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she’d found her man and had been betrayed; and for herself, though why, she wasn’t sure. Maybe because sooner or later she was going to have to give up something. But not Darryl. Uh-uh. She wasn’t that stupid.
    His voice grew soft and monotonous when he spoke of Raisa, and he tended to look away from Talba. His way of dealing with the pain. It made her nervous, seemed to under score her inadequacy. She was glad when he changed the subject.
    Wrapping himself around a meatball, he said suddenly, “How’s your own little problem coming? You thought about that any more?”
    She knew what he meant and it wasn’t her feelings about Babalu or even Raisa, for that matter. It was something so repellent she didn’t want to think about it—largely because it loomed so huge in her life it made her feel tired. Feel like tucking her head away like a turtle, a favorite pastime of hers in times of stress. Yet it nagged and gnawed at her. It was this: long after he left her mother, her father had been murdered. When she got her PI license, she made up her mind to solve the case. This was her unfinished business.
    And she really didn’t intend to give up on it. But she hadn’t even started.
    She just shook her head, smiling, willing him not to press it.
    He said, “Come on. Let’s go to my house.”
    “What about tomorrow?”
    “I’ll take you home—we’ll get up early. But you know what you ought to do? You ought to leave some clothes at my house, so you can dress there and go straight to work when you need to.”
    “Woo. I thought you’d never ask.” She snuggled up to him.
    “I didn’t think I needed to. For heaven’s sake, baby—you know I want you there.”
    But the simple fact was that he didn’t often take her home with him on a school night. Once there, she stayed—he lived across the river, at Algiers Point, and it made no sense to drive back and forth over the bridge.
    He had a wonderful house in a quiet neighborhood, a Victorian cottage that he’d fixed up in manly but comfortable fashion. Her favorite part was the living room seating area, consisting of two brick-colored sofas on which to recline and drink wine and talk into the night. When they were settled there, he brought up the subject again—her unfinished business with the universe.
    It was strange, she thought. Why was he doing it?
    “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ve got Raisa Sunday, but I’ll take you car shopping Saturday if you’ll start working on it.”
    “Why?” she asked. “Why do you care?”
    “Because you haven’t written a poem about it. That’s a really bad sign.”
    It was. It meant she was turtling out on it. Well, she had the next day off. It was Wednesday, but since she’d worked the surveillance the weekend before, (and also finished the report on the redhead), Eddie’d given her a mental health day. She could start in about eight hours, if she had the nerve.
    She woke up thinking about it, about what she could do to pursue it, and it came to her that it might be easy, that she knew someone who might even know the answer—who could certainly point her in the right direction.
    He was the retired minister of First Bethlehem Baptist, the church Miz Clara still went to, that Talba had been taken to every Sunday of her life as a child. She’d become reacquainted with him recently (on another case), and something he’d said to her then, something she hadn’t understood at the time, made her think of him.
    He’d told her that he’d seen her father in church after he left the family. Had he come back with his woman? If so, the old man might know her name; Talba could track him through her.
    The minister’s name was the Reverend Clarence Scruggs, and he’d been a terror in his day, petrifying her and the other kids Sunday after Sunday with shouted threats of “eternal damnation in the blazing flames of hell.” Sometimes she had to sleep with the light on after one of his sermons. He was probably the reason she