“You don’t think I can produce any evidence, do you? Well, you’re wrong there. Remember, Erik phoned me —the one journalist who’s more concerned with the truth than with a sensational headline about a jealous husband, the one reporter who knows and cares about your daughter. When you found out he was on the line with me, you interrupted him, didn’t you? I heard him say ‘Oh!’ as if he’d been distracted. But it was the start of your name, wasn’t it? He was beginning to say ‘Olga’.”
Olga’s face came alive as she made a disdainful snort.
“You’re right, Olga. That would never convince anyone in a court of law. But, you see, there’s something else to worry about. After I received that cell-phone call from Erik, I went to see him. He showed me his cell phone. Yes,
“He replaced the phone and hid up there, behind the summerhouse. And he saw you retrieve the phone and heave it, like a dog’s toy, into the lake. Only this time you had Hershey on a leash, didn’t you? The dog strained to leap into the lake, but you did not let him.”
Olga picked up the pair of rose cutters. Centering the rose stem between two small bites in the blades, she closed the scissors and pulled the flowerless stem between them, shearing off the thorns, one by one. With little sounds like time ticking away, they hit the cold slate floor between Olga and her challenger.
“With Erik in police custody and the convincing suggestion made that he had been using the phone all along, that phone had no more usefulness to you. You’re counting on a jury to find such ramblings mere speculation. But that’s not all, Olga. I, too, was there yesterday afternoon, photographing two young women you would call ‘coeds’ in the topiary garden. You didn’t see me? Well, I saw you. And my heart went out to you when one of the young women called out the name ‘Ellen.’ But the photograph I took of those girls tells another story. You see, you and Hershey appear in that photo, too. Hershey is straining at the leash as the ‘toy’—no, Olga, the cell phone you had just tossed—is frozen by the camera in its trajectory into Lake Waban. I have no doubt police divers will be able to find it there.”
Olga considered the rose stem. Placing it between the flattened fingers of her two hands, she rolled it back and forth. A bit of thorn must have remained on it to prick her. At long last, the flower arranger flinched. And her blood flowed.
“The place where the bodies are, near Plymouth, that’s not the scene of the murder, is it? You killed your daughter in her own kitchen when you came upon her with the swarthy-skinned man. You feared Ellen would confront you—even broadcast to others—the secret you’d hidden for decades: Her father and your husband—Karl Swenson—was a pervert. When you saw the cabbie, you thought he was the boy, all grown up now, who witnessed your husband’s masturbating over his own daughter. The same boy who phoned you on the anniversary of that awful day, year after year after year after year in December. So you killed them both, Olga.
“I wouldn’t have thought you capable of murder, Olga. Not until I realized you were cruelly capable of feeding Veronica false hope by making that call on her birthday. And not until I saw that you would stoop to implicate the only parent Veronica has left. Not until I saw you cared more about your husband’s reputation and your own freedom than about the well-being of your granddaughter. I thought you loved your granddaughter.”
In a sudden movement, and with a sound like a snarl, Olga shoved Liz into the doorjamb and reached past the several coats that were hanging on the wall. She wheeled around, training a rifle on Liz.
“Veronica!” she cried out. “Don’t you
“You may deny it and you may kill me, as I think you did your daughter, but there are still two more people who know what happened that day by this lake: Ali himself, and Ellen’s pen pal, Nadia. The police will know you murdered to hide your family secret. Count on it.”
The gun moved in Olga’s shaking hands. “I believed my husband when he told me the tongue-tied boy had exposed himself to Ellen. I still believe it! When I arrived at Ellen’s house and saw through the window a man clapping a hand over my daughter’s mouth, I knew it was that boy grown up. He was saying the same strange words, like a tuneless hum. It had to be the same person! I went out to the garden shed, where I’d hidden the skeet shooter I’d bought for Veronica for Christmas, and I loaded it. When I came back to the house the man had my daughter pinned to his side, with his bloody hand over her mouth. I wanted to stop him but I’m no killer. I aimed for his legs and pulled the trigger. I closed my eyes on what I’d done.” Olga shuddered and hugged the rifle to herself, barrel pointed upward. “But when I opened them, there was Ellen, on the floor. She was dead.”
Heedless of the rifle butt, which was now pressed against the underside of her chin, Olga sobbed. Liz stepped forward, reached for the weapon, and very slowly put her hand around the barrel. Relinquishing the gun, Olga sat down hard on the cold slate floor. She picked up some thorns and rolled them in her palms, bloodying her hands as she spoke.
“I must have killed her. It was inexplicable but I must have! The man kept up that awful humming. I had no idea what to do. I wanted to shoot the man, just to stop him humming. I wanted to run and run and run.
“Then the cookie ingredients caught my eye and I thought of Veronica. I couldn’t let her come home to this kitchen. I just couldn’t. I still had the gun. I could make the man clean the place up. First, we had to—to do something about Ellen. I looked around and saw the tree bag, the kind you use to wrap up a Christmas tree before you put it out for the trash. I made him put Ellen inside it. And I made him put the bag outside the back door. It was cold out there; it was beginning to snow. But how else could we clean up for Veronica? We came back inside the house then. I directed him to put on the rubber gloves that Ellen always keeps around. I told him to fill the dishpan on the side of the sink with water and some floor cleaner. I made him put the bottle of floor cleaner back under the sink. I made him use a sponge to wipe the floor and the wall behind where Ellen had—had been. While he was mopping, he knocked over one of the poinsettias. After it looked like he had done a pretty good job cleaning up, I made him carry the poinsettia into the living room. I wanted to keep his hands busy. I had to keep that man with me everywhere so I could point the gun at him.
“That’s when I saw Ellen’s purse in the man’s open backpack. There was no time to wonder what it was doing there. I pulled the purse out of the backpack and took Ellen’s keys out of it. Something fell out of her purse and when I bent down to pick it up, the Arab set down the poinsettia suddenly and flew across the room at me. He was reaching for the gun when the doorbell rang. Instead of grabbing the gun, he fled the room! You would have thought the man would have welcomed what we glimpsed through the window. It was two foreign-looking men, maybe Middle Eastern.
“I was afraid he would lunge at me again; I had to keep him under control. I followed him into the kitchen and kept the gun pointed at him. I wanted to stay in the kitchen and clean the counter where the cookie ingredients were, but he’s rattled me so! I was shaken. I put on my coat and grabbed Ellen’s jacket, too. I don’t know why I took the jacket. It just seemed like a good idea. Later I found Ellen’s purse and mine, and the Arab’s backpack, in the car, but I hardly remember putting them there.
“After we heard the two men drive away in their car, I made the man put the Christmas tree bag into the trunk of Ellen’s car. My head was spinning and I couldn’t think straight. I wanted it to be my car but it was too far away. Because of the snowstorm, I had parked it in the City Hall parking lot, which is always kept plowed. We got into Ellen’s Honda. I made him drive. I sat in the back seat so I could keep the gun pointed at him. It was not easy to do in the car.
“At first, I didn’t care where we drove, as long as it was away from Ellen’s house. Then I thought of Plymouth. I had picnicked there when I was a girl. I knew there were some isolated woods there.
“The drive was a blur. I was so shattered and it was snowing so hard. By the time we got to some deserted recreational area, the snow was quite deep, but not deep enough to make it easy to slide the—the Christmas tree bag into the woods. There was a lot of underbrush, and stumps, and even holes in the ground that you couldn’t see in the snow. I hung back, gesturing with the gun at him every time he seemed likely to turn on me, and made him put her in a hollow. Then I told him to cover her up with snow. I didn’t want to kill him but I was sure I must. All I could think was Veronica would not have a woman in her life—not a mother, not a grandmother—if I were turned in for what I’d done.
“When he bent over to cover Ellen with snow, I shot him. He fell down on top of the plastic bag. On top of my
