“The first year we lived in a furnished place, a room and a half. From my parents’ apartment we had taken some things, and that summer we stored them with friends while we went to stay with his mother. We had my teaching salary coming in. What we lost from his job we saved on rent. He needed the two months’ rest, anyway.” She paused.

“Tuesday I told you that we saved steadily. It’s true, but we really did it in a series of jumps. We didn’t pay his mother rent—we bought most of the food, but we would have spent that—and we banked all the surplus, the rent, utilities, and so forth. We used the car as much as possible for our entertainment. The first two springs we had big income tax refunds. Colin did the taxes and he deducted everything he could. He was very good at that. I tried to help the first year, but it just depressed me. He took the time to read all the booklets.

“By the time we broke up, even though he hadn’t worked full-time most of those years, we had twenty-five hundred dollars in the bank.”

“He gave you four thousand,” Leland said.

“He cashed in his insurance and borrowed the rest from his mother.”

He had to be careful with his phrasing. “What did your attorney think of the terms of the settlement?”

“It was all right with him. He had nothing to do. It was worked out before we went to the lawyers. It was an easy fee for my lawyer.”

“MacIver pay for that?”

“Everything.”

“What was his mother’s reaction to the purpose of the loan?”

“She called to tell me that she would not have given him the money—two thousand dollars—she felt that she had been duped. I was miserable at the time and she followed her sympathies. I don’t know if she hoped for a reconciliation or not, but—” Her voice trailed off.

Leland nodded. Of course none of it checked out, because MacIver had not cashed his policies. Nor could Leland remember seeing any notations of loans on their cash value. He had to put it out of his thoughts, for if MacIver had hidden assets from his first wife—money she had worked with him to earn—she might try to make a claim on it now. The settlement agreement had been based on fraud. There was one more side of it that he felt he could explore safely. “Can you tell me if his mother ever said that she had been repaid the two thousand?”

“Yes. She mentioned it once, perhaps two years after the divorce. My remarriage probably helped him get the money together, but neither of us—Mrs. MacIver or I—were willing to discuss it at the time.”