Ollie Clark—Friday, June 21, 2019
There wasn’t air conditioning in Eli’s apartment, and usually the U. P. didn’t need it, but he’d acquired a number of fans to keep the air circulating and cool things off when the weather forgot where it was. He got out of bed long enough to turn on two of them, one in the window and the other oscillating on a stand, and then lay back down again so Ollie could snuggle up with her head on his shoulder.
Eli’s hand went to hers on his chest, playing with the ring. The diamond was smaller than he’d really wanted to get, but Ollie put her foot down. It was large enough to be recognizable, small enough to be practical, and did he really want people thinking he was compensating for something? “I’m just saying,” he murmured, kissing her hair, “that there’s probably going to be friction.”
Ollie sighed and closed her eyes in exasperation, biting back a comment about how maybe he thought she was too stupid to come up with that herself. “All that research I did a few years back still holds. I’ve got options.”
“But you love teaching.”
“I love you more.”
He shifted, not enough to dislodge her, but enough to be noticeable. “I think it’s important to be happy with both your occupation and your spouse.”
“Noted.” God, she didn’t want to fight with him over this. To make it look like there was a possibility of walking things back when it was a struggle to even get this far.
Eli took the sort of breath that meant he wanted to say something, but he held it and then let it out slowly, reconsidering. “Okay. Sorry. I just, uh … I just need to be able to say those things, okay? So you can look me in the eye and tell me yes, you’ve already thought of it, and you still haven’t changed your mind.”
Oh. Right. Or maybe he was coming at it from another angle. A more vulnerable angle. Ollie propped herself on her hand, not entirely sitting up but getting enough distance so she could look down at him and meet his eyes. “I could lose my job. You’ve got yours, and with my savings we could make it a year in that apartment even if I don’t find anything. I know it would suck, but worst case scenario, we’d have the spare bedroom at Dad’s. I doubt it’ll come to that, though, because you’ve been working for Nelson for years, so then we’d just move back up here and you’d be in the office instead of remote. Or, if you don’t want to deal with the people around here, we pick somewhere else with internet and become hermits or something. Together. Okay?”
He nodded, reaching up to brush her hair off her face. “Thank you. But your dad’s always going to be pissed you didn’t fall for Jared.”
Ollie rolled her eyes as she lay back down again, looking up at the ceiling. “He’s always going to be pissed Jared isn’t his biological child. He doesn’t just like Jared better than you, you know—he likes him better than me.”
“Olls …”
She waved that away. Now wasn’t the time to talk about Dad’s differing opinions of Eli and his cousin, thanks. They were finally doing it, finally moving in together and moving ahead, and she really didn’t want to cover any of the reasons it was finally and hadn’t happened years ago. The thing she wanted to talk about wasn’t exactly bedroom conversation, but it was more important right now. “How much has Dad been talking to Len Wilcox?”
Eli sighed and sat up. “Pop?”
“Water.”
He nodded and went out into the kitchen, disappearing behind the fridge door for a moment while he got out a can of Sprite and the filtered water pitcher.
Eli always drank filtered water. For him, that Britta pitcher was a sign of success. Even in this tiny apartment where every room could be seen from every other, that pitcher was an important marker of how far he’d come.
He waited to answer until he got back and handed her a glass, sighing and adjusting the pillow so he could lean against the wall. His mattress was on a metal frame, but there was no headboard. “He’s barely said anything to me, but Jared says it’s a lot. Like, I don’t know if Jared’s worried about how Cindy’s taking it, but I am.”
Ollie nodded slowly, sipping at her water. “Cindy’s a saint.”
Eli shook his head. “No, see, she isn’t. She’s a human being, and we all have our limits. Even people with long fuses still get there eventually.” Then, at her look: “I’ve put in the work, remember? Alastair had some gems.” Alastair was the therapist who’d finally clicked, either because he was the right person for Eli or because Eli had grown enough to want it to click.
“Fair,” she mused, frowning.
“Randy likes the idea of Kelly because it means it’s solved, and he likes Len Wilcox because it means he can talk as much as he wants about Wendy and Birdy without anyone asking if he’s really okay or if he needs his own Alastair, and Len Wilcox is the sort of professional listener who isn’t allowed to judge or ask if you need therapy.”
Plus, as much as Dad liked the idea of Kelly, he also meant that Eli was cleared, officially, and there was nothing keeping them from actually getting engaged and publicly being a couple. So.
“Jared doesn’t want to be worried about your dad.”
Jared depended too much on Dad to want to think there was something to worry about.
“You’re going to get Cindy alone at some point, right?”
Ollie nodded. “Maybe not tomorrow, but yeah.” Tomorrow Ollie and Eli were meeting Harper and Brad for lunch just late enough to make sure Ollie wouldn’t be at Dad’s house when the writer looked at the living room for the first time. Then she blinked. “Shit, Harper and Brad.”
Eli closed his eyes. “Roger’s going to have a field day. Maybe they don’t want to be seen in public with me.”
Exactly how many people were on a first-name basis with the local paper’s lead reporter? God, this was depressing. Ollie’s purse was out in the bigger room, on the couch in the section designated living room instead of kitchen or dining room, but Eli waved her away and got up again to go get it for her.
There was already a text from Harper. Eli read it over her shoulder and sighed, looking at his Sprite like maybe he wished it were straight vodka, but Ollie googled first just to be sure. Harper’s Just saw the news. We’re still on for tomorrow if you are didn’t necessarily have to mean …
But it did. Serial Killer Has Alibi, Raises Questions About Guilt. “I think his lawyer’s a genius,” Ollie grumbled, going back to the text and making a unilateral decision. We’re good with it. We’ll get it to go if it’s crowded.
“Why is his lawyer a genius?”
“How long do you think it’s going to take to track down every single random shotgun murder in the Midwest and check for an alibi?” Ollie leaned over Eli to put her phone on the single bedside table. “It’s going to push his trial back and give them that much more time to work on the defense. Hey, can I make a request?”
He almost smiled. “Shoot.”
“Distract me so I can’t think of anything else but you?”
Eli grinned, the real one with the dimple. “I’ll do my best.”
From Len Wilcox’s draft manuscript
On Friday June 19, Eli Chapman spent the night at his cousin Jared’s house. This was a common occurrence. Eli’s home life was in turmoil since his mom fought with her live-in boyfriend who would soon leave her. Jared’s father abandoned the family when he was a toddler, but his mom had a stable job and was, at that time, more emotionally stable as well. Eli spent as much time at his aunt’s house as he could.
The trouble started on Saturday the 20th when Eli told the police that he had been with Jared all night. This conflicted with Jared’s statement that he had woken up around 11 and been alone. Eli hadn’t returned by the time Jared fell back asleep, but he was there again in the morning. This discrepancy in the young men’s stories was the lynchpin in focusing attention on Eli.
Things continued to unravel for the 19-year-old who was left not only without an alibi but trapped in a lie. It was supposed to have been Birdy’s daddy-daughter weekend, a tradition in the Clark family since the girls were in diapers: each weekend Randy took one of the girls on some kind of adventure, and they alternated in a predictable schedule. The 19th should have been Birdy’s time at camp with Randy, but Birdy asked her father to change plans … because, she told Randy, Eli had asked her to.
Although neither Randy nor Olive has ever made a complete statement about the topics they covered that night while star-gazing, one of them was indeed Eli Chapman—specifically whether Olive should marry him. Birdy apparently sided with Eli and asked Randy to convince Olive that marrying her high school sweetheart wouldn’t be a mistake. The theory quickly surfaced that Eli hoped to not only kill the mother and younger sister, but frame Randy for the murders and therefore isolate his childhood sweetheart, forcing her to choose him.
This was the story pieced together by the prosecuting attorney during Eli Chapman’s murder trial, but it did indeed have to be pieced. Randy reported what Birdy told him, although Eli denied saying any such thing. The defense was able to bring out the fact that it was well-known that both Randy and Olive enjoyed stargazing; that Eli himself had known of this for years; and that any plot to frame Randy because of a lack of alibi would have been known to fail.
The prosecution was further hampered when witnesses spoke of the rapport between Eli Chapman and the three women of the Clark family, indicating that he would not, as the prosecution suggested, have to “get them out of the way” to marry Olive. Emails between the sisters further indicated that, from Olive’s perspective, her relationship with Eli was secure. Olive and Birdy even debate over whether the couple should marry between Olive’s sophomore and junior year—“Just make sure I’m back to be the maid of honor,” Birdy wrote sternly—or if they should wait until after Olive graduated from college. After only three hours of deliberation, the jury concluded that the state had not proved its case beyond reasonable doubt. Legally, Eli Chapman was declared not guilty. The community’s reaction was immediate: the jury was wrong.
Bury the Dead 4 – coming April 4
Rebecca Frost 