Corpse in the Campus
Page 6
In spite of her attorney´s advice, Carol was no problem. Amid tears and sobs she accepted all the evidence against her: the diary, the pistol, the motive that led her to kill her friend Sarah, and the manner in which she carried out her plan.
Carol had been in love with Mark from high school days, practically since the moment her best friend Sarah Brown had begun to go out with him. All of them lived in Sheldon, and they were all apparently part of a tightly knit group of friends. All of them had registered at the same university, and it was there that Weight had understood that Walton was crazy about her friend, and that the only possibility to get his attention was to get rid of her, as cruel or painful this could seem. She drew up a plan, and on Thursday morning March 6th, very early in the morning, she took her in her car to that cluster of trees with the excuse that she needed to find some plants for her biology project. It wasn’t a problem to shoot her in the temple and from just a few centimeters distance from her friend, entertained looking for the nonexistent plants, ignoring all that hate and her end which was very near. Carol had stolen a 22 caliber gun from her father´s house and all she had to do was to take it out of her purse and shoot. She killed Sarah, but she was not able to make Mark fall in love with her. On the contrary, all she got was pushing him into a deep depression, from which he still won’t totally recuperate.
Incredibly, the plan she had drawn out with the Waterloo trip alibi worked and even better than they had dreamed of. When she found out that the case was being shut for lack of evidence and suspects, she was almost totally shocked. She didn´t know what other tortures were awaiting her a few months later.
Weight used to curse herself every night before turning out the light and going to sleep, pursued by a truth that she understood would pursue her infinitely. In spite of everything, she was able to make a new start in her life, and somehow she escaped from the police first, and from the past afterwards. However, she forgot one detail: she had given several things to a cousin for her father to put them up in his storage room. Among these objects were a very revealing diary and a gun that would convict her.
The jury barely took an hour to decide unanimously that Carol was guilty of first degree homicide. The judge was benevolent in her sentence, since the defendant had shown repentance and had confessed her crime. She got only 25 years with possibility of revision down to 15. In ways, justice had been served.
Philips felt that all the trial had taken just a few seconds, instead of months. Maybe having to struggle with such a remote case, reconstructing it with an artisan´s precision at the same time she was facing small daily offences that came into the department daily, had distracted her mind to the point of losing the notion of the passing of time. Now that it was all over, she felt comforted on the one hand but tremendously worn out and empty on the other.
Karen had relied on her Cedar Falls local police team, and they had responded with great ability and professionally. She had kept her friend Ron Davies up to date on progress being made and he had done all he could from Chicago to speed up the process and to be an active part of the solution of the case. However, now that all was over, she should make a call. She had promised herself that she wasn´t going to bother him, nor torment him with echoes from the past and only get in touch with him when the guilty party was in prison. She thought that this was the fairest and most appropriate.
—¿Gordon?
—Karen... Is that you Karen? —asked Stevens, in surprise. Maybe it had been some five years since he had talked to Philips for the last time, but he recognized her voice immediately.
—Yes, Gordon, It´s me. We can relax now. Everything is finally over. We have brought justice to Sarah Brown. You can now forgive yourself...
Karen didn´t get an answer to her words. After a few seconds, she was able to hear only a good man´s sobbing that had just found peace with himself. Then she began to cry.
XX
Finally, Sarah Brown´s parents had achieved their objective by getting in touch with that program that rescued past unsolved cases. They hoped that that would move consciences of some person watching that felt some kind of remorse and that this would help to catapult police´s bogged up cases.
Gordon Stevens had driven his own car for several hundreds of miles from south Kansas to Sheldon. Now that he was in front of the Brown´s house he felt he had no energy to call at their door and offer them his condolences. He considered that it wasn´t appropriate, and that maybe those parents wouldn´t take his visit well, or that they wouldn´t know how to understand its character. Now it made no difference.
Really the old detective had not subjected himself to that wearisome seven hour trip for that. The objective of his search was elsewhere, even though not too far from there. He knew that Sarah Brown´s remains rested in the East Lawn cemetery, so he went there walking. He didn´t have the courage to ask anyone, and he took nearly three hours of walking among tombstones in order to find the student´s grave marker. It was clean and well kept with a bouquet of wild flowers that were not wilted, which showed that someone probably came by fairly frequently. The tombstone was protected by two tall and bushy trees that protected it and spread over it their majestic shade. He looked around, in order to be sure that nobody was watching. Afterwards, Gordon pressed his knees into the thick grass and started praying. It had been some twenty years that he hadn´t prayed, but he felt the necessity and nothing or nobody was going to keep him from it. When he had finished, he left a rose on the stone.
—I´m sorry, Sarah, I´m sorry that I wasn´t up to the circumstances. I hope that wherever you are you have forgiven me. I hope that wherever you are, you may have found the peace you deserve...
Acknowledgement
Dear reader. Thank you for having purchased this book. If you have read to here, you are already a part of it, and you have already also made it a little yours, and a little less mine. If you have liked it and you want other readers to enjoy it, you can deposit a commentary on it. You will have my infinite gratitude...
I hope we can run into each other again in the future and that you can be a part of my following books, just like you already are with this book.
Yours sincerely,
Harry Glum
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acknowledgement
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