I didn't show the letter to anyone for most of that morning. I kept it in my desk drawer, under a box of carbon ribbons, and took it out twice just to read the four sentences again, as if another reading might produce a fact the earlier ones hadn't.
Owen Brant caught me at it the second time, leaning against my doorframe with a coffee going cold in his hand. Owen was thirty-one, hungry for anything bigger than the zoning board, and he had a way of standing in a doorway like he already belonged on the other side of it.
"What's that," he said. "You've been guarding that drawer like it's got cash in it."
I weighed it a second, then slid the page across the desk. "Anonymous. No postmark. Says to look into a woman in connection with the writing everyone's talking about this week."
He read it standing up. "Says how?"
"It doesn't. Just the name and the suggestion."
"That's not a tip, Ellis, that's a dare."
"I know what it is." I took the page back. "I also know the name. It's my former wife. Nora Pell."
That got him to sit down, finally, in the chair across from me, the cold coffee forgotten on the edge of the desk. "You're going to want to sit this one out, then."
"I'm not sitting it out. I'm disclosing it, which is different." I said it like the distinction settled something, though even as I said it I heard how thin it sounded in the room.
There was a second item in the envelope I hadn't mentioned yet, a photocopy of a letter, tenant to landlord, a grievance over a broken radiator and a withheld deposit, signed at the bottom in a hand I recognized from a decade of grocery lists and school forms. Underneath, in the same cramped typed hand as the first page, a single line claimed the phrasing resembled the writing in the news.
Owen read that too, slower. "This is a complaint about a radiator."
"I know what it is."
"It's not evidence of anything except that your ex-wife once had a bad landlord."
"I know that too, Owen. I'd like to know how it got into an envelope on my desk, and why, before I decide it's nothing."
He looked at me a long moment, the kind of look I'd have given a younger reporter proposing to chase a rumor on no foundation at all, and I felt the discomfort of being on the wrong side of my own lesson. "You want me to check where a landlord dispute letter came from. That's the assignment."
"Provenance,'' I said. "Where it's been, who had access to a copy, whether it could have left her apartment any legitimate way. Nothing more than that."
"And if it checks out as genuine?"
"Then we know the letter's real and we still know nothing about the other thing. Those aren't the same question and I don't want you treating them like they are."
He didn't look satisfied, but he wrote it down anyway, a clean line on a legal pad: Pell, letter, provenance only. I locked the original back in the drawer and wrote out a one-page assignment sheet for the file, giving it a name so it would exist as something ordinary, something with a line item, instead of what it actually was, which was a dare from a stranger that I had just agreed to answer.
I told myself, walking home that night, that disclosure was the honest part, the part that mattered, and that checking a photocopy's history wasn't the same as believing the four sentences above it. I almost believed myself. I didn't call Nora that evening, though I knew by morning I'd have no choice.