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if he only found out when he realized her paychecks had stopped. Was that why they fought those last weeks?
    It had been a long time since I thought about any of this. Jim and Renee told me only good things about my mother. In their stories, she was always smart and happy and totally devoted to my father and my brothers and me. When I asked why she did it—and I did ask, point-blank—they didn’t really have an answer. “Sometimes people get sick, and the world doesn’t make sense to them anymore,” Renee said. “They do things nobody can understand.”
    That was enough to buy me off when I was a teenager. Later, in college, I turned up some old articles from the Washington Post . The reporter had picked up on the Damascus gossip: marriage troubles and depression. One of my great uncles had been a suicide victim. Maybe there was bad blood in the family. I came away not believing any of it.
    Gradually I developed an explanation of my own, one that fit my vague memories and the things I was picking up in my psych courses. She had some undiagnosed condition, a hormone imbalance or a tumor that the medical examiner didn’t find. One day it got to be too much. She snapped, went for the gun. It was a clean story, one that left her free of guilt.
    Scottie touched my arm. “Are you all right?”
    I cleared my throat. “Yeah, fine.” My wrist was tingling where I’d been scratching it.
    â€œYou sure as hell weren’t listening to what I was saying.” He sat back slowly. “Could your aunt and uncle have known about this? We could talk to them.”
    â€œNo. I’m sure they told me everything they knew. That’s why this is hard for me to wrap my head around. Nobody said anything about it when I was young, and later . . . this isn’t how I imagined it was. Her last days must have been awful. Worse because nobody knew what was happening to her.”
    â€œI guess so,” he said, still eyeing me. “Anyway, take a look at this again.” He got the telephone bill and tapped the three entries he’d marked. “We were shot on October 3rd. The first two phone calls to Russo were on a Saturday, twelve days before that. The last call was—”
    â€œOctober 3,” I said, reading from the bill, “6:05 p.m.” It was around seven o’clock that evening when we started the game of hide-and-seek.
    â€œOnly an hour before it happened,” Scottie said. “That’s why I need to talk to him.”
    â€œTalk to who?”
    â€œThe lawyer—who do you think?”
    â€œYou mean Russo?”
    â€œYes.” He was annoyed I was so dense.
    â€œYou went to see him?” I said.
    â€œNo, I phoned him, but he wouldn’t talk to me.”
    â€œSo what happened?” I asked.
    â€œI talked to a man named Griffin O’Shea. He works with Russo.”
    â€œWhat did O’Shea say?”
    â€œHe asked Russo about those phone calls from your mother. Russo said he didn’t remember ever knowing anyone by her name.”
    Something clicked for me, the link I’d been missing. “Russo is the one the FBI says you threatened.”
    â€œI told you, I didn’t threaten anybody.” He put the papers back in the pile.
    â€œRusso works for the government now?”
    â€œHe’s Acting US Attorney for the District of Columbia.”
    I whistled softly. “That’s why they’re all worked up. What did you say to him?”
    â€œI never talked to him. I just said that.”
    â€œScottie, level with me.”
    â€œI sent Russo a couple of e-mails. They were nothing.”
    â€œCan I see them?”
    For a moment, I thought he was going to say no. Then he reached into his backpack for his tablet computer. Once he had the program open, his hands flew over the screen. He passed it to me.
    There were three messages, and it was clear that politeness wasn’t one of