I was called as a character witness for a man I don’t know, by a lawyer who says I contacted him. He had the email chain: twelve messages, my address, and my phone number in the signature. The first email described the defendant’s mother’s kitchen down to the wallpaper. The wallpaper was right, because I was in that kitchen once in 1981. I haven’t thought about that house in forty-four years, and I could not have told you what the wallpaper looked like if you’d paid me.
The lawyer asked me whether I’d ever known a woman by a certain name. I recognized it immediately, but I couldn’t understand why he was asking. She was someone I had known briefly when I was young, and I hadn’t heard her name in decades. I told him the truth, and he became very quiet. Then he showed me the second email, which had been sent from the same account. It contained a detail about something that happened in that kitchen in 1981 that only three people could have known.
I asked the lawyer who the other two people were. He said one was the woman I’d just named, and the other was the defendant’s mother. Both were dead. I asked why someone would use my identity to contact him, and he said that was exactly what he was trying to understand. Then he told me the defendant had been accused of something connected to an event that happened in that kitchen more than forty years ago. The strange part was that the defendant wasn’t even born yet.
Before I left, the lawyer handed me a printed copy of the final email. It had been sent three days before he contacted me, and the signature contained my name exactly as I would have written it. At the bottom was a sentence I had never seen before: “Ask him about the room behind the kitchen.” I told the lawyer there was no room behind that kitchen. He looked at me for a long moment and said, “That’s what everyone has said for forty-four years.” Then he showed me a photograph of the house from 1981, and there was a door behind the wallpaper that I had completely forgotten.:::
