Ollie Clark—Friday, June 21, 2019

Going home was hard. It wasn’t just the drive, which started with tourist traffic in Traverse City and ended with miles and miles of back roads and pine trees. Ollie wasn’t sure she agreed with Thomas Wolfe about the ability to return, but when they read “The Death of the Hired Man” in class she always stuck at “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.” Poetry was poetry, but home was hard.

See, for example, the text she got already almost five hours into her drive: I’ll be at your dad’s, so go there first. Ollie gave Eli’s message a thumbs-up when she stopped for gas, but exactly how many layers were underneath those nine words? Dad and Eli had never, ever, gotten along, not in the quarter century they’d known each other. They needed Ollie as their buffer, so what would make Eli go over there to wait for her?

“Nothing good,” she murmured, cranking the music up a little louder. Ollie had the windows rolled down even though this car was new—to her, at least—and the air conditioning worked. She just preferred the fresh air, the two-and-fifty-five they’d joked about as teenagers when none of their cars had AC.

Was it just Eli and Dad waiting for her? It was a Friday, so Cindy might have work. And Jared never had any issues being around Dad when it was just the two of them, so maybe he was there, too, but …

This trip was a total seesaw. On the plus side, Eli had time off so that, in two weeks, he’d come back downstate with her, both their cars packed full. On the minus side, Len Wilcox was due to fly in tomorrow and start his onsite interviews. For his book. Ollie and Dad didn’t see eye to eye about either Len Wilcox or his book.

And now she checked her speedometer and eased off the gas to drop back down to five miles an hour over the speed limit. Five was generally safe, as long as you didn’t run into a deer. More than that and there’d be flashing lights in her rearview—less common on the back roads, sure, but not unheard of. She wanted to concentrate on the glass half full stuff, and getting stopped for a ticket wasn’t going to keep that end of the seesaw up top.

The last long drive alone. The last time she and Eli would have what they agreed was the one main perk of a long-distance relationship: reunion sex. The last time she’d drive back downstate alone, but Eli would be coming with her. Thank God, honestly. There were enough reasons for the delay, but come on. There was only so long you could keep part of your life on hold.

The last half hour or so was gorgeous, but Ollie was sweaty and out of sorts all the same. Dad’s first instead of Eli’s. Was there any daughter who could have a proper reunion with her fiancé in front of her dad? So that just meant pushing that back even further, and having to deal with whatever was important enough to get Eli over there, and she was out of water so part of her headache was probably from dehydration. Honestly, the back way cut off time and meant she didn’t have to go through Houghton and hit city traffic—Upper Peninsula city traffic—but South Range was still just so far away from everything.

Harper once told her that the roads going into the U. P. were so much longer than the roads going out, which was why a) it always took so long to come back, and b) nobody wanted to visit you when you lived there and the burden fell on you to go and visit other people. Clearly Dad missed that memo. It was her job to come back, to come home, and his job to stay put.

Turning off M-26 meant she was almost there, since South Range wasn’t exactly huge. 2nd Street was only a few blocks long, so even having to go almost to the top of the hill was nothing. And yep, Jared’s car was in the driveway, so she pulled in next to it. Cindy’s car was in the garage, so at least she wasn’t at work, and Ollie could always move if Cindy needed to get out. It could even be an excuse. Her stepmom was good with those.

Ollie turned off her car and got out, stretching and trying to work out the kinks. She couldn’t do anything about the wrinkles in her dress, but when she put it on this morning she figured she only needed it to get inside at Eli’s. Then it could pick up more wrinkles on the floor. Nobody was outside at either the picnic table or in the gazebo, but the back door opened before she could lean back in and grab her purse, so she waited by the driver’s side because at least the car partially blocked things. The others might be grouped in the mud room and watching.

Eli came out barefoot, in faded jeans and an old plain V-neck t-shirt, and he circled the car to just … give her a hug. Normally he squeezed tightly, thin arms like bands of iron, bending to get her scent and tickling her neck with his breath, but this was gentle. Like she was made of glass and might break.

Or like he was.

“Eli?”

“Come on.” He bent into the car for her purse and then shut the door. “Your dad’s got something to tell you.”

Cancer. It had to be. Cancer or something like it, right before Len Wilcox was set to show up to bleed Dad dry, and right after the tenth anniversary of—

He took her hand, not interlacing their fingers but gently pulling her along.

And wait, if it was cancer, then why did Eli and Jared get to know first? Yes, fine, Dad and Jared went through that whole male bonding thing, but Jared wasn’t actually his kid. She was. The only one left, thank you very much.

There wasn’t really enough room for everyone in the kitchen, but that’s where Dad, Cindy, and Jared were, anyway, Dad holding a beer and the other two with pop. Dad cleared his throat and opened his arms for a hug, folding Ollie tightly into familiar flannel, but his hair was mussed and, unlike the younger guys’, Dad’s hair was never mussed. “Got a call from Arnie, kiddo,” he grunted before she even had time to pull back.

Arnie. That made her blink. Arnie Dubrowski wasn’t a doctor. He was a lawyer. “Arnie?”

“Kelly’s got an alibi.”

Her brain was still back two turns, shifting from some sort of horrific medical diagnosis to Arnie. And yes, of course, Sean Kelly went with Arnie Dubrowski when it came to name association, but …

Dad nodded, light blue eyes already bloodshot. “Kelly didn’t do it, kiddo. He didn’t kill Mom and Birdy.” He tried on a gruesome smile that squeezed out a tear. “It’s not solved, after all.”

From Len Wilcox’s draft manuscript

June 19, 2009, was a Friday. The older Clark daughter, Olive, was home from her freshman year at Northern Michigan University. The younger, Catherine “Birdy,” had just graduated high school. Neither young woman had a summer job—their parents were adamant about that. Neither Randall nor his wife Wendy had gone to college, and they didn’t want their daughters to have to grow up as quickly as they had. “School was their job,” Randy told them so often that even their friends knew the Clark house rule.

Olive had multiple scholarships to cover the cost of her education, but there was tension in the household during Birdy’s senior year because she wanted to attend a college that was out of the family’s financial reach. “Birdy really wanted to go out of state,” her friend Corrie Jameson remembers. And not just to Wisconsin—Birdy was ready to fly the nest all the way to California. Discussions of their younger daughter’s future plans were rampant that June as Birdy complained it wasn’t fair that Olive got to pursue her dream and the parents countered with an offer of exactly how much they were putting toward Olive’s education, challenging Birdy to make up the rest in scholarships.

“Birdy didn’t want a job,” classmate Kendra Heikkinen recalls. “The way she figured, she couldn’t work up enough to pay for her first year, anyway, so someone else had to do it. But you have to remember we were seventeen,” she adds with a bit of surprise in her voice, like she’s forgotten how much time has passed since their senior year.

It seems to have been the common growing pains of parents and a teenager ready to tackle adulthood. Emails saved to Birdy’s computer detail a loving relationship between the sisters, likely encouraged by the fact that, for the first time in their lives, they weren’t living under the same roof. The sisters wrote to each other almost daily, with Birdy complaining about their parents and the current high school drama and Olive reporting back on classes, new friends, and occasional updates on her continued relationship with her high school boyfriend, Eli Chapman. During her own senior year, Birdy started dating Eli’s cousin, Jared.

On the night of June 19th, the Clark family was divided. Birdy and mother Wendy were home in South Range, preparing to have a girly-girl night and, perhaps, to once again rehash why Birdy should pick an in-state school. Randy and Olive were out at the family camp near Covington. This put them out of reach of electricity, indoor plumbing, and even cell phone signals. Father and daughter stayed up late star gazing and talking about the future. It wasn’t until a police car made its way up the long two-track lane on the morning of the 20th that they knew something was wrong.

Neighbors reported a disturbance around 11 p.m. on the night of the 19th, although descriptions were vague. They had heard noises and one man reported seeing someone running away from the house, but it was dark and the figure, by then out of range of the garage’s motion-sensor light, was never positively identified. When the police arrived to do a wellness check, they discovered Birdy just inside the front door and Wendy further inside the living room. Both had been hit with buck shot from a standard 12 gauge shot gun, the daughter in the head and the mother in the chest. Neither was still alive when the police found them.

Even though father and older daughter were only about 50 miles away and both had cell phones, it took hours for the police to track them down because they were in a dead zone. It took further hours to determine that father and daughter were each other’s alibi, and that they could vouch for all the hours in question: Randy is an amateur astronomer, and both he and Olive were up until the wee hours of the morning looking at the constellations. Even without this alibi, Randy and Olive would have quickly been cleared. Suspicion immediately fell on Eli Chapman.

Bury the Dead 2 – coming April 2