Mara showed him a transfer from his consulting account to a contractor who had previously worked on Karen’s house.
The transfer had occurred shortly before someone damaged my fence.
Russell said it was a reimbursement for unrelated landscaping.
Mara asked him to identify the landscaping project.
He could not remember the address.
She asked whether an invoice existed.
Russell said his bookkeeper might have it.
Mara asked him to produce the invoice through the discovery process.
His attorney agreed to review the request.
Then Mara placed a photograph of my broken kitchen window on the table.
She asked whether Russell had seen it before.
He said Karen had sent him a picture after the incident.
Mara asked when Karen sent it.
Russell gave a date that was earlier than the police report.
The room became very quiet.
Mara asked whether he was certain.
Russell looked again at the photograph and said he might have confused the dates.
His attorney asked for the question to be repeated.
Mara repeated it without changing a word.
Russell said he would need to review his messages.
The court reporter recorded every pause.
I had once investigated insurance claims involving people who rehearsed elaborate stories.
The rehearsed stories usually sounded confident until someone asked about a small detail that nobody had thought to practice.
Russell’s problem was not that he had forgotten a date.
His problem was that the date connected a private conversation to a crime scene.
After the deposition, Mara told me that Russell would have an opportunity to correct his testimony.
She also told me that the correction itself might reveal which records he feared.
I drove home slowly because I wanted to think before speaking to Sophie.
She was in the kitchen with a bowl of strawberries and an unfinished school assignment.
She asked whether Russell had admitted what he did.
I said he had admitted some things and denied others.
Sophie asked whether people could lie in a room where someone wrote everything down.
I said they could, but a written record made it harder to change their stories later.
She nodded and returned to her assignment.
I watched her underline a sentence about civic responsibility.
I wondered how much of her childhood had been consumed by adults who should have known better.
The next morning, a neighbor named Ruth Ellison came to my porch carrying a small cardboard box.
Ruth lived two streets away and rarely attended association meetings.
