Ollie Clark—Thursday, June 27, 2019
Harper considered the pizza and took another slice. They’d gotten Cindy her ice cream, sure, but they’d also stopped at the Ambassador for some of their half-baked pizzas and finished them off in Cindy’s oven. “So did Jared co-opt the breakdown over your dad and you’re suppressing?”
Ollie grabbed a handful of sour cream and onion chips, but they were out back in the gazebo, alone, so there was no one to give her a stern look for talking with her mouth full. “If they actually charge him, I don’t know, but right now …”
“Do you think they really have fingerprints on the random freaking shotgun?”
“I feel like, if they did, they would’ve just waited to process Dad and then been all hah, we have a match.”
Harper tilted their head and licked white sauce off their thumb. “Is it weird that your dad’s never been fingerprinted before?”
“He’s never bought a gun. And he doesn’t work with kids. What else requires being fingerprinted?”
They held up a hand. “Brad and I have been.”
“Tow truck drivers need to give their fingerprints?” Harper worked at a bank, so Ollie could see the reasoning in that one, but really?
“Yeah. So he doesn’t run off with your car or something? I don’t know. But, considering our little group, it looks weird that your dad hasn’t.”
Ollie took another piece of her own pizza. They could’ve shared, but Brad and Harper wanted to leave a bunch of leftovers at the house in case nobody wanted to go out. “Kind of weird that it’s suspicious he hasn’t been fingerprinted.”
“Kind of weird they found a buried shotgun and just assumed it’s the right one.”
“Deborah didn’t even say where they found it.”
“They probably didn’t tell her. Like, if they find it, and your dad breaks down and goes oh no, not the gun I buried sixty paces from the southeast corner of the cabin, next to the giant oak tree with the sawed-off limb, under thirteen inches of whatever kind of soil we have up here …”
Ollie pretended to throw her napkin at them. “Do you think anybody ever does that?”
“Didn’t Jeffrey Dahmer? They caught him on one thing and he was like well, okay, let me back up.”
She took a sip of her birch beer—Harper and Brad stopped at the Keweenaw Brewing Company, too, like they’d gone on a tasting tour of Houghton—and shrugged. She knew Harper’s parents were from Ontonagon and had known Steven Tuomi before he’d left to go to Milwaukee and run into Dahmer, so she figured Harper would know better than she did. For some reason, Ollie had never really been interested in true crime.
“Or what about Kelly?” Harper suggested. “Same deal. They caught him for one, and then …” They spread their hands.
“They caught him for one, he said oh sure, I’ve been doing this for years, and then his freaking lawyer finds him an alibi for the nineteenth,” Ollie spat. “Confessions don’t mean anything without the evidence to back them up.”
Harper shrugged. “So they’re hoping they can match your dad’s fingerprints to the gun.”
“A gun buried somewhere near the cabin? Maybe they can tell oh, yeah, this one could’ve shot the buckshot that killed Mom and Birdy, but you don’t get rifling with shotguns. It’s not a one-to-one match like handguns. At best they could prove Dad touched that gun before it was buried, but that’s nothing. It’s Eli all over again.”
“I don’t remember Jared being quite so shattered when it was Eli.”
“We didn’t hang with Jared back then.”
They blinked, then blinked again. “Oh. Wow, we didn’t, did we?”
“Nope. He was still high school sports stud, getting drinks bought for him because of his football records.”
“God, we’re a small town.” Harper broke into a grin. “Remember Abby? I ran into her a couple months ago—I guess she was home visiting—and she was all like isn’t it weird Ollie and Eli hung out with you and Brad all the time because you two are queer and Ollie and Eli aren’t?”
Ollie rolled her eyes, but at least she didn’t have to ask if Harper corrected that misconception. “Safety in numbers.”
“Birds of a feather,” they agreed. “Jared had totally different feathers. Strutting peacock.”
“He and Eli didn’t even really hang out. Like, Eli would go over to Serena’s place, but Jared wasn’t always there. Or he’d just leave him inside and go play sportsball with his friends in the yard. It wasn’t until …” She waved a hand because really, there were only so many ways you could say the night my mom and sister were murdered.
“Yeah, I was kind of surprised Jared and Serena showed up to the trial every day.”
Ollie shook her head and held up a hand so she could swallow her current bite. “Not to support Eli. Or Esther. Not really. Serena totally went so she could be the sober, put-together one with the perfect kid and they’d say she was there for her sister-in-law and play up how she really didn’t have to be.”
“So then it’s a kick to the teeth when Eli’s innocent.”
Technically the verdict was not guilty.
Harper looked toward the house, tongue poking around in their cheek. “Did they ever find Eli’s dad?”
“Uh.” She shook her head a little. “No. I don’t think anyone’s ever tracked him down.”
“Do you think Len’s ever tried?”
She rolled her eyes. “His book’s about Kelly, so Eli was already like three degrees removed. I doubt he’d have any reason to try for four.” Especially since Lonnie Chapman left before Eli even started school, so it wasn’t as though he had anything to contribute to the story.
Ollie’s personal guess was that he was buried somewhere as a John Doe, unidentified and unclaimed. Either that or he was hiding out in a cave in Tibet, because otherwise someone should’ve found him back then, since his only known child was on trial for double murder and all.
Harper nodded slowly, thoughts apparently still drifting because they said, “You and Eli can sleep in our guest room if you want. If you don’t want to be either here or at his place. Like … I don’t know why you’d pick going further away, but it’s on offer.” They bit their lip. “Brad’s not going to say the same thing to Jared. We don’t want responsibility for him.”
There was a reason the only thing they’d brought from the KBC was birch beer and not any other kind. “Thanks. I don’t know what Cindy’s going to want, but we should probably stay closer than your place.” Not that Houghton was miles and miles away, but there was a difference in you can run there from here and get on the highway for a bit.
“Yeah, I figured. I just … I want to do something, you know? To help.”
Oh, yes. Ollie knew that feeling well. “I promise you that, if I can actually think of anything to do, I’ll let you know.”
Harper reached over and squeezed her hand.
From Len Wilcox’s private journal, June 27, 2019
Roger Porvoo’s a dick. He’s got a freaking contact in the police department and he still calls me to see if I can tell him something when hello he’s clearly got more than I do. And come on—blood type and gun? Do your research. Jesus. They really hire amateurs up here.
I’ve got documents with time stamps. Word tracks all that shit: when you made the file, how long you spent editing it, who owns it. It’s a pain in the ass to delete all that information if you’re submitting for awards or prizes or whatever and it needs to be blinded. It’s not his word against mine. It’s his verbal word against my documents with all their metadata. So choke on that, Rog.
They must’ve found something. Yeah, sure, I told that officer about the blood types and the stolen guns, but that was a chance encounter over beers. I’m not even sure the guy remembers my name. But he remembered enough to figure out that O plus O cannot ever equal A, and as far as the guns … I mean, come on. The paper covered the police’s own report. What’s to confirm?
I drove out to the Clark camp today. Once I didn’t find any of them in town, I figured why the hell not? Randy gave me directions and even loaned me a key, the idiot. Not like he’s going to keep a box of evidence under the bed, but come on. I don’t have a badge, but I’ve got a known byline.
I’m more dangerous.
Let me tell you, there’s a radio station that says something like “40 million pine trees can’t be wrong” and that’s no exaggeration. There’s nothing up here. I guess the map Randy drew is all the back roads, the way a local would go, and thank God I didn’t get a flat tire or something. You’re just going to die out there because cell phones don’t work and you’re nowhere near a house where you could borrow a phone. I was reminding myself moss grows on the north side of trees and you can eat cattails.
Seriously, people live up here?
And why have this cabin, anyway? It’s plonked down in the middle of nowhere at the end of a two-track and with a view of … nothing. No lake. Just trees. I swear you go twenty yards away from it and you better have a compass because the leaves close in and you can’t see anything. I hear people all the time complaining about how the city’s full of tall buildings and it blocks off the view, but come on. What view? All you can see is the freaking trees, and I guess there’s evergreens and some are white birch, but it’s not like there’s real variety. They’re just freaking trees.
Plus it’s cold. It’s June, it’s summer, and it’s cold. No wonder the people who live here go crazy and shoot each other.
The cabin thing looks like torture. There’s no electricity. There’s a toilet, a single toilet, and I guess there’s a tank or something for the water and then a septic tank, but the sink in the kitchen—because there’s not a sink in the room with the toilet, and no shower—has two different faucets. There’s no hot water. It’s just that one’s potable water and one isn’t.
What the hell. Are you going to catch some sort of disease if you don’t dehydrate?
There’s a water cooler for drinking water, except it doesn’t actually cool the water. It’s just a gravity-fed thing so you can fill a cup and live long enough to wish you were somewhere else. And no electricity means no fridge, so what do they even eat when they’re out here? There’s a single gas burner thing like a hot plate so I guess they can have coffee, and a fire pit in the backyard. An actual pit with stones around it. Not one of those metal things on legs.
Okay on the plus side anyone visiting that cabin would go back to the house on 2nd Street and think it’s a mansion with all the mod cons.
The other plus side is that a search didn’t take long. Open the handful of cupboards and see some empty shelves and some tin plates and cups. There’s only a couple of drawers, so there’s silverware—tinware?—and a junk drawer. They’ve got more storage with flashlights and candles and lanterns and long forks to roast hot dogs over the fire and weird torture devices that probably mean more cooking over the fire, but it’s not like I was looking for blood. Even if Wendy and Birdy were stabbed, someone would’ve washed those between then and now.
There are two tiny bedrooms with freaking cots in them and nothing underneath. There aren’t dressers or closets—just pegs on the walls, and are you kidding me? I would pay good money to not spend any more time there.
I got photos, though. Took a bunch from all angles, inside and out. Just to make sure I never have to go back there again.
I don’t think it was an entire waste. There’s still the “He left Ollie here while he went off and killed the other two” angle. Can’t even make a reference to “The Most Dangerous Game” because he came at them out of nowhere while they were defenseless. They’d changed into their freaking pajamas. There was cocoa and an open bottle of nail polish on the kitchen table, ye gods. They guessed Birdy went to get the door because Wendy was waiting for her first coat to dry.
And then, can’t forget, he just let Eli go to trial for it. Stood back and let his older daughter’s—his only daughter’s—long-time boyfriend take the rap.
What if he’d been convicted? Is there any point at which Randy would’ve stood up and said “This has gone on long enough”?
I don’t think so. Maybe pulling Eli and Ollie apart was even integral to the overall plot. It didn’t work, and you can tell he’s not happy about that. He’s so sure she can do better than a guy willing to do anything for her.
Oh well. At least she’s got Eli by her side so she won’t be alone once her dad goes to prison. Too bad for Jared, though—those two really bonded after the whole mess. It’s really just evil on Randy’s part. Hey, kid, killed your girlfriend and smashed your future, and now I won’t even leave you alone.
Okay maybe Jared should feel lucky that he’s still alive.
Bury the Dead 24 – coming April 24
Rebecca Frost 