Ollie Clark—Friday, June 21, 2019
Normally when her brain got caught on something, Ollie could blink a couple times and force it on through. She had plenty of experience thinking on her feet—high schoolers came at you with the weirdest stuff out of nowhere sometimes and you had to make split-second decisions to ignore, acknowledge, or redirect. Say, when some of them congratulated her on her engagement after Christmas and added something like “Isn’t it weird that he was on trial for killing your mom?” Well, yes, it was weird, because anyone who knew Eli knew he couldn’t have done it. The problem was that not many people really knew him. They just went on his family’s reputation.
All eyes were on her. They’d had, what, over an hour to digest this information, even if it was an elephant passing through a boa constrictor, but she’d just been hit with it. “How …?” It came out as a croak and Ollie shook her head in case that knocked things back into position enough for the blinking to help. “How did they …?”
Dad shook his head more slowly. “I don’t know. Arnie didn’t say.” He sighed. “I didn’t ask. He just said Kelly’s lawyer came up with an alibi, so he didn’t do it.”
“But …”
“But he confessed?” Dad nodded and raised the bottle to his mouth. “Yeah. Bastard confessed.”
Behind her, Jared snorted. “It’s probably going to call all of his confessions into question.”
Sean Kelly wasn’t the one they had to worry about. When Ollie turned around, slowly, like the air was suddenly thick, it was to look at Eli.
He had his arms crossed and his shoulders jerked in a shrug, but he could barely look at her. “That one school board member thanked you for keeping our relationship a secret until I wasn’t a murderer.”
“Eli …”
His chin lifted to indicate the small diamond on her ring finger. “You’re engaged to a killer again.”
“Not guilty,” Jared protested, because yes, that was the official legal sentence, but the community had never agreed. They scoffed that the prosecuting attorney had failed at a slam dunk.
Ollie shook her head, holding Eli’s eyes. “I’m engaged to you.”
That made him look away again. “Olls …”
“Hey.” She put a hand on his forearm, urging him to unstrap himself enough so she could hold his hand. “This sucks, and it changes a lot of things, but that isn’t one of them. Okay?” She tilted her head to the rest of the room. “Witnesses.” Because, for so long, he’d resisted the idea that anyone else could know. For so long, he’d resisted her entirely.
“Thank God this didn’t come out before,” he quoted, giving each word its own weight.
Yes, and Ollie had never liked that member of the school board, who’d been drinking at the time he said it to her, and whose term was almost up, anyway. “One random dude with a bad mustache doesn’t get to decide my future for me.”
“Take him home,” Jared ordered, and his flash of a grin was exactly the same as it had been in high school when all the girls swooned over the tall, broad-shouldered football player with that lock of dark hair that always fell so charmingly over his forehead. “Actions speak louder than words.”
“Yeah, my dad is right there,” she hissed, suddenly fifteen again with knobby knees and a training bra.
“That’s exactly why I said it.” Jared shrugged, unconcerned that he’d thrown her even more than Arnie’s news had. “Look, it’s not like we’ve figured out anything else to do.”
Cindy put her hand on Dad’s arm, shrugging as she looked at Ollie. “Len’s still coming tomorrow. Dad already called him.”
Uh. Okay. So not only did Jared and Eli find out before she did, but Dad called Len freaking Wilcox?
“He’ll be up tomorrow,” Dad agreed. He grimaced and twisted his head like he had a sudden neck cramp. “All of that’s going to go forward as planned.”
Meaning other things shouldn’t? Or that it was the only part Dad thought he had some say over?
“Go on,” Cindy urged quietly. “If we get any more information, we’ll tell you.”
Dad scoffed at that and drained the rest of his beer. “What more is there? Took them almost ten years to find a new suspect, and then …” He flapped a hand and turned to the fridge. “Go on. All of you.”
Jared shrugged and gestured for the other two to leave first, like he didn’t think any of this had been awkward. Like he was more used to Dad’s emotional thermometer than Ollie was.
The guys slipped into their sandals, identical-looking battered Birkenstock knockoffs, and just like that Ollie was back in the driveway again. Seriously. All that stress and worrying for what, a single sentence? It could’ve been a text.
“Let Cindy handle him,” Jared said in a low voice, ducking his head down because he was six four and their ears were nowhere near the level of his mouth. “He wanted you to know, but …”
But. This wasn’t the first time Dad pushed her away while he processed something. Except, in his mind, he wasn’t pushing. Even after the fight that preceded the reconciliation—which he never called a fight, and Dad also didn’t see why they needed a reconciliation because you only needed to restore something that’d gone missing—he wanted to dump the news on her and immediately push her away. Then he’d be grouchy about the fact that, if he wasn’t going to support her emotionally, of course she’d turn to someone else … and of course that person would be Eli.
Jared looked at his cousin and pointed at Ollie. “You’re marrying her. Full stop. Chaos swirls, people are jerks, but you don’t get to pull your stupid Edward Cullen shit again. You’ve put in the work.”
Eli snorted at that before drawing in a deep breath and letting it out with a sigh and something resembling his usual grin as he looked at Ollie. “Take me home?”
She caught his hand and gave it a squeeze. “It’s what I’m here for.”
Excerpts from the first interrogation of Sean Kelly by Detectives Lana Schoellman and Dirk West, November 18, 2018
SK: The thing is, this isn’t the first time.
DW: It’s not the first time? What the hell do you mean by that?
SK: Just what I said. It’s not the first time. I’ve carried that shotgun with me … oh, the entire time I’ve been driving, I guess. In case I need it.
LS: Need it for what?
SK: You know. Urges.
LS: Urges. Like Donna Sullivan.
SK: If that’s her name, yeah. I don’t know their names. I just … pick a house.
DW: What do you mean you—?
LS: Why don’t you tell us from the beginning?
SK: Beginning? You mean my childhood? My daddy was mean to me and my mommy—
LS: No, just—what happened that night? At the Sullivan’s? A week ago?
SK: Right, okay. That’s really not the beginning, but … I get antsy, you know? When it’s been a while. Like a junkie, I guess, but I’ve never done drugs. Never saw the appeal. Is this what you wanted?
DW: Mr. Kelly—
LS: It’s fine. Please go on.
SK: So I just knew the feeling. It’s nothing new. And when you get an itch, you scratch it. See? So I took my gun, and I went for a walk. And what I’m looking for is a house with someone in it, but the ones on either side don’t have anyone. People leave lights on and there are motion sensors and stuff, but they aren’t actually home. And they aren’t fooling anyone.
DW: Except—
LS: Continue?
SK: Right, so I found the house. That street’s pretty dark. It’s the kind of place you can linger because nobody’s out that late, and nobody’s even peeking through their curtains. They lock the door and figure they’re safe. Right? So you can stand there for a while and watch those curtains, which aren’t opaque. You watch for movement. Even the flickering of the TV. You know? You can see a lot if you just stand there and watch.
LS: Okay. And after you watch?
SK: Well, it was just the one house. Someone still up and moving around. Someone home. So I walk up to the door, not even slow, and start pounding on it. Like an authority. I try not to yell something like “Police!” but sometimes I have to. But you have to be careful—as soon as someone starts opening the door, undoing the locks and stuff, I get the gun up. Sometimes they open it still on a chain, that kind of thing, but that makes no difference. You shoot, say average height for a woman, and either you get her in the face or someone taller in the chest. One shot and you’re done. Turn and leave before the neighbors can get to the windows, and even if they can, so what? It’s dark and they don’t know me. I’m just some person walking down the street.
DW: And you’ve done this how many times?
SK: I don’t know. You kind of lose count. And it’s always dark, so … I never know who it is. And then I’m gone the next day, anyway. That’s the point, isn’t it? I’m there, bam, and gone. The perfect crime.
DW: It wasn’t perfect for Donna Su–
LS: What was different last week?
SK: The cat. The damn cat. Dogs, I’ve dealt with. There’ve been dogs before. But the cat? It tripped her, not me. I didn’t set a foot inside the house. But she opened the door, and I was too slow. She saw me, and the gun, and started to step back, and the damn cat … she tripped over it, but I was already raising the gun through the gap in the door, and she grabbed it. Pulled me forward. Didn’t ruin the shot, because it still went into her, but I banged my head off the door frame. Started bleeding everywhere. The cat was gone by then, so I didn’t bleed on it, but that was enough. My blood on the frame, the porch … and then, what, you just had to check urgent cares, right? For someone who needed sixteen freaking stitches on the right side of his head, yea tall. Then you get my blood type, and now you got me, and whatever her name was—
DW: Donna Sullivan.
SK:—she wasn’t the first. So. I guess you’ve got your work cut out for you.
LS: Mr. Kelly, when you say she’s not the first … how many are we looking for?
SK: I don’t know. Something about stars in the sky?
Bury the Dead 3 – coming April 3
Rebecca Frost 