• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

When I awoke in my old room about 9 a.m., I could smell the sausages and coffee. I followed my nose out to the kitchen and found my uncle, fully dressed, sleeves rolled up, sifting flour into an old crockery bowl.

I hardly knew where to begin, how to apologize. After a minute of fumbling for the words, I gave up, lip trembling, willing myself not to bawl like a baby.

Woody put down his wooden spoon and came over to me, hugged me tightly. “You will always be my girl,” he said, and there may even have been a bit of wetness in his eyes.

“But,” I said when I’d brushed away the tears, “you still think I’m foolish to get all up in this murder thing, don’t you?”

“I wish you wouldn’t, Cass. But I can see you’re going to do it anyway. So I have to stand with you.”

The pancakes didn’t disappoint. They were just as delicious as I remembered. Truth was, Woody was a better cook than Ivy, who had help with the household stuff several days a week. But on lazy Sundays or holidays, Uncle Woody would prepare one of his specialties—pancakes, or pepper steak, or his sensational duckling in sweet sauce.

After eating, we sat at the kitchen table over our coffee. Woody lit a cigarette with his beloved old Zippo. “Jack tells me you came to see him.”

“Yeah, I did.” I hoped Klaus hadn’t gone whining to Woody, telling him how rude I’d been, or that I’d stormed out of his office.

“He says some things are coming to light about these two youngsters. Details about the deaths. It’s not nice, Cass.”

“I didn’t think it would be.”

“He says the boy was tortured before they killed him.” Tortured. Jack Klaus was right: That was personal, I thought. “But it looks like they killed the girl right off. The homicide detective thinks she might’ve just walked in on it.”

I swallowed hard, refusing to visualize any of it.

“Cass, doesn’t common sense tell you somebody was trying to get something out of that boy he didn’t want to give up?” he said.

I nodded.

“Must have been a pretty big secret he was keeping.”

“Wilt didn’t keep secrets.”

“You sure about that?”

I hesitated before answering. I was thinking about what Klaus had revealed yesterday—the old relationship between Mia Boone and Dan Zuni. That was a secret, wasn’t it? But I didn’t know whether Wilt was party to it.

Almost as if he was reading my mind, Woody said, “Cass, you were devoted to this boy. But you have to ask yourself some hard questions. You say you knew him so well. But is that really true? What kind of things was he doing when you weren’t with him? Who all was he associated with? What about his friends?”

“His friends were my friends. We all lived together.”

“I don’t mean them. The boy lived in Chicago all his life until he went to school, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Did he get into any kind of trouble while he was away?”

“He never told me about anything like that. Neither did Taylor. They were at school together. I’m sure the police asked him about that.”

“Maybe he had enemies here in the city, people you don’t know about.”

“It’s hard to think of Wilton having enemies.”

“Don’t be childish. Everybody’s got enemies. Young men get up to things they don’t want other people to know about. Especially colored boys in these times.”

“Oh, look, Woody. Wilt was no criminal. His mother and father have money, and they sheltered him all his life. He went to the Lab School and Francis Parker. His dad is Oscar Mobley, one of the biggest, richest lawyers in the city.”

“You don’t have to tell me who Oscar Mobley is, girl. I’m the one can tell you about him. And one thing I’ll tell you is, it’s a good thing he is a smart lawyer, because he was able to get your boy out of trouble with the law.”

“What trouble?”

“Drug trouble. Wilton Mobley was arrested for selling dope to his classmates.”

“Oh.”

“You didn’t know that, did you?”

“No. But so what? Selling a little grass. That’s no big-time crime. I know lots of people who do it.”

“Is that so?”

“I mean, he couldn’t have been a major—Wilton didn’t have a lot of money. His mother slipped