What kind of person would awaken her peacefully sleeping best friend on a cold morning to say something that could easily be said two hours from then? I would wait until eight o’clock. That resolve lasted three minutes.
“Wake up, Jules!” I said. She grunted, snuggled deeper into the plushy mattress. Sleep was another of the gifts I envied her. “Julie! Wake up.”
“Huh? What the hell, Thea.”
“I have to go home right now. I’ll take a bus if you don’t want to go back.”
“Wait, what?” Julie said. “Go home why? What time is it? Is it morning?”
“It’s morning.”
“I haven’t even had coffee.”
“I have to make a phone call. It’s urgent.”
“Thea, there are phones right here.”
“I have to call from my house.”
Julie sat up with a reluctant sigh and a stretch.
She said, “No, Thea. No, you really don’t. This phone connects to anyone on earth you need to call. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on? What happened in the past six hours that I’ve been asleep?” She swung her feet to the floor. “No, don’t tell me yet. Wait, I’m going to make an espresso for me and one for you. That will take less than ten minutes, and then you can tell me.”
I said, “I figured out last night that Stefan didn’t kill Belinda.”
Julie would sooner have held her hand to a flame than disrespect me, so she kept her face neutral as she made the espresso and put butter on my raisin toast, peanut butter on hers.
“So so so...” she said. “I clearly missed out on some key life moments.”
I said, “Julie, I’m serious.”
“I know you are,” she said and hugged me briefly but firmly. “Thea... I don’t know what to say.”
I laid it out for her then, all the clues in the phone calls, the unremitting inquiries about Stefan, the warnings about “remembering” too much.
Finally, Julie said, “It’s all very compelling. But...why didn’t you think of this before now? Why didn’t Stefan? For that matter, why didn’t I?”
I didn’t know why. The best reason I could think of was that all of us believed the same story to be true; Stefan had confessed. Not one of us had a complete picture of that night. I hadn’t wanted to remember. Stefan couldn’t.
A few months earlier, I’d suggested that he consider being hypnotized to remember more of the events that night. His reaction was pure fury. “Do you not get that I want to put this behind me, Mom? Not keep going back and back and back and back until I’m a complete emotional cripple who just sits in the closet chewing on my raincoat? I’m done, Mom! I want a life. I suggest you get one too.”
“I have to tell him.”
“Well, you don’t have to tell him before breakfast. I imagine even detectives don’t get started until after they have coffee. Particularly on a Sunday.”
I said, “What? I mean Stefan. I have to call Stefan right now.”
Julie literally took hold of my shoulders then. “No, Thea, no. Not until something real comes of this...”
“But what if it’s all true...?”
“If it’s true, it will be wonderful beyond anything and awful beyond anything and it will all happen very soon. But imagine if you told Stefan and then this theory came to nothing? This isn’t like not getting a job, Thea. It’s like having your life held out to you after you’d thought you lost it and then losing it all over again.” She sat down and closed her eyes, inhaling the smell of the espresso. “I won’t let you do that to my godson. I don’t even want you to tell Jep.”
“I have to tell Jep.”
“Okay, maybe, maybe you’re right. Think that one through. Let’s take this one world at a time, Thea. One world at a time.” She began to run a bath.
I tried to force myself to settle and when I couldn’t, I threw on my wraps and went out for a hard solo hike to the edge of the bluff. My brain was like dolphins racing, silvery beams of light in a deep blue abyss. The list of questions I’d written down after examining the contents of the box didn’t matter now. Well, they did matter, but if Esme’s fingerprints turned out to be one of the unidentified fingerprints on the golf club, it would just be more proof that she was guilty. She’d been there, or so she kept insisting, and she must have wrapped Stefan’s hand around the handle of the golf club to cover her own guilt.
What if the reason they couldn’t ID her was she didn’t have any fingerprints on record?
I wouldn’t worry about that now: Everybody had fingerprints on record these days—kindergarten kids, teachers. I did. All the Thornton Wilder instructors had been fingerprinted. And if she didn’t, she would be fingerprinted when they arrested her.
As it turned out, I had to leave a message for Pete Sunday, who was on his honeymoon. The colleague who answered asked if this matter could wait until Friday. “No,” I said. “Well, yes. But please tell him it’s urgent.”
Unknowing, I had waited years. I could wait a a few days more. I would think and make lists. I would go through all the texts and make a list of everything she said, and a list of her myriad phone numbers. I would put together a case. The important thing was that Pete Sunday believe me. I didn’t have to prove that Esme did it; he would have to do that. All I had to convince him of was that this wasn’t just a mother’s natural protective instinct coming up again after so many years.
Which, of course, it was.
And yet, if it were not for that instinct, I might have given up, long ago. Then there would be no answer. There would be no justice. There would be no other story.
11
Jep and Stefan were at work when Pete Sunday called me back. I was prepared to give an impassioned speech if Sunday didn’t take me seriously. But before I said anything, he pointed out, “I gave you the wrong box.”
“There are no mistakes,” I said.
“Well, other than this one. It was an honest mistake. I probably broke a law or two. I wanted you to see the evidence but I didn’t intend for you to see those crime-scene photos, Mrs. Christiansen.”
“Thea.”
“Right, Thea.”
“And it’s okay. You didn’t force me to look at them.”
“What’s up?” he said.
Then I plunged in, racing to reveal the whole jigsaw of suspicions and suppositions so that he would see this was more than just a mother’s longing. I explained how the mention of the fingerprints on the golf club in the report contained in the evidence box, unimportant as this seemed, was the final puzzle piece.
“Okay,” he said, as if talking to himself. “Okay. Say this girl, this...”
“Emily. On the texts, she calls herself Esme, which I guess is the name that Belinda called her. But if she’s the same girl that Stefan knew, and I know she is, her name was Emily Lindquist or Emily Lundgren and she came from Chicago.”
“Did she live in Black Creek?”
“I think so. I think she went to college there.”
“Did you ask Stefan if she was in school with Belinda?”
“I, uh, I haven’t told Stefan about this theory I have. I don’t want him to get his hopes up...or hate me...or think I’m crazy.”
“That makes sense. Do you have a picture of her?”
“I never saw her in my life. I have no idea what she looks like. Stefan might.”
“So you could ask him for a picture of her.”
“I could, but I don’t want to tell him. And maybe him having a picture is a long shot. There’s no reason he would have kept it, unless... I don’t know, the picture included Belinda too.”
“Why don’t you think that over?” Pete Sunday said. “As for the box, you can’t just pop these things in the mail, as you know. I’ll come to get it myself. Would that be okay?”
“You could just send someone else, someone junior. It’s a long way.”
I heard a beep and a shuffle. “From what I see here, it looks like about...mmm, twenty-two miles.”
“It’s nearly two hundred miles, detective. It took me three hours.”
“Well, I’m driving to work right now, it’s about a half hour drive, pretty drive, we live right on Red Cedar Lake near the winery. That winery is a beautiful place. Wine isn’t bad either.”