Ollie Clark—Thursday, June 27, 2019
It had been one of Johanna’s points at the trial: sure, Denomie’s story that Eli wanted to kill Wendy and Birdy so Ollie would inherit the money might have been a plausible one had her client been that ruthless, shortsighted … and telepathic. On the night of Friday June 19, 2009, there were only four people in the entire world who knew that Birdy was in South Range and Ollie was in Covington. Witness after witness testified to the Clarks’ known weekend schedule, from the girls’ closest friends to mere acquaintances. As far as anyone who wasn’t a Clark was concerned, up until the moment they saw Ollie alive, she was one of the victims.
True, it was either difficult or impossible to prove not knowing, but there weren’t any calls to or from the Clark household members on any of their phones that entire day. Both Ollie and Dad said the change was made at dinnertime and they left right after the dishes were done. The change agent, as one person called Birdy, hadn’t brought it up until shortly before dinner, and she hadn’t been out of the house between then and when Dad and Birdy left. Knowing what they did about Mom, Birdy wouldn’t have left after, so it was impossible for her to have told anyone.
Add to that the fact that Jared broke down utterly and completely when he saw Ollie on the twentieth. It was at Esther’s apartment, and she’d had to call an ambulance. He didn’t need just some calming shot—they’d taken him to the hospital. Ollie got the feeling Selena blamed her for Jared’s breakdown.
Dad licked his lips. “You …?”
“Everyone thought Ollie was dead that morning,” Eli said quietly, and a muscle in his jaw twitched. “News got around. The address, two bodies … it wasn’t even a question until you showed up.” He looked at Ollie and shrugged like he had to apologize for the tears. “Even Roger said he had to stop the wrong name from going to print. Nobody thought Birdy was the one home that night. That’s why Johanna couldn’t figure out another suspect.”
Dad closed his eyes. “Whoever did it thought he was killing Ollie.” If he knew who they were at all. If it wasn’t another Sean Kelly or a case of mistaken identity.
But it was also why Len’s explanation made a twisted sort of sense: Dad knew which of his daughters was where. He could’ve made the switch himself, lying about Birdy’s excuse and just telling the girls what was up. If this were a CSI episode there’d probably even be a full theory fleshed out around Dad, but it was still too early for that to be the final answer. If you kept an eye on the time, you knew when the team was just chasing a red herring. In this case, it was a second red herring about a decade after the first.
This was a useless line of thought. CSI solved most cases in a single episode. Serial killers popped up during sweeps week, but Sean Kelly had an alibi, and oh, man, Ollie’s head hurt.
Dad stared at Eli. “You thought Ollie was dead.”
“Yeah. That whole morning.” Eli’s smile was ghastly. “Just a glimpse into Jared’s reality, I guess.”
And Ollie hadn’t even thought of it. Hadn’t had time to think of it. There was the police car rolling up to the cabin and the man who knocked had seemed a bit stuck on getting her name right, looking back and forth between her ID and her face like she was trying to buy liquor, but the news … it overwhelmed everything. The officer called it in and barely stopped Dad from jumping right into his car and tearing on out of there. It wasn’t really an emergency anymore once everyone was dead.
Jared was in the hospital when he told the police he’d woken up and Eli wasn’t there. He was probably still hooked up to an IV and all kinds of monitoring. But he was an adult, and it was such a juicy detail, given at a time when nobody thought he could’ve made it up.
Johanna hadn’t been able to get the judge to throw it out, even with Jared’s own protests, but there was reasonable doubt there. Especially when Eli testified that no, he hadn’t been in the bedroom all night because he’d fallen asleep on the couch. There were no witnesses to that, but no evidence that he got up to anything else, either.
Okay and why did Ollie have to keep thinking about these things? Couldn’t they go back to knowing that it was Sean Kelly, a perfect stranger and completely senseless? It was an unsatisfying answer, but at least it was an answer. It was something that everyone, even Eli’s biggest detractors, could get behind.
Cindy set a cup of coffee down in front of Ollie and she blinked, wiping at her cheeks and uncertain how long, exactly, she’d zoned out. Before Cindy could say something, though, there was a sharp knock at the front door. “Police, Mr. Clark,” someone barked before they had any hope of answering. “We have a warrant for your arrest.”
Dad looked toward the back door but Deborah, the only one whose pulse might not have changed, shook her head as she swapped out her glasses. “They’ll be around the back, too. You’ll arouse more suspicion if you try it. Cindy, go on and open the door. Say nothing. That goes for all of you,” she added, as though Eli hadn’t been here before.
“But—”
“Mr. Clark, you say nothing to them unless I give you permission, and you certainly don’t speak to them when I’m not around,” she said sharply, now able to focus on him through her glasses instead of over them. “They’ve either already found something else or they want you out of here and stuck with them for forty-eight hours so they can find it, so don’t give them anything.”
“There’s nothing to find,” he protested, but men were already coming in, demanding to know if Mr. Clark had anything in his pockets and moving the glass Coke bottle out of his reach and reading him his rights and pulling out handcuffs and patting him down, and God, if the kitchen was crowded before … or if any of the others had a weapon and wanted to strike out … there simply wasn’t enough room for enough people to come in and frisk everyone, or to keep out of arm’s reach while frisking Dad, but come on. Shouldn’t they have cleared things out first?
Eli offered his hand and Ollie clamped both of hers on it because hey, she wasn’t the only one having flashbacks here. First he had to remember the morning of the twentieth, and now they were back at the twenty-first, except he hadn’t had a lawyer calmly announcing she’d join them all downtown and meeting the officers’ eyes, refusing to back down. It had just been Eli and Esther and Ollie, and the police—the good guys—took away the last solid thing in her life.
At least they didn’t have a search warrant. Although, once Ollie thought of it, she realized it was laughable: a search warrant for something that happened ten years ago, in a house that had been remodeled so no traces of the crime were left. When they released a crime scene, they let you get rid of the evidence.
After the men left with Dad and while Deborah gave a long list of instructions to Cindy, Eli moved his chair closer so he could pull her into his arms and just hold on.
Birdy Clark—June 19, 2009
Birdy watched Dad and Ollie drive away, waving back at her sister before letting the curtain fall over the living room window. Her heart was in her throat, in her ears, and somehow in her eyeballs, making the entire world pulse, but she forced herself to say it loud enough for Mom to hear: “I’m pregnant.”
Silence. Great. This was going to be one of those things where she had to turn around and actually look Mom in the eyes and see every single nuance—
Mom had her hands on her hips, her head cocked, and one eyebrow raised. “Child. I’m the last person on Earth to lecture anyone about unplanned pregnancies.”
“Yeah, but …” Birdy tried a deep breath that shuddered in her chest. “You had Dad.”
Mom’s second eyebrow joined the first and she nodded. “I think we need cocoa.”
Cocoa. She just told Mom she was pregnant and Mom said they needed cocoa. Although really … all things considered … Birdy shrugged and followed her back to the kitchen so she could have some cocoa.
“I’m fact-finding, okay?” Mom asked, reaching up to get the special cocoa mugs. Birdy thought it was a little silly they had special cocoa mugs, but she kind of liked it, too. “Jared’s the father?”
“Yes.” Just fact-finding, huh? God, you’d think this would’ve been easier.
“And he knows?”
Okay, seriously, no one should be that graceful while making cocoa. Mom was picture-perfect, barefoot in her red dress with her long blonde hair, like she didn’t actually have any care in the world. “I told him this afternoon.”
Mom glanced over but at least didn’t pin Birdy with her gaze. “How long have you known?”
“I took the tests this morning.” She decided she might as well sit, folding her hands together on the tabletop. “Two of them. Just in case.”
“All right. And Jared said?”
Birdy cleared her throat and looked out the window. “He proposed.”
Wendy clucked her tongue. “Sorry, honey, but you’re really making me pull information out of you piece by piece here. Lay it all on the table?”
She had practice with saying the I’m pregnant part—once, at least—but the rest of this was brand new. “He started figuring out how he could come to California with me and we’d get married and raise the baby. But I’ve been talking to Ollie, and she … ugh.” Birdy closed her eyes and slouched back. Why was this so hard? All the times she’d talked, sitting here at this table, you’d think she’d be able to just say it. The words had always come so easily before.
Mom just waited, because she made cocoa on the stove, slowly heating up the milk before stirring in the powder. It was her special mix of powder. Mom never used cocoa packets.
“Okay, so, Ollie said college has been really good because it’s with all these new people, in this new place, and you get to just show up without all this baggage from people who think they’ve known you forever and won’t let you be anything else, and every class she had to tell them it’s Ollie, not Olive, because nobody else beat her to it. And she could just be herself, but that’s fine for Ollie, because she’s always been herself and it’s good to be her and she just … I don’t want to keep being me.”
She opened her eyes to see Mom standing at the stove, slowly stirring the milk and listening intently.
“Like at what point … do you ever … have you …?” Birdy shook her head and tried another deep breath. “I’m here, and I look back at who I used to be, and I don’t know how I got from there to here, and I don’t know if I can even get back to who I was before, but I can’t do that with Jared because this is the me he wants. And I can’t just tell him that I woke up this morning and realized I don’t even like this me.”
Mom nodded slowly, still stirring. “Okay.”
“So … yes? You know how that feels?”
“Well.” Mom smiled wryly. “I have gotten into a few situations and wondered how the hell I ended up down here in the mud when it seems like two seconds ago everything was clean and clear.”
“But you had Dad.”
She held up a finger as she turned to get out the cocoa mix. “You’ve got Dad. And me. And Olls. So.”
Birdy scoffed before she could stop herself, because come on, it wasn’t the same.
With her back turned again, Mom asked, “Are you absolutely sure it’s Jared’s? No room for doubt?”
“He’s the only one who didn’t use a condom and I only just missed my period.” Being blunt didn’t actually make her feel better, and it was worse when she heard Mom suck air through her teeth. “What? You don’t think it’s a good thing?”
“Honey, you’re sitting here tonight alone instead of the two of you announcing it to all of us at once.”
Birdy blinked. “Oh.”
“You’re telling me it’s not a good thing, sweetie. Jared proposed and you said?”
She shook her head, watching Mom get out the marshmallows. “I didn’t say anything. I just burst into tears. He waited while I cried and then I said I had to get home for dinner.”
Mom tossed the package of marshmallows onto the table even though she usually rationed them out like it was WWII and turned to pour the cocoa into mugs. Birdy got the one with the couple on the ski lift and Mom had the one with the ice skaters, because those were the mugs they always got. “So he thinks it’s still on the table,” she mused, sitting down across from Birdy and carefully placing her first marshmallow into the mug so it wouldn’t splash. Then she stifled a laugh.
“What?” Birdy demanded.
“I was just thinking that, a century ago, we’d send you off to some relatives like nobody else would catch on, but …”
Birdy winkled her nose and kept her fingers on one half of her marshmallow while she dunked the other like a teabag. “No relatives.”
Mom tilted her head. “Ollie and Eli—”
“They wouldn’t want me living with them,” she interrupted.
“Plus Marquette isn’t far enough and it’s the first place Jared would look?”
Birdy nodded miserably. “I’m going to ruin their wedding.”
“Pfft.” Mom pretended to flick something—that thought—off the table.
“What? I’m either going to be big as a house or have a newborn.”
“If Ollie and Eli end up married at the end of the day, they’ll have a perfect wedding. Nothing’s going to faze them.”
She shrugged, taking refuge in that same old insolence. “I’m not going if Jared’s there.”
Mom sighed and made a bigger gesture, now backhanding something instead of flicking it. “If you tell your sister that you never want to see Jared again, she’ll want to know why, but she’ll also turn around and tell Eli she’s not marrying him if Jared’s there.”
Birdy wanted to protest—God, the armor was hard to put down—but that part was true. If Eli got to marry Ollie, none of the rest of it mattered. No wonder she was envious.
“Okay.” Mom reached across the table to take Birdy’s hands. “We don’t have to figure it all out tonight. Two important things, though, okay?”
Birdy nodded even though she wasn’t sure if she wanted to hear the two things.
“I love you. And whatever happens, whatever you decide, we need to put you first. Okay?”
“The baby—”
“The baby will be fine. Especially if we put you first and make sure you’re safe and happy. Okay? If you want to talk abortion, we’ll have to do that sooner rather than later, but otherwise we can get you in to see Dr. Huang and buy you vitamins and all the rest and you can have some time to think it through.”
“Dad …”
Mom smirked a little. “Dad might have a few uncomfortable flashbacks to before Ollie was born, but this is your life, honey. Not ours.”
“Dad loves Jared.”
“Dad’s not the one who has to spend the rest of his life with him. Okay? Dad doesn’t get to tell Ollie she can’t marry Eli just because the two of them are oil and water, and he doesn’t get to decide who you marry, either. So.” Mom squeezed her hands. “You first. Okay?”
Birdy wasn’t entirely sure it was, but she nodded to show she’d heard.
“Good. Now we can keep talking about this if you want to, or we can change the subject and do our nails and have more cocoa. Which,” Mom allowed as she tilted her head, “we could still do while we talk about it. So. Dealer’s choice.”
She smiled. “What if we did, like … a movie and then manicures and more cocoa?”
Mom smiled back. “Sounds like a deal.”
Bury the Dead 20 – coming April 20
Rebecca Frost 