Chapter 23 The Actual Smoking Gun #3
“Yeah. The day before the poor kid was killed. It still—”
He never finished. Never got the rest of the sentence into the world.
Because it was at that moment that Olivia Foster in her blue-and-white minidress started to scream, “It’s not her fault!
She didn’t do it!” She was pointing at me and sobbing, rocking in her seat on the bench, and some people would tell me later they thought she was hysterical because my lawyer and Bolger were talking about the week that her brother had died, deconstructing his last days on the planet.
Her father had both her shoulders in his hands and her mother was looking at her quizzically, but the ninth-grade girl wrenched herself free from her father and stood up from her spot on the bench and cried out, “Let her go! Please, let her go! Kenny did it himself!”
Eric Lindley did not literally say, “Oh shit.” But his face did. So did the crazily wide eyes of his assistant. They stared at the poor girl in her anguish and then at each other, as Mr. Foster tried to console Olivia, but there was no mollifying her and there was no dialing this back.
Lindley, for all the ways he had demonized and vilified me, was no beast from a Greek myth or Grimms’ fairy tale.
He was just a prosecutor doing his job and what he thought was right.
And so with a speed that surprised me, but not Cleon Barker, we went into recess, and Lindley had a police officer bring Olivia and her father into a conference room so he could interview the child and get a statement.
During that recess, it all came out. With Olivia Foster’s statement in hand, the lawyers from both sides disappeared into Judge Ephraim Wood’s chambers, while a young lawyer in Mr. Barker’s firm, a fellow barely out of law school, babysat my parents and me at a pizza parlor a block from the courthouse.
Apparently, Olivia had been a runaway train with the police officer, unstoppable, and she wanted to be sure that everyone knew what she knew.
She could no longer bear the weight of the secret.
The truth might make it harder for her parents to shoulder their son’s death—that had been her fear since her brother had died—but the burden of seeing me pilloried for something I hadn’t done was too much.
Remember, she was only fourteen. Seeing me taking the blame in the courtroom for an accident that wasn’t my fault was the tremor that split open the cracks in the dam.
The walls, striated with fissures, were no match for her tears.
She was, that spring, as broken as I was.
The truth was both simpler than I had supposed and more complicated.
The part that was simple was this: her brother, Kenny, had done it himself, meaning he had cut off the target himself.
He had done it on Monday night, the last Caddy Day he had been alive.
Olivia had been with him.
He had been at the practice net often that spring and summer, always at night, learning to play golf the way, once upon a time, he had learned to dance in Florida.
According to Olivia, he was also at the putting green, practicing some evenings there too.
She kept him company because he would let her drive the family car around the empty country club parking lot, listening to the Talking Heads and Foreigner and Meatloaf on the car radio.
Sometimes, she’d park the vehicle on the grass and point the headlights at the driving range so he could see.
The target, with a note, was meant to be an offering for me.
His motive—a word too legalistic for a gesture awash in the sort of chivalric devotion that had gotten him his girlfriend in Miami—was me.
He had a crush on me, as deep and real and seemingly all-important as any seventeen-year-old’s crush.
He knew I loathed that target and on Monday night, with Olivia present, had cut it off the practice net.
On Tuesday morning, he had gone to the bag room and planted the target in my golf bag where I would find it.
Except he had forgotten the note.
But then on Wednesday, when he had tried to return to the bag room to place the note into my bag, Curt Bolger had stopped him.
And then, of course, I had killed him.
So, there had been no note when the target was discovered.
But Olivia still had it. She’d retrieved the note from her brother’s bedroom the night the golf ball had slammed into his temple.
In her statement to the police, Olivia had said, “My brother was watching her at the driving range the day he died because, well, that’s what he did.
I mean, that sounds weird. But one night at dinner, when my mom was asking him why he wouldn’t ask her out if she didn’t have a boyfriend, he said, okay, maybe, he’d see if she wanted to go to a movie or something the next time she was at the putting green or the net.
He said she had a picture-perfect swing from all her time there. ”
I share this part of her statement for one reason and one reason only. I really was a black widow spider. I had lured the kid to his death.