The Mortician of Black Wall Street

• Chapter 1: The Measure of a Man
• Chapter 2: Parlor Whispers
• Chapter 3: Greenwood Avenue
• Chapter 4: The Embalmer’s Knife
• Chapter 5: Traces of Bitter Almond
• Chapter 6: Red Dirt and Black Gold
• Chapter 7: The Ledger’s Secret
• Chapter 8: Shadows on Standpipe Hill
• Chapter 9: The Widow’s Veil
• Chapter 10: Bloodline and Deed
• Chapter 11: An Uneasy Sabbath
• Chapter 12: The Messenger from Brady Heights
• Chapter 13: Arsenic and Ivory
• Chapter 14: Rumors on the Tracks
• Chapter 15: The Eleventh Hour
• Chapter 16: The Spark in the Courthouse
• Chapter 17: Gathering Storm
• Chapter 18: The Night of Broken Glass
• Chapter 19: A Final Confession
• Chapter 20: Sky on Fire
• Chapter 21: Flight Through the Alleys
• Chapter 22: The Burning Parlor
• Chapter 23: The Hidden Safe
• Chapter 24: Surviving the Dawn
• Chapter 25: Ashes and Reckoning
• Chapter 26: The Ledger Preserved

The dead do not fidget, which made them considerably easier to deal with than the living, but they still required an immense amount of tailoring.

Mattie Crawford drew a taut yellow tape measure across the broad expanse of cold, dark wool. Six feet and two inches of prime Oklahoma clay, dressed in a charcoal three-piece suit cut from cloth that had traveled all the way from Chicago. Beneath the wool lay the shell of Charles P. Campbell, late director of the Greenwood Mercantile Trust, owner of three dry-goods stores, and a man whose signature on a promissory note had carried more weight than gold dust anywhere north of the Frisco railway tracks. Now he was horizontal upon a porcelain-topped preparatory table, and the only business left to him was looking presentable enough for a choir to sing over him on Sunday.

"He's sinking in the shoulders, Mattie," said Silas, wiping his hands on an oilskin apron. Silas was sixty, with skin the shade of roasted chicory and joints that cracked whenever the weather turned damp. He had buried two generations of Creek Nation freedmen and oil boomtowners before Mattie ever laid a hand to an arterial pump, but he still deferred to her eye. "Likely need a bit more tow on the left side to level him out with the silk lining."

"He isn't sinking, Silas. His tailor simply cut the shoulder pads crooked to disguise a childhood hunting tumble," Mattie replied without looking up, her voice steady and crisp against the faint drip of the washbasin. "Give a tailor twenty dollars and he'll hide an uneven spine. Give me an hour and I'll do it for nothing more than professional pride."

She jotted down the measurements in a small, calfskin ledger kept tucked into the pocket of her split-skirt working gown. Mattie was thirty-one, widowed by an overseas mustard-gas shell two years back, and in possession of an embalming license issued by the State of Oklahoma that had her legal initials—M. E. Crawford—printed without an indication of her sex, a small clerical oversight she had never seen fit to correct. The white licensing inspector in Oklahoma City had assumed the initials stood for Marcus or Matthew. She had not felt compelled to disabuse the state government of its assumptions, so long as the framed certificate hung square on the wall of Crawford & Son Funeral Home. The "Son" on the brass plaque out front had belonged to her father, who had been resting beneath the sod out at Oaklawn Cemetery since the bitter winter of nineteen-sixteen.

The late afternoon sun was slanting through the frosted glass transom above the alley door, cutting ribbons of amber through the pungent aroma of cavity fluid, carbolic acid, and lavender water. Greenwood Avenue was alive on the other side of the brick walls. Outside, the world hummed with the vitality of late May: the tinny rattle of a Model T Ford backfiring near Archer Street, the high trill of a cornet being warmed up in the second-story rooms of the Dreamland Theatre, and the ceaseless, rhythmic chatter of men who carried crisp banknotes in the pockets of their silk shirts.

People called this corner of the world Negro Wall Street, and they said it with chests puffed out and hats tilted back. If a man had ambition, two working hands, and could stomach the heat of the Osage Hills, he came to Tulsa. Money flowed up from the oil pools like sweet sap, washing through the red dirt until even a shoeshine boy had a nickel to spare on a lime phosphate at Williams Confectionery.

Yet Charles Campbell had managed to die with his shoes clean.

Mattie stepped around the table, the heels of her practical leather oxfords clicking against the clean concrete floor. She reached out and lifted the deceased banker’s right hand. It was a well-tended hand, broad-palmed, with the nails trimmed short and buffed smooth. He had spent forty years counting other men’s collateral, not swinging sledgehammers on the Midland Valley line.

"Silas," she said, her fingers lingering on the wrist. "Did Doc Jackson bring the certificate with the delivery?"

The old man ceased his scouring of a brass trocar and pointed a thumb toward the zinc counter by the chemical cabinet. "Set it under the paperweight, Miss Mattie. Heart failure, same as always when an old bull falls in his own pasture. Doc said Campbell took a turn after supper last night, fell straight into his wife’s azalea bed, and never took another breath."

"Heart failure," Mattie murmured. It was the physician’s favorite wastebasket of a phrase. Every heart failed eventually; the trick was knowing what had convinced it to stop.

She peered closely at the fingernails. Under the bright glare of the overhead electric lamp, the pale crescents of Campbell’s nail beds showed a faint, mottled duskiness, not the uniform gray-white typical of an ischemic collapse. She leaned closer, her nose twitching against the sharp, chemical tang of the prep room. There was the familiar bite of formaldehyde, the dry musk of tobacco leaf embedded in the man’s lapels, and something else—a faint, oily sweetness that hovered on the tongue like stale almond paste, thin as a spider's thread and entirely out of place.

"Did Mrs. Campbell say what he ate for supper?" Mattie asked.

"Ham, I reckon. Greens. Whatever a man with thirty thousand dollars in the vault eats on a Thursday," Silas grunted, tossing a damp rag into the tin bucket. "She wasn't doing much talking. Just sitting in that front parlor of theirs up on Detroit Avenue, stiff as an iron stove, clutching her Bible like somebody was aiming to pry it out of her fingers. Young Everett had to sign the order for the mahogany casket."

Everett Campbell was the nephew, a sharp-featured boy who wore wide-striped trousers and spent entirely too much time leaning against the billiard tables at the Dixie Theater. Mattie had seen him around the avenue, flashing a roll of greenbacks that smelled of bad gin and cheap pomade.

"Everett signed it?" Mattie asked, her eyebrows drawing together. "Not Victoria?"

"Said his aunt was too overcome. He was in an almighty hurry about the burial, too. Wanted him underground by Saturday noon."

Mattie dropped Campbell's hand. It struck the porcelain slab with a dull, heavy thud that sounded entirely too solid for a man whose spirit had allegedly departed in peaceful grace.

"Tomorrow is Saturday, Silas."

"I know what day it is, Mattie. I told him we had to draw the blood, set the features, and wait for the grave diggers out at the cemetery to hack through that hardpan clay. He offered an extra fifty dollars if we had the hearse rolling by eleven o'clock tomorrow morning."

Mattie unbuttoned her linen working cuffs and rolled them a turn higher. Fifty dollars was more than a laborer made in two weeks down at the refineries across the river. It was an extravagant sum to shave twenty-four hours off a customary vigil, especially for a member of the Mount Zion Baptist congregation, where people took their mourning with the same slow, ponderous gravity they gave to a Sunday sermon.

"A man who gives away fifty dollars to bury his uncle before the neighbors can bake their casseroles is either very practical or very frightened," Mattie said softly.

"Or he just don't like the smell of dead folks," Silas said reasonably, adjusting the wooden headrest beneath Campbell’s neck. "Can’t say I blame him for that. Most folks don't take to our trade."

"Most folks don't get rich off it, either," she countered.

She picked up a pair of curved forceps and stepped back to Campbell's head. The face was handsome in a heavy-jawed, stubborn sort of way. His silver-streaked hair had been carefully parted on the left and smoothed with brilliantine, but there was a faint, blue-black discoloration along the hinge of the jawline that did not align with post-mortem lividity. When blood settled after death, it followed gravity, gathering in the lowest points of the flesh. If Campbell had died on his back in his wife's flowerbeds, as Dr. Jackson’s neat cursive claimed, the dark pool of stagnant blood should have colored his back and the nape of his neck.

Instead, the purplish shadow crept up toward his right ear, as though he had spent the first few hours of his death lying flat upon his face on a hard, unyielding floor.

Mattie pressed her thumb against the flesh of his cheek. The skin was firm, the rigor mortis having fully seized the muscular structure of the jaw, locking the teeth tight behind graying lips. She parted the lips with a small silver spatula.

The inner mucosa of the mouth was dotted with tiny, pinpoint hemorrhages—petechiae, the textbook in Chicago had called them. Her instructor, an austere German gentleman who had treated corpses with the cool precision of an engineer inspecting a locomotive, had spent two full lectures on petechiae. They were the telltale fingerprints of an engine starved of fuel, the tiny capillaries bursting when a throat was squeezed or lungs were denied their natural draw of air.

A heart attack did not burst the vessels in a man’s cheeks like crushed elderberries.

"Silas," she said, her voice dropping an octave into the quiet register she used when trouble was stepping onto the porch. "Where are the clothes he was wearing when he fell?"

"In the laundry hamper by the scullery door. Silas don't leave dirty rags lying around your floor, Miss Mattie."

"Bring them here."

Silas looked up, his brow furrowed beneath his white hair. "He’s already suited up, girl. Took me twenty minutes to wrestle that coat over his arms."

"Bring them anyway."

The old man sighed, the long-suffering complaint of an elder who remembered changing her diapers, but he shuffled across the room and hauled a bundle of rumpled garments from the wicker basket. He dropped them onto a small zinc utility stand beside her.

The trousers were expensive wool-worsted, gray with a faint blue windowpane check. The matching coat was torn at the left elbow, the fine threads frayed where they had met something rough.

"See?" Silas said, pointing a gnarled finger at the rip. "Scraped on the stone border around the flowerbed, just like Doc Jackson told it."

Mattie lifted the coat to the electric bulb. "A stone border in an ornamental garden is made of smoothed river rock or painted brick, Silas. Look at the weave." She pulled a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles from her apron pocket, hooked the curved wires over her ears, and peered through the lenses at the torn wool. "There are yellow wood shavings caught in the thread. Cedar, by the smell of it. And the knees of the trousers are dry."

"It rained yesterday morning, Mattie," Silas observed, scratching his chin. "Ground was soup until noon."

"Precisely. If Charles Campbell took his last breath among Mrs. Campbell’s prized azaleas at nine o’clock last night, the wool of his knees would have soaked up red clay like a lamp wick draws kerosene. But look here." She ran a gloved finger down the creases of the trousers. They were dusty with a pale, powdery grit, but there was not a single trace of damp mud. "He didn't fall outside. He fell on a wooden floor that hadn't been swept since the carpenters left."

Silas ceased his scratching. He leaned over the table, his rheumy eyes narrowing as he looked from the torn elbow to the rigid, stubborn face of the banker.

"Now, Miss Mattie," he began, his voice taking on that low, guarded cadence that every colored person in the county used when the subject turned toward matters that might involve the sheriff or the men who ran the town from the petroleum exchange. "Campbell was an important man. White folks knew him, traded with him at the clearing house, even let him sit on the sub-committee for the new union depot. If something went wrong with Campbell, that ain't for us to untangle. Our business is five feet six inches of earth and four brass handles."

"My business is the truth of what enters this room, Silas," Mattie said, her voice firm, devoid of heat. "My father didn't buy this building and pay off the mortgage with twenty-dollar gold pieces so I could look the other way when a man is brought in through the back door with sawdust in his coat and a lie on his death slip."

She set the spectacles down on the edge of the tray. The quiet in the room seemed to deepen, filled only by the distant, rhythmic clang of a streetcar rounding the bend at North Greenwood and Cameron. It was five o'clock. In half an hour, the evening trade would begin. The barbershops would fill with oil field workers wanting the mud scraped from their collars; the girls from the high school would crowd into the soda fountain; and the lawyers in their high-collared shirts would sit out on the second-story balconies of the Gurley Building, smoking their cigars and talking about the price of crude.

Tulsa was a city that believed its own grand stories. It called itself the Oil Capital of the World, and Greenwood called itself the Promised Land. But Mattie knew that below the fine talk and the diamond stickpins, the foundations were dug into shifting sand.

"Go on up to the front office, Silas," she said quietly, picking up her scalpel from the velvet-lined mahogany case. "Lock the street door. If Everett Campbell comes back with his fifty dollars, tell him the chemicals need another twelve hours to set the tissue."

"And if he don't want to wait?"

"Tell him the law requires an embalmer to certify the state of the remains before a transit permit can be drawn," Mattie said, her jaw setting with the same stubborn hardness that had belonged to her father. "And tell him that M. E. Crawford doesn't sign anything she hasn't looked at twice."

Silas lingered for a second, his dark face tight with worry. He opened his mouth as though to offer another word of caution, thought better of it, and turned away. His footsteps scuffled across the pine floorboards of the hallway, followed by the heavy, metallic click of the brass deadbolt sliding home in the parlor entrance.

Left alone with the dead man, Mattie Crawford took a clean linen cloth and dipped it into a bowl of cool distilled water. She began to wipe away the remaining layer of dust from Charles Campbell’s forehead, watching the pale skin emerge beneath the gray dirt.

The almond smell lingered, sweet and faint, refusing to be washed away.

The reception parlor of Crawford & Son smelled of dried rosebuds, lemon-oil polish, and the damp wool of coats that had weathered too many thunderstorms. It was a room calculated to soothe the living into parting with their savings while maintaining an air of solemn churchhouse dignity. Heavy burgundy drapes swept from the picture rails down to the varnished red-pine floorboards, muffling the shouts of the street vendors out on Greenwood Avenue. A horsehair sofa, black and bristling as a boar’s spine, sat squarely against the wainscoting, flanked by two mahogany armchairs that looked considerably more comfortable than they actually were.

Mattie had shed her split-skirt working gown and carbolic apron for a high-necked waist of lavender cambric and an ankle-length skirt of heavy black poplin. It was the armor of a woman in trade: too severe to invite familiarity, too respectable to allow dismissal. She took her seat behind the roll-top oak desk in the corner just as the brass bell above the front door gave a short, metallic clatter.

Silas had unbolted the door five minutes early, against instructions, because Silas possessed a deep-seated terror of keeping paying customers cooling their heels on the porch.

"I tell you, she’s back in the office, Mr. Everett," Silas’s voice drifted through the velvet portières, polite to the point of bowing. "Working on the register books. She don't like to be rushed when the ink’s wet."

"I am not interested in her register books, old man," came the reply, loud and brittle with tobacco-rasp and the petulance of a young man who had never been told to wait behind a door in his life.

The drapery parted with a snap of brass rings. Everett Campbell pushed through, trailing a fog of bay rum, sweet tobacco, and the sour yeast of illicit mash liquor. He was twenty-four, with skin the color of a hazelnut shell and the sharp, restless features of a man perpetually looking over his shoulder for an ace he might have dropped. His gray fedora was tilted back on his pomaded head, and his lavender silk necktie was secured with a gold stickpin shaped like an oil derrick—a gaudy trifle that looked as though it had come out of an express catalog from St. Louis.

Behind him slipped a woman who moved with such quiet slowness that she seemed to bring the cool air of a tomb in with her. Victoria Campbell was fifty if she was a day, though grief and whatever else had taken roost in her home had carved another decade into the corners of her mouth. She wore heavy mourning bombazine that looked twenty years out of style, complete with a weeping veil of black crape pinned to a round pillbox hat. Her hands, encased in black net gloves, were knotted around the leather-bound edges of a pocket hymnal.

"Mrs. Campbell," Mattie said, rising from behind the desk with a measured inclination of her head. "Please, take the armchair by the hearth. Let me have Silas bring you a cup of sassafras tea."

"No tea, Miss Crawford," Everett cut in, tossing a pair of chamois driving gloves onto Mattie’s spotless blotter. "We aren't here for a tea party. We came to settle the bill and make sure the hearse is at Mount Zion by ten tomorrow morning, not eleven. The pastor has a revival committee meeting at one, and we want Charles in the ground before the midday heat gets up."

Mattie did not touch the driving gloves. She looked at Everett until the young man shifted his weight from his left two-tone oxford to his right, his eyes darting to the framed panoramic photograph of the nineteen-nineteen Grand Lodge convention hanging on the opposite wall.

"A hasty interment does poor honor to a founder of the Mercantile Trust, Mr. Campbell," Mattie said smoothly, her voice dropping into the calm, neutral register that had calmed weeping widows and irate creditors alike. "A man of your uncle’s standing deserves a proper viewing. Two nights in the church parlor is customary for a deacon."

"Custom is for folks who have time to waste," Everett snapped. He pulled an enameled gold pocket watch from his waistcoat, checked it with a dramatic flick of his thumb, and snapped it shut. "The family is agreed. Aunt Victoria wants it over with. Isn't that right, Auntie?"

Victoria Campbell did not sit. She remained near the door frame, her gloved fingers picking restlessly at the leather spine of her hymnal. When she lifted her face, the black netting of her veil hid everything except the tight, bloodless line of her lips.

"Charles did not care for pageantry, Miss Mattie," the widow whispered. Her voice was like dry leaves being swept across concrete. "He was a quiet man. A Christian man. The vanity of an open casket was never his wish."

"An open casket is not vanity, Mrs. Campbell. It is closure for those left on this side of the river," Mattie replied softly. She stepped out from behind the desk, keeping her hands folded at her waist. "And as the licensed embalmer, I have an obligation to the county registrar. Your husband’s remains were delivered to me only three hours ago. The arterial preservation requires twelve hours at minimum to fix the tissues against the summer damp, especially given the sudden nature of his passing."

"Sudden?" Everett’s head jerked toward her. "Doc Jackson told you what happened. His heart gave out. A man Charles's age, carrying all that weight and working fourteen hours a day down at the bank—it was bound to snap. Nothing unnatural about an old heart quitting."

"I did not say it was unnatural, Mr. Campbell," Mattie said, holding the young man’s gaze with a steady, unblinking scrutiny that made him clear his throat and look away. "I said it was sudden. Sudden deaths require more care in the preparation. There is the matter of discoloration to manage. If I rush the drainage, your uncle will look like a wax dummy by the time the choir begins the recessional."

"We will keep the lid closed," Everett said flatly. "Problem solved."

"An expensive mahogany box with copper fittings seems a terrible waste if no one is permitted to see the workmanship," Mattie observed, a thin edge of irony in her tone. "Or the man resting inside it."

Victoria Campbell took a single, halting step forward. The silk of her mourning skirts rustled against the horsehair sofa. "Did you... did you wash him already, child?"

Mattie’s eyes flicked to the widow’s veiled face. There was a tremor in the woman’s hands now, a rapid, fluttering tension that had nothing to do with the sorrow of a bereaved wife. It looked remarkably like panic.

"I have begun the external preparations, Mrs. Campbell," Mattie said. "I washed the dust from his face and hands. I noticed his trousers were quite clean, considering he fell among your azalea beds."

The parlor grew very quiet. Through the heavy drapes, the distant, brassy blast of an evening train whistle echoed from the rail yards across Archer Street, followed by the muffled rumble of iron wheels on steel. In the small room, the ticking of the mahogany regulator clock on the wall sounded as loud as a small hammer hitting lead.

"What does that mean?" Everett demanded, his voice pitching higher. "What are you getting at, Miss Crawford?"

"I am an embalmer, Mr. Campbell, not a detective," Mattie said, though her tone remained as dry as Osage County limestone. "My work requires me to notice surfaces. I merely observed that the red clay from your garden was remarkably absent from Mr. Campbell’s knees. He had cedar shavings in the wool of his left sleeve, however. Cedar of the sort they use to line the vaults down at the new building projects along Cameron."

Victoria Campbell let out a sharp, indrawn breath that hitched in her throat. Her knuckles turned dead white through the black fishnet of her gloves.

Everett stepped between Mattie and the widow, his shoulders squaring under his padded suit coat. "Look here, girl. We didn't come here for a lecture on carpentry. My uncle was checking on his storage properties yesterday afternoon before he came home to supper. He must have picked up the shavings then. Are you going to have that carriage at Mount Zion tomorrow morning, or do I need to telephone the Boardman brothers down on First Street to bring their wagon over here?"

The mention of the Boardman brothers was an explicit insult. The Boardmans were white undertakers who ran a livery service on the south side of the tracks; they had buried a few wealthy colored men whose families wanted to put on airs, charging double the fee and making the mourners enter through the back alley behind the livery stables.

Mattie did not flinch. Her father had stared down angry oil wildcatters, railroad land agents, and two different deputy sheriffs with nothing more than an even temper and a firm hand on his ledger. She had inherited his spine.

"The Boardman brothers do not hold a permit to transport a deceased colored citizen through the city of Tulsa after dark without a police escort," Mattie said, her words dropping like cold river stones. "And they certainly cannot sign a transit permit for an un-embalmed body without Dr. Jackson countersigning a supplementary release. If you wish to pull your uncle’s body from this establishment and load it into a dray wagon like a sack of cotton, you are within your legal rights as next of kin to attempt it. But I will have to record the transfer with the municipal health board before midnight."

Everett’s eyes narrowed into slits. A vein pulsed along his temple, tight and blue beneath his brown skin. "You think you run this town because your daddy had a desk and a brass shingle, Miss Crawford?"

"I think the law is the law, Mr. Campbell," she said. "And in Oklahoma, the law is particularly fond of finding fault with colored people who cannot produce their receipts."

A heavy, suffocating silence settled over the room. Everett Campbell’s jaw worked silently, his fingers twitching near his waistcoat pocket where his roll of money rested. He was calculating the cost—not in dollars, but in attention. Attention was the one currency that young men who haunted the pool halls and dice dens on Archer Street could never afford to spend.

"Sunday morning," Victoria Campbell said suddenly. The voice came from deep behind the crape veil, flat and dead, cutting through Everett’s bluster like an ice pick through lard.

Everett turned on his heel. "Auntie—"

"Sunday morning, Everett," she repeated, her tone brook-no-argument firm. "The church will be open. People will expect to pay their respects. We cannot... we cannot look like we are hiding him in the dirt."

"Aunt Vic, you said yourself—"

"I said Sunday," she snapped, a flash of steel showing beneath the widow’s weeds. She turned her veiled head back toward Mattie. "Sunday at two o'clock, Miss Mattie. That gives you tonight and all of tomorrow. That is enough time to do your work, isn't it?"

"It is plenty of time, Mrs. Campbell," Mattie replied, inclining her head. "He will be properly prepared, the casket will be lined in the lavender silk he favored for his church vests, and the registry book will be opened for visitors beginning tomorrow afternoon."

"Lavender silk," the woman repeated, almost to herself. A shudder ran through her narrow frame, so violent that the beads on her reticule clicked together like teeth. "Yes. Lavender."

Everett looked from his aunt to Mattie, his face dark with frustrated fury. He snatched his driving gloves off the desk with a sharp snap of leather. "Two o'clock Sunday, then. But I want the accounts closed today. Here."

He reached into his breast pocket and drew out a thick wad of greenbacks, peeled off three crisp twenty-dollar bills and a ten, and slammed them down on the leather blotter. The notes were new, the ink fresh enough to leave a faint green smudge on the cream-colored desk pad. They were federal reserve notes, issued by the Fourth National Bank of Tulsa, not the local scrip or promissory drafts commonly traded along the avenue.

"That covers the mahogany box, the hearse, and your trouble," Everett said, his voice dripping with venom. "Write the receipt, Miss Crawford."

Mattie pulled her dip pen from its brass stand, uncapped the black ink bottle, and wrote out the voucher with steady, rhythmic strokes. Received of Mrs. Victoria Campbell, seventy dollars, in full payment for funeral services rendered for Charles P. Campbell. She sprinkled sand over the wet ink to dry it, blew the grit away, and slid the paper across the desk.

"Your receipt, Mr. Campbell."

Everett shoved the paper into his trousers without looking at it. He grabbed his aunt by the elbow, his grip tight enough to bunch the heavy crepe of her sleeve. "Come on, Auntie. We have business at the office before the banks shut their grates."

Victoria Campbell allowed herself to be turned toward the front door, but as Everett reached for the brass handle, she paused. Over her nephew’s shoulder, she turned her face toward Mattie once more. Through the dark weave of the veil, Mattie caught the glint of the woman’s eyes—wide, wet with unshed tears, and filled with a terror so absolute it seemed to freeze the air between them.

The widow’s lips parted beneath the gauze. She didn't speak. She merely shaped three silent words with her mouth, slow and deliberate, before Everett jerked her arm and pulled her out onto the street.

The brass bell jingled overhead. The front door clicked shut, the heavy oak panel sealing the parlor off from the bustling world of Greenwood Avenue once more.

Mattie stood behind the desk, her hand still holding the cold metal barrel of her pen.

Don't look inside.

That was what the widow’s lips had shaped. Don't look inside.

The parlor was empty now, save for the ticking of the clock and the faint scent of Everett’s cheap pomade fighting against the dried rosebuds. Mattie looked down at the desk. The seventy dollars in crisp greenbacks lay beside the inkwell. Beneath the bottom bill, where Everett’s damp palm had pressed it against the mahogany surface, was a faint, yellow smudge.

Mattie touched the tip of her forefinger to the dust, then brought it to her nose.

Cedar. Freshly cut, fragrant cedar sawdust.

"Silas!" she called, her voice sharp and ringing through the empty parlor.

The portières parted immediately; the old man had clearly been standing just beyond the velvet curtain, his ear pressed to the jamb the entire time. His face was gray with the specific anxiety of a colored man who smelled white folks’ trouble creeping into colored folks’ houses.

"I heard 'em, Miss Mattie," Silas said, stepping into the room and wringing a dry linen towel in his hands. "Young Everett got a mouth on him that’s going to get somebody burned out of house and home one of these days. Flashing twenty-dollar bills like he struck a gusher in his backyard."

"Where did Everett get that money, Silas?"

"He didn't get it from the bank, that’s for sure," Silas said, shaking his head. "Old Charles wouldn't give that boy a plugged nickel without three signatures and a deed to a mule for security. Word on the street is Everett was into the Greek down on Boston Avenue for near two hundred dollars over some bad dice games. Had two white fellas in straw boaters looking for him outside the Dixie theater just Tuesday."

"And now he has seventy dollars for an undertaker and an extra fifty to speed up the hearse," Mattie said, staring at the greenbacks.

"Money travels fast in this town, Mattie. Sometimes it falls off a wagon, sometimes it comes out of a hole in the ground." Silas stepped toward the front window, peering through the gap in the drapes out onto Greenwood Avenue. "Look at him. Dragging that poor woman down the sidewalk like she was a calf on a tether."

Mattie walked over to the window and stood beside him. Outside, the evening rush was reaching its peak. The street was a sea of dark suits, silk dresses, and polished boots. The electric arc lights had just flickered on, buzzing with a blue-white glare that illuminated the brick storefronts of the Stradford Hotel and the red-and-white striped pole of the modern sanitary barbershop across the way.

Everett Campbell was practically hauling his aunt across the intersection of Greenwood and Archer, weaving through the stream of pedestrians and dodging an idling black Hudson Super Six that honked its brass horn in protest. They weren't heading toward the Campbell residence on Detroit Avenue, where the wealthy colored doctors and businessmen had their fine two-story frame homes with wraparound porches.

They were heading south, straight toward the Frisco railway tracks—toward the brick warehouses where the lumber yards and cotton compresses sat in the industrial shadow between the Negro district and downtown Tulsa.

"He’s in a mighty big hurry for a boy whose uncle just died," Silas muttered.

"He isn't in a hurry to mourn, Silas," Mattie said, her gaze fixed on the retreating black veil of Victoria Campbell until it disappeared behind the corner of a hardware store. "He’s in a hurry to hide something."

She turned away from the window, her mind working through the puzzle with the same cold, methodical precision she used to trace an artery through embalmed flesh. The torn wool of the sleeve. The cedar shavings. The pinpoint hemorrhages in the mouth. The smell of bitter almonds that had no business being on the breath of an elder who died of a stroke among his wife's flowers. And now, seventy dollars in fresh bank scrip and a terrified widow warning an embalmer not to look inside.

"Silas," she said, her voice dropping into a businesslike clip.

"Yes, Miss Mattie?"

"Go down to Williams Confectionery. Buy yourself two cigars and sit on the bench out front for an hour."

Silas frowned, his white eyebrows knitting together. "I don't smoke cigars, Mattie. They make my chest rattle."

"Then hold them in your hand and look like you're smoking them," she said impatiently. "Keep your ears open. I want to know who was talking to Charles Campbell yesterday afternoon before the bank closed. I want to know who Everett was drinking with last night, and I want to know what company delivered fresh cedar planks to the Cameron Street warehouses this week."

The old man hesitated, his eyes darting toward the hallway that led back to the prep room where the body of the banker lay beneath the cold white sheet. "And what are you going to be doing, girl?"

Mattie Crawford walked toward the back door of the parlor, her fingers already reaching for the buttons of her lavender blouse to change back into her canvas work sleeves.

"I am going to do my job, Silas," she said, her voice calm and unyielding. "I am going to open Charles Campbell's chest, and I am going to see what he took to the grave."