I Was Paid to Pretend to Be His Granddaughter — Then His Final Wish Shocked His Family
My mother, who had come in from her second shift and stood in the doorway for the last minute of the tape without my noticing, came and sat down across from me and put both her hands over mine.
“That woman,” she said, “hired you to be the alibi.”
“Yes.”
“And he knew.”
“He knew by the second Sunday, Mama.”
“And he kept you anyway.”
“He said he didn’t want me to stop coming.”
My mother, who does not cry, because she does not have the time, cried at her own kitchen table for a man she had never met.
“Then you find that girl,” she said. “You find her tomorrow.”
Kiara Booker was not hard to find.
She was twenty-five, a dental hygienist in the next county, and she had not changed her number, because — she told me later — some part of her had never stopped waiting for a call from Alder Street that never came.
I called from the porch.
I don’t know why.
