Just Try to Stop Me

by Gregg Olsen

  “Living next door to this place has made me into something I no longer recognize,” she said.

  It was a strange remark. Kendall noticed the resignation in the older woman’s voice.

  “How do you mean?” she asked.

  “Small things. Big things. You think you will find her?” she asked, though unwilling to wait for a reply. “If you don’t, she’ll just do more of the same. She’s got one speed, that one. Always has, I bet. That’s why I don’t try to think about her too much. But then people like you come by, and I’m back there with her in my head again.”

  “I’m sure it’s hard,” Kendall said.

  The older woman sighed. “Shooting a basket from mid-court is hard,” Jess said. “And I did that to great success in my day. Forgetting what happened here . . . well, that’s damn near impossible.”

  Kendall followed Jess’s eyes and she scanned the house.

  “Wish the fire department had let it burn down. That night I worried about my apple trees. If I could do it all over, I’d have waited to call 911. I mean, what was the point of calling for help anyway? They were dead.”

  “You were there that night?” Kendall asked. “I didn’t see you on the witness list.”

  “Dick testified. That’s my husband. He’s watching TV now. We were both home when she came running over.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  It had all happened so fast. A thundershower had pummeled the houses along Stoneway Drive with a relentless force that rattled the windows facing the street, away from the ravine and greenbelt that the homes backed up to. The storm’s cadence was so regular that it nearly seemed mechanical, predictable. One punch to the earth after the next was followed by a torrent of rain that filled the gutters and sent a cascade to flood the driveways. The illuminated dial of the clock next to the Conways’ bedside indicated two minutes before midnight when the couple was awakened by what they first thought was the mother of all thunderbolts.

  “That was a close one,” Dick said, lifting his sleepy head and nuzzling his wife.

  “It felt almost like an earthquake,” Jess answered.

  “More like a bomb,” her husband said.

  A minute or so later, they heard the beating of a fist against their front door. Next, a series of urgent rings from the doorbell propelled them down the hall.

  “What the hell?” Dick said, putting on a robe. Jess, in her nearly floor-length nightgown, followed him as he flicked on the front porch light.

  Brenda Nevins stood outside. She was wearing only a bra and panties. Her hair was wet, and she was flailing around trying to get their attention. Even though their eyes locked, she kept pounding on the door and screaming for help.

  “Oh, my God,” Jess said, scooping up the young woman and pulling her inside.

  Dick looked behind her. Flames shot up into the sky from the back side of the house. “Brenda, what happened?” he asked, holding her by the shoulders.

  Brenda’s teeth were chattering, and she was shaking in a way that indicated shock.

  “Explosion,” she said, her voice rising to a level louder than she’d used at the front door. “I don’t know. God, I don’t know. Maybe we were struck by lightning.”

  Jess hurried for a blanket and wrapped it around Brenda’s shoulders. The poor girl was a mess.

  “Joe? Kara?” She said. “Where are they?”

  “Inside. Call 911,” Brenda said, catching her breath a little and pulling the blanket tighter around her lithe frame. “Joe and Kara are still inside. Our house is on fire! Oh God, no! This can’t be happening to me.”

  Dick dialed 911. The transcript of the call was presented at Brenda’s trial.

  “Our neighbor’s house was hit by lightning!” he said so quickly that the operator asked him to slow down. “The house is 921 Stoneway Drive. The family’s name is Nevins. The wife got out. Baby and husband are trapped inside. The house is on fire! Can you get someone out here right away?”

  Dick ran over to the burning house and tried to get inside, but it was engulfed at the entryway. He circled around the perimeter, trying to find another way in, but the back door was locked. He pushed his shoulder against the door as hard as he could, but he couldn’t budge it. He considered using the hose to try to do something. Anything! Finally the sirens cut through the rain.

  Jess and Brenda stood on the other side of a laurel hedge that the Conways had just planted. Brenda was screaming something, and Jess was trying to stop her as she appeared to lunge toward the burning house.

  * * *

  “It bothered me right then and there, Detective,” Jess said, her eyes now riveted to Kendall’s, “when she said it was happening to her. Happening to her? Her baby and her husband were the ones that it was happening to. She got out. Nothing was happening to her.”

  Jess tucked some loose strands of her wispy hair behind her ear. Her eyes had puddled.

  “Remembering things like this isn’t easy,” Kendall said.

  “That’s right,” Jess said. “And it has been seven years, and you’d think that the passage of time might make it easier, but it hasn’t. That house is a daily reminder. No matter how tall I grow that hedge I’ll never get it out of sight, out of mind.”

  “Why hasn’t someone either fixed it or tore it down?”

  “Insurance companies,” Jess Conway answered. “They’re part of the problem. Fighting over the money they’d paid out, refusing to do right by those of us who live here. The state’s no better. No one wants to take responsibility for what happened, though they had their hands in it.”

  “Brenda’s hands more than others,” Kendall said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  Jess pulled some birdseed from her pocket and scattered it. “Right,” she said. “She did it. But if there hadn’t been any money in it for her, then she wouldn’t have. If the insurance companies hadn’t sold her those policies. . . if the state had some kind of regulations to stop people from buying insurance on their children . . . then maybe both Joe and Kara would still be alive.”

  Kara’s name stuck in Jess’s throat.

  “You loved that little one,” Kendall said.

  Jess dabbed at her eyes with the sleeve of her pink pullover.

  “I did,” she said, trying not to full-on cry. “I really did. I babysat her the first week she was home from the hospital. Brenda said her own mother wasn’t ‘the grandmotherly’ type, and she knew that I didn’t have any grandkids.”

  “You babysat Kara? Did Brenda go right back to work?”

  Two finches landed and started eating the seed she’d scattered.

  “No,” she said, watching the birds. “She and Joe went to Hawaii for ten days. I should have known something was off with her then. Really, going to Hawaii on a vacation after you have your first baby? Who does that?”

  Kendall wasn’t tracking the story.

  “I don’t understand, Ms. Conway.”

  “Jess,” she said. “Jess, please, call me Jess.”

  “Ten days in Hawaii right after she had Kara?”

  Jess blinked at the memory. “Right,” she said. “I know. What a red flag. She told me that she needed to pull herself together and that she needed some bikini time in the sun.”

  “But she just had a baby,” Kendall said. “I sure didn’t feel like bikini time after delivery.”

  “Most women wouldn’t. Kara was seven weeks early. A preemie. I’d never seen a tinier baby. Now with everything I know, I think Brenda took something or did something to induce labor early. She wanted to be like one of those Hollywood stars that has a four-pounder and hits the runway to let everyone comment about how amazing their bodies look after delivery.”

  Jess walked Kendall over to her white SUV.

  “She is smart and stupid at the same time,” Jess said as they stood there, looking back at the house. “Smart might not be the right word. Maybe devious is a closer fit.”

  Kendall liked Jess Conway. Brenda’s kind of evil touched her, but it had
n’t blinded her. The woman showed more resignation than hate. That was rare. Most of the people she’d met who’d been that close to murder couldn’t be analytical, only emotional.

  “Stupid?” Kendall asked.

  “Maybe that isn’t so fair either,” Jess answered, thinking about it. “She just isn’t able to see herself the way others do. She has this inflated opinion about her beauty, her body, her brains, and that no one could ever compare to her. For a long time after the fire, I wondered about why she showed up half naked on our doorstep. It hadn’t been because she was that way when the explosion took down the back end of the house. Brenda’s more calculating.”

  Kendall fished for her car keys. “I never thought about it until now, but I guess I have my own theory. What’s yours?” she asked.

  “Distraction,” Jess Conway said. “Brenda used her body to keep eyes on her so that fire investigators and the police would miss other things as they trod over the evidence and extinguished the fire. I swear that when she was sitting on the back of the fire truck sobbing her eyes out while a fireman comforted her, she let that blanket we gave her fall away.”

  That sounded like the Brenda her former father-in-law described.

  “She’s a class-A manipulator, but that could have been an accident,” Kendall said as she unlocked her car door and prepared to get behind the wheel.

  “Right, of course,” Jess said, “if that’s all she did.”

  Kendall studied Jess’s eyes. There was more.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “Remember how I told you she came to our house in her bra and panties that night? When she dropped her blanket, you know, accidentally, guess what?”

  “What?” Kendall asked.

  Jess studied Kendall’s face. She and her husband had told this story several times before, and she enjoyed the reaction.

  “She was completely naked,” Jess said, letting the words settle in. “Not half. All the way.”

  Kendall hadn’t heard that. It was not in the police report or mentioned during trial.

  “Maybe she took her underwear off because it was soaked from the storm?” Kendall asked. “She was uncomfortable, maybe.”

  Jess threw out more birdseed. “For anyone else, I’d say that’s possible,” she said. “Not for her. She was right there, completely naked, pointing to what she claimed to be a burn on her shoulder. There was no burn on her. I doubt she was even in the house when she blew it up. Brenda wouldn’t risk her body on anything. She was all about Brenda 24-7. Joe and Kara never had a chance. Wish we’d have known that back then. A lot of good it does any of us now.”

  * * *

  As Kendall Stark drove away from Stoneway Drive, the tall woman with the heavy burden shrank, then disappeared in the rearview mirror. Jess Conway had shared some things about Brenda Nevins that stunned Kendall as much as the fact that Brenda was a cold-blooded killer.

  Kendall tried to imagine a woman who had no connection whatsoever with her baby. She’d loved Cody from the second she’d heard his heartbeat for the very first time. Every second since then had been a building block on which even more love could be assembled. It was unending and growing all the time. When she was away from him, her heart ached for the sound of his voice, the touch of his skin against her cheek.

  Brenda hadn’t been wired that way at all, and it was possible that it was generational. Nothing would have stopped her own mother from being at the hospital the second that he was born. Cody went from her womb to Steven’s arms, then to her mother’s. The night he was born, there culminated a moment of deep understanding that the instantaneous love they all had for Cody was something to be shared.

  Brenda’s mother didn’t appear to have that in her DNA. Neither did Brenda. She’d come into the world without the ability to love or feel love. She probably held Kara for the first time and wondered what all the fuss was about as she planned her trip to Maui now that the “birthing thing” was over and she could have the rest of her being back to herself. Maybe when she was in labor she was imagining that Kara was some kind of parasite that she needed to purge from her body so that she’d be unencumbered and free to be Brenda again. Not Brenda the new mother. Not Brenda the doting wife. Not the neighbor with the stroller parading down Stoneway Drive to show off what her love had created.

  Just beautiful, gorgeous, sexy Brenda.

  As Kendall eased her foot down on the gas pedal to pull away, she could only wonder what else was in Brenda’s past that caused her to be the dangerous and cunning woman that she’d become? Had Brenda Nevins been born a predator? Or had circumstances beyond her control conspired to make her into one?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Kendall Stark stopped by the Nevins place on her way out of town. Brad had told her that he’d be home and that the coffee was on if she wanted a cup. She did. It was early, but he was dressed in jeans and a Seahawks jersey.

  “I didn’t realize it was game day,” she said, when he let her inside.

  “It’s not,” he said, smiling. “Every day should be game day. World would be a whole lot better place if it was.”

  Kendall loved the Seahawks too. Devotion to the Seattle football team was practically a requirement for living in the Pacific Northwest.

  “How was Chelsea?” he asked. He handed over the coffee. “I don’t have anything to eat,” he said. “Need to get to the store.”

  “I’m fine,” she said as she took a seat at the kitchen table. Looking around she could see the telltale signs—besides an empty refrigerator—that Mrs. Nevins was no longer there. The plants in the windowsill had dried up. Or maybe had been overwatered? In any case, they were dead. One was a Christmas cactus with shriveled blooms that hung on to the barely green plant like a swirl of moths stuck on a car’s grille. The counter was devoid of junk, but its surface was dulled by a film left by a cleaning cloth or sponge that needed a good rinsing.

  “How was Chelsea?” he repeated.

  Kendall didn’t want to say much, but she knew that the man sitting across from her with the stubbled chin had lived through a Katrina-size storm of sadness. He was resilient, to be sure, but inside his skin was a broken heart.

  “She was all right,” she said, holding back the truth. “We talked. Nothing really helpful. She might be holding back a little.”

  “Did she tell you she was obsessed with Brenda? Back in high school?”

  “Not really,” Kendall said. “Not obsessed. More like interested.”

  “Sure,” he said, swirling milk into his coffee. “That’s what she called it.”

  “What are you getting at, Joe?” Kendall asked.

  “My son told me,” Brad said. “Said Chelsea was a bit of a freak about Brenda. He thought it was funny. I guess at the time I did too. Maybe I think differently about her now because of all the ugliness that she has brought to the world. And for what she took from me.”

  “She took it all,” Kendall said. “I know.”

  “Yeah. All of it.”

  “Tell me more about Brenda and Joe’s marriage. Were they ever happy?”

  Brad drank some coffee. “He thought they were. But I doubt she was. She was strange about things.”

  “Be specific, Brad. Details matter.”

  “For their wedding, Brenda lined up the photographer. We paid for the guy. I guess that’s fine. Can’t be old-fashioned about stuff like that. You know, considering how the world’s changed and all.”

  “What about the photographer?” Kendall asked.

  “It was a guy from Richland. Antonio something. The best of the best. At least that’s what she bragged. Cost $5,000 to have him shoot the whole thing.”

  “That’s expensive,” Kendall said. “I had a friend photograph my wedding. She wasn’t a pro, and later I regretted it, but Steven and I didn’t have the money.”

  “So, get this,” he went on, “when we got the photo book back, guess who wasn’t in any of the shots?”

  Kendall didn’t have a clue. She sugge
sted the most egregious omission.

  “The groom? Your son?”

  Brad shook his head. “No. That would have been pretty good, though. Even by Brenda’s standards. My wife and I. We were missing. Although Antonio the Great took plenty of pictures of us with the wedding party, Brenda said not a single one of them turned out.”

  “That is weird,” Kendall said.

  “It was a lie. She was mad that we didn’t pay for the platinum plan—which, by the way, cost another 2K, and we weren’t about to do that. I called her on it. I told her that she was being a petty bitch. Excuse my French. But she was. That’s exactly how she was acting.”

  “No excuse needed,” Kendall said. “Brenda’s a lot of things. I think we’re in safe territory to call her a petty bitch.”

  Brad smiled. “You got that right, Detective. Thanks for that.”

  “No worries,” Kendall said. “I’ve met her. I’ve followed her career. She’s complicated, but in all the wrong ways.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Elise was upset, so she had me call this moron photographer and ask if there were any outtakes or something. We wanted pictures too. He’s our only child. Nothing wrong with that, right?”

  Kendall asked if they got any.

  Brad set down his now-empty cup. “No. When I asked about it, he told me that photos were the property of the bride and that he couldn’t speak for her. Against policy.”

  “Why wouldn’t she let you have any pictures?” Kendall asked. “I don’t get it.”

  “Because she could. She was always pulling crap like that. Stealing the big moments to hurt us or to hurt Joe.”

  He got up and left Kendall alone. A flash later, he was back with a manila envelope. He set it on the table and slid it over to her.

  Kendall looked at him before opening it.

  A photo was inside and a Post-it note.

  “Elise was beautiful,” Kendall said. “You all look so happy.”

  “We were, Detective. We just didn’t know the devil had married into our family just then.”