Guilty by Norah McClintock Page A

father. Well, that’s what it sounded like to me. What else does a woman mean when she tells her husband she needs time alone? But then, who asked me? I shouldn’t have said anything.
    I sip my tea. I’m angry at myself for having the chance to learn something and finding out exactly nothing—well, except that maybe the first Mrs. Newsome was giving some thought to the future of her marriage, no matter what Finn thinks. He was seven years old at the time. What seven-year-old wants to think his parents are going to break up?
    What else do I know now that I didn’t know before? Nothing useful. His grandmother was against the marriage. I wonder what she had against Finn’s father. I want to know because I want to have something against him too. He killed my father. I want to hate him for that instead of hating my father for going over there with a gun and trying to kill him…assuming that was his intention. I keep thinking about Detective Sanders’s question: Did he say anything to you about money, Lila? According to Finn, he said something to Mr. Newsome about it. It’s why he went there in the first place.
    I set my mug down on the floor and push myself up off the couch. I go into the dingy little room that I’ve been trying to think of as my bedroom, even though it isn’t as nice as my room at Aunt Jenny’s and contains hardly any of my stuff. Most of that is still back home.
    Back home. Where I mostly grew up. Where I belong now.
    I look around the room. I should just finish packing and get out of here. I have enough money for a bus ticket. I don’t need to stay here any longer.
    I open the top drawer of a cheap chest of drawers. I feel under my socks and underwear and pull out a file folder. I take it back into the living room with me, sit down and open it. The folder contains everything I know about my father’s case, which isn’t much. As soon as he was arrested, I was taken by child welfare. They contacted my aunt, and the next thing I knew, I was far away. Aunt Jenny tried to shield me from what was happening, which turned out to be easy. People in Boston weren’t interested in something that had happened far away to someone who wasn’t a native Bostonian and who hadn’t lived in Boston for more than a few months. So the folder was pretty thin—a few clippings and a few things I found on the Internet a little later.
    It consisted of the following:
    An obituary for the first Mrs. Newsome—Angela Fairlane Newsome. There was a picture. I hadn’t looked at it in years, but when I pull out the clipping with the little black-and-white photo, I am stunned to see how much Finn resembles his mother. According to the article, Angela Fairlane was daughter to Albert Finn Fairlane, an eccentric Ivy Leaguer who quit a lucrative law practice to turn inventor and who made a fortune when he patented some gizmos that most people have never heard of but that are used in manufacturing processes all over the world. Angela came from money. She was also an Ivy Leaguer. But, the obituary said, she became a devoted mother to her only son Finn. In other words, she didn’t put that Ivy League education to work. At least, not on a job or career of her own. The obituary also noted that she was both a helpmate and business partner to her “beloved husband Robert.”
    I see a couple of articles about the burglary and shooting, short items that I had found in Aunt Jenny’s house one day after school. They didn’t say much, only that Angela Newsome, a thirty-year-old homemaker, was dead after being shot during a break-and-enter at her home on a quiet tree-lined street in an affluent neighborhood. The police suspected that she had surprised a burglar. A follow-up article noted that an arrest had been made and mentioned that Mrs. Newsome’s body had been discovered by her seven-year-old son. A final article quoted Mr. Newsome as saying that he was