Chapter 9 — WHAT $340 BUYS

My mother in February 1997 was fifty-two years old.

She had been a school secretary at a parochial school in Portage Park for nineteen years.

She had a daughter at university on loans and a Buick with a hole in the floor and eleven thousand dollars, which was the whole of what she had, and it was in a passbook account she had built up a hundred dollars at a time since 1981.

She spent three hundred and forty of it on a ring at a state auction.

Ruben found the buyer file.

She paid by cashier's cheque.

And here is the piece I could not make sense of for a week, which turns out to be the only piece that actually explains anything: the buyer file has a second document in it, dated three days after the sale, and it is a written request from D. Keane to the Treasurer's office asking for *any information regarding the previous owner of lot 1147, including full name and last known address.*

The office refused, which is correct, because that information is confidential.

But that request tells you that on the twenty-first of February 1997 my mother did not know who Elena Rosewood was.

She had not stolen from a specific person.

She had gone to a public auction that was advertised in the *Sun-Times*, in a room in Springfield with folding chairs, and she had looked at a ring with a name inside it, and she had bought a name.

And then she had tried to find out whose it was.

I have thought about the request a great deal.

I have decided it means she wanted to know how much room she had.