Front Page Teaser

by Rosemary Herbert

  “After we heard the two men drive away in their car, I made the man put the Christmas tree bag into the trunk of Ellen’s car. My head was spinning and I couldn’t think straight. I wanted it to be my car but it was too far away. Because of the snowstorm, I had parked it in the City Hall parking lot, which is always kept plowed. We got into Ellen’s Honda. I made him drive. I sat in the back seat so I could keep the gun pointed at him. It was not easy to do in the car.

  “At first, I didn’t care where we drove, as long as it was away from Ellen’s house. Then I thought of Plymouth. I had picnicked there when I was a girl. I knew there were some isolated woods there.

  “The drive was a blur. I was so shattered and it was snowing so hard. By the time we got to some deserted recreational area, the snow was quite deep, but not deep enough to make it easy to slide the—the Christmas tree bag into the woods. There was a lot of underbrush, and stumps, and even holes in the ground that you couldn’t see in the snow. I hung back, gesturing with the gun at him every time he seemed likely to turn on me, and made him put her in a hollow. Then I told him to cover her up with snow. I didn’t want to kill him but I was sure I must. All I could think was Veronica would not have a woman in her life—not a mother, not a grandmother—if I were turned in for what I’d done.

  “When he bent over to cover Ellen with snow, I shot him. He fell down on top of the plastic bag. On top of my daughter.

  “Up until then, I was a person in a daze. But that seemed to wake me up. Suddenly I realized I needn’t have done this thing. Surely, I could have explained to the police that I’d tried to protect my daughter from an attacker. After all, shooting my daughter was an accident. But then I thought, how could Veronica love the person who had killed her mother, even if I shot her unintentionally?

  “There was something else. I did not feel innocent. I felt guilty about him. I told you before, I’m no killer, so I aimed at his legs, but I didn’t want to aim at his legs. I wanted to kill him point blank for exposing himself to Ellen and for all those phone calls and for putting his bloody hand over her mouth in her kitchen. I wanted him to die. And I wanted to be the one to kill him.”

  Olga looked up at Liz with an expression of relief on her haggard face.

  “So when those two men arrived at Ellen’s house and startled us, I felt like a guilty woman who has no choice but to flee. And I fled.

  “There in the woods, in the snow, I had to move that man off my daughter. I went down into the hollow and pushed him off her. It was not so hard to slide him across the plastic. But as I pushed him, my hand encountered his belt. I realized someone might figure out who he was from his clothes, and then they would connect the boy from the Wharton School with our family. So I removed his boots, and an awful gaudy ring he was wearing, and his belt. I took his wallet, too. It fell open as I held it, and I saw a taxi driver’s I.D. card in the wallet’s plastic window. The picture matched the man’s face, but the name was not Al Leigh. It was something foreign. Seeing this, I felt I couldn’t breathe. But I could see my breath in the air, big clouds of it. I must have been gasping.

  “I opened the bag and took off Ellen’s wedding ring, and her earrings, and her shoes. It was much harder to take off her sweater, but I did that, too. I think it tore as I took it off of her. I was glad she was lying on her face. I covered her up with snow then and walked back up the hill. I put the sweater, the shoes and boots, and the gun and things in the trunk, but I kept Ellen’s jewelry in my coat pocket.

  “I got into the car and turned on the engine. When the heat came on I realized how chilled I was. I didn’t know where I was exactly, so I just drove. I would have loved to drive around mindlessly forever, but I knew I had to get back to Ellen’s to wipe off the counter. Silly of me, I know. It was already too late in the day for that. Veronica would have come home by then. But that’s what I thought. It was the only thought in my mind. I didn’t even think about what I would do with the car.

  “Then I saw the pond and it occurred to me that I could just drive the car right into it. But there was a kind of metal edging there to prevent cars running off the road. I kept driving. Then I saw the second pond. It was set back farther from the road but there was nothing stopping me from driving in. I got out of the car first and traded my coat for Ellen’s jacket. It had a hood and it was cleaner and much drier than my coat. I took the jewelry out of the coat and put it into my purse. I also added some things from Ellen’s purse to mine. Then I put my coat and Ellen’s purse into the trunk and locked it. I got in the car and positioned it on a slope that leads toward the pond, leaving the engine running. I put on the handbrake and got out.

  “I took a plastic shopping bag that was in the car and filled it with snow—I don’t know what made me think of this—and I put the bag on the gas pedal. Then I reached in and released the handbrake. The bag of snow wasn’t very heavy, so the car only edged forward, but it kept going, right into the pond. I watched until it sank out of sight.

  “I walked along the road for awhile. It seemed a long time but I don’t think it could have been. Then, in a little pull-off, I saw a car idling with no one in it. I suppose someone was walking a dog there. There were dog tracks and boot prints leading away from the car. I got in and drove the car to Boston. The radio was playing ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.’ I listened to the carol all the way through. Then the announcer told the time. I turned off the radio then.

  “I realized it was too late to clean up the kitchen, but there was time to keep my hairdresser’s appointment. I don’t know how I remembered that appointment. But I knew if I kept it, it would make it look like I’d had a normal day’s outing. I parked on Boylston Street, where I saw the off-price clothing outlet. There were homeless people in there sheltering from the snowstorm. If I appeared disheveled, I looked no worse than they did. I bought the coat, new slacks, and a sweater. Then, in a Dunkin’ Donuts bathroom a few doors down, I changed my clothes. I stuffed the shopping bag of old clothes in a trash can on Boylston Street by the car rental place and went straight to the hairdresser. After that, I went to FAO Schwarz and bought a teddy bear for Veronica. I knew the Christmas shopping would help make my day look normal, but that isn’t why I bought it. I bought the bear because I love that child,” she said. She lifted her thorn-torn hands and gazed at them, perplexed, as though she had no idea how they’d been bloodied.

  Sitting on the chilly slate floor, amid the rose petals and thorns, Olga said no more.

  Liz was silent, too, as she mentally calculated the time it would have taken Olga to take the Green Line to Newton Highlands, pick up her car at Newton City Hall, and drive to Wellesley in the snow. She must have had to turn around immediately upon arriving at her house and drive back to Newton through the storm to collect Veronica from the Johansson house.

  But it was difficult to keep her mind on matters of timing as she stood in the doorway between the distraught woman and the view of the lakeshore. So much had happened in the landscape Olga refused to look at from her home. Looking down at Olga as the woman sat, mute now, on the slate, Liz slumped against the doorjamb, staggered with pity.

  “You don’t have to report what you know,” a voice told Liz, expressing the thought that was running through her mind. “You should think it through before you do. What do the police have on Erik, anyway? Just circumstantial evidence. You are in the position to let a little girl who’s lost her mom keep her grandma and her dad.”

  Liz looked down at Olga. The older woman seemed utterly unmoved.

  Perhaps Liz was hearing things. She moved to sit on the floor herself.

  But strong hands and arms reached out and supported her. She turned and relinquished herself to Tom’s embrace.

  “I followed you,” he explained, “to surprise you with a picnic lunch.” He pointed to the Mexican blanket and a small backpack from which a baguette and bottle of wine protruded. “I didn’t want you
to go off with that guy Kinnaird. When you went inside, I waited out of sight here.” He pointed to a spot behind the open mudroom door. “When I heard you confront Olga, I was afraid she’d hurt you.”

  “Exactly!” Liz said, stepping back from Tom’s arms—and from the temptation to let Olga go free—in one movement. “That’s just it, Tom! You see, there’s no telling how many times she would kill in order to remain a loving grandmother, in order to stay in Veronica’s life.”

  “But if you don’t report it, Liz, she’ll have nothing to fear. She’s not attacking you now, even when you might still report her! Think of Veronica more than your career, Liz! She needs a loving woman in her life. Look,” he said, striding into the mudroom and picking up a framed photo of Veronica blowing out nine candles on her birthday cake, with her grandmother smiling over her shoulder.

  Liz stared at Tom, stunned he would support Olga. Then she remembered that Tom had been brought up by his own grandmother in the absence of his mother.

  Liz turned her attention to the photo. Hanging around Veronica’s neck was the wedding ring Olga had ornamented with a stone for Veronica—the wedding ring that she had stripped from her daughter’s lifeless finger. It was one thing to do everything possible—even to cover up a killing—to remain in a beloved child’s life. It was another thing entirely to hang a memento of that horror around that child’s neck. As Tom looked on aghast, Liz took out her cell phone and dialed the police.

  Chapter 30

  Even with television and radio reporters covering the arrest of Olga Swenson in the evening news, Liz’s full solution to the crime, set to run in the next day’s Beantown Banner, was a scoop.

  “That’s star-spangled reporting for you,” Dermott McCann admitted, lifting a drink to Liz at J.J. Foley’s, a Boston bar frequented by news reporters. “Great legwork,” he added, slapping her on the back and looking down at her legs.

  Esther O’Faolin winced. Then she said, “Good job, Liz.”

  “Nice that you had that forensics guy in your back pocket,” Dick Manning admitted. “How’d you get ahold of him?”

  “That was thanks to Esther, actually. And Dermott, too. They insisted I cover a mystery writer’s conference at the Worcester Public Library.” Liz smiled as Cormac Kinnaird walked in and crossed the barroom where no Irish music played. “I was so fascinated by his bite marks presentation that the rest is history,” she said, winking, as Kinnaird arrived at her side and put an arm around her shoulder. “Here’s the good doctor himself.”

  “Liz wrote about your assessment of the crime scene in Plymouth,” Esther said. “Because Olga Swenson confessed, we cut some of it to put the focus on the confession. But I’d like to hear more about it. I gather from what Liz wrote that if the Swenson woman hadn’t confessed and you hadn’t realized there was an ephemeral pond there, the identities of the skeletons might never have been discovered. The police would have thought the bones were too old to have anything to do with the case.”

  “Possibly,” Kinnaird said, “although, under ordinary circumstances, the dental work should have been matched to Ellen Johansson’s in a matter of minutes on the police databases.”

  “The guy who didn’t enter them into the system is in deep shit, I’ll bet,” the city editor said.

  “Not as deep as it might have been if the Johansson case didn’t look like a possible voluntary absence,” Kinnaird said. “Remember, it was not clear murder was done. I think the error would have been caught more quickly once the bones were found if the ME had not been in Manhattan helping out with the remains from Ground Zero.”

  “What about the cabbie’s teeth? Didn’t they have dental records for him on the database, too?” Jared asked.

  “No one filed dental records for him. The only person who seems to have missed Samir Hasan was the manager of the taxi garage,” Liz said. “And he soon discovered Hasan had given him false information. Hasan was so successful in hiding his true identity that we still don’t know who he was. Ironically, he was killed based on mistaken identity, too. I wonder if somebody, somewhere, cared about him,” she added, running her fingers through her hair and looking across the barroom distractedly.

  “Did Mrs. Swenson have any notion why the cabbie was in her daughter’s kitchen?” Jared asked Liz. “Or did she kill him before she could find out?”

  “She told me she believed he was the same person who had masturbated at the sight of her scantily dressed daughter when Ellen was just eight years old. She said she shot him, not just because he had a bloody hand over her daughter’s mouth, but because he used an Arabic expression that made her think he was that person come back to threaten Ellen again. She would have liked me to think Ellen never knew about Karl’s perversions. Perhaps she didn’t, but it’s just as likely she killed to keep the family secret.”

  “If it wasn’t the same guy, then why was the taxi driver in the kitchen?” Jared asked.

  “I’m not sure we’ll ever know,” Liz said. “Ellen told her pen pal, Nadia, she’d taken a strange cab ride during which the driver communicated in Arabic on the two-way radio with another Arabic speaker. We know the word teena—the Arabic word for ‘fig’—was used in that conversation and it appeared in a list of words found in the cab’s glove compartment. Was this a code word used for some illegal operation, even a terrorist plot? Was the driver simply talking salaciously about a woman named Tina? We can’t be sure.”

  “I’ll bet he had a terrorist connection,” Manning put in. “Probably he was sent to do Ellen in after she overheard something he said. Didn’t you say she spoke some Arabic?”

  “Just a few words and phrases. If Hasan sought to eliminate Ellen,” Liz said, “why would he panic when the car dealers arrived at the Johansson house? Shouldn’t they have appeared to be welcome allies? It’s just as likely the cabbie came to warn her that something she’d overheard had put her in danger.”

  “In any case, Ellen’s own mother did her in,” Esther said, apparently satisfied with that incontrovertible fact. Turning to Dr. Kinnaird, she added, “Tell us more about the ephemeral pond.”

  “I worked under a great disadvantage, of course,” Kinnaird obliged, “since I didn’t have access to the police evidence from the scene of the crime until the department took me on as a consultant today. But while the police had the physical evidence, they did not know the crime scene was submerged with water a few months after the bodies were placed there. Ordinarily, this would make the remains appear less old than they are. Even if an expert had examined the bones with the organic shower in mind, he or she might think the bones had arrived there relatively recently, since pollen that had fallen during the wet season would not cover the bones in the ordinary way. Those bones would have been shielded from the rain of organic material by the water.”

  “But surely not entirely?” Jared Conneely piped in.

  “That’s right. Some pollen from all of the seasons during which the remains had been outdoors would potentially show up after careful analysis. But it would not be obvious on preliminary examination.”

  “Why, then, did the bones seem older than they were?” René DeZona asked.

  “For the reason this young man suggests,” Kinnaird said, pointing to Jared. “There was, indeed, organic material in that pond. Remember, the area is surrounded by white and pitch pines. Stewing in that pond each year is pitch from those trees, loading that water with tannin. Bathed in a sort of acidic tea, the remains were immersed in a kind of natural preservative. To some extent, those bones were on the road to mummification. Think of the bog people archeologists have discovered.”

  “Wasn’t the ME getting a grip on this, now that he’s back from New York? He told me today he thought the bones must have been placed there more recently,” Dick Manning said.

  “Yes, but it was the hair found with the bones that still gave him pause. I discussed that with
him this afternoon. He was puzzled at how the bones could appear so old and stained while rather well-preserved hair was found under the skulls. If he’d known a seasonal pond was there, he might have figured it out. I told him about the pond and the preservative effects of tannin. The tannin not only stained the bones. It also acted as a dye when it was absorbed into Ellen Johansson’s hair. Samir Hasan’s hair was already black. That’s why initial reports indicated the two victims were dark-haired.”

  “The bog people all had dark hair, too,” Jared volunteered. “I’ve seen pictures of them. But they were preserved, skin and all. Their skin looked like leather! But there was no skin on the bones in Plymouth.”

  “Unlike the bog people, our two victims were not immediately plunged into water. Remember, they lay out in the elements, where animals could strip those bones. Water only covered the bones after the snow melt formed the ephemeral pond—some would call it a vernal pool—in the spring.”

  Dick Manning was not convinced. “How can you be so sure about the pond?” he asked. “There might be some ponds in there, but that’s a big woods. What if the science teacher is wrong about that pond’s location? Isn’t it dry there now?”

  “I examined the area myself, after the police were through with restricting the scene. Even in this dry season, I know that depression holds water in the spring. I can tell from the signature species—plant and animal life that exists only under specific conditions. I found certain salamanders, sedges, white-bracted boneset, and bladderwort there. These are signatures of a vernal pool. Even that tall grass, where the deer lay down, is evidence that standing water prevented the encroachment of other shrubs and ground cover there. Yes, there is no doubt this is the site of an ephemeral pond.”