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freelance writer had gotten hold of something like that. More than that, I wondered why Scottie was interested in this old stuff. He was waiting for a signal that I understood. “I’m with you.”
    â€œIt covers the four weeks up to the night it happened. See these entries?” He’d marked three long distance calls. “The number is in Annapolis. It was the home number for the lawyer for Braeder Design.”
    â€œThe FBI asked me about that—Braeder Design Systems.”
    â€œYou don’t remember? Your mother worked there.”
    That was why it was so familiar to me. It was no wonder I couldn’t place it, given the way I’d tried to forget everything from back then. “So my mom phoned somebody she worked with. What does that mean?”
    â€œThe lawyer, Eric Russo, worked for an outside law firm, not—what’s it called—in house. Only the top people at Braeder would have been in touch with him.”
    My mother had a degree in physics and worked as a technical writer (I remembered that much). She might have been in touch with anyone on her job, including this Eric Russo. “Let’s cut to the end. Where are you headed with this?”
    He sighed again, and I could tell he was getting angry. “All right, go ahead. I’ll shut up.”
    Now he grinned, easily appeased. “I’ll go slow for the dummies.”
    He pulled out a single page, a poor photocopy that I had to hold close to read.
    â€œDid you know about that?” he said.
    It was a form from the Maryland Division of Unemployment Insurance. My mother’s name was written under “Applicant.” Our address. Dated the 9th of July that year.
    I read it over twice. “My mother couldn’t have filed for unemployment that summer. She went to work every day. We had papers all over the house from her job. Your mother babysat for us, along with that other woman—”
    â€œMrs. Cataldo,” Scottie said. “I remember.”
    â€œThen what is this?” I shook the form at him as if any mistakes were his fault.
    â€œHere, look.” He spread out four bank statements from my parents’ account—May, June, July, and August of that year. On the first he’d marked a deposit of $1,966.40. There was a deposit of the same amount in June. They stopped there. No similar amounts for July or August.
    He took the Unemployment Division form from me. “This says she was terminated from Braeder on—”
    â€œJune 16,” I said. My father worked as a consultant. The money he earned didn’t come in on a regular basis. The nineteen hundred dollar deposits must have been my mother’s last two paychecks.
    This was a new picture for me. The work my mother did involved writing patent applications. As a boy, I never understood exactly what that meant, but I knew she loved it. She brought work home almost every night and would sit for hours at the dining room table shuffling through papers and blueprints. One of the clearest memories I have of her is coming into the dining room to say good night after taking my bath. I would have been five or six years old. She pulled me onto her lap and showed me what she was working on, some new telescope system. I barely understood a word, but she seemed so happy it didn’t matter.
    The unemployment filing, no more paychecks. Without her job, I could only imagine the tailspin she’d gone into. Obviously, with a bank account that slim, she and my father needed the money. And she needed the challenge of the work. Jim and Renee had told me that after college, she’d been accepted into several PhD programs, but she couldn’t afford to go. Drafting patent applications was the best substitute she could find. And when she lost the job, she still got dressed for work every morning, packed her lunch, and went—where? The public library? A museum in the District? I wondered if she even told my father, or