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say you have a history of breaking and entering. If you think I’m going to be moved by some sentimental crap about your mystical connection with Cupcake, you underestimate my intelligence. Unless you have a credible explanation for what happened—other than ‘she was already dead when I walked in on her’—I’m out of here and you’re on your own.”
    Her head raised, and I could feel anger in the eyes behind the sunshades. But she must have heard reality in what I’d said, because she sighed and pushed her sandwich aside as if she were clearing the deck to get down to business.
    “I’ve known Cupcake Trillin practically all my life. We lived in a little parish in Louisiana where half the population is below the poverty line. Women marry in their teens, have a passel of babies by the time they’re twenty, fry up fish their men catch in the bayous, grow old fast from worry and work. Men, especially black men, work in sugarcane fields the same way Appalachian men work in coal mines. It’s what their fathers and grandfathers have always done, and unless they’re extra smart or extra talented, it’s what they’ll do, too.”
    Her voice trembled, and she took a sip of coffee.
    “I make it sound as if it was all grim, but I have good memories, too. Like the man who came to our back door twice a week selling fresh fish from an ice-filled box on the back of his truck. He sold shrimp, too, right off the boats. At certain times of the year, he had crawfish, and my folks would order fifty pounds and have a party. They boiled the crawfish in huge pots with lots of cayenne pepper thrown in to make the crayfish spit out the sand. All their friends would gather in the backyard, and we’d suck meat from crawfish tails and drink cold beer.”
    I made a get-on-with-it motion, and her pale skin flushed pink.
    “Cupcake and I were the odd ones in our families. We didn’t fit in, didn’t want the same things they wanted for us. It was the same way in school. We were smarter than most everybody else, including the teachers. And we laughed at things the other kids thought were holy and important. Nobody else wanted us, so we sort of drifted together.”
    “You were friends?”
    “More than friends.”
    “Lovers?”
    That faint blush again. “We weren’t like that. We just sort of dared each other to go beyond what the world expected and then supported each other while we did it.”
    She let a beat go by as if she were watching images float by inside her head.
    She said, “I would have followed the devil himself if he’d offered me a chance to get out of that little town.” She stopped and flashed an ironic smile. “Perhaps I did.”
    I looked at the eyeball-sized emerald on her hand and thought that the devil was certainly generous.
    She said, “Cupcake escaped because he was an outstanding athlete. I escaped by leaving my family and everything I knew, and I’ve never been back.”
    “You just left? Just like that?”
    Her lips tightened. “Sorry. The truth doesn’t come easily. I’ve lied so much about my family I’ve almost come to believe my own lies. My official bio says I was orphaned in a little village in Switzerland when my parents were killed in an avalanche, but a kind couple adopted me and brought me to the United States. Minnesota, to be exact. I say I grew up on a remote farm and that my adoptive parents home-schooled me until I was eighteen and then I left home with their blessings. The truth is I was born in Louisiana on the fork of the Mississippi River to a couple who never went beyond grade school and had about six teeth between them. My white-trash uncle molested me from the time I was six. I killed him when I was sixteen. Shot him through the head with a double-barreled shotgun my father used for killing rattlesnakes. Then I took off. Worked as a maid for a while, turned some tricks, and then got discovered by a modeling agency.”
    Her voice had the gritty underpinning of harsh truth.
    I