It had never had a fireplace.
Not when she bought the house thirty years earlier.
Not when I was a teenager.
Not now.
The entire house used a central electric HVAC system.
So why would my seventy-one-year-old mother own a cast-iron fireplace poker?
I moved closer without touching it.
Near the handle was a small white rectangular sticker.
A barcode.
A price tag.
Hardy’s Hardware.
Two miles from the townhouse Nolan and I shared.
The poker was brand new.
I stood slowly.
Nolan hadn’t been attacked with a weapon Mom already owned.
Someone had brought that weapon into a house where it had no reason to exist.
And Nolan had built his entire self-defense story around it.
I called Detective Dalton.
“Detective, you need to send forensic officers back here.”
“What did you find?”
“The weapon Nolan says my mother attacked him with is a fireplace poker.”
“Yes.”
“My mother doesn’t have a fireplace.”
Silence.
