Four and Twenty Blackbirds (Eden Moore 1)

"Your dumbass friend said you talked to the gunman for a minute. He said he thought maybe you knew him somehow. Tell me, then, was it Malachi?"

"Yeah. It was him. "

"What did you say to him?" she asked, closing the door behind her and shutting us both outside. "What did he say to you?"

So this was it—just me and her. I didn't get Dave for backup, and neither did she. All shields down. Unless I wanted to waste more of the night with the nervous shakes, I'd have to fire the first shot. "I don't see why I should tell you. You never tell me anything. "

She held me in her gaze like a frogsticker with a flashlight. The challenge had been delivered. I couldn't tell if she was annoyed or impressed. She's hard to read. "What you want to know?"

Might as well start with the big one. "Who's my father?"

At least she wasn't surprised. She must have been expecting it for years. "Don't know. We didn't even know Leslie was pregnant when Momma sent her into that place. "

"You must have known she was seeing somebody. She was your baby sister. You must have known there was someone up her skirt. Damn, Lulu, she must have been a couple of months along when you sent her in—the newspaper said she was only there for six. Come on, who was it?"

If she was surprised that I'd gotten hold of the old clippings, she didn't show it. "I told you. I don't know. "

"Was it Avery?"

"No. " The word flew out of her mouth without hesitation. "It wasn't him. "

"Then who was he? Why does Malachi think I've got something to do with him?"

"Because he's crazy. He's crazy and he doesn't know shit. "

"Now you're lying. "

"Don't you call me a liar. "

"Then you tell me the truth. "

"Okay, the truth is it doesn't matter about Avery. He's been dead generations before you were born. And the rest of what I said was the truth. Malachi's a crazy little fuck stick to think you're Avery come back, and that's all there is to it. "

"Then what harm would it be to tell me about Avery if it really don't matter? Maybe the police will let me talk to Malachi, and he'll fill me in," I bluffed.

"You won't really do that," she said, but I could tell she wasn't so sure. Her hand reached for the porch rail and her lips tightened. She was holding something back.

"Maybe I will, and maybe I won't. But I tell you what—I might. "

Lulu was torn. She walked away from the door and sat down heavily in the wooden porch swing. The chains squealed reluctantly, rhythmically, as she rocked on her heels and the swing began to sway. She didn't look at me for a few seconds, maybe a minute or more. She was working something out, deciding how much to give up and how much to keep. Every sentence was a trade-off, and I wished to God I knew what she was playing to keep. But when she raised h

er eyes to me I knew she was giving up the round . . . at least as much as Lulu ever gives anything up. At least I'd gotten her into a mood where she was more willing to talk, and that was something new.

"Okay, then," she breathed. "You're right. Sit down beside me. You've not had a bedtime story in longer than I could say. "

IV

"What year did they fight part of the Civil War here in the valley? What year was the Battle Above the Clouds, like old white people like to call it—you know, when they fought on Lookout Mountain? When was that?"

"I don't know," I admitted, joining her on the porch swing and kicking it into back-and-forth motion with the back of my heel.

Lulu dropped one of her toes and pressed it against the ground, slowing the sway but not stopping it altogether. "I don't know either," she said. "So I don't know exactly when this started, then. We'll say 1860-something. That's close enough. My great-great-grandmother was a house nigger named Lissie. She worked for the Porter family, who had a big house at the foot of Lookout—not too far from the thick of the fighting. The Porters had fled down into the valley when the shooting started, but they wanted some of their things from the house if they could save them, so they sent Lissie and her brother out after them.

"When they got there they found the place wasn't too bad off, so they started gathering up some of what had been left behind. Then Lissie heard someone calling for help out back. A shot-up Northern soldier had gotten separated from his fellows. He wasn't dying yet, but he wasn't in good shape either, and as regular as this city changed hands in those days, his position wasn't exactly secure. As the story goes, Lissie and her brother took him inside and hid him in the basement. Her brother took what he could carry and went back to the Porters, telling them his sister had been taken off by the Yankees—and let me tell you, they would have believed those Yankees were capable of almost anything, so they didn't try very hard to disbelieve him. Lissie stayed in the basement and nursed the soldier back to health enough to make it back to camp a few days later. When the war was over, his unit went back up North, and when the family got back home, Lissie was pregnant.

"She told the Porters she'd been raped by those damned dirty Yankee soldiers, and they felt sorry enough that they took pretty good care of her, by all accounts. She gave birth to a little boy, and she named him Avery.

"Maybe five or ten years later, the soldier came back looking for her, wanting to thank Lissie for saving his life. When he learned about Avery, he tried to be distantly helpful. He wasn't willing to have any contact with his half-breed son lest his wife find out, but he felt guilty enough to throw money at him. Some years later, the soldier—I guess I should mention his name was Harvey—maybe Lissie was trying to halfway name his son after him, the names do sound alike, don't they? Anyway, Harvey got divorced and then married again, to a much younger woman. She bore him two children. The younger one was a girl born around the turn of the century, and that's old Tatie Eliza, who you've met.