Ollie Clark—Saturday, June 22, 2019
Harper and Brad already had a table when they walked in, but Harper popped up to give Ollie a hug. It was a long hug during which they rocked from side to side and Ollie nearly wished for some Dramamine. “Wasn’t sure if you’d change your mind,” they murmured in Ollie’s ear, giving one more squeeze before letting go.
Brad, taller and broader by far, moved in now that his partner was done. Brad hugs were shorter, but still tight, and always smelled of whatever new beard oil he was trying that month. “Olls. Good to see you.”
“Chopped liver,” Eli sighed, dodging Harper’s punch to his shoulder and accepting a pity hug from Brad, the mocking kind with thumps on the back. “Did you already order?”
Harper nodded, sitting back down again.
“Okay. I’ll get ours,” he told Ollie. “I’m starving.” He even winked at her, which made her blush but also relax a little. Either he was okay with going out in public or doing a good job of faking it.
“Didn’t you have time for breakfast?” Harper inquired, batting their dark eyelashes.
“Nope.” Ollie took the chair across from them. This table was next to a giant pillar that apparently helped support the ceiling, and the way Harper and Brad sat down meant her own back was to the door and therefore to most of the room. That was perfectly fine. She’d told Eli she wanted to walk in holding his hand, yes, but she didn’t need to see for sure how many people stared at them. “Too busy.”
“Understandable,” Brad commiserated, then “What?” when Harper smacked him. “Have you or have you not lamented that Ollie’s gray ace and has never experienced attraction for you?”
Harper narrowed their eyes but they clearly fought a smile. “Just because I’d spend all morning in bed with her doesn’t mean I need to know you would.”
Brad shrugged, an unconcerned unironic lumberjack. “Didn’t say I’d do it for her.” He looked meaningfully at Eli and then back to Harper before his beard split into a grin. “You and only you, babe.”
They raised one slitted eyebrow but gave in with a sigh and a kiss before settling more comfortably in the plastic chair to face Ollie. “So, how are you?”
“Len Wilcox should be landing any minute now so Dad can take him to the house and show him exactly where Mom and Birdy died.” There was a lot she could’ve picked as her answer, but that one was the current frontrunner.
Brad frowned. “Even though …?”
“Oh yeah. Dad called him. But he already had the ticket and the cabin booked, so …” She sighed and slouched and rolled her eyes at Harper’s pointed look down the front of her t-shirt. “He’s coming, and my family’s a footnote.”
“Maybe he likes the wilderness,” Harper suggested.
Ollie snorted. “Mr. Chicago? Sure. He’ll rent an ATV and go chasing waterfalls.”
“I think I’d be more worried about the reputation he has with his interview subjects,” Brad murmured, raising a hand to claim the sandwich baskets being brought out from the kitchen.
“I’ll have you know,” Eli announced, plopping into the empty chair, “that Ollie hasn’t agreed to be one of those interview subjects, but Randy’s been talking the guy’s ear off.”
Brad tilted his head. “Len Wilcox is going to sleep with Randy?”
Ollie made a show of sticking her fingers in her ears.
“Consenting adults.” Harper picked up their iced drink and saluted with it.
“I could veer slightly and say that Len Wilcox also treats dead people as notches,” Eli offered. “Not on his bedpost. What would that be? Notches on his resume?”
“Lines on a resume,” Harper corrected. “Your analogy doesn’t work.”
“Harsh,” Eli complained, getting up again because their drinks were ready.
Brad shrugged. “That was a bit harsh. Is Cindy talking to him?”
Ollie shrugged. “She hasn’t yet. He’s done a bunch of Zoom interviews, though, so I don’t really know why he’s coming up here for so long. See the house, whatever, but like … you take one day to drive around and you’ve got it down.”
“Maybe he wants to get a real feel for the small-town thing,” Harper suggested. “He’ll show up in dark wash jeans fresh from the store and a plaid shirt with the fold lines still in it.”
“Walk into a locals’ bar and get the crap beat out of him,” Brad agreed rather gleefully.
Harper shrugged as they swallowed a bite of their walnut burger. “What’s your dad see in him, Olls?”
“A listening ear,” Eli answered for her. “No judgment.”
“I asked Olls.”
“A listening ear and no judgment,” Ollie repeated. “I think he’s just glad he gets to talk about them and it feels like it has some kind of purpose. Had,” she corrected, scowling as she sipped her iced mocha. “Had some kind of purpose.”
Harper considered, chewing on their lip. “It could still be one of his articles or something, right? Not part of the Kelly book anymore, but …”
“A way for him to still make money and get clicks off my mom and sister’s dead bodies?”
Brad shrugged and grabbed a napkin to get some stray tuna melt off his beard. “That’s what the man does. And does well. What they keep asking the man to do.”
“It’s his first book deal,” she pointed out.
“Which he got because of everything else he’s written,” he argued back. “And your mom and Birdy were going to be, what, less than a chapter anyway? So now it’s an article for Medium or something.”
“People only cared because they were serial killer victims instead of just a cold case,” Eli pointed out, raising his hand for their sandwiches.
“That was quick,” Harper observed.
Ollie smirked. “Subject change?”
“Well …”
Brad shook his head. “He’s got a point. Only, what, a handful of people cared about Wendy and Birdy? Until Kelly came along. So.”
Ollie sighed and looked down at her BLT. They hadn’t had breakfast, but she couldn’t say her appetite was exactly roaring. “They were cool because it was a serial killer, and maybe they’re a blip now because of the retracted confession, but …”
Eli shrugged, already well into his chicken cordon bleu sandwich. “I could probably get a few interviews out of it. Mr. Chapman, how does it feel to have certain innocence snatched away from you so callously?”
Brad’s eyes flickered up and he nodded to something behind them, but his mouth was too full for him to talk.
Ollie turned enough recognize Roger Porvoo and sighed, facing her sandwich again as Eli said, “Rog, hey. No comment.”
“Eli. Ollie. I’d be remiss if I didn’t give you the chance to speak on the fact that—”
“No comment,” Ollie agreed. Probably the only good thing about the way Dad responded a decade ago was that it kept her moving around and away from Roger and his continued hunt for a juicy sound bite.
“—the murders of Wendy and Catherine ‘Birdy’ Clark are back to being cold cases?”
It was like dealing with some sort of wild animal: don’t make eye contact. Don’t show fear.
“Well, if you change your minds …” Roger already had a card between his fingers and he set it on the table.
Like Ollie didn’t already have any and all numbers associated with the Daily Mining Gazette programmed into her phone so she knew not to answer.
Ollie watched Harper track him on his way. “Clark and Chapman seen at lunch,” they narrated, presumably once Roger was out the door, “Clark still wearing the engagement ring. They rejected all offers from this charming reporter to offer insight into their hearts and minds in the wake of this … yeah, okay, I lost it.”
Eli’s hand went to Ollie’s thigh and he squeezed gently. “You okay?” His voice was pitched low to let the others know they should pretend they didn’t hear.
Of course he wasn’t shaken by this. He’d stayed, so he’d been dealing with it this whole time. Ollie wasn’t entirely sure she was okay, but she nodded anyway so the conversation could move on.
Interview excerpts, Len Wilcox with Kendra (Rajala) Heikkinen, April 12, 2019
LW: Why don’t you start by telling me how you knew Catherine Clark?
KH: Oh, just call her “Birdy.” Everybody did. She’d get all mad if you tried calling her Catherine or Cathy. Sixth grade on, she was Birdy. She used to go up to any new teachers at the beginning of the year and tell them. “It says Catherine, but I’m Birdy.”
LW: So you knew her how long?
KH: Since third grade, when my family moved. We were at South Range Elementary together. It’s small here. If you’re the same age, you’re in the same class. There’s no switching teachers or whatever. So I knew her before she was Birdy, but seriously, that’s what you have to call her in your book. Birdy.
LW: I’ll make a note of it.
KH: Good. I think she picked it, you know, not just because of the book, but because she always thought Ollie had a better nickname. She never liked “Cathy” but there isn’t really any other good nickname for “Catherine.” So she read that book, and it doesn’t matter that she didn’t care about birds. She did a book talk on it, you know. Catherine, Called Birdy. We had to do those in sixth grade. And at first we thought it was just her being extra, you know, going overboard and pretending to be the main character, but no. She was Birdy.
LW: What was Birdy like as a friend?
KH: Oh, ride or die! Not that we would’ve said it that way. But she was intense. When she was in, she was all in. To everything. Used to drive her teachers crazy. One assignment she’d be hounding them for feedback, extra credit, whatever. The next she’d take a 0 and shrug. We loved having sleepovers at her house, Corrie and Liza and me, but our parents tried to have her over as infrequently as possible. Middle of the night she’d get an idea and we just had to do it right then. Truth or Dare, whatever, or we’d go into the kitchen to make brownies from scratch, or she’d get an idea for a Halloween costume. I think I’m talking too much.
LW: No, that’s the whole point. You’re supposed to do all the talking.
KH: Oh, right. Well. Um. So Birdy would get these ideas, and they’d be big ideas, and they couldn’t wait. She broke her arm when we were kids, right? Because she had this idea for a homemade parachute, so she made it, ripped up a bunch of the family’s sheets, and tried it out. Mr. Clark—ugh, it’s been years and I still can’t call him “Randy” first time—Randy got so mad about that. They called him at work because their mom, Wendy, didn’t answer at home. She must’ve been somewhere else that day. Maybe Marquette. Because Wendy wasn’t around to stop her.
LW: Where was her sister?
KH: Ollie? Off with her own friends. She was at Harper’s house, and Birdy was supposed to be at Liza’s, but really we were all out together. Our little gang. [Laughter] Not that we were a gang. God, you’re going to get the wrong idea. “Gang.” “Ride or die.”
LW: How old were you at the time?
KH: The parachute thing? Eleven. Well, ish—we weren’t all exactly the same age. Birdy was the youngest in our ga—in our group. And it … showed.
[A pause]
LW: You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.
KH: I just … it feels like a lie if you don’t say it, you know? It’s not like Birdy was perfect. Not like any of us were. But the rest of us … we’ve had a chance to grow up, you know? We’re not going to be stuck with the label “little terror” for the rest of our lives.
LW: Meaning people thought Birdy was a little terror?
KH: God, yes. All the teachers had Ollie first, right? And she did her work and wasn’t loud in class and they were all like ah, okay, the Clark girls are so amazing. Then they get Birdy, who just had too much energy and too many ideas. She couldn’t sit still. She always had to be doing something, to be occupied, because otherwise she got in trouble. Not because she wanted to get in trouble, but … like I said, her ideas. She’d have them, and have to do them, and then Mr.—Randy would have to leave work to come take her to the hospital to get her arm in a cast, and then a week later she’d be out in the rain and it got all soggy and she had to get another one, and it just … it was like that.
LW: Ideas and energy.
KH: And it wasn’t all bad. She had the best ideas. If you were bored, you found Birdy. She always had something else to do, and back then … I mean, it wasn’t exactly eons ago, but in the summer we could just leave the house in the morning and be back by dinner. Call home if we were staying over somewhere. It sounds like the fifties everywhere else, I guess, but come on. This was South Range. You know where the kids hang out when they’re too young to drive? In front of the post office.
LW: So if you were bored, you’d go to the post office?
KH: Yeah, and find Birdy. If she wasn’t there, she’d be out on the trail. She … okay, you have to say this part right, okay? She’d go hang out in the cemetery. And there was … when we were little, some of the kids teased her, you know? About being a witch. Then we had to read The Crucible in high school, and she punched one of the guys because he wouldn’t stop teasing her.
LW: Was it Jared Chapman?
KH: What? No. He was three grades ahead of us.
LW: But Birdy did date Jared in high school.
KH: Senior year, yeah. Our senior year. He was already graduated. We had this joke, right? That Ollie and Eli were in a three-legged race? Always in step. But Birdy and Jared … fire and ice. Even when they were dating, you’d show up and maybe they’d be screaming at each other, or maybe they’d be making out. No middle ground. With Birdy, there was just no middle ground.
Rebecca Frost 