Tag: thriller novel

Ollie Clark—Friday, June 28, 2019

Cindy shook her head firmly. “He’s had a breakdown, he’s probably been drinking, and he’s lying because he thinks they’ll have to let Randy go.”

“Hmm,” Eli said.

She blinked and drew back. “You don’t think he could actually have done it? Shot Wendy and Birdy? You said they were toxic, maybe, but … mutually, right? So …?”

He shook his head slowly. “Olls pointed it out, though. There were only four people in the world who knew it was Birdy here and Olls at camp.”

Ollie shook her head once, violently, even though she still wasn’t sure her lungs were working. She felt … well, not frozen, but … in stasis, maybe. Like any moment now her heart would start beating again and she’d hear it in her ears, and feel her breath pull at her muscles, and just … get back to living.

“Birdy complained about everything,” he said slowly, feeling his way along a crumbling ledge at night. “It didn’t matter to her if her complaints could be backed up with empirical evidence—she just complained. And she was either the best of the best or the one being wronged, every single time. Right? So … unless they were having sex every single second they were alone together … she probably complained to Jared. Right? And we all knew the words.”

That made her nod slowly because yes, it was a familiar song. On the record, even, because everyone wanted multiple voices saying that Birdy was a whiny brat.

“She complained about money that year, and it ramped up because you were gone. Clearly there was enough for you, because you’d escaped. You weren’t stuck negotiating your parents’ rules anymore, and it didn’t bother her that your dad doesn’t like me. She never saw when things were even in how they treated you, or when things weren’t good for you. You were always a year older, a year ahead, so you got the license and the car and the boyfriend before she did, and it wasn’t fair. She wanted to get out, to get away, and it wasn’t fair. Over and over and over.”

“Broken record,” Ollie murmured. Birdy was the reason so many kids their age knew what a broken record was.

“But she’s also the girl who cried wolf,” Eli continued, still slowly, but now more sure of himself. “She fought with your mom because it got her attention, and she fought with your dad because he did always treat the two of you differently, even if you each thought the other got the better end of the deal. She tried to fight with you, but you just backed down and let her have her way, except that wasn’t what she really wanted, either. She had her friends who would do or not do whatever she said, and maybe she slept with all those guys or maybe it was just rumors, but …”

Cindy shook her head slowly and continually but didn’t try to say anything.

“Along comes Jared,” Eli mused. “And why not? Ollie’s off at college, but Birdy knows we’re still going strong because Ollie says so. She knows we’re talking marriage. Ollie’s ahead of her again. It doesn’t even matter, maybe, that I’m not the good Chapman, because the point is that Ollie’s got something she doesn’t. But there is another Chapman, and he’s older. Old enough to buy beer. And maybe he’s got the same sort of reputation, so maybe it starts with sex and booze, but …” He looked up at Ollie. “What if he listened? What if he was the first person to ever actually listen to her complaints … and he believed them?”

Ollie shook her head in small, tight jerks. “He’s the one who stood up to Dad and told him he either accepts you or loses me. He’s been our biggest champion. He’s pissed you didn’t propose earlier! Move in with me earlier! He’s been rooting for us!”

“Only after.” Eli’s voice was still calm. He didn’t raise the volume or the pitch, and it made her take a breath and actually listen. “Jared didn’t care about you before. He barely cared about me before. After the trial, when we did start hanging out, I’d reminisce with him about Birdy. I’d tell him things you’d told me, you know? The rose-colored glasses things, because you were the only one who really saw her that way, and he was just shocked. Like he couldn’t believe that you didn’t hate her. Even with all the emails and everything that came out, and even with you being there for the trial and never backing down. Except, no, that’s wrong,” he interrupted himself. “He wasn’t just shocked that you loved her. He was shaken.”

“You make Birdy sound like an absolute terror,” Cindy protested.

Eli raised an eyebrow at Ollie.

She let her head fall back against the wall. “She was an entitled, spoiled teenager who never got the chance to sort all that out and find more productive ways of navigating the world, okay? A lot of teenagers can be terrors. That wasn’t what made her special.”

“Honey, the fact that you thought other things were special about her floored him. It did. I thought it was just because I was willing to talk about her, you know? Because so many people don’t want to talk about the dead, so he was just surprised it didn’t bother me. That he was reacting to the fact I was talking and not the kinds of things I was saying, but maybe it was, Olls. Maybe when I thought I was being kind, I just kept steamrolling over whatever thought of you. The person Birdy painted you to be.”

Ollie lifted her head and opened her mouth to protest, but it hung there for a long moment. “Eli.”

“Yes?”

“The twentieth.” She swallowed, but it hurt her throat. “At your mom’s place. When Jared showed up.”

Eli’s face went slack. “Oh, God.”

“What about the twentieth?” Cindy almost snapped. “When Jared showed up where?”

“Dad took me to Esther’s because he couldn’t drop me here, and then Jared showed up. And, when he showed up …”

“He had a breakdown.” Eli cleared his throat. “A complete breakdown. Really horrible. Mom had to call an ambulance, but it wasn’t like in the books. They took him away. He really, completely had a breakdown when he saw you. Because …”

Ollie closed her eyes. “Because that’s when he realized he shot Birdy instead of me.”

---

Excerpts from Jared Chapman’s interview with Lieutenant Samuel Johnson and Sergeant Parker Dennis, June 28, 2019

PD: Do you understand your rights as we’ve explained them to you?

JC: Yes. And I don’t need a lawyer except to make sure this happens as quick as possible, okay? Randy didn’t do it. I did. And fuck, he’s one of the people who needs to know. He thinks he can read people …

SJ: You’re not currently under arrest, Mr. Chapman.

JD: Yeah, and that’s your mistake. Can I start?

PD: Please.

JC: Okay. I started dating Birdy right after her birthday. She turned eighteen on May 6, and we had sex for the first time on the eighth. And then just about every day up until the … you know. We were together a lot. I didn’t have a job, and she didn’t really care about school, so … point is, we spent a lot of time together, and she spent a lot of time complaining about how things were in her family, which was kind of surprising to me, because I figured hey, she’s got two parents, and they’re doing well enough her mom doesn’t have to work. I knew Randy didn’t like Eli going with Ollie, but I avoided him back then, anyway, and, like … well, I thought it meant Randy had taste.

SJ: What—?

JC: Let me get this out the first time through, okay? We can go over it as many times as you want, but right now I just need to get it out.

PD: Continue.

JC: The point is, I didn’t know Birdy or her family before then, so I was a … a blank slate. Everything I knew came through her, but I didn’t think about it that way back then. I just knew she wanted to spend time with me, naked, which wasn’t anything new, but she also wanted to talk to me, and that was. She told me about her mom being strict and overbearing, like a Puritan, except Ollie was somehow perfect, so I figured Eli was too much of a wimp to try anything with her, and her dad kept putting his foot down on … everything. Just awful.

SJ: You never went over—?

JC: A few times, sure, but they never asked me to stay for dinner or anything. I wouldn’t have wanted to, anyway. And I guess when Ollie got back from college she took Birdy out for a birthday dinner, but I didn’t know about that until later. Much later. Birdy gave me some story about her mom for that day, so I didn’t know. Look, it’s not an excuse, but it’s the truth: I didn’t know. Birdy told me her parents were awful and they liked Ollie so much better because she did everything they wanted, and then her parents gave Ollie the money to get out and away, except it didn’t matter because she was perfect, anyway, so … you know this part. Carrie and them all talked about it at the trial.

PD: Yes.

JC: Well, Birdy told me more than she told them, and I felt honored. Like she trusted me when she couldn’t trust her girlfriends. And even though Ollie was home, she kept wanting to avoid the house, avoid her sister. I asked her once if she wanted to double-date with Ollie and Eli and she just shut me down with a look, like I wouldn’t get any ever again if I insisted on it. And I thought … I thought it was because Ollie was awful to her. Like I figured if I was there, too, then Ollie would have to be on her best behavior, right? She’d have to play nice and maybe we could have a good dinner and get a … there’s a French word. Not a reunion, but a …?

PD: Rapprochement?

JC: Yeah, that sounds right. I figured Randy liked me, the real man-to-man thing, so I had an in. Even if Ollie complained, Randy would have my back. And then I could work on Randy, too. Maybe not make him realize what he was doing to Birdy, but pressure him into … I don’t know. Supporting her better, I guess. God, I was so … I had this idea I could talk him into the money for her freshman year at college, but I didn’t know, like, anything about timing or having to pay to secure your spot or just anything. The way Birdy talked, money would solve it, so, if I could get her the money …

PD: Ah.

SJ: Continue.

JC: Yeah, so … day in and day out: I don’t know what I’m going to do, Jare. I’m going to be stuck under their thumbs forever, Jare. I can’t just move out and get a job, Jare. Well, she figured she could if she stayed in the area, because she could find an apartment for cheap, but it would be too close. And she’d looked into apartments in Marquette, because maybe she could mooch off Ollie if times got tight, but then she told me she didn’t want to be that close to Ollie, either. So, if I wanted to do anything for her … if I wanted to help her at all … she needed money.

SJ: How did you know that killing Wendy and, uh …

JC: Well, the family was weird about money, right? So one of the things Randy made them do is write their own wills. Not even once they turned eighteen—he took them to a lawyer and had them do it when they were younger. I thought it was weird. Death obsessed, maybe. His dad died when he was young, you know? Stupid accident. And Wendy’s parents went in that car crash. I don’t know. But the thing was, Ollie’s will said everything, one hundred percent, should go to Birdy. Which meant her college money, because she was over eighteen, yeah? I figured that was all hers, so then it would end up in Birdy’s account, and bingo.

SJ: Even though …?

JC: That’s what Birdy suggested would happen. Yeah. She didn’t out and out tell me to kill Ollie, but she had a lot of if scenarios: if Ollie got hit by a car … I guess the whole family was kind of death obsessed. But if Ollie died in a way that had nothing to do with Birdy, then her money would become Birdy’s. Unless Ollie decided to change it and leave it all to Eli, which Birdy figured she’d get around to any second because Eli was going to propose. I never asked him, but Birdy was sure: Eli was going to buy Ollie a giant rock and propose, and then the two of them would be legally entwined and he’d have access to her money.

PD: How was Eli supposed to afford a huge rock?

JC: Well, I guess the plan was he’d get a big loan or something, buy the ring, get Ollie’s money, and … I don’t know. Birdy had it all figured out, okay? She knew what was up, and she knew them all better than I did, so that’s what I had. That was the scenario. Everything was awful, and unless Birdy had some money and got away from them, it was all going to continue to be awful. If it went on for too much longer, Eli would get Ollie’s money instead. And Randy liked me, so I figured if I kept him around, he wouldn’t mind me comforting her, you know? In her grief. So I formed a plan.

---

Bury the Dead 27 – coming April 27

Ollie Clark—Friday, June 28, 2019

Cindy sighed as she counted out paper money. “You know, when we were kids, we used to rob the bank.”

“Pretty sure there’s something against that in the rules.” Eli scooped up the pile of fake cash and started organizing it by color.

“If everyone playing agrees, the rules can be whatever you want. The only one that always applies is you can’t change them in the middle of the game.” She pushed the dice over to Ollie.

“Your childhood sounds lawless and exciting,” Eli observed.

She shook her head. “It actually meant we rarely played because there was no way all six of us were going to agree on anything. Split into smaller groups and it limits your options.”

Ollie nodded. “Yeah, that’s why we’ve got what we’ve got.” She landed on one of Cindy’s properties, but the bills she handed over didn’t make up for what she’d just lost to Eli. “A bunch of them had to be okay for two people. Dad’s not a board game kind of guy.”

“Your mom’s the one who taught me to play most of them.” Eli owned a nice long stretch of the board so his turn was highly unexciting. “She was nice about it, though. She didn’t act like it was something every kid from a happy, healthy home should know.”

Cindy winced. “Did a lot of parents do that?”

“Well, I can’t really say a lot because I wasn’t exactly invited many places, but there were enough pity faces. And you’d think teachers would know not to do that kind of thing, but …” He shrugged. “I guess it’s better than them acting like they didn’t expect any better, but by the time I was six I knew Jared was the golden boy who rose above his situation instead of … whatever I was doing.”

“Reading beyond your grade level,” Ollie offered. “Annoying Ms. Meindertsma because you knew what negative numbers were and she wanted us to tell her you can’t do subtraction and end up with something less than zero.”

“Library cards are free,” he reminded Cindy. “We didn’t have a tv, but I borrowed all kinds of books. Compared to this one, though”—he tilted his head at Ollie—“my speed is abysmal. Thank God for audiobooks.”

Cindy chewed on her lip and then looked up from the board to meet Eli’s eyes. “I don’t get it. Your dad left, but so did Jared’s. And they were brothers, so it wasn’t like Randy knew one better than the other. And your moms …”

Eli raised his hand. “Mine’s the slut. In case that clears things up.”

She frowned and looked to Ollie like she expected the younger woman to correct him, but he’d accurately represented public perception. “That’s it?”

Eli licked his lips and looked at Ollie, but she wasn’t sure what he wanted from her. Permission? Intervention? Then he turned back to Cindy. “I know you only met him like five years ago, but before? Jared was popular. Confident, charming … sassy without stepping over the line. He had the wordplay and the grin down. His grades weren’t great, but they weren’t awful, and teachers loved him. He’d raise his hand and try at least half the time. And he was good at sports—just naturally agile. He came by those records honestly. He’s big, but he could move. Put him on that football field and after freshman year the other schools just trembled in their cleats. He had a reputation, and he kept smashing it. He was friends with everybody in his grade and the grade below, which meant he didn’t have to be friends with me, and I think he was fine with that. He was going places. Not college, but … places. And then …” He looked at Ollie again, passing it off.

Sighing, Ollie shrugged. “Publicly he dated Birdy all of six weeks, but she was eighteen years, six weeks, and two days old when she died, so maybe they had a thing before then.” She closed her eyes because Eli backed her into a corner, and maybe it wasn’t entirely accidental. “They looked good on the outside, but they were really toxic together.”

Eli’s hand went to her thigh, gave it a squeeze, and rested there.

“Toxic?” Cindy echoed.

“Okay, so.” Ollie sighed and held out her hands like she was weighing something in them. “On the one hand you’ve got Birdy, who always needed to be the center of attention. She had to have the best stuff, or the worst weekend, or just … I think she struggled with how much attention Mom got inside our family, how everything seemed to be based on what Mom could or couldn’t do, so she just needed someone to focus on her. And then you get Jared, who had it easy for so long and then left high school and was all ‘Now what?’ She was very clear in what she wanted from people, and he could give her the attention she wanted.”

“I think …” Eli rubbed his mouth, looking at something only he could see. “I think Jared was used to saving people. Making them look good. I know the football thing makes it sound like he liked the spotlight, but he was never entirely comfortable with that. He was always like hey, we’re a team. He’d rather support someone and let them shine.”

“Birdy thrived on people wanting her to shine?” Cindy suggested.

Ollie shook her head. “She thrived on people telling her she was shining.”

“And what did you thrive on?” her stepmom wanted to know.

Ollie winced and looked at Eli, who leaned over to kiss her forehead. “You thrived on going off to college and not having to think about your sister every waking minute,” he said with an apologetic shrug.

“I loved her.”

“Honey.” Eli caught her chin in his free hand and gently forced her to look at him. “You know that doesn’t mean you had to like her. You liked Birdy better from a distance. She was a better sister from a distance. And you didn’t abandon her, but you put up those boundaries. Email once a day, call once a week … it’s okay to grow apart from someone. To admit you need the space and they’re not your responsibility.” Then he raised an eyebrow and cocked his head. “Which is what you’ve been thinking about me and Jared, right?”

“Okay, except you get to pick it. I didn’t get a choice.”

He started to lean in and land his next kiss on her lips, but his phone buzzed. Sighing, he pulled it out. “Speak of the devil. Hey, Jare. What’s—?”

Ollie couldn’t hear what Jared said, but his voice was higher than usual and the cadence much faster. Eli tried to say a couple things, but he only got out single syllables because Jared simply didn’t stop. He finally said “Yes” and “Okay” and “I will,” but when Eli tried asking “Are you sure?” he took the phone away from his ear because the phone ended.

Cindy smiled sympathetically. “Trouble?”

Eli shook his head slowly and ever so gently placed his phone on the table. “That was his one phone call. Jared went down there this morning and confessed to the murders.”

---

Initial conversation, Jared Chapman and Lieutenant Samuel Johnson, June 28, 2019

JC: You’re the lead or whatever? The one going after Randy?

SJ: I am, Mr. Chapman, and I’m very busy, so—

JC: You need to hear this. Cindy said you guys found a gun? Somewhere?

SJ: Near his cabin in Covington, Mr. Chapman, but I don’t think—

JC: That’s not the gun that did it. I don’t know if you can tell that, but it’s not. I’ll tell you where the real gun is, but the thing is, I’ve got to tell you a lot first.

SJ: Mr. Chapman …

JC: I’ve done a lot of research since then, and I figured I’d never be caught, because you can’t match the gun. Even if you find it and my prints are on it, you don’t know it’s the right one. And where I put it … it seemed like a good idea at the time, even though now … But Randy didn’t do it. You have to believe me.

SJ: Mr. Chapman … we know you have a close relationship with Mr. Clark. We also know that there are no firearms registered in your name. I know you’re upset at this turn of events, but confessing to this horrendous crime in an attempt to clear his name—

JC: You only found one shell there by the door. The second one was in the alley. I only grabbed the one, because I didn’t see where the other one landed, and then I dropped it when I fell. I figured it didn’t matter, because I wiped them down and wore gloves when I loaded it, but that part didn’t make the papers. Or the trial. Everything said they found two shell casings, and you figured the guy didn’t care because he left them, but you didn’t say they weren’t close together.

SJ: Individual casings—

JC: Can fly different distances from the same gun, yeah, sure, but we’re talking behind the house, in that foot traffic alley, two houses up. I had the shell in my left hand and it flew out into those bushes, the scratchy ones. I tried to find it but I figured someone would’ve heard, so I grabbed the gun and kept going. I actually stashed the gun under my mattress again that night, and I was afraid you guys were going to find it before I had the chance to move it, but you didn’t. You didn’t even look at me.

SJ: Mr. Chapman, you’re making some very serious declarations.

JC: Confession. I know it’s a confession. You figured out it wasn’t Eli back then, but I don’t trust you to figure out it wasn’t Randy, either. He doesn’t deserve that, and he—God, he’s shit at judging people. Do you believe it? Saves my life, keeps dragging me in, keeps trying to care about me. Fuck, I didn’t mind when it was Kelly. He’s done enough, so what’s two more? And then I’d really be okay, nobody’d be after me, but nobody’s been after me, do you understand? Randy and Ollie and Eli all … all circled the wagons. Sorry, that’s racist, but that’s what they did, you know? And Ollie? Fuck, she’s an absolute sweetheart. Did you know? Because I don’t think Birdy did. She told me Ollie was stuck up and little miss perfect and all this but God, the emails between the two of them? All the stuff that came out? I feel … God, he should’ve just let me die.

SJ: Mr. Chapman, am I to understand that you’re confessing to plotting and carrying out the murders of Wendy and Catherine “Birdy” Clark?

JC: Plotting? No. You don’t understand. Birdy was supposed to be in Covington that night. She left me right before dinner, and she was going to eat and then get in her dad’s car and go. Right? So it was supposed to be Wendy and Ollie at home, and they were both bitches. Do you understand? The mom being all overbearing and controlling and just unfair, because Ollie got everything and Birdie got the shaft. And I’m not the only one who believed her, right? Kendra and them … they got on the freaking stand and told everyone, right? And I had even more than that, because Birdy just told me everything. All these rants, all these hours of how her parents were freaking Nazis and her sister’s farts were perfume, and I just … I believed her, you know? So when … when I actually got to know Ollie …

SJ: Mr. Chapman, I’d like to get a stenographer in here so you can start from the beginning.

JC: The beginning? Shit. The whole thing’s a tangled mess. Can I make a phone call first, though? I still get one phone call, right, even if I’m confessing to murder?

SJ: Yes, you can make a phone call. JC: Good. And then I’m going to need a glass of water, and you’ll have to send someone to check on the gun, and … well. You’ll have to let Randy go. He doesn’t deserve this.

---

Bury the Dead 26 – coming April 26

Ollie Clark—Friday, June 28, 2019

Mom had always had plans to turn the girls’ room into a guest room once Birdy left for college, but it had been years since Ollie slept there, and she’d never shared the queen bed with Eli. The guest room had been for those weird and rocky years after the trial, when she finished college and moved away, and before that morning on the beach. Since then, when Ollie came up, she slept at Eli’s apartment.

Brad and Harper dropped Eli off there last night on their way home so he could pack some stuff and then drive back up, in case either he or Ollie wanted a car. It probably hadn’t been a restful night for him, either, in this impersonal and strange room that barely had enough space for the matching furniture, but at least Cindy hadn’t tried to ask Ollie to stay but Eli to go or something.

Dad wasn’t religious, but it was clear he didn’t think his daughter should spend the night with someone she wasn’t married to. Or maybe that was just because it had always been Eli.

The guest bathroom situation was weird, because the only upstairs bathroom in the house was through the master bedroom. Part of Dad’s home renovations as a new widower included upgrading the Michigan basement with its random toilet in the middle of the floor to a finished room that was never used and a three-quarter bath, which meant there wasn’t actually a bath at all. At least there was a shower, even if they had to go down a couple of flights of stairs to use it, so she waited for Eli to come back up before taking a set of clothes down and pretending like a shower was a full reset. Dad probably hadn’t slept well last night, either.

But come on, what was there to do? Whatever Len Wilcox thought he’d found, whatever the police thought they’d found … those were done deals. They had it, and they wanted to use it to taunt Dad, which Ollie wanted to say wouldn’t work—can’t taunt a man with something if he’s not guilty—but Mom and Birdy were always going to be sore spots. Police interrogations liked jabbing at sore spots.

Even then, what could he really do to himself? Ollie couldn’t see him actually assaulting a police officer. Telling them to keep Wendy’s name out of their mouths, maybe, or going off on the two guys who’d laughed them off after the assault, sure, but you couldn’t get arrested for yelling at an officer. Right?

Seriously, they were supposed to be over this. Sean Kelly came along and it was all wrapped up in a bow. Arnie Dubrowski wasn’t even worried. He’d wanted to talk to them in person and go over what the likely next steps would look like, but none of those steps involved And then he gets an alibi so I can dump you without a qualm. They weren’t Arnie’s case anymore, so why was Len Wilcox still clinging like a leech?

Okay, she knew the answer to that question. A true crime writer with his first book deal about a serial killer was one thing. A true crime writer who personally solved a cold case was another. What sort of man felt that smug and confident playing with other people’s lives?

Eli was in the kitchen when she came up, getting the coffee going, but first she had to take her pajamas upstairs before anything else. The Clark house really wasn’t built for guests. When she got back down Eli had a mug poured for her and the milk already added. “Thanks.”

“I figure we could probably use some hi-test this morning. Is there a game plan?”

“Get through the day.” She scooted into her usual seat, the one further in with her back to the wall. “If they can keep him forty-eight hours before charging him, they will, right? So nothing’s going to happen until tomorrow.”

“Except I might scream if Tom Petty keeps running through my head.”

Ollie grinned a little wickedly. “I heard if you get an earworm, you’re supposed to go through the entire song, start to finish.”

“I wouldn’t trust your source.” He sat down across from her. “That sounds fake.”

“We could pack some more.”

“Leave the house and risk being seen? How many messages have Roger and Len left you, by the way?”

Ollie shrugged. “My phone’s still upstairs.”

“I wish I had your self-control.”

“I didn’t plug it in last night. How many do you have?”

“Multiples. Not just from them. Pretty sure we could have a free destination wedding if we allow someone to film it exclusively. All expenses paid for us and up to twenty guests.”

“Twenty guests? Do we get to pick the destination?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t read that close. Maybe. Why? What would you consider?”

“None of them. I’m just curious.”

Eli pulled his phone out. “You should charge yours, though. In case someone actually needs to get a hold of you.”

“Deborah’s got the house number and Cindy’s number.”

“What if the police want to ask you some questions? What if,” he continued before she could respond, “your answers to those questions make them pause?”

“Like what? I could tell them exactly the same thing I told them ten years ago. He was with me that night.” But she got up and scooted out from behind the table. “I expect you to be making me some sort of breakfast when I come back.”

Eli shrugged. “I don’t know where anything is in this kitchen.” But he got up all the same and started with the fridge.

---

Phone call, Katrina Olson and Lieutenant Samuel Johnson, June 28, 2019

KO: Hey, Sam. I’ll get you the paperwork, but I thought you’d want to know ASAP.

SJ: The gun?

KO: The gun. We didn’t get any from the gun itself—no wonder, if it’s been buried that long, not wrapped up or anything—but we got a good one from the shell.

SJ: … the shell.

KO: Yeah, I guess it was protected. Good clear thumb print. You still there?

SJ: There was a shell still in the gun?

KO: They didn’t tell you it was loaded?

SJ: No, they just told me—what about the print on the shell?

KO: Kurtti’s. And you said it was actually buried on his property?

SJ: … yes. Close to Clark’s.

KO: Right, well. I can’t even begin to speculate on the story behind all that, but … sorry I don’t have better news.

SJ: Not your fault. Just doing your job.

KO: Right, well … let me know if there’s anything else.

---

Bury the Dead 25 – coming April 25

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

Ollie Clark—Thursday, June 27, 2019

You probably weren’t supposed to be annoyed by people who were trying to help, but they just piled more expectations on you in the middle of your distress. Ollie felt like she had to worry about Jared above herself, so that was annoying and concerning at the same time, but then there were Dad and Cindy’s friends. It wasn’t politically correct to make this kind of division, but it really seemed like they were doing it for her: the men wanted to get together and drink and complain, all loud voices and stomping boots, and the women wanted to bring food to the house and sit and gossip.

Seriously, did women just have casseroles in the fridge, waiting for emergencies? It was one thing to have a hot dish for Sunday after church or for a funeral, but those were all planned ahead of time. Maybe they had frozen hamburger next to the bag of frozen mixed vegetables and cream of whatever soup waiting in the pantry, but seriously. The guys trooped out to one of the bars but the women swarmed and Ollie didn’t know them.

Jared didn’t go out to the bar, and Eli wasn’t going to leave her, so it was the two guys in this house of print blouses and rinsed hair and ostentatious jewelry and voices that really did sound like chickens, so apparently Meredith Willson knew his stuff. Cheep cheep cheep, talk a lot … And Ollie couldn’t tell if Cindy actually wanted all these people here, or if she was just malleable and the victim of her friends’ curiosity barely disguised with goodwill.

After Mom and Birdy’s memorial service, the lunch took place at the church. Dad hadn’t even allowed Ollie home at that point, so it didn’t matter that they wouldn’t all have fit inside anyway—nobody was allowed to come over unless it was Dad or someone delivering supplies. She wasn’t even sure he’d let anyone help him with the renovations. The gazebo wasn’t around back then, so all they’d had extra was a picnic table, and of course everyone swarmed for the funeral.

That day, everyone said nice things about Birdy. Rose-colored glasses things. Back then, they all remembered she was just a child.

Ollie couldn’t even try to tend to Cindy because three of the others attached themselves to her side and kept offering more food or more of something fizzy and pink that was probably made of Sprite and Hi-C. They asked her questions about how she was doing, which were really questions about what, exactly, her husband did to get arrested, and clearly restrained themselves from saying they’d told her so, even though that wasn’t actually true. When Cindy started dating Dad, everyone wanted her to know what had happened to her predecessor, but nobody thought Dad did it. That should’ve been enough tragedy for a lifetime.

She’d stopped counting the number of times she wanted to scream when, in a lull in the general kitchen conversation, one of the self-appointed three said “Well you know Randy didn’t do it because we all know who did.”

Ollie slowly set down her cup. Eli and Jared were in the living room, but the living room wasn’t exactly far away. She took a slow breath, because this wasn’t her house, and maybe she wasn’t even the one closest to the problem right now—did new wife trump daughter? After all, she’d moved out years ago, so Cindy was the one who counted on Dad being around for the day-to-day—when Cindy blinked and straightened up. “Get out.”

There was a pause and then some titters as the group prepared, en masse, to make excuses for her.

“Get out,” Cindy repeated, louder this time. “All of you, but especially if you’re so ignorant. I know Randy didn’t do it, but Eli didn’t do it, either, so take your dishes and your gossip somewhere I don’t have to listen to it. All of you, out. Ollie and Eli and Jared can stay, but I want the rest of you to leave.” Then, at a rising protest: “Now.”

One of them still tried: “Cindy, do you really think your husband—?”

“Randy’s spent too long with his head up his ass about Eli, okay?” she snapped back. “He’s just pissed because he wanted to keep Ollie to himself, as his little girl, for just about ever, and maybe because sometimes we aren’t actually the best people for our children, but he’s wrong. Eli didn’t do it, and I’m glad he and Ollie are finally getting married, and I want the rest of you out of my house.”

They didn’t move quickly—there was saran wrap and tin foil to put over their dishes, if they were taking them, and punch to negotiate, and some more snide remarks to mutter—but they did go. Eventually. Ollie practically chewed on her tongue to keep from responding to things like “Everett told me the wedding was off” and “Poor dear, doesn’t know what she’s saying,” but at least she didn’t taste blood. She followed Cindy into the living room, drifting a bit, and watched as her stepmom first locked the door, peered out through the curtains, and then flipped the bird at the final departing cars. It probably wasn’t possible for someone not to know that particular gesture in today’s world, but Ollie thought her stepmom had never actually used it before in her life.

“They’re going to talk about you,” Eli offered from the couch.

Cindy shook her head and crossed her arms. “Let them. If they’re saying I’ve gone mad with grief because I think you’re innocent, at least they’re saying you’re innocent.”

Eli smirked. “I don’t care what they think.”

No—he just cared what the random school board member thought.

“Olls, hey.” He reached for her hand and gave it a tug, pulling her to sit on the arm of the couch next to him. His eyebrows asked if she needed him to keep going on that, to verbalize the fact that she didn’t need to be thinking whatever she was thinking, and Ollie shook her head. Her eyes, though, flicked to Jared to ask her own question, and Eli’s mouth tightened. So. Not good.

Cindy sighed and checked her phone, scrolling through notifications or messages but apparently not finding what she wanted. “What are the chances they’ll just let him go, do you think?” she asked, sitting in the wooden rocking chair that Ollie always thought looked hard and uncomfortable, but it was Cindy’s favorite.

“Did you ask Deborah?” Eli wanted to know.

“Yeah, but she avoided answering. Something about how you can’t put percentages on these things.”

Ollie chewed on her lip, holding Eli’s hand in both her own and trying not to think that Mom would’ve yelled at her for sitting on the arm of the couch. Not this couch. This was the one that replaced the old couch. But she figured Mom’s rule would’ve applied to the new couch, too.

Eli took a deep breath and tried to settle in more comfortably. “It depends on what they think they have on him. If it’s just the blood type thing Len said, then that can’t be enough to actually charge him. They can’t prove how long anyone knew.” Then he blinked and really focused on Cindy. “Wait, did you know?”

She nodded. “Not right away or anything, but …” Cindy flushed.

Eli nodded hurriedly to indicate that no, she didn’t have to mention how such information might be relevant to Randy’s sex life, thanks. “They’ll want to hit him with that and see how he reacts. They try to get you angry or defensive so you just lash out without thinking. And they try to push it when your lawyer isn’t in the room and make you believe wanting a lawyer is already admitting guilt—anything to get you talking.”

Cindy closed her eyes. She didn’t have to say anything, though, because they all knew Randy.

“They might also have him right now to buy themselves time to look for something else, although I don’t know what they’d think they could find.” He gestured around the room that Randy had renovated so it didn’t look like two women died here. “There weren’t fingerprints or anything. No boot prints.” Because, if they’d had any of those, it wouldn’t have matched Eli. It would have matched the murderer.

Cindy sighed and checked her phone again before tucking it back in her pocket. “If it would make people feel better for Harper and Brad to come over, they’re allowed. Have them pick up dinner if they need something to do. I might …” She flapped a hand toward the stairs to indicate a retreat. “But they’re okay. If you want.”

“Do you think you’ll be hungry for anything?” Ollie asked.

Her stepmom almost laughed. “Moose tracks, maybe. A big old tub of moose tracks.”

Ollie nodded as she pulled out her phone, because it was really nice of Cindy to let other people help, even if it was just bringing her some ice cream.

---

Excerpts from the interrogation of Randall Clark by Lieutenant Samuel Johnson and Sergeant Parker Dennis, with Deborah Binkman present, June 27, 2019

SJ: Now, this isn’t going to be like yesterday, Clark. You know that, right? You can’t just walk out of here when we piss you off.

DB: Do you have questions for my client, gentlemen?

SJ: Sure we have questions. For example, how did it make you feel when you realized you weren’t Catherine’s biological father?

DB: To be blunt, gentleman, Birdy Clark was the product of a brutal rape. Her mother was violently assaulted and sexually battered. My client learned of this occurrence shortly after it happened and was understandably upset.

PD: Mr. Clark, we don’t have a record of a police report about a rape.

DB: No, gentlemen, your colleagues ridiculed Mrs. Clark and informed her they didn’t believe her. They said she was trying to cover up an affair. I could name names, if that would help.

PD: I’m sorry, but without that record, we can’t—

RC: My wife was raped, you bastards and—

DB: Randy—

RC:—you guys laughed in her face—

DB: Randy.

RC: I just—you wonder why more women don’t report it.

SJ: So you’re angry at the police, is what you’re saying. Not at your wife. Even though … well, maybe she was asking for it?

DB: Gentlemen.

PD: Sorry, Ms. Binkman.

SJ: Yeah? Because I’m not. You murdered your wife, Clark, so you’re trying to come up with some sort of story that … I don’t even know, because it doesn’t explain anything.

PD: We know about the blood drive.

RC: The blood …?

PD: When Catherine did the blood drive. For the first time. And she had that sheet with her blood type. Which, as far as we can tell, is the first time she ever got that information. And, since you knew your own … and your wife’s …

DB: Birdy’s blood type was not a surprise, since both Wendy and Randy were aware of the conditions surrounding her conception. Birdy herself was aware.

SJ: Yeah, well, we can’t ask her, can we?

PD: What about the gun, Mr. Clark?

RC: The gun?

PD: The gun. We went on a bit of a scavenger hunt yesterday by your cabin. A bunch of us with metal detectors. Your neighbors let us onto their property, too. We found a shotgun buried in the woods. The estimate is that it’s been there for about a decade.

DB: Exactly how did you come to this estimate?

SJ: You used it to shoot your wife and her daughter.

RC: Birdy was our daughter.

SJ: Not biologically. Which you knew by early June 2009. So on one of your daddy-daughter weekends, you broke into Ensio Kurtti’s camp, maybe in the middle of the night, and tried to throw us off because you took more than just the shotgun.

DB: Why didn’t this come up in 2009, gentlemen?

SJ: You got rid of the other guns but kept the shotgun until you could figure out how to do this. Except you got impatient and didn’t want to wait for the proper weekend, so you lied to Olive, told her Catherine wanted the change, and brought Olive to your camp so she’d be out of the way. Drugged, probably, so she wouldn’t realize you just dropped her off and left.

PD: She didn’t even realize she was drugged. She gave you your alibi.

SJ: Sneaky, using one girl against the other like that. So you came back, shot your wife and Catherine, and hightailed it back to Covington like you’d been there the whole time.

PD: Did you bury the gun that night while Olive was still drugged, or come back and take care of it later?

SJ: Mr. Clark, do you have any idea how long fingerprints can last on a buried gun?

DB: There is in fact no scientific way to determine how long a latent fingerprint will last, gentlemen.

SJ: Right, so … we get the gun to the lab …

PD: Mr. Clark, you haven’t been fingerprinted before, have you?

SJ: … and we have our answer.

DB: Gentlemen, even if you could prove that the gun you found is the murder weapon, if there are any usable prints on the gun, they won’t be a match to my client.

SJ: Right, right. Never fired a gun in his life.

PD: You know that’s hard to believe, Mr. Clark. You being a full-blooded Yooper and all.

SJ: Not very manly.

PD: Plus there’s the whole camp.

SJ: You tell me you have that camp on all that land and you’ve never gone after deer?

PD: No record of bow hunting, either.

SJ: I mean, that’s the entire point, right? You stole the guns so they wouldn’t be connected back to you. There’s nothing on paper that says you’ve ever shot anything before, so … when your wife and her kid get shot …

PD: It doesn’t actually look good, Mr. Clark. The complete lack of records.

SJ: You might even say it’s suspicious.

DB: Gentlemen, if you have no other questions, we have nothing to say to you at this time.

RC: Actually, I do have something to say.

DB: Randy—

PD: Go ahead, Mr. Clark.

RC: I didn’t do it. That’s all. We can be done now.

---

Bury the Dead 23 – coming April 23

Ollie Clark—Thursday, June 27, 2019

Eli tried calling Jared again before they went up the crumbling concrete steps, but there still wasn’t an answer so his phone went into one pocket while he dug keys out of the other. It turned out that one of the unknowns on Dad’s usual key ring fit, but Ollie held back as Eli went inside, just in case Jared slept naked. Okay and maybe a little bit because she didn’t really want to see his initial reaction when Eli told him.

Eli went through the doorway from the living room—Jared had a separate one—into the other main room of the apartment, since that led him to the bedroom door, but Ollie stopped in the living room and let the door close behind her. She usually avoided coming here because Jared’s apartment made her sad. He’d been here for years and had permission to hang things on the walls, but hadn’t. Most of his furniture once sat on someone else’s lawn with a FREE sign on it, and the blinds were the ones that came with the apartment. He didn’t keep it neat so much as ascetic, and the cans not quite overflowing the plastic bin by the couch were about the only touch of personality. Ollie couldn’t imagine living like this. She couldn’t imagine Birdy living like this, and that was the depressing part, wasn’t it? There was absolutely no proof that Birdy and Jared would’ve stayed together if that night hadn’t happened, but Ollie was fairly certain Jared wouldn’t be here, like this, if Birdy were still alive.

She jerked out of her reverie when Jared came into view, pushing his hair back from his forehead with one hand while clutching a sheet around his waist with another. Ollie didn’t know guys did that outside of television shows that weren’t rated to reveal more than naked male torsos.

“Olls, what the fuck?” he asked, blinking.

“They just arrested Dad for the murders.”

“Yeah, that’s what he said, but …” Jared looked like he wanted to rub both hands over his face but caught himself just in time and made do with one. “Based on what? Len’s blood type information?”

She shrugged, crossing her arms and trying not to take too deep a breath. It didn’t smell bad in here, but Jared wasn’t the kind of guy to open windows and let in some fresh air. “I think they’d have to have more than that, but it’s not like they told us. They just pounded on the door and arrested him.”

Jared nodded, then shook his head. “Wait, you were up there? Your dad asked you to come?”

“Cindy asked us to,” Eli corrected. “Because Randy’s lawyer wanted us to. So he’s got one, and she was there, and she told him not to say anything until she got downtown.”

“But …” His hand worked over his face again, pulling it down into a mask of tragedy. “But Randy didn’t do it.”

And ten years ago Eli hadn’t done it, either, thanks. Ollie took a breath and firmly reminded herself she hadn’t seen Jared’s reaction back then, so maybe it was exactly the same. Jared saying Dad didn’t do it wasn’t Jared saying that Eli did. God, she needed some Excedrin.

“They have forty-eight hours to charge him,” Eli pointed out, either patiently or just slowly. “And there’s not really anything we can do in those forty-eight hours, but we thought you’d want to know.” He shrugged when his cousin turned to look at him. “And hear it from us instead of … I don’t know. Roger, maybe.”

Jared looked toward the front door and reflexively pulled the sheet higher. “Be right back,” he murmured, narrowly avoiding Eli as he returned to the bedroom and shut the door.

Eli sighed and jingled the keys in his pocket as he came to join Ollie in the living room, not relaxing enough to put an arm around her but touching shoulders. Well, letting her shoulder touch his upper arm because of the height difference. “There’s literally nothing we can do right now for your dad, hey?”

She nodded. “He’s got Deborah. That would be the only thing I can think of.”

“And Cindy?”

“I mean, I just kind of hope she doesn’t mess anything up.”

He sighed. The jingling stopped, but he hunched his shoulders. “They both need to just clam up. Let Deborah do the talking. But, uh … the police can lie to you, did you know? They could be telling him right now that they absolutely have some piece of evidence that proves he did it, just to see what he’ll say.”

Ollie opened her mouth to protest that Dad wouldn’t confess, but she shut it again before making a sound because hey, confession wasn’t the only thing they were after. Get Dad in a mood and he’d say a lot of things to add to the suspicion, especially if he thought he should stand on keeping all of Mom’s secrets. He didn’t seem to realize that it wasn’t being disloyal to Mom if they talked about it in order to keep Dad out of prison.

“God, Jared doesn’t even have a deck of cards,” Eli murmured, eyes roving around the room he’d seen hundreds of times before.

“We can go back to Dad’s. There’s that shelf of board games down in the basement.”

He almost smiled. “Did every kid think they were bored games because your mom only told you to play them when you were bored?”

Ollie tilted her head. “I think Mom usually got them out before we said we were bored. Like, if I was bored I’d get out a book and just sit there, but if Birdy didn’t have something to occupy herself, she’d get destructive.”

“Destructive.”

“Too much energy.”

He looked over, and then past, her. “Aw, hell. I was going to say you always see her through rose-colored glasses, but …” The blinds were open enough to see Len Wilcox coming their way.

“Maybe it’s just harder for me to forget that she was a literal child,” Ollie pointed out, locking the doorknob with one hand before pushing Eli back into the other room and out of sight. Len’s arrival didn’t have to interrupt their conversation

“I think he saw us.”

“There’s glare on that glass. And even if he did, nobody has to answer.”

“If he’s hanging around, we’re going to have a harder time getting back to your dad’s.”

Ollie shrugged and winced a little at the loud knocking, but at least Jared emerged from the bedroom and raised an eyebrow at them instead of calling out. “Len,” she explained.

Jared’s eyes closed briefly. “God. Okay. Get down under that window—he’s tall.”

Eli frowned, like he wasn’t sure what Len’s height had to do with anything, but then he nodded and the three of them sat on the floor beneath the window that Len would probably peer through, far enough over so that they wouldn’t be visible from the windows in the living room, either.

“It’s like an active shooter drill,” Ollie grumbled, hands linked around her knees. “Except the principal’s not going to give us an all-clear.”

Jared, on the other side of Eli, checked his watch. “Right, so how long do we give him?”

Ollie shook her head and then groaned when Eli started singing: “Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall …”

---

Phone Call, Roger Porvoo with Len Wilcox, June 27, 2019

RP: You find them?

LW: No. No answer anywhere.

RP: Cindy’s down at the station. She wouldn’t talk to me.

LW: I could have a run at her.

RP: Doubt it. She and I are in agreement: we both think this is because of you.

LW: I made connections, but I don’t have evidence.

RP: Speaking of connections, mine just gave me two things. He said “blood type” and “we found the gun.” Either of those mean something to you?

LW: They found the gun?

RP: Yeah, that’s what I said. He didn’t clarify. I don’t think they can even match an individual shotgun to the crime right after, much less ten years later, but that was it. “We found the gun.” Do you know anything about the gun?

LW: I know of a shotgun that was stolen only weeks before the murders.

RP: Yeah?

LW: It’s your town. Your own paper reported it.

RP: You city kids think you’re all the Lone Ranger. You know something about the Lone Ranger? He was useless. He was just the white guy who listened to Tonto.

LW: Randy’s blood type is O.

RP: Randy’s blood type is O. That’s, um … still basically nothing, kid.

LW: You can find everything else on your own. If you actually look. You telling me that reporters up here don’t do any better than the police?

RP: You don’t have many friends, do you?

LW: You know what? Not all of us had our best friend’s dad offering us steady gigs right out of college.

RP: You …

LW: It’s called research.

---

Bury the Dead 22 – coming April 22

Ollie Clark—Thursday, June 27, 2019

Deborah left immediately to go downtown and be with Dad while they did whatever they did after an arrest—Ollie figured Eli could tell her, but she didn’t want to ask just now—and Cindy decided that she should go, too, even though that wasn’t on her list of orders. She was, in fact, supposed to stay put where neither police nor Roger Porvoo could question her.

Cindy clearly thought she knew better than some lawyer with years of experience, so she ran a brush through her hair, freshened her lip gloss, and told Ollie to lock up.

Right. So.

Eli took a slow breath and got up to freshen his coffee, moving slowly. In shock? Deep in thought? When he turned around and leaned against the counter, cup in both hands, he asked Ollie, “Have you and I ever been alone in this house?”

Ah. Deep in thought. “Uh.”

“I’m just saying. This is weird.”

Right. That was the weird thing about today.

He slurped some off the top. “What did you do last time?”

“Last time?” They’d never been alone in Dad’s house before.

“Yeah, last time. I get arrested and you … did you text people?” He frowned, pondering this as a sort of academic exercise instead of something deeply personal. “Do we text people that your dad just got arrested? Is that rude? Because I can’t see us calling everybody, and even if we do that, the first people are going to keep us on for so long the last people will get it from the grapevine before they hear it from us.”

Ollie pulled out her phone and just looked at it. “Honestly, I can’t remember.” She didn’t have an iPhone back then, but what phone had it been? A flip phone? The one with the full keyboard that pulled out with actual buttons instead of just a touch screen? “There’s a lot about that time I can’t remember.”

“Lucky,” he sighed, grabbing the pad of paper off the fridge and drinking more coffee so it didn’t spill as he sat down again. He plunked the mug on the table and tore off the shopping list on the first sheet before clicking open the tiny pen. “Okay. Jared, my mom … Harper and Brad, hey? And …?”

“Serena.”

Eli made a face. “Jared can tell her, thanks. She agrees with your dad.”

“With …?” Oh. Well. True, things had been tense between Serena and Esther for years, but Ollie had always assumed it had to do with the brothers they’d married.

He sighed and clicked the pen again. “Well. That was a good use of paper.”

“Group chap with Harper and Brad?”

He nodded, pulling out his own phone. “I’ll leave you out of the Jared one.”

“If he’s awake.”

“Shit.” He lowered his phone and leaned back to try to see into the mudroom. “You think his apartment key’s on your dad’s ring?”

“No clue.” And at least she had the easy ones to inform. Ollie pulled up the proper group chat and typed So Dad was just arrested for Mom and Birdy’s murder. There wasn’t any reason to pad it, and it wasn’t like she had any evidence she could share. Maybe Len started the police looking at Dad, but the suppositions of some hotshot true crime writer weren’t enough to get a judge to sign the warrant. They had to think they had something, but what? Seriously, after a decade … what?

Eli had his phone to his ear, but his mouth tightened and he sighed before saying “Hey Jare, when you get this, call me right back.” He lowered his phone, hesitated, and ended up texting someone.

“Your mom?” Ollie guessed.

“Jared. But we’ll probably have to go down there. Now I’m texting Mom.”

God, it was awful. Ollie couldn’t remember what happened to Esther after Eli got arrested. Someone came to get Ollie—was it Dad?—but Esther … well, she probably went downtown, like Cindy, because even if she couldn’t do anything, it still felt better to do nothing close by instead of sitting out here where you couldn’t be there in an instant if there was something you could do.

Her phone buzzed. WTF. Do you have any more information? Harper wanted to know.

Sort of. He’s got a lawyer and Len thinks he did it, but I don’t know what the police think they have on him. She didn’t really want to go into how Cindy called them up to the house and they got to see Dad get arrested, thanks. Clearly Harper knew how their last encounter went, since they volunteered Brad to perform the wedding ceremony, but … some things were just too much right now.

Okay make that most things. Maybe this was why she couldn’t remember what happened last time. Who wanted to move second by second through the minutes television and movies turned into montages? This was the boring stuff. She wasn’t even doing a training regimen so she could defeat her enemy in the epic battle sequence.

Waiting really was the hardest part. Being set to music didn’t make it any less poetic.

“Can I be weird for a sec?” Eli asked, eyes still on his phone.

Uh. “Sure.”

“I’m fine with being the one to barge in on Jared, but I’d feel better if you were the one who handed me your dad’s keys.”

Ollie shrugged and got up to look at the various options on the key hooks. Yeah, maybe it was kind of a strange dividing line, but she was used to working with boundaries. You could respect them without fully understanding them. She picked up Dad’s usual key ring and spread the keys out: his car, Cindy’s car, front door, back door … “There’s extras on this one,” she told Eli, holding it up. “But there’s more still on the hooks.”

He chewed on his lip. “How do you feel about grabbing them all?”

Ollie held out her hand because hey, the mud room really wasn’t that far from the kitchen table. “Toss me my phone?” She took a picture of the rest of the keys before grabbing them. It felt halfway between being nice and wanting to put them back in the proper place so Dad didn’t get annoyed, and being sneaky and wanting to put them back in the proper place so Dad maybe wouldn’t find out she’d touched them. Don’t darken my door again probably included don’t take my keys.

Eli held out both hands so she could pass them off with a jingle. “Thank you. You don’t have to come with me.”

She smiled, and it actually felt natural. “Like I have anywhere better to be.”

---

From a file on Len Wilcox’s laptop created June 24, 2019

Wendy and Birdy Clark were murdered late on June 19, 2009. Within forty-eight hours the police closed in around suspect Eli James Chapman and made the mistake of shutting off all other avenues of inquiry. Evidence contained within the case file remained there for me to find almost a decade later. It was neither hidden nor concealed, but rather overlooked. If it didn’t fit or support the theory of Eli Chapman as murderer, prosecuting attorney Carson Denomie had no use for it.

One of the biggest questions surrounding the double murder is “Where did the murderer get the gun?” Although shotguns are not uncommon in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, neither the Clark family nor Eli Chapman owned one. That is, none of them could be found to have purchased one legally.

In early June 2009, Ensio Kurtti pulled up to his camp outside of Covington, Michigan, and discovered that it had been broken into since he was last there. “Camps” in the Upper Peninsula refer to cabins in the woods, generally rustic and off the grid, mostly used for hunting. The Clarks were not hunters, but Kurtti was, and a number of his guns had been stolen. As of this writing three of them, including a shotgun, have not been recovered.

Kurtti’s closest neighbor in the woods is the camp owned by Randy Clark. It was here that Randy and his older daughter, Ollie, spent the night on June 19—according to their testimony. We cannot blame a nineteen-year-old girl in shock from the brutal murders of her mother and sister for insisting that she spent the night stargazing with her father, especially when the pair had indeed done so many times before. In the confusion, Ollie could easily agree that Randy was there all night without even realizing her mind had crossed the wires from a different night. Ollie could be hooked up to a polygraph machine and give her dad that alibi without moving the needles so much as a millimeter … but that doesn’t mean it’s true.

With the gun stolen from Kurtti’s camp, Randy had a weapon that could not be traced back to him and the means of committing the murders. The opportunity came during a daddy-daughter weekend when he unilaterally declared that the daughters should swap, feeding Ollie a half-baked lie that her sister would never be able to explain or deny. This only leaves the question of motive.

Birdy was not an easy child. Even her friends admitted it, breaking the taboo and speaking ill of the dead. Each one was defensive, but they all said it, even when declaring it was against their better judgment. Ollie was universally loved by her teachers, the “easy” child, but Birdy made up for that in spades. During Birdy’s senior year, when Ollie was out of the house as a college freshman, Birdy dialed it up to eleven. It took the murder trial and evidence displayed in court to start untangling the lies she told her friends … and that her friends believed.

As her father, Randy Clark endured the accusations that he favored one daughter over the other as an incompetent and unfairly biased parent as the rumors spread through the teenage grapevine and permeated the community. Without undergoing the embarrassment of throwing the family accounts open for public scrutiny, there was no way Clark could counteract Birdy’s claims. Teenagers delight in aggravating their parents.

Like the stolen guns from the Kurtti camp, there is another fact that was overlooked in the police’s scramble to pin the murders on Eli Chapman. Even Birdy’s friends seem to have forgotten it, perhaps because it shows a more generous side of the murdered girl: at the end of her senior year, despite a long-stated phobia of needles, Birdy donated blood for the first time at a local blood drive along with other members of her senior class. She brought the paperwork home where it was pinned up on the kitchen cork board so she wouldn’t lose it before she was able to donate again. This paperwork clearly displayed her blood type.

---

Bury the Dead 21 – coming April 21

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

Ollie Clark—Thursday, June 27, 2019

Deborah Binkman, Esquire, looked like Carrie Fisher except for the fact that she sat ramrod straight in the kitchen chair with both feet flat on the floor. She had one pair of glasses perched on her nose with the chain dangling, and another hung around her neck on the same kind of chain. Only the color of the cat’s eye frames set them apart.

Between her briefcase, laptop, and legal pads, she had half the kitchen table to herself. The other chair on that side was pulled out, and presumably Dad and Cindy sat together facing her as they’d talked it through, but those three chairs weren’t enough now that Ollie and Eli were here. Not that Dad wanted to sit down with them, anyway—it was his turn to lean back against a kitchen counter, although at least the glass bottle currently in his hand was Coke. The kind with real sugar.

“Ms. Clark.” Deborah smiled up at her and gestured for Ollie to take a seat, even though it meant having her back to Dad. It made her realize she thought of Dad as a wild animal, which came with its own layers of guilt. “Cindy said you talked to Mr. Wilcox after your father’s interview.”

So Len was Mr. Wilcox and Dad’s interrogation was an interview. “We both did, yeah.”

She smiled and nodded at Eli, too. “Mr. Chapman. What can the two of you tell me about that conversation?”

“That’s private family business,” Dad rumbled.

“Mr. Clark, this is all in the name of protecting you from an impending arrest.”

“It’s all in the name of gossip and airing dirty laundry, and they won’t arrest me because I didn’t do it.”

Ollie wasn’t sure which of them moved first, but her left hand clamped solidly on Eli’s right, because seriously? Was it possible that Dad didn’t realize what he’d just said? Denial was one thing, and never underestimate the special snowflake beliefs of the white American male, but come on.

“Mr. Clark, you don’t have to be here for this.”

“Talking about someone when they’re not in the same room is the textbook definition of gossip.”

“Len’s all smug because he thinks he uncovered evidence that Randy killed Wendy and Birdy because he discovered Birdy wasn’t his biological daughter,” Eli said quietly but firmly. “He saw Wendy and Birdy’s blood types and got Randy to say his, so he concluded the whole paternity thing. He also thinks Ollie’s either a liar or got her nights confused so she’s not a good alibi about him being in Covington.”

Dad muttered a lengthy curse under his breath but didn’t offer up anything louder.

Deborah frowned. “If the blood types were in the information available to the police at the time …”

“Did they have yours?” Ollie asked, twisting around to look at Dad.

If possible, his scowl clicked up a notch. “How the hell should I know?”

The lawyer tapped a finger against her chin. Her fingernails were manicured but not polished. “They might have had access to that information but, since the prosecution focused so quickly on Mr. Chapman, paternity questions had no role in their narrative.”

Eli shrugged at Ollie’s look. “You can ask Johanna if she knew, but the whole ‘this doesn’t make any sense’ thing means she couldn’t pull together any sort of story against anyone else, either. Just … no evidence against anyone.” He closed his mouth before he could add what Ollie read in his eyes: Including me.

Deborah nodded slowly as she scrolled through whatever she had up on her laptop screen. “Mr. Wilcox saw a blood type and jumped on it?”

“Oh, he thinks you lied about Birdy asking for the change, too.” Ollie twisted around again without thinking even though she knew what Dad looked like when he was grumpy. “He said it doesn’t make any sense because you never would’ve argued Eli’s side.” Then, turning back to the lawyer: “We talked about it that weekend. Dad and me. About how it was a really flimsy excuse and we’d get the real story Sunday or Monday, but … yeah, it was weird.”

“A cry for help kind of weird?”

Ollie pursed her lips. “I think she wanted Dad to know it was serious. She didn’t want to tell him what the real thing was, but she needed him to believe her enough to make the switch. We’d never done that before—those weekends were set in stone. It helped Mom to have that schedule, so we didn’t break it.”

“So your sister had to lie about Eli to break it?”

“She had to tell him something that would make him stop short and not just dismiss her.”

Behind her, Dad made another grumbling noise again, but she didn’t catch any words. Still, Ollie guessed he didn’t like how she’d just casually suggested he often dismissed Birdy. Even though they all did. Sometimes all that drama was just too much to take.

Deborah looked over the frames of her glasses at Dad. “Mr. Clark, I take it you would never have encouraged your daughter to accept a marriage proposal from Mr. Chapman?”

“Birdy and Jared? Sure. Ollie and Eli? Hah. Absolutely not. I get that she’s the best thing to happen in his miserable life, but some of that misery’s your own making, Eli, and you don’t get to drag my daughter down just because you think she’s some sort of life preserver. You can look at her with those puppy dog eyes all you want, and you got Wendy on your side, that’s for sure, but Ollie deserves better than you. Especially after all this. God, I don’t even know what you were thinking. All that just to get her piddling college account.”

Ollie turned around slowly, this time sliding in the chair instead of simply twisting. “Dad, if Eli did it … showed up that night with the shotgun?”

He waited, arms crossed firmly, one eyebrow raised in challenge.

“The guy who killed them shot through the screen door, right? When they were both backlit?”

“And? So it made it easier. He didn’t have to look at them while he killed them.”

“Eli didn’t know we’d switched. If it happened the way you said, he would’ve thought he was killing me.”

Dad opened his mouth to retort, clearly meaning to give some sort of snappy comeback, but it remained open and silent as he simply stared.

---

Excerpts from Len Wilcox’s notes, December 17, 2018

What a lunch. I’m grateful Dubrowski’s willing to share his contact info, but man, there’s something about this family. They’re all down here to talk to him, because I’m not enough of a draw—yet, at any rate—and it’s weird.

Okay, so this is the Clark family. Mom Wendy and daughter Catherine were killed in this dinky town north of nowhere in Michigan in June 2009. Classic Kelly: Catherine shot in the face at the door, mom through the chest in this little passageway between the kitchen and living room. (I’ve got diagrams of the house. Everything is little. I guess they don’t have a lot of trees up there.)

Going in, I figured the clincher would be the living daughter’s boyfriend. Same boyfriend now as back then, can you believe it? He went on trial for the murders, everyone thought they were over, but true love conquers all. Let’s get his side. He didn’t say much. He’s not really the strong, silent type—too geeky—but he didn’t give an inch. I’ll have to wear him down.

The older daughter, Olive, didn’t have much use for me, either. Can women be the strong, silent type? Silent, yes. Not so sure on “strong.” Brown hair, brown eyes, average figure … nothing stands out about her.

Try the stepmom next. Looks nothing like the real mom. Wendy was blonde with blue eyes, a total knockout. The sort of woman wrap dresses get made for. This new one, Cindy, is plumper than Olive. The cozy cuddly librarian, I guess, instead of the frosty old maid, but yow. Imagine being her. Who the fuck would want to marry into this little disaster of a family?

It’s the dad who made the bill worth it. I get silence from the kids, these stony, sullen faces, and new wifey just keeps looking admiringly at him as he talks—with his mouth full, and if that man’s seen a dentist lately, that guy’s license should be revoked—and he keeps pulling out all these photos.

Bingo. Every family has one. This man is desperate to tell you about the perfection that’s his dead wife and child, and he doesn’t freaking care if new wifey and other child are sitting right there. You know what’s even better? Dead kid was dating boyfriend’s cousin—talk about a time when you need the bulletin board and red yarn—and cousin’s the golden child. Even more golden than the dead kid. I’m surprised Dad didn’t bring him down here, too, so he could squeeze those broad shoulders into the booth along with the rest of them and flash me a grin with teeth that know the touch of whitening toothpaste.

This guy has so many tells. He’s so anxious to spill his guts and can’t read the room even of his nearest and dearest. You’ve got the kids who just want to get this over with and get Kelly convicted so she can stop being that girl whose mom and sister got murdered and he can stop being the one who murdered her mom and sister, and a wife who’s somehow decided to hitch her cart to his dying star for … I don’t even know what. There’s no chemistry there, so it can’t be sex. Maybe she was just sick of being an old maid.

The dad’ll get me enough for that part of the book, and maybe he can even get me interviews with some of the others. Friends and whatnot. If it’s the family asking, a lot more of them say yes. Then all I have to do is turn on the charm and make them think they’re the most interesting person in the conversation, and there we go. Pull out the juiciest lines, mix it all together, and that’s another chapter done.

I don’t know why I didn’t think of a serial killer book before. This thing’s going to write itself.

---

Bury the Dead 19 – coming April 19

Ollie Clark—Thursday, June 27, 2019

Ollie groaned at the text from Cindy and showed Eli her phone. Dad’s lawyer is here and wants to talk to you.

Eli stirred his coffee, tilting his head from side to side. “On the one hand, she’s making sure you know it’s actually his lawyer.”

“What, before I start ranting to one stranger about how he spilled his guts to a different stranger who wants to get him arrested?” Ollie set the phone on the table, plunked her elbow down next to it, and propped her chin on her fist.

“On the other hand,” he continued, nudging her mug closer, “we’re not allowed to darken that door again. So.”

The little dots danced and then revealed She’s told Dad in no uncertain terms that she needs to talk to you, even if he wants to be a whiny brat and leave the room.

Eli raised an eyebrow. “Do you think the lawyer actually said ‘whiny brat’?”

“Children’s librarian,” Ollie murmured, picking up her phone but then hesitating. “I don’t have to rope you into this.”

“I don’t have work and I’m sure as hell not packing if you’re not here to marvel over the wonderful job I’m doing.”

“Praise kink,” Ollie muttered, shaking her head as she typed We’ll be up there soon.

“Slow burn, hurt/comfort, fluff and angst.” He winked. “Adult content. By clicking here, you agree that you are over eighteen and consent to see—”

“Yeah, let’s bookmark that for later.” Ollie chugged the rest of her coffee and considered her shorts and t-shirt before deciding that a lawyer who made house calls had probably endured worse. “Okay.”

“Not flip-flops,” Eli cautioned, going to grab some socks so he could put on sneakers instead of sandals. “You know. In case we need to run back home.”

She rolled her eyes. “Beat Jared’s time trial. Hey, you heard from him today?”

Eli shook his head. “Way too early. His phone’ll be on silent, so unless your dad went and broke down the door …”

“Doesn’t he have a key?”

“Maybe. If your dad’s ever asked for one. Randy’s the only guy Jared’s ever had trouble saying ‘no’ to.”

Ollie’s phone buzzed again before she dropped it into her purse. Coffee’s on.

Eli nodded. “So she’s anxious.”

Cindy didn’t need to be anxious to put the coffee on. “They just got into the biggest fight of their marriage because Dad wants to blame you for the murders and now super stud Len Wilcox is trying to get her husband arrested.”

Eli grimaced but got the door and gestured her out first. “So, I’m not saying your dad’s stupid but, if he actually did do it, trying to focus all the attention on me is about the worst move.”

“Yeah?”

“Sure. I’ve already been dismissed. I,” he announced with theatrical grandiosity, “have been vindicated by no fewer than four separate podcast episodes.”

She wrinkled her nose. “You actually listen to those?”

“I have, yeah. I know they tell authors not to read reviews, but …” Shrugging, Eli took her hand as they crossed the parking lot. “I did at least wait until other people listened and posted and gave away the ending.”

“Who’d they say did it, then?” Since presumably these episodes were published more than six months ago, before Sean Kelly got his own wave of podcasts.

“Two of them said it was a stranger or a mistake. One of them went for your dad, and the other …”

“The other?”

“It was one of those dynamic duo podcasts. One of them said a stranger, and the other … she said Jared.”

Ollie wasn’t sure what sound came out of her, but it wasn’t very ladylike. “Jared?”

“Yeah. So it’s probably a good thing they didn’t know Birdy was pregnant, or else she would’ve said he killed her to keep from getting tied down.”

She chewed on her lip, not really keeping an eye out as they walked because there just wasn’t much traffic in South Range and Eli would pull her to a stop, anyway. Jared knew Birdy was pregnant. The math meant she wasn’t that far along, unless it was someone else’s kid, in which case Jared wouldn’t have been tied down, anyway. If Birdy came after him for child support, he’d say sure, after we do the DNA test, and bingo. Except Jared wasn’t angry about it last night. He was sad. And oh, God, that totally put him on par with Dad, didn’t it? They’d both lost their partner and their child. Dad wasn’t going to stick at the whole idea of potential child, not with everything he and Mom went through with Birdy. So if Jared knew Dad knew …

But there were other things Jared wouldn’t have known. “How did this podcaster get around the fact that I was supposed to be the one home that night? Like, if he wanted to kill Birdy, why didn’t he go out to Covington?”

“Yeah, that’s what the other one pointed out. Plus how angry do you have to be to kill someone and her mother because hey, by the way, birth control isn’t just on the partner with a uterus?”

“I mean, if it’s the uterus that pisses you off …” Still, she shook her head, because Jared? Jared was self-destructive. He drank and he hid from the world and he refused to socialize and he wouldn’t even buy self-help books. She couldn’t imagine Jared killing anyone other than himself, and definitely not Birdy. Sure, it might’ve been six weeks, but in those six weeks his entire universe revolved around Birdy. Her death tore his life apart.

“Yeah, nothing makes any sense,” Eli agreed. “It would’ve been so much easier if they could’ve made it stick with me, but uncertainty is part of life.”

Ollie shook her head. “We had our certainty. Sean Kelly.”

“And now it’s not him, so we’re back to the uncertainty. And,” he added with an apologetic shrug, “we’re probably going to be stuck there. It was a freaking miracle we had Kelly in the first place.”

If you could accept a serial killer as a miracle, maybe, but Ollie knew what she meant. She chuckled, though, and nodded at Dad’s driveway instead. “How much can you trust a lawyer who owns a Prius up here?”

“Maybe she owns two cars. She’s successful enough she can do the Prius in the summer and something hearty in the winter. So really, it’s a good sign.”

“Yeah, I’m just going to say that having to talk to a lawyer is never a good sign.” But Cindy had the door open already and stood there fiddling with the hem of her blouse as she waited for them to come in, so Ollie gave Eli’s hand a tug and went on up the steps.

---

Phone Call, Roger Porvoo with Len Wilcox, June 27, 2019

RP: Hey, Len, it’s Roger.

LW: Hi Roger.

RP: You know, I’d like to get you on the record. I don’t want to say you were hiding things from me on Monday, but …

LW: You recording right now?

RP: I am.

LW: I’ve got nothing to put on the record at the moment.

RP: At the moment. So. What are you thinking? Is he going to get arrested? Can I get some insights then?

LW: No comment at this time.

RP: Come on, Len. You can’t keep this kind of thing all to yourself. Make nice with the locals, hey? Throw me a bone to tide me over until you publish whatever you’re going for.

LW: Rog, come on. You know how this goes.

RP: I do know how this goes. You’re the one who doesn’t seem to get it. You’re not a lone wolf here, kid. And if you sit on it, and something happens, the police might mention your name during a press conference. Once. Then, if you try to publish your own tell-all, you’ll get swamped by angry people saying you’re trying to take the credit for their hard work. Back the blue. So the way this goes, Len, is you give me a comment now about the fact that you’re involved, and then, later, you let me have a teaser before you drop the full piece.

LW: I don’t think—

RP: You don’t have to think, Len. If you don’t go on the record now, I’ll be the one pointing out your Monday-morning quarterbacking and how you’re trying to take credit away from our good men and women with your city smile and capped teeth.

LW: They’re not—

RP: Final question: do you have anything you want to put on the record?

[long pause]

LW: I would like to express … my gratitude … for everyone who’s been willing to speak to me about the murders and … if anything this project uncovers … assists … the police in any way, I only hope that the Clark family can find closure.

RP: Clark family, huh? Every single member?

LW: No further comment.

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Bury the Dead 18 – coming April 18