"Gus," I said, "when did you paint your door?"
"May. Middle of May. Before Imelda's birthday. She'd have wanted it done."
"Redbuds in Larkin bloomed this year from about April eighth to April twenty-fifth," I said. "I've got Ruth's tree on camera twice a week. By June, a redbud has heart-shaped green leaves and little flat seedpods like snow peas. There isn't a flower on it." I held the paper up toward the light as though that would help. "This was taken in April. Before you painted."
Gus looked at the picture, and then at me, and for a while he didn't say anything. He was eighty-one and had worked forty years in a plant that made dies for stamping car doors, and he had the hands to prove it, and the kind of quiet face that men of his generation wear when they are deciding whether to be angry.
"Huh," he said finally. "So she's a liar."
"Someone is."
"Nell." He took his coffee back from me, because I had been about to spill it. "There's only one person sending these letters."
* * *
We needed a lawyer, and as it happened, one lived across the street.
Priya Raman had moved into the Colonial at 38 Larkspur the previous fall with her wife, Jo, a pediatric nurse, and their two boys, who were six and seven and spent most of the summer making a fort out of the cardboard boxes their parents had never gotten around to breaking down. Priya was a real-estate attorney at a mid-sized firm in downtown Columbus — title disputes, closings, commercial leases. She walked a wiry rescue greyhound named Biscuit every evening at nine, and that's when I caught her, on the sidewalk, with my folder.
She read the letters under the streetlight with Biscuit leaning against her shins. She read them twice. Then she said, "Can I come over? I want to see your pictures on a real screen."