“Because you’re determined to know, and when someone does something with passion, the people around him go along with it, even against their will.”

“Don’t make a speech—” I stop her with a hand gesture, I command her.

I can’t believe it.

I’m thinking energetically about a news article, get it out right now, a scoop, but first I have to finish up with the girl here; this dialogue is good material for the series, I should have recorded it; she must have been intimidated and she doesn’t intimidate easily. She’s still standing there, she’s not leaving, she’s waiting, waiting for what, she has me tangled up in all of this and it may well be that she never wrote a letter nor was there ever any letter of any kind.

“Who wrote the letters?”

“We never found out.”

“Who signed them?”

“They weren’t signed.”

“Where are they now, in the case file?”

“They disappeared before the police could search the house.”

“There can’t have been very many people who were in a position to get their hands on them.”

“Of course not, only Mamá and I were in the house.”

She’s challenging me. Now I wonder what she wants. An adventure? What sort of adventure, with me? But I retreat from that idea just in time: What she’s trying to do is make me suspect the mother.

“Your mother took the letters?”

“Yes.”

“She’s the one who wrote them?”

“No, but she knew who it was.”

“So the police never heard a word about this, I’m guessing.”

“ . . . ”

“Will you tell me, once and for all, who it was? Or what you’re trying to do besides set more traps for me? What do you want—to destroy your own mother? You hate her that much?”

She waits for my flare-up to subside, then says, “Mamá saved me.”

“You’re the author of the letters?”

“No.”

“Are we starting in on this all over again?”

“My aunt wrote the letters to herself, she did it herself. She’d put them in the mail and then when she read them she’d go pale and be upset for hours and days . . .”

This is the truth now, I have no doubt. The girl made this statement with vivid emotion, no longer trying to provoke me, her eyes squeezed shut, clenched fists resting on her knees.

Time passes, and after a while hands begin organizing books, fingers run through long hair . . .

I help her get herself back together, speaking in the voice of a friend. “I still don’t know your name, only your family name . . .”

She tells me, and I call her Emilia, and she feels better.