Free Blanche on the Lam: A Blanche White Mystery by Barbara Neely

Blanche crying because some kids had teased her about being so black.
    “Course they tease you!” Cousin Murphy had told Blanche. She'd leaned over the crouching child as she spoke. Blanchecould still smell her Midnight Blue perfume and see her breasts hanging long and lean from her tall, thin frame.
    “Them kids is just as jealous of you as they can be! That's why they tease you,” Cousin Murphy had told her. “They jealous 'cause you got the night in you. Some people got night in 'em, some got morning, others, like me and your mama, got dusk. But it's only them that's got night can become invisible. People what got night in 'em can step into the dark and poof—disappear! Go any old where they want. Do anything. Ride them stars up there, like as not. Shoot, girl, no wonder them kids teasing you. I'm a grown woman and I'm jealous, too!”
    Cousin Murphy's explanation hadn't stopped kids from calling her Ink Spot and Tar Baby. But Cousin Murphy and Night Girl gave Blanche a sense of herself as special, as wondrous, and as powerful, all because of the part of her so many people despised, a part of her that she'd always known was directly connected to the heart of who she was.
    It was then that she'd become Night Girl, slipping out of the house late at night to roam around her neighborhood unseen. She'd sometimes stop beside an overgrown azalea by a rickety front porch and learn from deep, earnest voices of neighborhood deaths and fights, wages gambled away, about-to-be-imprisoned sons and pregnant daughters, before her mother and her talkative friends had gotten the news. This prior knowledge had convinced Blanche's mother that her child had second sight.
    Everything I was then, I am today. Blanche examined the idea and discovered all of her Night Girl courage and daring still in the safe in the back of her brain and growing more valuable every day. Without even realizing it, she drew on it when she needed to, like at the courthouse. Her break from there might turn out to have been a crazy thing to do, or it might not. In either case, it was the act of a take-charge kind of woman. A Night Girl kind of woman. Too bad she didn't also have the second sight her mother claimed for her. She could use it to make some senseof what Nate had said. She couldn't dismiss it. A black man in America couldn't live to get that old by being a fool. Tomorrow. She'd tackle him then. She yawned, said goodnight to the night, and went up to bed.
    She lay naked on top of the sheets, hoping to attract a bit of the breeze she could hear stirring the pine trees. Despite the coolness of the evening, her high, narrow room was still full of afternoon warmth. She wondered if Taifa and Malik were asleep. She could see their round, plump faces, replicas of their daddy's sloe-eyed Geechee good looks. Did they suspect something was wrong? Kids were so good at feeling out situations.
    She fell into a fitful sleep in which she was chasing a blood-red bus down a long, narrow highway and was in turn being chased by Mumsfield. Trees with prison matron branches reached out for her, but she knew she'd be safe as long as she kept moving.
    “What do you think, Blanche? I trust you, Blanche!” Mumsfield shouted from behind. But she couldn't spare the breath to respond.
    Up ahead, Malik and Taifa beckoned frantically from the back of the bus. She was carrying Mumsfield's automobile tools under her left arm. Instead of her own hair, big, fat gray sausage curls flopped about on her head.

FOUR

    I n the morning, Blanche put on underwear still slightly damp from last night's washing. While she sipped her first cup of tea at the kitchen table, she listened for voices, footsteps, or the sound of water running overhead. Nothing. Ordinarily, she'd have flipped on the radio and twiddled the dial until she found something other than hillbilly music and preaching. Radio—especially late-night radio, when she could pick up stations from California and French-speaking stations