Chapter 72 2025
From the road, the sheriff glimpses the manor house concealed beyond the trees. The home is on the shore of Lake Minnetonka in a neighborhood known for its large, exclusive properties and expansive lakefront estates.
“I really don’t want it to be her,” Grace says as he pulls to a stop in front of the columned portico. It’s a beautiful Saturday, and Grace asked to join him for the excursion.
The lightest peach fuzz frosts her head, and it’s all he can do to stop himself from running his hand over it.
It makes him so happy. No more chemo, just the long, slow road back to her former, vibrant self.
Two days they’ve lived with the remarkable news, but a lump still forms each time he thinks of it.
The PET scan was clear, and though that doesn’t mean they are entirely out of the woods, the doctor is cautiously optimistic that the chemo did its job and that they are among the lucky ones.
Behind them, the puppy, still unnamed, yips and barks in her crate, excited they’ve stopped and perhaps smelling the lake. She’s a righteous little diva who makes her opinion known at every opportunity, so entirely unlike Maggie the sheriff marvels they’re the same breed.
“She’s a national . . . no, international . . . treasure,” Grace goes on, “and this is going to ruin that. We have so few heroes these days, and she’s one of them.”
“I’m just going to talk to her. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
He also hopes Vivien Kendall had nothing to do with the reverend’s death.
Though the way things are stacking up, it’s not looking that way.
A background check revealed she owns a Glock 17 purchased three years ago.
The amulet found in the reverend’s pocket was likely from Africa, where Vivien Kendall lived for several years.
The finger bruises on the body were made by a small person who was also remarkably strong.
And there’s CCTV footage from a bank in town that shows Vivien Kendall’s SUV driving toward Meryl Fairbanks’s house just before noon on the day of the reverend’s disappearance.
Her height doesn’t add up, but everything else points to her like a blinking neon arrow.
He climbs from the car and releases the puppy, setting the squirming hair ball on the ground. She takes off, then finds the limit of her leash, and it yanks her off her feet. She rebounds and reverses course and is yanked off her feet again.
Grace laughs as the sheriff rolls his eyes.
“Oh, a puppy!”
A little girl, perhaps six or seven, bounds down the steps. She has dark curly hair and long, lanky limbs.
“What’s his name?” she asks, kneeling down as the puppy trips over herself to jump on the girl.
“Her name,” the sheriff corrects. “And we haven’t figured that out yet.”
“What’s your name?” Grace asks.
“Ivy. Ivy Kendall.”
Ivy gets down on all fours and faces off with the puppy as if she’s a puppy herself.
She bounces side to side, and the puppy does the same, and the sheriff feels the old pang of sorrow that he and Grace never had children.
If they’d been able to conceive, he imagines they’d have had a child a lot like the girl before them.
“Your mom is Vivien Kendall?” the sheriff asks.
“Yep,” the little girl says as she picks up the puppy and sets her on her lap.
The puppy licks her face, and Ivy giggles.
“How old are you?” Grace asks.
“Six.”
The sheriff does the math. It means Vivien had her when she was twenty-one, shortly after her last Olympics.
“Is your mom home?” he asks.
Ivy points down the grassy lawn toward the lake, and that’s when he sees the bracelet—carved orange beads surrounding an engraved silver capsule, similar to the one found in the reverend’s pocket.
“That’s a pretty bracelet.”
“My eedo gave it to me.”
“Eedo?”
“Auntie. I lost my first one. This one fits better.” She shakes her hand to show how the bracelet doesn’t move. “It protects me.”
“Protects you? From what?”
She shrugs, more interested in the puppy than the question. But then she says, “Anything bad. But mostly the evil eye, which is bad luck, monsters, falling off bikes.”
“You said you lost your first one?” the sheriff asks, his detective senses buzzing.
“On Thanksgiving.” She nuzzles the puppy’s nose, then falls back when the puppy playfully nips at it. She giggles and bats the puppy’s mouth, taunting her to play fight.
“How’d you lose it?” the sheriff asks.
She shrugs.
“Did you misplace it?” he persists.
“I put it on a bench at the playground so it wouldn’t fall off in the sand, and when I went back, it was gone.”
The sheriff looks at Grace, and her expression matches his own, both of them thinking the same thing. Ivy didn’t lose her bracelet. It was taken. And three days later, it wound up in the pocket of a dead man.
Grace flicks her head toward the lone figure sitting in one of the two chairs on the dock. “Go. I’ll stay here with Ivy.”
He hands her the leash and busses her cheek.
“Why don’t you have a name for her yet?” he hears Ivy ask as he walks away.
“We haven’t figured out the perfect one,” Grace says.
He’s halfway to the dock when Vivien Kendall senses him and cranes her head back.
She stands and smiles warmly. “Sheriff.”
She’s tiny. Which he knew. Yet somehow it still surprises him. This inimitable icon who’s loomed so large in the world of sports and politics over the past dozen years barely reaches his chest. She extends her hand. “Vivien Kendall. It’s nice to meet you.”
He does his best not to stare at the right side of her face as he shakes her hand but finds it impossible. Up close, the birthmark is far more disfiguring than he expected. Lumpy and malformed, several dark boils and at least a dozen gray lesions that look like mold grow from it.
She gestures to the Adirondack chairs, and they sit.
The day is startlingly beautiful. Light dances on the lake, and birdsong from the woods floats on the breeze.
On the table between them are a glass of iced tea and a book placed face down, My Friends by Fredrik Backman, the same book Grace is reading.
“I assume you’re here about Bart,” she says, her eyes steady on his and the warm smile still on her face.
“Heddy called you?” he asks.
“Meryl,” she says. “Heddy called her, then she called me.”
She’s different than he imagined. When he watched her performances, she was a marvel, a magnificent dynamo who skated with such joyous energy it was impossible to imagine her sitting still. But here, on the dock, she’s tranquil as the water lapping at the pylons beneath them.
“I understand there was some bad blood between you and the reverend.”
“Generations of it. My grandfather destroyed his family.”
He’s surprised by her candor and the genuine remorse he sees in her face for the crime of her ancestor.
“And the reverend carried that grudge against you?”
“He did.”
“And you carried a grudge back?”
She takes a second before answering. “Grudge is the wrong word. I was never vengeful, only afraid. For myself and for my daughter.”
“Did he threaten you?”
“He didn’t need to. It was clear he was never going to stop trying to hurt me.”
The sheriff does his best to keep his expression neutral, though her words strike a chord. From everything he’s learned about the reverend over the past few weeks, he believes she’s right.
“You own a gun,” he says.
“I do. I bought it several years ago because Ivy and I live here alone.”
Her slate-gray eyes are steady on his but then drop to the armrest to an ant crawling toward her hand. She moves her arm from its path to her lap.
“Can you tell me where you were the day the reverend went missing?” he asks.
She doesn’t pretend to search her memory. Plainly she says, “In the morning, I was here with Ivy. And around eleven, I drove to Moosewood, to Meryl’s house.”
It’s not a confession, yet she’s making no effort to deflect his suspicions. If anything, she’s doing her best to implicate herself.
He looks again at her birthmark, and suddenly the lesions take on new meaning.
“You’re sick,” he says at the exact moment he realizes it.
“Dying,” she corrects.
He swallows and involuntarily glances back at Grace, who sits on the grass playing with Ivy and the puppy, her fuzzed head glowing in the sun. Lucky.
He turns back to Vivien Kendall. Unlucky.
“I’m sorry,” he says, the air suddenly weighted.
“Thank you.”
“How long have you known?”
“Since October.”
“So you knew you were dying at the time of the reverend’s death?”
“Yes.”
“And you admit you were terrified of the reverend, and that you drove to Meryl Fairbanks’s house the day he was killed?”
“I do. Meryl and Elwood were out of town, and I wanted to make sure their house was buttoned up for the storm.”
It’s her first lie, and her tell is very slight, the smallest flare of her nostrils.
“What time did you get there?”
“Around noon, after I dropped Ivy off with her aunt.”
“So you were alone?”
“I was.”
“And did you go to the pond?”
“It was blizzarding.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I don’t recall.”
“Did you see the reverend?”
“I don’t recall.”
“So what you’re telling me is that you recall dropping your daughter off at her aunt’s and driving to Meryl and Elwood’s house, but you don’t recall whether you went to the pond or saw the reverend on the day he went missing and was presumably murdered?”
“That’s correct.”
He finds it interesting that, though she’s intentionally incriminating herself, she’s doing it while trying not to lie, each time choosing evasion over fibbing.
The ant has made its way to the back of the chair, and she shifts to give it way.
And it makes him think about what Heddy said when he suggested Vivien Kendall might have been involved in her husband’s death, and she said with such certainty that she wasn’t.
She’s Patch. She’s better than the rest of us.
The woman in front of him won’t even kill an ant.
“You didn’t kill him,” he says matter-of-factly.
“Good. Then are we done here?” She almost smiles, but her lips don’t quite curl.
“No, because you’re lying.”
“About what?”
“All of it. You and everyone else. The whole lot of you.”
She sits quiet, tranquil as water.
He pulls out his phone and opens the photo of the bracelet. “Is this your daughter’s bracelet?”
Her eyes pulse in surprise. “Where’d you find that?”
“In the pocket of the reverend’s coat.”
“My daughter lost it.”
“And the reverend happened to find it?”
“I have no idea how he ended up with it.”
Again her nose flares ever so slightly.
He looks at her for a long minute, and she calmly looks back.
Finally he says, “The bracelet belongs to your daughter. It was found in the pocket of the victim. You admit to being in the vicinity of the murder at the time it presumably took place. You own a gun. And you had a long-standing grudge against the reverend and admit to being scared of him.”
“I thought you said you believed I was innocent?”
“I do. But unless you start telling me the truth, you’re leaving me little choice but to arrest you.”
She holds his eyes half a beat longer before turning to look at the water, leaving the decision to him.
“Fine,” he says in frustration.
He stands and gestures for her to do the same.
“Vivien Kendall, you’re under arrest for the murder of Bart Reicher.”
Sometimes the only way to discover the truth is to follow a lie.