Chapter 76 2025
The sheriff settles behind the desk in his home office and takes a sip of his lukewarm coffee as Poppy curls at his feet.
“Here we go,” he says.
She listens alertly, a good dog that way, humanlike but without annoying opinions of her own.
He opens his laptop and logs into iCloud, then punches in Vivien Kendall’s username and password. He feels a distinct sense of discomfort as her files open, like he’s a voyeur peeping at an intimate past.
Vivien Kendall died a month ago, and he had considered letting the case go, but then he went to her memorial service, and the injustice of all those people believing her a murderer gnawed at him.
He’d been wrong about her legacy being damaged by her conviction.
If anything, her myth had grown. The number of mourners at the service was astounding.
They flowed out of the Dar Al-Hijrah Mosque and onto the street, thousands gathered on a sweltering August Sunday to pay their respects because Vivien Kendall had touched them in some way.
There were pop-up memorials at both Olympic sites where she had competed, at the girls’ school in Somalia that she had funded as well as worked at, at the ice-skating institute where she’d trained in Prague as well as the one where she’d taught in Bonn.
Flowers and crosses were placed outside her home on Lake Minnetonka and on Summit Street, where she’d marched for nearly a month in front of the governor’s mansion.
There was even a memorial at the jail where her mentor had been detained and died.
Her death made international news, and everyone from CNN to the BBC was talking about the impact she’d had and the remarkable life she’d lived.
News vans lined the street in front of the mosque to report on her memorial service.
The sheriff was fortunate enough to have gotten a spot inside toward the back, and he watched a dozen people eulogize her, several of them on the sheriff’s suspect list—the librarian, the major, Elwood, and Meryl Fairbanks.
There wasn’t a dry eye in the house when Meryl Fairbanks spoke.
“To know her was to love her,” she started. She wore a powder-blue suit that openly defied the tradition of wearing black to a funeral.
Despite how crowded the room was, no one murmured or moved, everyone’s attention rapt on the icon before them. She leaned on the pulpit for support, and her right cheek twitched. She did not have notes, and she looked at the audience as if speaking to each person individually.
“Vivien was kind in the truest sense of the word, open and accepting to everyone, and a gift to anyone blessed enough to have her in their lives. Unlike me, a born diva, she never sought the spotlight.” She smirked, and the audience chuckled.
“Yet, from the start, she was destined to be in it. Rare and precious, it was impossible not to be drawn to her and to recognize her as special. I’ve coached a lot of skaters, but never have I coached an athlete with more heart, determination, or fearlessness.
” She turned to the large photo of Vivien Kendall on the easel beside her.
“Basically, you were a complete pain in the ass.”
The audience laughed again.
Meryl Fairbanks turned back. “She was a girl with a dream and the courage to go after it. A young woman who saw the injustices in our imperfect world and stood up against them in the noblest of ways, simply by refusing to accept them, peacefully and unrelentingly. A force like the wind, with a spirit as boundless as her enormous capacity to love.”
She stopped, and the twitch in her cheek grew worse as she fought to keep her composure.
“God broke the mold when he made Vivien Kendall, and the world has lost one of its brightest lights now that she’s gone.
” A tear escaped to fall down her cheek.
She did not wipe it away. Lifting her face to the heavens, she said with gusto, “Go out there and just have fun!” and the sheriff felt the effort it took for the audience not to applaud.
Elwood helped her back to her seat, her muscles misfiring so violently he practically needed to carry her from the dais. Watching them, the sheriff’s throat grew tight, and he could not help but think of Grace and close his eyes in a silent prayer of gratitude.
The imam took the pulpit, and as he delivered the final words, the sheriff looked at the large portrait more carefully.
It was a shot from several years ago, a candid photo of Vivien Kendall laughing, her dark curls animated as if caught in a wind.
Her smile was wide and open, and her birthmark did not look ominous in the least, a simple patch of brown skin surrounding her right eye.
Conspicuous as it was, it had not been the thing that made her special.
As Meryl Fairbanks said, that came from within.
Yet he wondered what her life might have been without it, if her destiny would have turned out as extraordinary.
Most live their lives unassumingly and leave the world quietly, fading to gray before disappearing altogether.
Not Vivien Kendall. Even her death seemed as if it had been designed to inspire, her parting coming at the exact moment Americans were rising up against the Ice raids proliferating around the country, peaceful people who had lived in America for years being rounded up and detained or deported.
The story of her noble march was getting a second wind as her name was invoked repeatedly as a pioneering champion for immigrant rights.
When she was arrested, most assumed she’d killed the reverend out of revenge for her mentor’s death, a final act of retribution of a dying woman. And the reverend was being hailed a martyr of patriotism and an innocent victim. That was until Heddy gave the interview on Good Morning America.
It aired the day Vivien Kendall’s plea deal was announced, which the sheriff was certain was intentional.
Heddy, looking every bit like a fairy-tale princess, sat across from the reporter and gave a tear-jerking account of the domestic abuse she’d suffered at her husband’s hand.
She spoke of how terrified she was, and how his death might have saved her.
She revealed what a dangerous man her husband was and the grudge he’d harbored against Vivien Kendall since they’d been children.
“If she killed him,” Heddy said, tearfully, “which I’m still not convinced she did, she did it out of self-defense.
She did it because she was as scared as I was. ”
The sheriff had entirely missed the signs.
Perhaps because Heddy seemed so concerned when her husband had gone missing.
Though, being on the job for as long as he has, he knows better than most how complicated love can be, and that love and fear are not mutually exclusive.
He feels like he should have seen it, but Heddy, like the rest of them, was a masterful liar.
The day after the service, the sheriff returned to the pond.
What he couldn’t figure out was, if Vivien Kendall didn’t kill the reverend, which he still wholly believed she didn’t, then how was it that she knew he’d been shot and that his body was at the pond.
He had her email, text, and phone records, and other than an outgoing call to Ivy’s “aunt,” a woman named Astur Osman, at a little after ten thirty from Vivien Kendall’s home on Lake Minnetonka, there was no communication of any kind.
Mosquitos buzzed around his head as he slogged through the grass to the inlet.
He swatted at them as Poppy darted after rabbits she had no chance of catching.
Had it not been for the incessant pests, he’d likely have missed it.
But while swatting at a particularly persistent marauder, he looked up to see a black wire weaving through the trees.
He followed it to a camera set high in a pine with the lens angled toward a bird’s nest inhabited by a mother eagle and two small eaglets.
He discovered the camera belonged to the Minnesota Ornithologists’ Union, an organization that researches and protects endangered birds, including golden eagles.
A union representative informed him that the motion-activated camera turns on whenever it detects anything bird-size or larger.
Until a few weeks prior to his inquiry, Meryl Fairbanks had monitored the feed.
It didn’t take a huge leap of deductive reasoning to believe Vivien Kendall knew about the camera.
The camera itself only stores data for sixty days, so the sheriff went to a judge to request a warrant for Vivien Kendall’s iCloud account.
The judge was reluctant. “The case is closed, and Ms. Kendall confessed and pleaded out. I don’t see the point.”
“The point is, I believe she falsely confessed, knowing she was going to die and that the real murderer is still out there.”
“You’re saying we convicted the wrong person? And not just any wrong person, a famous wrong person who is beloved by the world? Someone we will most certainly be crucified for wrongly convicting if that turns out to be the case?” She frowned deeply.
She was right, and if the sheriff’s hunch was right, it would likely mean the end of his career. After all, he was the one who had arrested her.
His finger hovers over the mouse, then with a deep breath, he clicks on the folder.
He sorts the files by date, looking for files from the day of the murder. His heart ticks up a notch when he sees four videos in a row from the day after Thanksgiving to the day the reverend went missing, two days later. There are no videos before or after.
He decides to view them chronologically and clicks on the first one. The time stamp is 11:12 a.m.
It takes a second for him to recognize what he’s looking at.
The wide-angle view shows the empty eagle nest and, below and beyond it, the inlet and pond.
A figure moves into the frame, his back to the camera.
The herringbone wool coat is unmistakable.
The reverend. He walks to the water’s edge and turns his head left, then right as if scanning the shore, then he climbs the knoll and walks out of view.
A minute later, he returns, walks back in the direction of the wall, and disappears from the frame.
The next clip is from the following day, Saturday, two days after Thanksgiving and a day before his death.
The video is similar to the first one except the reverend is fingering something in his hand.
The sheriff peers close, his nose an inch from the screen, and though it’s difficult to make out, he believes he catches a glimpse of orange. The bracelet.
His blood chills as he realizes what it means.
Ivy didn’t lose her bracelet. It also wasn’t planted on the reverend after his death by the murderer to incriminate Vivien Kendall, which is what the sheriff had assumed.
It means the reverend took the bracelet when Ivy was playing at the park, and the only reason he would have done that was to send a terrifying message to Vivien Kendall.
The reverend continues to finger the bracelet as he walks up the knoll, disappears from view, then returns a moment later, and leaves the way he came.
The reverend was stalking them and making no secret of it. He was letting Vivien Kendall know he was coming for her and would possibly reap his revenge through her daughter, the same way he’d gone after her mentor all those years ago.
The sheriff takes several slow breaths through his nose to settle his simmering rage before moving on to the first video from the day of the murder.
It’s snowing, and the image is hazy. The time stamp reads 10:02 a.m., which would have been after the storm started but before it turned into a full-blown blizzard.
A pair of women’s legs enter the screen, trudging down the snowy knoll, and his first thought is that he was wrong and that Vivien Kendall was responsible after all.
Then comes sheer surprise.