By the time I find Detective Varney, I already have the answers to most of my questions. So instead of asking him anything, I write him a letter to say thank-you: Thank you for working on my mother’s case; thank you for being the friendly face I remembered all those years. Thank you for taking the time to come to brunch.
When he gets my letter, he has his daughter call me back because he cannot. Detective Varney is dying. He remembers me, she says. “He remembers finding you in that motel room in the drawer. He remembers the brunch. I remember it too, when he and my mom came back from it.”
I don’t remember his wife being there. My memory of that day shifts again: five people at the table, Detective Varney’s wife, also named Marilyn, sitting at the end, smiling.
“My dad had a hard job, you know,” she goes on. “It wore on him. On all of us. That was a really nice thing your grandfather did. It meant a lot to him. He got to see a happy ending.”