“I ought to call the police,” Greg Payne drawled into the telephone receiver in his provincial Detroit accent.
But Aunt Ola shook her head and ducked furtively toward the window, snapping shut the blinds like a fugitive, the phone receiver balanced on her shoulder.
“Be cool now, police might end up being the cause—not the solution—of even more troubles.”
Lia might not have told her parents about what had happened at the Greens’ that afternoon, but by the time she came home, bursting through her own screen door, she was panting and weeping, and her palms, which she’d employed to brace her fall, were scraped and bleeding, and there was no way to conceal the evidence of what had happened from her parents because they were sitting right there in the living room as she rushed inside.
“This
