They were taken away.
Who took them away?
You shrug. You point.
Mom . . . The young woman puts her hands to her face, sits down heavily in a chair.
Jennifer, what are you saying?
Her. There. She took the bloody cloth, the gloves. Cleaned everything up.
Detective Luton—Megan—I don’t know why she’s saying this.
But it’s too late. The middle-aged woman has raised her head, the intelligence in her face aroused.
Three women in a room. One, the young one, deeply distressed. She has taken her hands away from her face and is clasping them tightly in her lap. Wringing them. Wringing her hands. A rough motion, this grasping and twisting of the metacarpal phalangeal joints, as if trying to extract the ligaments and tendons from under the skin.
Another woman, older, is thinking hard. She is looking at the young woman, but she is not seeing her. She is seeing images play out in her mind, images that are telling her some sort of story.
And the third woman, oldest of all, is dreaming. Not really present. Although she knows she is wearing clothes, sitting on a hard chair, that material is pressed against her skin, she cannot feel any of it. Her body is weightless. The atmosphere has thickened. It is difficult to breathe. And time has slowed. An entire life could be lived between heartbeats. She is drowning in air. Soon, scenes will begin appearing before her eyes.
The woman, the one that is neither old nor young, is opening her mouth. The words drop out, hang motionless in the congealing atmosphere.
At last, something is making sense, she says. A beat of silence. Then another. Perfect sense, she says. She stands up. She is working something out. Even if your mother were capable of killing, it’s unlikely that she would have been able to cover her tracks so thoroughly. Not without help.
The younger woman’s hands are now still, but they are gripping each other so tightly that all blood has drained from the knuckles. She closes her eyes. She doesn’t speak.
The middle-aged woman’s voice is getting louder. She is coming alive as the young and old women shut down. That’s one of the things that saved your mother from being charged for so long. Her capacity for that kind of act was so obviously not there. But if she had assistance . . . Yours . . .
When the young woman finally speaks, her voice is so low you can scarcely hear it. What are you going to do? she asks.
I don’t know, says the middle-aged woman. First I have to understand.
Understand? What is there to understand? The young woman is speaking faster now, agitatedly. Her voice is higher, pleading. She tugs at the edges of her shorn hair. Almost whining. You do not find it attractive. What does it remind you of ? Stop that. Stop it now. She did it, the young woman says, loudly. I found out. I helped her cover it up.
Not so fast, the middle-aged woman says. I need to understand. She picks up something from the table, runs her fingers across it, puts it down before continuing. Did she give you any indication that she was angry at Amanda? That she was thinking about doing something like this?
Absolutely not. The young woman almost interrupts, she is so eager to answer. She places her hands in her lap, one on top of the other, like stacking bundles of kindling. Willing them not to move.
Then how did you know to go over there? The older woman’s voice is rising. She is losing control even as the younger woman is regaining it. They are focused entirely on each other. One tamping down emotions, the other escalating them.
I went home to check up on her. I’d been worrying. And I couldn’t sleep that night. I thought I’d spend the night there, give Magdalena a break.
Why didn’t you tell us this?
Because one thing would lead to another and you would ask too many questions.
And so . . . ?
I pulled up into the parking space next to the garage. Behind the house. And saw my mother coming down the alley. She was spattered with blood. All I could get out of her was one word: Amanda. So I took her there. And found her.
Did your mother say why?
She said it was blackmail.
Blackmail?
Yes.
About what?
About me. The circumstances of my birth. That my mother didn’t know who my father was. Not for
