The Girl in the Woods

by Gregg Olsen

  Danny Lake was sure that Jennifer was his brother’s killer. Bobby Drysdale ruined his life over her, and yet, as a parting shot had told Birdy that he was all but certain that he’d been the lucky one.

  “I’m the one who got away alive,” he said.

  But as she sat in her cozy home office, poring over the report, she knew there was nothing but a cloud of suspicion hovering over Jennifer Roberts. A photograph of Birdy’s father holding a massive king crab on a boat in the Bering Sea hung above her desk. It was rendered in black and white, which only served to make his dark eyes sparkle more. His smile was wide and there was a little anxiousness on his face.

  That was one giant crab.

  She called Kendall.

  “Nothing turned up in the tox report on Donald Lake,” she said when the detective answered.

  “No antifreeze? No poisons?” Kendall asked.

  “None,” Birdy said. “A big fat zero. There is nothing here to indicate that she killed Donald. But she might have.”

  “Don’t feel bad. You did your best.”

  “We can only go where the evidence takes us. No matter how we feel inside.”

  “Right. If Jennifer hadn’t hooked up with that doctor down there, maybe things would have been different.”

  “Yeah, maybe a proper autopsy would have been conducted. And if it had, Ted Roberts would never have met her. He’d be alive kayaking or running laps.”

  “We can’t change any of that, Birdy.”

  “You don’t need to tell me that. By the time a case gets to my office, I’m pretty much the end of the line. In fact, my office really is the literal end of the line.”

  “The papers down there in Arizona—and our own Kitsap Sun here—sure are loving the story,” Kendall said, changing the subject.

  “I guess nothing beats a ‘black widow’ case.”

  “I know. A guy can kill his wife—and they do all the time—and unless they’re super rich or super handsome no one gives it much of a thought. But put a flashy woman at the defense table and you’ve got a winner, media-wise.”

  Birdy asked Kendall what her next step was.

  “I’ve been thinking about that. We have motive. We have opportunity. We have a history of a person who doesn’t stop at anything to get what she wants.”

  “Prejudicial, detective.”

  Kendall laughed. “I know. The defense will fight tooth and nail to keep all of that Arizona crap out, but the bell will have rung louder than St. Gabriel’s. Everyone knows what kind of person she is. The prosecutor wants more evidence, but I don’t know where we can get it.”

  “Her son and daughter,” Birdy said. “Lean on them. Elan tells me that they’re the talk of the school. They think you and I have been mean to their mom. Especially you.”

  “Great, Birdy. Well, they’ve been on my list. How’s your tan holding up?”

  “I’m Native American, remember? Tan is my skin color.”

  “Oh I was thinking maybe you’d like to go visit Desert Enchantment with me. I’m thinking of signing up.”

  Birdy looked up at her father’s portrait. She always favored his coffee-with-cream skin tones. “Come to think of it, I am looking a little peaked.”

  “Be there in five.”

  Ruby Lake stood behind the counter; the Ocean Scene suntan product line’s endless commercial on the big screen in the lobby was on mute. Jennifer’s daughter, her blond hair artfully tangled, looked up and her nirvana of sun, fun, and piped-in music was over. A grim look came over her pretty, but surprisingly not overly, tan face.

  “What do you want now?” she asked, clearly irritated. “Haven’t you done enough? Because of you and what that bitch Molly accused her of doing, mom is in jail. She’s going to have to fight to stay out of the gas chamber.”

  “We don’t have the gas chamber in Washington,” Birdy said. She didn’t add, “but we do have death by hanging.”

  Ruby glared at Birdy. Her phone sounded indicating a new text, but she didn’t take her eyes off the forensic pathologist.

  “I know all about what you’ve been up to,” she said. “My uncle Danny called me. He said that you think that my mom killed my dad.”

  It was interesting that Danny would do that, but Birdy didn’t remark on it. She had thought Danny and his nephew and niece were estranged and that she’d been tapped as the messenger for a reunion with his ailing mother.

  “I do, but so does he,” Birdy said. It was a tit-for-tat answer, but that’s the way Ruby seemed to like to deal with things. She was a know-it-all-button pusher. A mini-version of her mother, except she hadn’t killed anyone. And that along with the fact that she almost eighteen, as Birdy knew, was a pretty big difference.

  Ruby glanced at her text and made a face. Whatever it was it wasn’t important.

  “I hope you called your grandmother,” Birdy said.

  Ruby rolled her eyes upward. “Oh my God,” she said. “Are you lecturing me? My brother knows Elan. I know a few things about you. So don’t go telling me what to do or who to call. People like you are always trying to act all perfect and making sure that others do what you want them to do. What you think is right. My mom hates my grandma and I hate her too. So stay out of it. Fix up your own issues.”

  Though she was sort of enjoying the give and take between her colleague and the teen, Kendall circled back to the reason they were there.

  “We are here for the truth about what happened the night Ted died, Ruby,” the detective said.

  Ruby picked up her phone and texted a short message.

  “I don’t know anything,” she said, finished with what was so much more important.

  Kendall pushed. “Ruby. You do.”

  “You wish I did, because your case is weak and you know it.”

  “We wouldn’t have arrested your mother if we didn’t think we could prove our case in court, but I admit that it would be helpful if you told us the truth.”

  The dryer made a pinging sound that signaled the end of the cycle.

  “Excuse me, I have work to do,” Ruby said, leaving the counter for the hallway of desert photos. She tapped the mute button on the TV, and the commercial with its oiled and bronzed bodies frolicking in the surf had sound again.

  “Looks like Fiji,” Kendall said. “I’ve always wanted to go there.”

  “It’s all right,” Birdy said.

  “You’ve been there?”

  “No but I’ve been to Scottsdale and I’ve seen enough of the beautiful people. At least for a while.”

  “What’s taking her so long?”

  “Search me.”

  Birdy smiled. “I love it when cops say that without irony.”

  Ruby had been gone at least four minutes and the looping commercial started to repeat.

  “Let’s go find her,” Birdy said.

  The two women went down the hall toward the room with the bank of dryers. As they approached they heard sobbing. It was soft and then hard, like popping corn against the aluminum lid of a pot on the stove. A cry. Then quiet. Then a cry, cry, cry.

  Ruby was on the floor holding a handful of towels to her face.

  “Honey,” Kendall said, the mother in her rising to the surface, “what is it?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Ruby sputtered out, “but I don’t think I can hold it inside anymore.”

  Kendall bent down and put her arm on the teen’s shoulder, but Ruby pulled back and sobbed some more. More like wailed. Her mascara smudged the snowy white of a towel.

  “You don’t know what it’s like to have a mother like mine,” she said, looking up at Kendall, then over at Birdy who moved in closer but still stayed behind the detective. “My mom. My mom,” Ruby said, struggling to string her words together. “She’s not like other moms. She’s not like other people.”

  Kendall looked deep into the girl’s eyes. The hardness that had been there when she was telling them to get lost at the counter was completely gone.

  “Your mom do
es have a big personality,” Kendall said, choosing her words carefully.

  Ruby sat there, crumpled in a little ball. She rocked back and forth a little and she cried some more. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to me or my brother. I really don’t know what to do.”

  “We’ll help you, Ruby,” Kendall said.

  “I’m afraid of her.”

  “Who? Your mother?”

  “Yes, my mom. You don’t know what she’s capable of. I do.”

  “I think we have a pretty good idea. That’s why she’s been arrested.”

  “Do you know more, something you haven’t told us?” Kendall asked.

  Ruby started crying some more.

  A tone sounded that a customer was there.

  “I have to get that,” she said.

  “No, I’ll do it,” Birdy said, leaving for the front door. A young woman stood there.

  “I’ve been like waiting a long time,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, but we’re closed.”

  “Nah-ah. I have a Sundowners Pass and I can come anytime without an appointment. And you don’t close until late.”

  “We’re closed,” Birdy said with complete authority. “You have to leave.”

  “I paid a lot of money for my unlimited.”

  “I know. You can come back tomorrow.”

  “I’m really mad. You have to give me something for my inconvenience.”

  Birdy handed her a bottle of lotion marked TESTER.

  “Thanks!”

  “No problem.”

  The girl left. Birdy pulled the string cord on the OPEN sign and turned the deadbolt. When she returned to the dryer room, Ruby was just pulling herself together again.

  “You know what happened to Ted, don’t you?” Kendall said, her eyes barely grazing Birdy’s as she resumed her place in the toasty warm laundry room.

  “Uh-huh. I do.”

  “Can you tell us?”

  “You don’t understand. She’s my mom. I love her. I don’t want to get her in trouble.”

  “She’s already in trouble. You know that.”

  “I know that she killed Ted,” Ruby said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw her do it.”

  “Do what?”

  Ruby paused while one of the dryers let out its melodic chime.

  “Poison him,” she said. “That’s what. She put the poison in his drinks. Sometimes she added it to the spaghetti sauce. That was easy because he liked meat sauce and my brother and me didn’t.”

  “Did you know what the poison was?” Kendall asked.

  “No,” Ruby said. “Not at first. She kept the stuff under the sink in the kitchen. I looked at it. It wasn’t really poison, I mean not like rat poison with a Mr. Yuck sticker on it. It was some stuff she bought in the automotive section at Fred Meyer.”

  “What was the product?” Kendall asked. “Do you know?”

  The teenager nodded. “Yes, Prestone.”

  “You just let her do it? You didn’t say, ‘Hey, Mom, why are you doing this?’ ”

  “Honestly, I am not going to lie. There is no reason to. I didn’t say anything at first, because I thought it was medicine or something. She even told me one time that it was something that would ‘make him feel better’ and I guess at first I just wanted to believe her.”

  Birdy spoke up. “But something changed and you began to suspect something wasn’t right.”

  Ruby looked down, struggling for the words. “Yeah, she told me that he didn’t love her and was going to divorce her. And she said something like ‘I’ve been on that merry-go-round before and I’m not going to do it again.’ ”

  “What symptoms did he have?” Birdy asked. This was her area.

  “Throwing up mostly,” Ruby answered. “I mean, he was always heaving his guts out. One time when he passed out, my mom held his mouth open and poured it right down his throat. Another time—and this was only one time—she took a can of Raid and sprayed it in his eyes.”

  Birdy and Kendall exchanged quick looks.

  “You said she didn’t want to lose everything?” Kendall asked. “What did she think she’d lose?”

  Ruby was clearly uncomfortable, but she wasn’t going to stop now.

  “Well, when they first got married, Mom got some extra life insurance and she was afraid that he’d find out before, you know, he, like, died.”

  “She told you this?” Kendall asked.

  “Yeah, she did. I told you my mom isn’t like other people. She didn’t want to end up back in Gila County with her mom and the rest of the trailer trash that she grew up with. She had—we all had—a really great life in Scottsdale. I cried and cried about leaving there for here. Mom told me, she promised, it wouldn’t be for long.”

  Birdy could see that Ruby knew her mother was devious, but her last remarks indicated something she wondered if the teen quite understood. How was it that Jennifer knew they wouldn’t be in Washington long? The explanation was clear to her. Ted had been a mark. He’d been snared in one of Jennifer’s traps. Killing him was a means to an end. When Jennifer was convicted, and Birdy was sure she would be, she would face the death penalty. Kitsap County more so than others in Washington had a prosecutor who believed that certain killers shouldn’t be shown any mercy.

  Jennifer Lake Drysdale Roberts was easily going to qualify for the death row club.

  “Tell us about when your stepfather, Ted, died,” Birdy said. “What happened?”

  Ruby’s tears started anew. “I don’t like thinking about it.”

  “We need to know,” Kendall said. “What happened?”

  Ruby looked down at the floor as she spoke. “My mom got me up. It was around four a.m. She told me that she needed my help. I was like a zombie. It had been a late night and I wanted to stay in bed. But I got up. She made me. She took me into Ted’s room. She’d moved him into the guest room like a month ago. She turned on the light and told me to check to see if he was breathing.”

  “And did you, Ruby, did you check?” Kendall asked.

  The girl looked up “Yeah. I did. He wasn’t. I felt his chest but it wasn’t moving at all. It wasn’t going, you know, up and down, like a living person’s would.”

  The dryer room at Desert Enchantment was warm. Too warm. But there was no way anyone was going to leave that space. The tumbling noise of the machinery was like a drum, padding each word with emphasis.

  “What happened next?” Kendall asked.

  “Okay,” Ruby said. “This is really hard to talk about. I mean, this is my mom I’m talking about, but it’s also something I did. I don’t want to go to jail.”

  “You didn’t give him any poison, did you?” Kendall asked.

  She shook her head. “Oh no. Never. But maybe you’ll think I was an accessory because I helped her. But I had no choice.”

  “Telling the truth like you’re doing, you’ll be fine,” Kendall said. “I promise.”

  Ruby, for the first time, looked a little relieved. She was still trembling a little, and obviously shook up, but Kendall’s words seemed to give her the courage to carry on—to do the right thing. The teenager swallowed hard.

  This was not easy. Despite the poster promoting an after-tan lotion that hung by the dryers, life was not a day at the beach. Ruby’s day certainly hadn’t been.

  “My mom was in a tizzy,” she said. “She said she didn’t know how she was going to explain why, if he was so sick, she didn’t check on him all the time. Or have a nurse. She gave me some washcloths that she had got wet and soapy and told me I had to help her clean him up. He’d thrown up in bed. It was totally gross but I did it. She told me that we needed to go back to bed and then get up and act like it just happened.”

  One person had been left out of the conversation.

  “What about your brother?” Kendall asked.

  Ruby acknowledged the weirdness of her brother being so absent from the action with a shake of her head. “Micah slept through the whole th
ing. He could sleep through anything.”

  “Did he know about what was happening?”

  Ruby thought he did. “Yeah, but not as much.”

  “So did you go back to bed?” Kendall asked. “Is that what you did?”

  Ruby looked away from the detective as one of the dryers pinged. She went over and twisted a knob for an additional ten minutes.

  “Yeah, the next morning Mom fixed breakfast,” she said. “She even made Ted a plate of food although he was dead and she ate some of it to make it look like, you know, it just happened. But really he’d been dead for at least three hours. It’s all so crazy.”

  “You’re going to need to come to the sheriff’s department so we can put this all in writing.”

  “Look, I don’t know. You mean that I would have to testify against my mom?”

  Kendall looked deep into Ruby’s eyes. “You have to do what’s right, Ruby.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think I can. My mom can be scary.”

  “You can do it. You can be stronger than her. The truth is very powerful.”

  “What about my brother?”

  “It depends on what he knows.”

  “Only enough to know that there’s something seriously wrong with our mother.”

  The trio returned to the front desk. Birdy unlocked the deadbolt and pulled the OPEN sign light back on. Ruby went to the restroom to pull herself together. She’d promised to come to the office and give a statement the next day, after school. She’d convince Micah to come with her. In other cases, Kendall would have insisted she come right at that moment. But with Birdy there witnessing the interview, there was backup for everything Ruby had said. Ruby came out of the restroom with her hair in a ponytail and an application of fresh makeup. She looked better, but not great.

  “Are you going to be all right?” Birdy asked.

  “I think so,” Ruby said. “I have to work. I promised my boss. And, really, I don’t have any money. The house is paid off, but I don’t know if I can stay there or what. Ted’s family hasn’t come around yet. But if they do, they’re probably going to want it back.”