by Gregg Olsen
Nothing happened.
She finally summoned the courage to tell her mother.
The two were outside planting bare root roses up against the house. Her brother and father had gone to town to the feedstore.
“Mom,” she said. “I have something to tell you.”
Ida looked up from the bundle of ruby rugosas they were planting.
“It’s bad, Mom. Really bad.”
“What is it?”
Sarah started crying. It was as if the words were caught in her throat.
“Mom,” she spat out, “Dad has been abusing me.”
Ida returned her attention to the roses and started, vigorously so, to dig a hole.
Sarah stood there. Frozen. Confused. It was neither of the responses she’d imagined. The first was a hug and a promise to help. The second scenario was denial and a call for proof. But this response? It was as if the wind had carried off her words into nothingness.
“Did you hear me? Don’t you believe me?”
Ida continued digging.
“I heard you, honey. Yes, I believe you. I know it is true.”
Her mother’s last words jolted her.
I know it is true.
“How do you know?”
“Your father told me. Years ago. He told me he had a sickness and had been praying on it. And after a while, he said that God was allowing him to continue.”
“God let him continue to rape me?”
“I’m sorry that you don’t understand. In time, I know you will.”
“I could never, Mom. How could you let it happen?”
“I am my husband’s wife first,” she said.
We’re not there yet on her story. It will come. I look at the time and consider asking if she needs a bathroom break. I don’t. I’d rather have her pee on my backseat than hand her a single minute in a stall to rethink telling me her story.
“I’m sorry for all you’ve been through,” I say.
“Thank you,” she says.
I watch her in the mirror. She’s looking out the window again, watching the world go by. She’s thinking about what happened and the lie she’ll tell me.
What really happened.
I play the game.
“What happened, Sarah? What happened to your parents?”
“I don’t want to get Joshua into any more trouble.”
“Tell me,” I say. “I am a victim of abuse too. I know what it’s like. I want to help you.”
I think just then how Mindy and Sheriff will laugh at that one. I’m a lot of things, but victim will never be one of them.
“I don’t know if I should say anything.”
To me that means she can’t wait to lay blame.
“I know it is difficult,” I tell her. “The right thing to do isn’t always easy.”
Her eyes catch mine in the mirror and she gives a little nod.
“That night when Joshua came home, I told him what happened. How I’d told Mom and how she just stood there saying that she already knew. Had known for years. He just lost it. He was so mad. Scary mad. It was like some kind of switch had been turned on.”
I urge her to take a breath.
“What happened, Sarah?”
Slowly, deliberately, she paints a picture.
Joshua found her later that night. She was crumpled into a ball, crying in a corner next to the workbench.
He dropped to his knees to comfort her.
“Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
She shook her head,
“Josh, I told Mom what Dad’s been doing to me.”
“Seriously? What did she say?”
“That bitch didn’t care. She said she’s known for years that this has been going on.”
Joshua didn’t understand.
“For years? You said it was one time.”
“I said that because the truth was too much for me to put on you. I thought you might do something crazy. And I didn’t want that. I just wanted someone to help me.”
Josh’s face went white. His eyes stayed on her.
“I let you down, didn’t I?”
“It’s okay.”
Joshua stood up and turned to the door. Their father stood there.
“What are you ungrateful kids doing in here?”
“Just talking,” Joshua said.
“I heard what you were talking about and it’s complete bullshit. Your sister is the biggest liar in the county. She’s full of shit. Never touched her once.”
Joshua put a hand down to help Sarah get up.
“We’re going to go to the sheriff, Dad. You’re going to stop.”
Merritt started for Josh. His eyes bulged from his face. He looked as angry as Joshua and Sarah had ever seen their father. He wasn’t holding a belt to beat them, but his bare hands.
Just before he reached Josh, the teen grabbed a claw hammer and swung it at his father’s head. After one strike, the big man fell to the floor.
He struck him a third and fourth time, sending a spray of blood upward.
“What just happened here?” Sarah screamed.
“I saved you.”
A few minutes later, Ida came looking for her husband. When she entered, she processed the chaotic scene. She looked at her kids and rushed to Merritt.
“What did you do?” she asked.
Then the hammer went down.
We drive in silence for a while as I think about the blood evidence.
“That’s not what happened, Sarah.”
“It is too.”
“The evidence says otherwise.”
She doesn’t say another word for at least a mile. I stay quiet, letting my challenge to her story sink in. I wonder if Sarah is thinking of a way out of what she said or giving in to the reality of her situation.
“Joshua did it all. He did it to protect me.”
“That’s a story, Sarah, and you know it.”
“I don’t understand what you’re getting at, Detective Carpenter.”
My eyes burn into hers through the rearview mirror. I’m thinking of the evidence that’s never been mentioned, or thought of as inconsequential.
“The shovel,” I say. “Let’s start there.”
She looks away. “What shovel?”
“The one you used to kill your mother.”
She doesn’t say another word.
It doesn’t matter. I know what happened. The evidence and what Ellie told me in the jail interview room is all a jury will need to convict.
Forty-Seven
Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office is a madhouse. It seldom sees press action of any kind. The place is one story, so nondescript that people often pass by thinking it’s a former nail salon or dollar store that’s been stripped of its livery for the next big thing. Whatever that is. Especially here. When I go inside the moron TV reporter is already setting up. I wonder if he and his camerawoman made it to that restaurant—and a motel room.
I tell Sheriff I need to leave. I don’t want to be on camera again. A lot of good it did me last time. I shudder at the very idea of it.
“You need a scorecard to talk to the press?” I ask. “Don’t forget to add Ellie killing her mom to the list.”
He gives me a side eye and a shrug.
“I’ve got this,” he says.
I nod, and he actually reaches over and hugs me.
I can’t think of the last time anyone did that.
“You are the best person I know,” he says.
I don’t deflect. I’m not, but he means well. He cares about me.
“See you later,” I say.
He gives me a quick nod and makes his way to the TV people. I hear him bark at them and tell them no one is making any statements.
I read through my text messages before I start the car.
Mindy notes that dogs alerted on the firepit at the Torrance property.
Found a femur and a human jaw. Tool marks on both.
I don’t need a forensic dentist to tell me who the j
aw belongs to. I know. I followed the trail. Just like Regina Torrance did.
As I drive, I consider that the murders were a chain of broken links. Not completely connected but interlocking in peculiar ways. The first to die is unrelated to the sequence, but I count it anyway because the last death—Regina’s—bookends everything. Her reason for dying was the hidden crime which was sure to be discovered. It starts with Regina’s wife. Amy was murdered, or killed by accident at least two or so years ago. A dark, hidden crime. Then, this summer on the other side of Puget Sound, Tyra Whitcomb tells Ellie she killed her mother, Susan. That in turn inspires Ellie to kill her parents, Hudson and Carrie; all three murders are set up to look like boating or hiking accidents.
Except one was a lie. Tyra never killed her mother. She and her father just made her disappear the old fashioned way.
With a threat and a check.
At the same time, or shortly thereafter, Ellie urges Joshua to do the same thing: to kill his folks and sister so they could be lovers in a world of their own.
When Regina finds Merritt’s body on the edge of her property, she becomes frightened that her secret will be discovered, so she disposes of his body in the firepit.
Who could do something like that?
Considering how she managed her wife’s corpse, my bet that dismembering and burning Merritt’s body wasn’t the hardest thing she’d ever done.
Why didn’t she do the same with Mrs. Wheaton?
My thinking is that she just didn’t see her. It was dark in the woods and her vision was poor. In addition, the body was wrapped in a carpet.
All of that is conjecture informed by the evidence.
My phone pings and another piece of the puzzle falls into place as Mindy provides an update from processing the women’s bodies.
Regina poisoned herself. Tox will tell us more. The other one. Wow. Amy’s corpse was filled with charcoal. Like a bean bag. Let’s do lunch next week.
He’s drinking a Scotch and soda while I down a shot of tequila and a PBR. The burn of the alcohol feels good in its own way as it travels down my throat. I don’t even bother with the lime.
“You drink like a guy,” Sheriff says with a smile.
“You do too. Sometimes.”
We laugh and then stare ahead at the back bar while the bartender, a portly man in his late forties, chats up a young pretty brunette nursing a gin and tonic. She’s acting interested, but I’ve seen that look before. Used it myself even. She’s talking to him because no one better has sidled up next to her.
Not yet.
“I knew you’d be the best detective I’d ever hired,” he says, unsuccessfully motioning for a second Scotch.
“I don’t know. You sure took a chance on me.”
He knows some of the baggage I carry with me, but not the worst of it. I doubt he’d have hired me if he knew.
I know I wouldn’t.
It feels uncomfortable just then. It’s me, of course. Compliments are hard to accept. I think that it’s because, deep down, I feel like a fraud. Dr. Albright warned me that it would be a lifelong battle and I might never fully believe that I am a good person, that the sins of my past don’t define me.
I immediately segue to the case. I resist the urge to write on the cocktail napkin. It’s complicated, but Sheriff knows all the pieces.
Just not how they all fit.
“It was through Sarah that Ellie met Josh,” I say.
“Through the hate-my-parents’ social site.”
“Correct.”
The bartender looks our way, finally, and Sheriff indicates one more. I shake my head. I’m fine with my beer.
“Sarah had logged on to the site first, then introduced her brother to Ellie. Ellie, in turn, played Joshua in the same way his sister did. She wasn’t in love with him. She only needed a place to stay until everyone moved on.”
“Yeah, she lived in the mobile home with the sweet potato vines.”
“That’s what she said. She didn’t move on to the property with Joshua until after it was all done.”
“Let’s run down your theory,” he says.
“Okay, Ellie claims she was only a sounding board to Josh. She didn’t make anything happen. I’m not so sure about that.”
I sip my beer.
Sheriff speaks up. “It doesn’t matter anyway. She cut a deal and is off to face charges for murdering her parents.”
“Right. So, here’s what I think happened—backed up by the evidence: Sarah was looking for the right moment and she found it when she and Ida were planting the roses. She swung the shovel, striking the back of her mother’s head. The autopsy indicated multiple blows. The back of Ida’s heels indicated that she’d been dragged.”
“Back into the workshop,” he says.
“So, she was the first to die.”
I nod. “Merritt was lured into the workshop by Sarah. Josh, who believed her rape story, was lying in wait. He used the hammer and beat his father to death, while Sarah egged him on. During or right after the bludgeoning, Ida stirred.”
“She wasn’t dead. That’s what you think?”
“Her blood was on the hammer. No real castoff. Just a couple of blows to finish her off.” We stay quiet and watch the brunette wrangle a free drink.
“Cold. Calculating,” he says.
Though I know he’s talking about the Wheaton kids and Ellie, I resist adding that a free drink’s a free drink.
“There were three sources of DNA on the hammer. Mr. and Mrs. Wheaton and a third. Sarah’s?”
“Lab will let us know. But I suspect so.”
“How would it get there?’
“Not sure. Maybe she put it there.”
“To throw us off?”
I look at the foam in the bottom of my beer glass. “Maybe so. Maybe she’s smarter than we think.”
It’s what I would have done.
Sheriff shifts the conversation to Sarah’s purported defense.
“Do you think Wheaton was molesting his daughter?” he asks.
I shrug. “I honestly don’t know. My guess is that will be her defense. Her brother’s too. It might work. However, there isn’t a shred of evidence. No school counselor. No doctor’s visits. No friends to say she confided in them.”
My own story passes through my thoughts.
I’d never told another person about what happened to me until I met Karen Albright.
Forty-Eight
I idle in the drive-thru at our local burger place and order the works. Even a chocolate milkshake. When I get home, I go for the tapes right away. It’s like there’s a poltergeist in my house putting those little cassettes in my face and telling me to PLAY them.
So that’s just what I do.
I can’t resist.
I’m a moth to the flame.
I eat slowly and listen to every word. I also see every single thing that my younger self is describing. I am reliving it all. I want to stop the player, but I can’t; I’m an addict. I’m someone without the good sense to throw the damn thing into the trash.
The garbage disposal. That is if I had one.
Run over it in my car.
“Go on, dear,” Dr. Albright says in her sweet, yet urgent voice. “You’re doing fine. You’re revisiting a time and place that made you… but doesn’t have an iron grip on you. You can be free. Acceptance is what we’re going for here.”
It’s almost laughable how those words spoken a decade ago still ring false.
I finish my milkshake, making that sucking noise that kids do when they want to get every last drop.
I close my eyes and allow a memory to fill my head.
Hayden was asleep in the bedroom across the hall from mine. The house was quiet; I could actually hear the clock in the foyer ticking away the time. My thoughts had been racing, looping, spinning, since we’d arrived in Idaho. I padded downstairs and found Aunt Ginger in the darkened living room, the curtains still drawn. The TV was still on mute. The light flickering over her
face altered her appearance a little. She didn’t look like my mother at all. Her eyes were darker; her hair was long and lifeless, without even the faintest trace of a shimmer. By the time I took a seat next to her, I had already learned everything I could about her by studying the photographs in the hallway, and yes, digging through every drawer that I could when she was getting our rooms ready. I knew that she was single. She loved the scent of lavender. I knew that she was estranged from her son and daughter. I didn’t know exactly why, and when it got right down to it, I really didn’t care. What I did care about was the truth. What I cared about was finding my mother.
Dr. A: Rylee, what did your aunt tell you? About your mother?
Me: Sorry. Just thinking about it. How incredible and awful it all seemed to me.
Dr. A: But you’re here now. You’re safe.
Me: (pause). I think so. But I don’t know for sure. No one really does.
Dr. A: I suppose that’s so. You’re no longer in imminent danger.
I don’t say it, but I remember thinking it at the time. That’s what you think, Doctor.
I see our conversation in pictures. My aunt sitting on the sofa, looking away from me to tell her story. I play the whole scene in my mind.
“When I was twenty, your mom was sixteen,” she told me. “She was coming home from feeding the neighbor’s cat. It was summer, and the dahlias were in bloom. We had planned to go out shopping after dinner. She needed a new outfit for a party at the end of the month.” Aunt Ginger hesitated, lost in a memory that might have been bittersweet and horrific at the same time. I gave her a minute. I have memories like that too; the kind that take me far away from the present.
“No one saw it happen,” my aunt said, back from wherever her thoughts had taken her. “I mean, she just vanished. It was as if Courtney was just lifted up away from home by a helicopter or something. There was no trace of her. Nothing.”
