miki Hayden
Smashwords Edition
All rights reserved
Miriam Obadah waited as her husband Kofi tucked his luggage carrier, display table, and merchandise back into the front hall closet of their 123rd Street apartment. Kofi then sat in his armchair in the living room, where, kneeling painfully, Miriam removed her husband’s shoes for him. Her bones creaked as she rose from the floor. Kofi had spent the day selling African crafts at the nearby Shabazz Harlem Market.
Rather than saying “thank you,” which he never did, Kofi observed that his wife apparently was getting old.
“Yes, husband, we have gotten old together,” she reminded him tartly. She turned to put their dinner on the stove.
“And because you are old, I have sent back home to Ghana for a second wife.” He spoke loudly as if Miriam were deaf in addition to having a touch of arthritis, along with occasional, frightening, bouts of night sweats.
She turned back. Tears of surprise and hurt came to her eyes.
“A new wife will be good for us both,” Kofi observed. “She will take care of the two of us in our old age.”
Kofi’s wife of 35 years curled her lip. She didn’t want to mention right here and now that only men who could afford to do so were able to marry and support second wives.
They brought Nana Mensah home from the airport on the bus, Miriam all the while casting brief, evaluating glances at the new wife. The girl was good-looking, but had been married once before, and was thus considered spoiled goods. Kofi had attended school with the girl’s father, so money Miriam and Kofi might have used for household purposes had gone to the Mensah family to compensate for the loss of their daughter. The plane trip alone had also cost more than eight hundred dollars.
Miriam would have pointed to well-known sights along the way, if she had been familiar with any of them. She only knew the blocks nearest her own home; so, after inquiring about her new co-wife’s comfort in traveling, Miriam sat in an unbroken silence. Kofi, of course, was never prone to speech at all.
For the first month, the girl, Nana, slept every night in her new husband’s bed, of great annoyance to Miriam at the start of the cooler season. She herself remained in the living room on the couch, which made her feel twisted in the morning.
Then, somewhere at the start of the second month, Kofi said the girl slept restlessly, and he asked Miriam back into his bed. The girl took the couch. Still, Miriam didn’t feel completely reconciled with the situation. When she and Kofi had originally married, he had never said he intended to take more wives. After the first number of years, and after their move to the United States, she supposed he wouldn’t. Now he had.
At the 28th Precinct on Eighth Avenue (better known in Harlem as Frederick Douglas Boulevard), detectives Russo and Sheldon had gotten a call to the scene of a homicide on 123rd Street near Marcus Garvey Park. Russo grunted in disgust. “Louses up the precinct stats,” he remarked to his partner. “This puts us one ahead of last year and we have two months left.”
Sheldon shrugged, though Russo always thought his partner, who was black, ought to be more concerned about high crime in a black neighborhood. “Never going to get it to zero,” Sheldon said. “Who’s the killer?” He looked at Russo expectantly.
Unlike on television, half the murders they took charge of were solved by the time they arrived at the scene. Russo and Sheldon would pull up, and some poor jerk was already sitting sullenly in cuffs in a cop car. Murders were like that more often than not. The killer was in too great a shock to try to get away, or his exit was ridiculously faulty.
Russo shook his head. No killer had been apprehended this time. Or, at least if so, Russo hadn’t been told. The two detectives drove to the scene.
Opening the door to two policemen in dark suits was frightening to Miriam. She didn’t know anything about the law, but she knew the feeling in the neighborhood was that the police were not to be trusted. Her husband, Kofi, was at home, but of what use was he? She worried that the men might brutalize the two vulnerable women even with their husband present.
Since Miriam spoke English well, she had to deal with the situation herself. “Yes?” she asked. Her mouth was dry. She was thinking of ways to explain herself and their living arrangement. She understood that having more than one wife was against the law here. And whether the three of them lived in this country legally or illegally, she couldn’t be sure. Kofi liked to keep his business to himself.
“Sorry to bother you, Ma’am,” the black one said. His soft words didn’t offer a shred of comfort to Miriam, however. She had no idea what tricks these men might play. First they speak kindly, then they do some ill deed. She thought with worry of her nest egg under the mattress. “They’ve had some trouble in the building. May we come in?”
This was not a happy moment. Resigned, she stood back without protest and allowed the two policemen to enter the Obadah home. The other two inhabitants of the apartment looked up.
“My husband and our daughter,” Miriam said to the policemen, then wiped away the sweat that had collected in her eyebrows.
“Very nice,” replied the black policeman, looking over Nana in a way that somehow pained Miriam’s sense of propriety.
“Last night, between eight and ten, did you notice anyone strange enter the building? Hear anything unusual?” asked the white policeman.
“No,” answered Miriam without actually bothering to think if she had.
Both policemen looked at the other two occupants of the small living room.
“My husband and daughter don’t speak English,” said Miriam, again without considering. The second the words had escaped her lips she worried that she had given something away. Watch out, she told herself. The less said, the better.
“A man was killed in the apartment right below you,” the white policeman told her. “So please think carefully.”
Miriam did think carefully. Very, very carefully. And what she thought amounted to the memory of seeing Nana smile at the man downstairs and seeing his hungry eyes fasten on the girl as if he would devour her, shoes and all, right on the spot. Men tended to look at Nana that way. And last night between eight and ten by the clock over the sink in the kitchen, neither Nana nor Kofi had been home. Neither one. Both had been missing for at least two hours.
“We heard and saw nothing,” Miriam said first in Twi, the language of the Asante, their people—one of many cultures in their homeland—and then in English. “The three of us were here watching the television.”
“And you didn’t hear any fights or shouts?” the white policeman checked.
“No.” She held him with her eyes and breath. “Was he killed with a gun, perhaps? Though I heard no gunfire.”
The white policeman shook his head while the black policeman watched her closely. “Not a gun, but a knife,” the white policeman said. He waited another moment for her to respond.
“Ah,” said Miriam. “That is bad. Very bad.” An American killer would have used a gun. A killer from Ghana, male or female, might well have used a knife to stab.
“So, no one killed him,” Russo suggested as they took the stairs back down to the victim’s apartment where they'd already done their initial due diligence.
Russo could hear the voices of the crime scene unit techs issuing out into the hallway as they worked—strong male tones along with the down-to-earth accent of a woman who seemed to be holding the reins of the team—though Russo knew she was just a junior.
“We have 48 hours to catch the killer,” Sheldon responded jovially. “They told me so on TV.” The two arrived at the apartment and looked in at George Chang blowing a thin film of black magnetic powder over all the surfaces in the shabby, ancient kitchen. The decedent remained in the bedroom straight ahead, where he had been found.
Russo expressed agreement with the 48-hour rule of thumb. “`Cause if we don’t find the killer within the first 48, we’re assigned to something else,” he concluded.
Saturday. They could interview a few more folks in the building, he supposed—the super.
“You think they didn’t hear anything upstairs?” asked Sheldon. “She seemed nervous.”
“Of course she was nervous. She thought we might be the INS.”
“The daughter is some looker,” Sheldon added.
As if by common agreement, though not a word passed between them, the two continued on down the worn and soiled marble steps to the first floor.
Miriam went and sat in the kitchen. She didn’t want to even see the girl’s face again the rest of today. Whichever one of them might have killed the man downstairs, the girl, Nana, had brought ruin upon all three in the family. Such was a result of Kofi’s actions.
What on earth made Miriam so positive that one of the two had killed the man in 3A? Perhaps she’d gone crazy with her husband’s marriage to another woman. Or perhaps the cause was the change her body was going through at her time of life. The women of the Akan people, from which the Asante were descended, never discussed such strange difficulties. But maybe that was because most women of her tribe had traditionally died before they entered this stage. In Miriam’s mind, she used the English word, menopause, because she couldn’t seem to find a Twi word that fit. Of course, lately, a lot of her native language had vanished from her head. Sometimes she would search for hours for a word she believed she had once known.
Being too old to bear a child was a shameful passage, she felt. Naturally enough her husband had sent for a young wife. Kofi and Miriam had no children. How could he face his own old age without a child?
Another voice in her head, the voice of the genuine Miriam, spoke up. He should have thought of that 30 years ago, the feisty voice argued. But that was a subject Miriam didn’t want to contemplate, either. What if he had taken a second bride years before? And what if they’d never come to this very interesting country?
The girl came into the kitchen. “Shall I make you a cup of tea, Mama?” she asked. The girl had never before called Miriam “Mama.” Miriam shook her head in the negative. “Shall I rub your shoulders to make you comfortable?” the girl suggested.
The girl had never offered such a thing before, either. In Miriam’s eyes this was a sure-fire sign of murderous guilt and made her feel all the more crazy because, could this really be possible?
Miriam stood up from the dining room chair. “I will go out and buy some dinner,” Miriam told Nana.
“I will go with you and carry the packages,” said the girl. This, in fact, she usually did, as Miriam had no better idea of how the girl might pass the hours of the day than to tag along with the older co-wife.
“No,” answered Miriam with great firmness. “Today I will go shopping alone.” And she picked up her purse from the table near the door, put on her jacket which hung on a hook, and—without a single word to her husband in the adjoining room—took herself out. The two of them, she thought, the two of them. They were to blame.
Though she tried to tiptoe down the stairs without arousing any notice, white policemen’s eyes followed her progression on the next flight down.
At the new giant grocery on 116th and Lenox, Miriam with great pleasure wheeled a cart through the aisles. So clean. What a beautiful place. Chicken liver and gizzards would be good for tonight’s dinner.
Adding to the relief of the distraction from her household troubles, she spotted an acquaintance, a woman from a nearby building who sometimes had a word or two to say in passing.
The two women stopped their wire vehicles and stood for an exchange of views on the world and on life in Harlem.
“I’m so sorry to hear about your niece’s beau,” said the neighbor at once in sympathy.
A shock swept straight through Miriam’s whole body. This single sentence—though she wasn’t entirely sure of the meaning of the word `beau’—confirmed the reality of her suspicions. Nana had, indeed, been mixed up with the overmuscled and flirtatious man. That girl, that Nana, had brought scandal to their house without a thought in her head. Everyone on the entire block had noticed something going on.
“She must be very heartbroken today,” added the neighbor. A touch of sympathy shined from her eyes, but curiosity was clearly mixed in her expression, too.
“Yes, she has wept for him,” Miriam agreed. “She was sad. But her involvement with the man was not so very great. She is a tender girl, however, and cried for his family.”
“The two looked very close when I saw them last night…” The woman broke off as if from some finer feeling.
“Girls,” answered Miriam. She hoped to make that single word suffice, but as she spoke it, a great anger flared up inside her at Nana for behaving badly. Miriam herself would be too shamed now to hold her head high outside her apartment. But Miriam would get over it, she decided, and she would make sure Nana redeemed herself in the eyes of West 123rd.
Russo and Sheldon, now heading on foot to Abe’s Fried Fish for some dinner, had talked to several more of the dead man’s neighbors. Even in Harlem where mistrust of the police was a great tradition, some one or two persons could always be found to backbite and tattle. The detectives had the scoop, more or less, on Adam James, who had worked as a limousine driver for the Harlem Car Service—“weddings and proms our specialty.”
“He was a womanizer extraordinaire,” concluded Russo. “A real Don Juan.”
“Cherchez la femme,” quipped Sheldon, only partway in jest. “And then look for her husband.”
“The husband,” agreed Russo. They crossed the street at Malcolm X Boulevard—well, Lenox Avenue, to the area residents. “Nude and stabbed in the back. The husband did it. Duh.”
Miriam stood and cut a big yellow onion into strips for frying. The apartment was quiet. Formerly, the silence would have been contentment itself, but, today, not knowing where the other two were, was slightly unnerving.
She tried to suppress a runaway imagination that led in a couple of disturbing directions at once. Kofi, of course, was a mild man, aside from a streak of typical male grouchiness and resistance to any comments Miriam might make. She could hardly think of him stabbing the larger more muscular male in a fit of rage. But of course maybe she didn’t know her husband at all. His taking Nana as a second wife had blindsided Miriam. And he had never really adequately explained why he had sent for the girl. So, yes, maybe he could have come at the other man with a knife, and, through sheer luck, been able to prevail in a fight.
Miriam paused and checked her knife drawer to see if one of her several implements collected over the years was missing. No, everything was in its place. Yet how awful if the very blade she cut the onion with had just last night been stained with dark red human blood. She nearly flung away the knife and was tempted to throw the onions in the garbage, but the practical habits of 50-some years of behavior prevailed. She refused to allow the thought of blood on the knife to take on a life of its own, and she continued calmly to cut the vegetable. Though when her husband entered the kitchen, she momentarily startled.
“I thought you were out selling this afternoon,” she said. Her eyes watered from the sting of the plant’s strong emanations.
“Not on the day a man in our very building has been killed and we are questioned by the police,” Kofi chided.
Of course he would try to blame her for her very reasonable assumption. But why, really, should he be so upset? “The man was not a relative,” Miriam replied.
“He died beneath our very floorboards.”
“Perhaps you saw him last night as he went in or out of the building, or as you did?” She lent a sympathetic tone to her voice.
“No, no. Why would I have seen him? I don’t even know who the man was.”
Now here was an interesting contradiction, not atypical of her husband. The dead man had lived beneath their feet yet Kofi had no idea who the man was, and still he felt too respectful to go to work to earn money for their needs. That was Kofi logic for you, and not necessarily a sure sign of guilt. Miriam put a great deal of corn oil in the pan and lit the heat low.
“Perhaps you weren’t in the neighborhood last night and have no idea who went in and out of the building,” she speculated.
“I was just outside the building, talking with some men.” He emphasized the word “men,” obviously to show her he’d had important things to do. “I told you that,” he added.
“You may have seen the killer come in or out. Perhaps you and I should go to the police. They might need to question you.”
The oil was sizzling and she tossed in the onions. She had cut them nicely in an even way. In a moment she’d throw in the gizzards and livers.
Finally, his face showed irritation. Now he might talk. “I didn’t see anyone go in or out of the building,” he rebutted. “I stood on the north side of the park under the street light and talked with some men from the Caribbean islands. Sometimes a man cannot stay in a house where women rattle, rattle, prattle.”
She knew that he had meant the comment to sting, and she might easily have retorted to the rattle and prattle charge since she and Nana spoke very little. More to the point, as well, he was the one who had arranged for a second wife. However, she had another focus here. “And those friends of yours would say you were with them to the police, if the police should ask?” If he had killed the man downstairs, of course he would lie to her about his whereabouts.
“I’m not from their culture. I don’t know what they’d say.” He shrugged, defeated, and left the room.
All she could deduce was that, with him standing around outside, he might well have seen Nana and the man, just as their neighbor had. And he would have seen the two being very friendly. Indeed, he might have followed them inside, up the stairs, and… And what? And taken a knife from the man’s kitchen drawer? No, not Kofi. He wouldn’t go into a stranger’s apartment and rifle through the man’s belongings. He would have first come upstairs. And once upstairs he would have settled in his chair and… would have turned on the boxing or some such and fallen asleep. Miriam sighed. Not to mention that if he was in serious trouble today, he would be crying to her with tears of desperation.
“I love fingerprints,” said Sheldon, peering at the computer on the front desk. “I love it when a crime scene yields so many of them.”
“Yes, it’s great,” Russo agreed. “And if we happen to find the killer some other way, these fingerprints might actually do us some good.” Fingerprints were a wonderful thing, but they only worked if the perpetrator’s prints were already on file. The same might be said for that modern miracle of DNA.
“Should we go home tonight and try again tomorrow?” proposed Sheldon in hopeful tones.
Russo shrugged. “You go,” he said. He had begun to prepare the murder book. He didn’t feel right arriving home on time the day they were assigned a new homicide. Something about that didn’t seem respectful to the vic.
Sheldon made a face, acknowledging Russo’s unspoken point. He sat and leaned back in a chair, demonstrating, Russo supposed, his willingness to go the nine yards required.
In the bedroom, Miriam found the red-eyed girl lying on the bed and sniffling into a thick wad of toilet paper. Tight-jawed, the senior wife sat down on the mattress next to the junior. “All right,” she said, “you might as well tell me everything. I’m going to find out sooner or later.” Her heartbeat quickened against her will. She must admit to herself a fear of the unthinkable—that the girl had actually killed the man. In which case, what was Miriam to do? Turn Nana in and get rid of her, while all their family secrets came out in court, and maybe she and Kofi were thrown into jail as well? Not that he didn’t deserve it for how he’d behaved…
Nana sat up and propped her head against the wall. “Thank you, Mama, for lying to the police. I do speak English, you know.”
“Naturally, you speak English,” Miriam said. “So does our husband. But not as well as I, of course.” Everyone in Ghana spoke some degree of English, the official language. That was obvious, but the police wouldn’t know.
“I was in his room when he got killed.” They both spoke Twi for such an intimate conversation.
“Yes, I know,” said Miriam, as if she had been certain from the first. And maybe she had been.
“I was… beneath him on the bed…” Nana’s eyes flickered hesitantly over her older co-wife, as if evaluating Miriam’s ability to deal with this news.
“Yes, yes,” agreed Miriam briskly, even though actually hearing what she suspected was a bit painful. The morality of her household had been breached. She tried to understand just why she cared.
“And the woman came in and was angry,” said Nana. “Very angry.”
“Yes,” said Miriam. With the sudden knowledge that neither her husband nor the girl had actually killed the man downstairs, a great gasp of relief escaped her lips. She was glad.
“She had a knife and she stabbed him twice, very fast,” Nana went on. “I shoved him away before the blood could get on me and jumped up.” Her face wrinkled in disgust. “Then the woman and I just stood there and looked at him. That was all. She went away and I came upstairs. You were in the kitchen weaving your crafts.”
“You didn’t check to see if he was still alive? You didn’t call the emergency number?” Miriam was amazed at the girl’s simple-minded actions.
“No, Mama. I haven’t been told anything about that. And I didn’t want to get in trouble. I didn’t do anything wrong. Our husband is old. He can’t do his job in bed anymore. It’s only natural I should find a man who can. I’m too young to be buried alive in a country with many fine men.” The girl’s eyes lit up at the thought.
So? Kofi wasn’t acting the male goat with his new wife? That was of some mild interest to Miriam, she supposed, and made her feel perhaps more content. Maybe they could look on this foolish girl they had in their home as a daughter.
“Do you know the woman who stabbed the man and killed him?”
“Yes, I know her. I know where she lives across the square,” said Nana, much to Miriam’s surprise. “I watched him go in with her one day.”
Telling Kofi the dinner would be delayed, though he might go ahead and eat alone, Miriam put on her coat and ushered Nana out so they could locate and confront the woman who had killed the downstairs man.
“But, Mama, why can’t we leave well enough alone?” asked Nana plaintively.
“The police are very smart. They will find out quickly what happened there and come and arrest you.”
“Arrest me,” squeaked Nana in indignation.
“Yes. They are smart but not entirely smart. They are men and have their own way of seeing the world. I will handle this—don’t worry.” She didn’t know quite how she would deal with this yet, but something was sure to come to her on the way. “Now don’t say a word. Let me do the talking. You just listen.”
But as they crossed over to 124th Street and walked toward Madison, Miriam couldn’t think of a single thing she might say to the woman who had killed the man. And she wasn’t entirely certain that leaving “well enough alone” wouldn’t be the very best approach, after all.
“This is the place.” Nana pointed out an old building with steps up to the first floor. How would they know which apartment the woman lived in though? Miriam hesitated, but Nana led her down a few steps toward the door below the street. “She lives in the basement.” Now Nana was the one to falter. She licked her lips. “Maybe we could…”
But Miriam had an insistent habit of following situations to their logical conclusion, so she grabbed Nana’s hand and urged her all the way to the lower level. Once at the door, Miriam rang the bell. Her heart thudded, and she wasn’t able to plan how to manage the discussion.
The eyes of the woman who came to the door were as red-rimmed as Nana’s had been earlier. Yes, she had quite obviously been crying.
Seeing Nana and Miriam, she nodded in acknowledgement and motioned them in. “Come and sit in the living room,” she whispered. At first Miriam thought her voice was hoarse from a day of loud sobbing, but when they went into the room ahead, Miriam saw a small boy sleeping on the sofa and understood the quiet tones. The woman indicated her visitors should sit and sat herself, turning a weary face to them.
At the sight of the child, Miriam’s heart slowed to a flutter as if the blood her organ pushed through was a warm flow of honey. Her unformed intentions suddenly formed; she knew where she wanted to go with this.
Russo and Sheldon had just about decided to hang it up for the night when the desk sergeant told them that three women were here for them in the Adam James’ case. “Three women?” Russo repeated. He was puzzled.
He recognized two of the woman who came upstairs—the mother and daughter—but he didn’t know the third. He turned to see Sheldon’s reaction and noticed his partner’s eyes were popping out of his head like a cartoon character’s. Okay, Russo supposed the daughter was something else—well built, you might say.
The detectives’ space at night was pretty quiet, so they got the ladies seated beside their desks. Then, instinctively, all of them looked at the older black woman, though Russo wondered why he, too, waited for her to take charge of the meeting.
“This woman!” The older woman pointed at the pretty black female Russo hadn’t seen before. “She saved my daughter from being murdered. That terrible man downstairs took my innocent daughter into his house. She screamed and screamed.”
The woman spoke emphatically as if imprinting the story on all their minds. And could this be true? Both of the younger women nodded for emphasis. Russo felt his head begin to whirl. One of the two, or both, had killed their vic—and for a reason unknown, but probably a good one.
The older woman looked at him expectantly and Russo nodded. In the meantime, the innocent daughter had her brights on high and was beaming them at Sheldon who seemed to be sucking up the attention as if it were a milkshake.
“He raped her!” the older woman exclaimed in horrified outrage. “And this woman came in and saved my daughter. He would surely have killed her after raping her, don’t you think?”
Russo could feel the force of the woman’s personality willing him to accept what she was handing out, hook, line, and sinker. And he knew his easy acceptance of the story was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. One of the young women had killed Adam James, who maybe had raped the girl—who knew… and then the three, for some reason that suited them each, had concocted this ridiculous story. He had heard better, lots better, many times. But he’d heard it from hardened criminals he wanted to see trapped in tiny cells in Sing Sing for the rest of their lives.
“ Yes, he might have killed her. You never know!” Russo answered gamely. He glanced once again at Sheldon, who was looking all concerned over the savaging of the innocent daughter. Or was Russo too cynical? Maybe that was exactly what had happened, but who would find out without intensively grilling the three for several hours? Russo instinctively looked at his watch. “That’s terrible,” he added.
“You’re so brave.” Sheldon seemed to be talking to the innocent daughter, though the other woman was the one who—allegedly—had wielded the knife.
The daughter smiled and Russo recalled that she didn’t speak English. But she must have a loud and very convincing scream.
The older woman was looking at Russo, her eyes searching his, weighing, weighing, weighing his reaction. He pulled out his notebook and a pen. “Let me get your names and addresses,” he said. “Then we’ll record a statement from each of you.”
The women were gone and Russo all at once had a nightmare, galloping migraine. He never got headaches. “Well?” he finally asked Sheldon. “What do you think?”
Sheldon looked up at the ceiling as if to heaven. “We closed a case?” he asked. “We’ll turn it over to the D.A. with a recommendation to let it alone? A good day’s work?” He shrugged.
Russo twisted his mouth in a way that showed exactly what he thought of the answer. “Murder,” he mused. “Murder is not a good thing.”
“Right,” agreed Sheldon. “And neither is the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for three clueless black women.”
“Not much we can actually prove,” Russo suggested.
“Could turn one of them,” said Sheldon. “The American one—Francine.”
“Yeah, and she’s the one who stabbed the guy…supposedly.”
Tonight Russo felt like a lousy cop, but he was beat and he badly wanted to go home. He wasn’t sure anyway that what they were doing was altogether wrong. The older woman seemed convinced that this was the proper approach to the situation, and she had a special way about her.
Over and over again, driving across the 59th Street Bridge, Russo asked himself: But just what can we prove?
“So that’s it,” Nana said happily as Miriam and she neared their own building, having dropped Francine off at hers. “That ended up pretty well, thanks to you, Mama.”
“Except for the man who was stabbed to death last night. Yes, well.”
Nana turned to address Miriam, causing both of them to halt in front of their stoop. “He shouldn’t have cheated on her,” Nana said in all seriousness. She shook her head gravely. “That was wrong.”
“Not wrong enough to warrant being killed,” Miriam answered. “And one more thing...”
“Yes, Mama, yes.” The girl seemed eager to make amends for whatever she’d done, though Miriam could see she didn’t feel she’d done anything that wasn’t quite justifiable.
“You left the man on the floor to die. Just like that.” That was the part Miriam found inexcusable in a woman she shared her home—and husband—with.
“Oh, Mama, he was dead almost immediately. That knife made a terrible mess of him. His eyes went blank only a second later.” The girl bowed her head as if in repentance.
“And if he hadn’t been dead right away?” Miriam asked.
“I would have come upstairs to find you, Mama. You would have known just what to do. I’m a know-nothing girl, but you can fix everything. Just like you fixed it all tonight.”
The girl was trying to flatter Miriam, and Miriam knew it, or maybe the child was sincere. But what difference did either possibility make? One must not take compliments to heart lest one become a bigger fool than the person doing the praising.
They went inside. Miriam wondered whether Kofi had eaten his dinner. She herself was surprisingly hungry.