Sleep with the Lights On. Maggie Shayne

the boys, you know.”

      He nodded. “They’ll need me. I know, Mother.”

      “Eric was our link to them. We can’t let Marie start pulling them away from us.”

      “She would never do that.”

      “She’s angry. I know you don’t see that, but I do. I’m a woman. I was his mother. She blames me.”

      “I don’t think that’s true.”

      She was quiet for a moment. He pulled out of the cemetery, onto the road. It was a beautiful day, too beautiful to spend it among the dead.

      “You’re a policeman, Mason. I never wanted that for you, never understood why you wanted it—but it’s what you are. I expect you to do whatever it takes to get to the bottom of this.”

      He glanced sideways at her and didn’t bother going into the old argument. He’d decided to be a cop when his best friend’s kid brother had been murdered by his babysitter. “To the bottom of what, Mother?”

      She shot him a How can you ask me that? look. “This,” she said. Then she shook her head hard. “He didn’t just shoot himself. He couldn’t have. Not my Eric.”

      He started to speak, then pressed his lips together to keep the words inside. His mother knew the circumstances of his brother’s death. He didn’t need to tell her again that he’d walked in on the suicide-in-progress. She knew. She’d insisted on reading the reports. She’d been high on prescriptions ever since.

      “Mother, you know he did.”

      “I know, I know, I—” She fluttered a hand in the air. “I mean there had to be a reason. I’ve been asking Marie about things—their finances and so on—and she says they’re fine, but I know better. Honestly, if it had become that bad, why wouldn’t he just have asked...?” Her voice trailed off as she slowly shook her head. “Maybe he borrowed from the...the wrong people.”

      “He didn’t borrow. Their finances were fine. Marie didn’t lie to you.”

      “Drugs, then.” She said it almost hopefully. “Maybe he was on some sort of drugs that—”

      “He wasn’t on drugs, Mother.” Ironically, she was, but prescriptions, as she so often reminded him, were not really drugs. They were drugs, but not, you know, drugs.

      Mason took a breath. She wasn’t going to let go of this. “Eric had...problems. You know that.”

      “No.” She shook her head. “Not problems. He was a quiet boy. Scared. But that’s natural, of course. Six years old, coming to a new country, a whole new family, learning a new language. We don’t even know what happened to his birth family in Russia.” She lowered her head again. “We never asked him, you know.”