'That will be fine,' I said.
She set the tray down on a low table, and I saw that her checkbook was on the tray also. She handed me one of the glasses and took the other for herself. She raised it toward me slightly.
'You seem an honest man, sir,' she said.
' 'Let be be the end of seem,' ' I said.
She smiled faintly.
' 'The only emperor,' ' she said, ' 'is the emperor of icecream.' '
'Very good,' I said.
'My generation read, Mr. Spenser; apparently yours did, too.'
'Or at least I did,' I said. 'Still do.'
'Yes,' she said. 'I do as well.'
She took another pull at her drink. Then she put the glass down, picked up the checkbook, and began to leaf through the register. I sat with my drink. The hydrangea continued to nod in the late summer outside the glass.
'I gave him three thousand dollars on January twenty-first,' she said after a time. 'How many guns would that buy?'
'Four plus ammo,' I said. 'And he might have had some left over.'
'For ski masks,' she said.
'And extra magazines,' I said. 'Perhaps even a controlled substance.'
'Drugs?'
I shrugged.
'I believe none of this,' she said.
'No need to yet,' I said.
'Nothing will make me believe it.'
I didn't speak.
'You believe it,' she said.
'I think it likely,' I said.
'And you think when he bought the guns in January, he was planning to shoot those people in May.'
'I don't know when he was planning to shoot,' I said. 'I only know when he got the money and when he did the shooting.'
'He didn't do the shooting.'
'Have you talked to him since the incident?' I said.
'Yes.'
'Did you ever ask?'
'No.'
'Excuse me, ma'am, for saying so, but you don't want to know.'
She looked at her drink, tilting the glass slightly so the ice rattled faintly.
'Jared has always been a silent child,' she said. 'Perhaps lonely. I don't know. I always felt that everyone pried at him too much. His parents were always after him to tell them more. Where are you going? Who are you going with? Who are your friends? Do you have a girlfriend? What do you wish to become? I felt my role was to offer him respite, a place he could come and be loved and respected, where he could indulge himself in as much silence as he wished.'
'Did you spend much time with him?'
'A great deal of time.'
'Did he have a girlfriend?' I said.
'I don't know,' she said. 'Nor do I know about friends or ambitions or fears or hopes and dreams.'
'What did you talk about?'
'Books, movies, ideas.'
'Ideas?' I said.
She smiled.
'We talked about love,' she said. 'We talked about friendship. We talked about what humans should be. About what one human owed another. About what made a person good.'
'But in the abstract,' I said.
'Yes.'
'Without concrete examples,' I said.
