Mama squinted at me as she gripped the arms of her wheelchair. She looked all rumpled in her gown, with her black-and-silver hair going in every direction. “Especially not at two in the morning.” “Mama.”She turned her face away from me and stared at the far wall of her bedroom. “We will not be doing this, Darius Hyatt. That man is dead. Let him stay buried.” I sat in the wing chair across from her bed and remembered what Captain James said, about growing up in Eff Leer’s shadow. I’d taken a little teasing about my monster of a grandfather, but it pretty much stopped when I hit six feet tall in eighth grade. What had Mama gone through at school? At church? At home in her neighborhood? I didn’t even want to think about it. “I’m sorry, and I know it’s late.” I studied the back of my knuckles for a few seconds before I caught Mama’s eye and gave it another try. “I’ve tried to find out what I need to know online. There’s hardly anything. And at the library, those years are missing from the newspaper archives.”
