Twenty-Seven
Reece
“Mom!” I shouted, standing at the top of the stairs that led to the basement. “Detective McCabe is here.”
No response. She’d either found a way to crawl out a basement window or was pretending not to hear me.
“Mom,” I called out again.
She appeared at the bottom of the stairs, glaring up at me, probably wondering how it slipped my mind that thirty seconds
earlier she’d told me to tell the detective she was not there.
I was tired of playing games with her.
“She’s coming,” I said to McCabe, who was standing just inside the front door.
Mom shifted past me as she reached the top step, slapped a fake smile on her face, and said, “Detective.”
“Mrs. Chartwell. I had a few more questions.”
She sighed audibly. “What more could you possibly need to know?”
Quite a bit, I thought.
“Perhaps we could sit,” McCabe said, inviting herself into the living room. She hadn’t asked me to leave, so I chose to stay.
She led off with: “I wondered, since we last spoke, whether you might have remembered anything about Leah Kennard.”
I exchanged a quick glance with my mother.
“No,” she said, looking first at McCabe, then fixing her eyes on me, as though daring me to contradict her.
I was definitely thinking about it. But in that moment, I wasn’t sure what would be gained by ratting Mom out. In the end,
what difference did it make whether Mom knew Leah? Dad had shot her, then himself. Did the other details matter?
“Let me run another name past you.”
Mom raised her chin somewhat defiantly, like she could handle whatever was coming. “Go ahead,” she said.
“Evelyn Corby.”
That chin quivered. Did McCabe see what I saw at that moment? It lasted no more than a second, but Mom had just experienced
some kind of earthquake. And just as quickly, she restored her look of resolve.
“Could you repeat that, please?”
“Evelyn Corby.”
“Evelyn Corby, Evelyn Corby,” Mom said. She shook her head slowly. “I don’t . . . it does sound somewhat familiar, but it’s
not a name I’ve heard in a long time.”
“When do you think you might have heard it?”
“I’d have to think.”
McCabe waited, gave her ten seconds, then said, “Anything?”
“Maybe you could give me a hint.”
“Wiffel-Smith.”
“That’s the company my husband once worked for,” Mom said. “But he left them around nineteen ninety-nine. Did this Corby woman
have something to do with Wiffel-Smith?”
“She was an employee, in sales, doing the same kind of work I believe your husband did for them.”
“Oh.”
“Did your husband ever mention her? Did her name ever come up in conversation?”
Mom looked as though a memory had clicked in. “Now that you mention it . . . I remember around that time someone Brent had worked with was killed. Murdered, I think.”
McCabe nodded. “Yes.”
“I knew I’d heard that name somewhere. I’m sure Brent must have mentioned it. Something like that happens at work, it’s a
shock for everyone. But I don’t recall the details.”
“Evelyn Corby’s body was found alongside a road, just down the embankment a ways. Shot in the back. Her car was found a few
miles away outside a bar.”
“Terrible,” Mom said.
“It appeared she was killed elsewhere, her body moved and dumped.”
Mom shook her head, made a tsk sound with her tongue.
“Her killer made it look as though there’d been a sexual component to the murder, but the evidence didn’t bear that out.”
Mom shrugged. “It’s all horrible, but I still don’t understand why you’re telling me about it.”
“It’s what they call an open-unsolved case. Police try their best to close it, but when the leads dry up, there’s not much
they can do but hope for a development someday that will give them another kick at the can.”
“I see.”
“And that’s what’s happened.”
“What’s happened?” Mom asked.
“There’s been a development.”
McCabe had me on the edge of my seat. Mom was, too, but she looked more uneasy than intrigued.
“After we did a ballistics check on the slugs that were recovered here yesterday we fed them into our database. Just a routine
thing we do. And something interesting came back.”
“What?” I asked.
“We got a match. The gun that killed your husband and Leah Kennard is the same gun that was used to kill Evelyn Corby.”
Mom had the face of a statue.
“You understand what I’m saying?” McCabe asked.
Mom opened her mouth to say something, but no words came out. After a couple of seconds, she managed two:
“That’s impossible.”
Then, a few more: “It’s . . . I don’t . . . it’s impossible. That’s all. It’s as simple as that. It’s impossible.”
“The evidence suggests otherwise.”
“But that gun—” Mom stopped herself, shook her head slowly.
I stepped in. “Is there any way these tests you do, they could be wrong?”
“No,” said McCabe.
“But are you suggesting my father killed this Evelyn Corby? I mean, I have to agree with my mother. There’s no way. My father
wasn’t capable of something like that.”
“It would appear he was yesterday,” McCabe countered.
I had no comeback for that.
Mom whispered, “Maybe it isn’t impossible.”
“Mom,” I said imploringly. “Come on. Shooting some woman and leaving her body at the side of the road? That’s not Dad. I don’t
believe that. I won’t believe that.” To McCabe, I said, “Just because that same gun was used in both cases doesn’t mean my father pulled the trigger.”
“That’s true.”
“Dad didn’t even like guns,” I said. “Didn’t want them in the house. I still can’t believe he had one. It doesn’t add up.”
Now I was thinking back, way back. To a vague recollection of my parents having an argument. They were in the kitchen and
I was in the adjoining TV room.
“I remember,” I said, slowly, “a fight—maybe not a fight, but a discussion—where you and Dad were talking about getting a
gun because of Dad’s job, in case some crazy addict thought he had samples at home. In case we were a target.”
“Then your father was thinking about it,” McCabe said.
I hesitated. “It might have been the other way around.”
The detective turned to my mother. “Is that how you remember it?”
Mom blinked. “I have no memory of a conversation like that.”
“No, wait,” I said, things becoming clearer. “Because I can sort of recall, I was watching Beavis and Butt-Head, but I had the volume turned way down because you hated that show, and that’s how I was able to hear what—”
“You’re wrong,” Mom snapped. “We never discussed it. You imagined it.”
She turned on McCabe. “Even if I were to say to you, right now, gosh, maybe Brent did kill that woman years ago, it wouldn’t be proof, would it?”
“No.”
“After all this time, there’s really nothing that can be proved, one way or another. You might have a suspicion, you might
think you have an idea of what happened, but you’re never going to know for certain.”
“True,” McCabe said.
“Then I don’t know why we’re having this conversation,” Mom said abruptly. “As you can see,” and she pointed to the suit and
other items we had collected from the upstairs closet, “we have to make a trip to the funeral home.”
The detective nodded, got to her feet, and showed herself out.
“Mom,” I said, “what in god’s name was that all about?”
She ignored me, got up, walked through the kitchen, opened the sliding glass door, and stepped out onto the deck. Stood there
a moment, then went down the two steps to the yard and walked toward the pond.
She stopped ten feet short of the edge, not far from the old, rotting rowboat that wouldn’t have stayed afloat five seconds
on that smooth, murky water. She stared out over the pond and waited, as if she expected the Loch Ness monster to raise its
head and say hello.