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Flirting no longer, she let her anger flare. “What the hell is that s’posed to mean?”

She clutched her faux red alligator purse to her bosom. I was pretty sure that she had a gun in there.

“Don’t shoot me, honey. I am not your enemy. You know if I was, Mara would have never put us together.”

“Why are you lookin’ for me?”

“I’m not. I’m looking for the woman that I think might be your daughter.”

“Twyla?” The strain on her vocal cords might have ruined her voice for a week. “Who the fuck is it lookin’ for her?”

Instead of answering directly, I said, “If my instincts aren’t too rusty, I’d bet that you have a bottle of good port wine on a kitchen shelf.”

The singer’s murderous gaze turned, once more, to a schoolgirl’s grin.

“Madeira,” she said as an act of submission.

“All right, then. Offer me a drink and I think we could talk.”

The house was of an oddly organized design. At first glance, it looked to be normal. A one-story wood-frame boxlike structure that had a lawn with an apple tree that had seen maybe thirty years from sapling through maturity. But the front door was on the far right side next to two picture windows that spanned from gutter drains to garden. The roof, lined with dark lemon tar-paper shingles, was almost flat, and the corners of the American chalet curved outward at a forty-five-degree angle, as if this was some kind of plant that had been stunted by lack of water, sunlight, or nutrition in the soil.

The front door opened onto an open-ended foyer with a sitting room on the left and a dinette straight ahead. I followed my mercurial host past the eating room into a kitchen, where she located a fancy wine bottle in a cabinet over the sink.

It was a bottle of Madeira that had a label claiming that it had been forty-some years in the making.

She handed me the bottle and rummaged around another shelf, searching for the right glasses.

Back in the dinette we sat across from each other at a table made to accommodate four.

I poured. She sipped and then I did.

“Why are you looking for Twyla?”

“Because my grandmother met a man who claimed to be Twyla’s grandfather. He has cancer and may be dying and wants to talk to her if she will. He also wanted me to tell her that Mara Macintosh is not her natural mother but that he was still her blood.”

“Arman is dying?”

“He has cancer,” I offered. “But… so does my grandmother and I’d never bet against her survival.”

The pain on Aurilia’s face was like an echo of the complex tastes of the Portuguese wine, by turns sweet memory, bitter acceptance, and submission to a fate predicted long ago.

As if trying to throw off the yoke of her pain, she said, “You know I really did have a gun in my purse.”

“Yeah. I saw you put it in your pocket when you were climbin’ out the car.”

“Who told you about me?” she asked.

It took me a moment to settle down, as I was both disturbed and engaged over the notion that the beautiful and talented woman of a certain age sitting across the table was willing, if not wanting, to take my life.

“That’s a tricky question,” I said, hoping to involve her in a conversation that would lead to some kind of acceptable resolution.

“Tricky how?”

“Well, you see, at first I didn’t know the name Aurilia Fox—never heard of you before tonight. But, hearing you, the first thought I had was Why would a jazz singer of such obvious quality be in some underground club without any fanfare whatsoever? I mean, your name wasn’t even on the sign out front.”

“I don’t need no smoke up this ass, Mr. Oliver. Miss Mara wanted me to talk to you. She didn’t say why.”

“Her reason was that I wanted to talk to Twyla.”