“Oh, where are my manners! I do apologize. Shall I phone you another day?”

“No, go ahead, if there’s something—”

“Yes. There is something. You knew it too! You could tell! Your grandmother was absolutely right about you! She said you were a very perceptive person, Rebecca, if I may call you Rebecca, and she was absolutely right.”

“Okay—”

“I would like to speak frankly with you, if I may.”

“I kind of assumed that was what you were already doing.”

“Ha ha. Yes, of course. Very humorous. Of course. That was very witty. Rebecca, I have reason to believe—well, how shall I say this? I hesitate to bring this up to you, but you might as well hear it now, from the horse’s mouth. It must be said. I have reason to believe that your grandmother was not entirely truthful.”

“Is anyone?”

“I myself try to be truthful. You sound like a truthful person, as well. And I am usually a very good judge of these things. I mean to say that I believe that Esther very specifically concealed certain information about the events of the fire.”

“Oh my god, that’s old news, Ruth. It’s the second gunman on the grassy knoll of Triangle fire theories. That guy, whatshisname, in the sixties, Lou Lipman? I’m sure you know who I mean—”

“I am intimately connected to the work of Lou Lipman, let me assure you. In fact, I can reveal to you in utmost confidence that I have special access—”

“Okay, whatever, so you know what I mean. The point is, he tried to make a connection between her testimony at the trial and the locked door, and the discrepancies with the Jacobs testimony, and the acquittals, and then there were the insurance payoffs, to paint the whole thing as a conspiracy, et cetera, et cetera. What more can be said about it at this point? Her testimony in the end was probably more useful to Blanck and Harris than to the families of the dead, it’s true, and it’s really unfortunate. She was always pretty sad and regretful about that. But I’m sure you know all about this. They had a brilliant lawyer—”

“Max Steuer.”

“There you go—you know about this. He got her to repeat herself on the stand—”

“Twice, actually.”

“Okay, twice. He tricked her into using the same words over and over, and she thought that was what she was supposed to do, for accuracy, so her testimony ended up seeming to be rehearsed, which it kind of was, in a naive way, and the jury concluded that such rehearsed testimony must be false, which it really wasn’t, though she probably got a lot of little things wrong. People do.”

“Have you ever seen a transcript of that testimony, Rebecca?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“I have one. I would like to show it to you, if I may, to get your response. Possibly you will agree with my theory if you read the transcript. And I have had access to the Lipman papers, thanks to the kindness of his son Jonathan, who has been very helpful to me, so I have his interview notes, and therefore exclusive access to material he did not feel he could include in his book, back then.”