Inside was a photograph.
Maxwell at twenty-three.
Standing in this very room.
Blood on the cuff of his shirt.
He remembered that night in fragments.
A telephone call from his mother.
A drive from Boston.
Julian meeting him at the door.
An argument.
Then a blinding pain near the back of his head.
After that, a hospital bed.
He had been told he fell down the terrace steps while drunk.
He believed it because he had been drinking earlier that evening.
A week later, his mother was dead.
Julian told him she had been distraught over his behavior.
Maxwell carried that guilt for twelve years.
Now he stared at the photograph.
“What happened?”
His uncle said nothing.
Eleanor struggled to sit straighter.
“You found us arguing. Julian grabbed my arm. You pulled him away.”
Maxwell looked at the blood.
“Whose?”
“Yours.”
He touched the back of his head.
There was still a faint ridge beneath his hair.
“I remember falling.”
“You were struck.”
Julian’s face hardened.
“With what?”
Samuel turned to the next photograph.
The brass base of a lamp.
Maxwell looked toward the corner where that lamp used to stand.
It had disappeared after the funeral.
“When you went down,” Eleanor said, “you didn’t move.”
Her voice broke.
“Julian told me you were dying.”
“He called a doctor,” Samuel said. “The doctor treated you privately before you were taken to the hospital.”
Maxwell remembered the name.
Dr. Harlan Pierce.
The man who signed his mother’s death certificate.
Eleanor gripped his wrist.
“Julian said he could save you. But only if I signed what he put in front of me.”
The first papers surrendered management of Eleanor’s assets.
The next authorized private treatment.
The final document was a statement saying she had attacked Maxwell during a mental collapse.
“I signed it,” she whispered.
Maxwell stared.
“I thought he would let you die if I didn’t.”
Julian shifted beside the officers.
“That is a grotesque misrepresentation.”
Eleanor looked directly at him.
“You held a cloth against my son’s head and told me to choose.”
The hallway went silent.
Maxwell felt suddenly cold.
He looked at the photograph again.
At his own unconscious body.
At his mother’s hand visible near the edge, reaching toward him.
She had not merely been taken from him.
He had been used to make her surrender herself.
“Afterward,” she said, “they told me you knew what I’d done. They said you wanted me kept away.”
“No.”
“They showed me letters.”
“No.”
“I know that now.”
He knelt beside her chair.
She placed her palms against his face.
“I watched your chest move until they made me leave the room.”
