He was having some kind of chuckle at my expense. This seemed odd, and a little out of character, until I typed “Red Cedar Lake” into my phone. He really was twenty miles away. “You moved,” I said. “You took the job in Dane County...”
“Just a few weeks ago. Changed jobs. Got married.”
“Do you like it?”
“I never realized how simple and easy my job was before. The things I did once a year up there, I’ve had to do in my first week here. People here seem more determined to harm each other, you know?” he said. “They’re not all cases like Belinda McCormack. But people are bashing away at each other every night.”
“True thing that,” I said.
“It’s exciting for sure, but we’ll see.”
I put on makeup, ground beans for coffee. I went back upstairs to bring the box down and restore it to pristine order. Literally, all I could do was to hope for the best, and that was never a problem for me. All the while I was wondering if this situation gave me permission to do something that would have been unthinkable even a year ago. Then, I did it. I still vacuumed under Stefan’s bed, and I knew he kept a boot box down there filled with photos. Slowly, I drew them out. The whole top layer was made up of lavish photos of his work, gorgeous evidence of his ability. There was a photo of a series of stone shelves that formed a waterfall, all hung about with thick, flowering vines and backed by a stand of sunflowers. It looked like a feature from the garden of a king. Another garden was laid out in a series of concentric circles around a fountain, three rings forming masses of yellow and purple perennials hugged tightly by small, shiny evergreens trimmed to the shape of big beads in a string. These had clearly been taken by Stefan with his phone and made on the photo printer in our house, which sat on the corner library table that was Jep’s makeshift desk.
A thick pocket folder held all the family photos that my sister Phoebe had sent to Stefan in prison. I slid those back and fastened the envelope. Beneath those, there was a plain, thinner envelope marked SUMMER. I opened it.
There were a dozen photos of Belinda, brandishing a wooden spoon as she cooked, her hair piled up artfully, Belinda sleek as a seal at a lake in her bikini, Belinda on a stone bench reading, several of her in the pool at her own house, and of Belinda asleep on her bed (that chilled me). The scene shifted then. There she was with a group of girls in front of that restaurant in Black Creek where I’d eaten macaroni and cheese. And then there were a clipped batch of photos of Stefan and Belinda, her in a shiny top and jeans, him in a soft blue denim shirt. In several of those photos, they were with another girl, a dark-haired girl with a cap of short feathered hair, very slight but almost as tall as Stefan. They were all miming firing a gun at the photographer. In another photo, it was possible to see Belinda’s image in a mirror, as she snapped a picture of Stefan and that same girl, sitting on a cream-colored couch. I had seen that couch, in the crime-scene photos, splashed with Belinda’s blood and tissue. In a third photo, the girl and Belinda were wearing witch’s hats. They held up a sign between them that said, BOO! STEFAN. That one would have been taken before Stefan moved to Black Creek. Some of these photos were of different vintage. They were all relatively recent, but in some Belinda’s hair was shorter, in some longer, at least one dated back to junior prom.
There were twenty photos, and I wondered with a shock if Stefan had these with him in prison. But who would have sent these to him? Were they part of his belongings from the hospital? Was a murderer even allowed to have photos of his victim? On the other hand, how would anyone sifting through mail have known that this particular girl was Belinda?
Or who the other girl was.
It had to be her.
I was looking at her.
* * *
I put all the photos back except two. If my luck was extraordinarily bad, Stefan would notice what I’d done and hate me for the violation. If my luck was extraordinarily good, he would see what I had done as needs must and his relief would subsume all his qualms.
Pete Sunday rolled up to our house about twelve.
Pete praised the coffee. I offered him an egg salad sandwich and, to my surprise, he accepted, since he’d forgotten breakfast.
In passing, as if I were a heavyweight warming up for the title bout, I mentioned the contents of the box, my questions in brief. The fingerprints all made sense now, and he said he didn’t know why the toxicology reports were not included, but he did remember them well. Stefan’s blood revealed a high level of stimulants, opiates and alcohol. Belinda’s tested positive for the antidepressant sertraline, sold under the name Zoloft, as well MDMA, or 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, known as ecstasy.
I thought of all the years that I would never have believed that Belinda used drugs.
Just so that I could see everything fully, I asked about the things Stefan said when he was interviewed that night. I also asked why he was interviewed when we weren’t there, because he was a minor, but just as quickly, I remembered the lawyer telling us that with a crime this serious, the age of seventeen was a presumed adult.
By the time Sunday entered the apartment, he said, paramedics were going through the motions on Belinda, and Stefan was on the floor, groggy but alert enough to already be in handcuffs. The coroner showed up about the same time as Sunday did. The first time Sunday talked to Stefan was at the hospital ward: “He was pretty incoherent, just crying and moaning. I tried to ask him what happened but he didn’t really seem to get it. The only thing he said to me was, will Belinda be okay? He didn’t realize she was dead.”
The second time Pete Sunday interviewed Stefan, he’d been processed, allowed to shower and been given a huge pair of surgical scrubs and a robe to wear. He was shivering so fiercely that Sunday went to the nursing station to get him a blanket, which our son looped over his head like a Bedouin’s robe. Wearily, then, Stefan confessed to breaking down the door by kicking it and hitting Belinda with the golf club. He didn’t recall doing it but he had been told that was how she was hurt. He did remember getting into a physical fight and screams and blood. He remembered things that hadn’t happened, however. For one thing, upon examination, the door was in perfectly good order. Pete Sunday had written down what Stefan said. “He said, I guess I just went in and then I hit her. Why would I do that?”
I sat across from the detective, delicately deconstructing and reconstructing my egg salad sandwich, but my thoughts went to Stefan. Abruptly, the sight of my food, soft and soaking into the bread, suddenly revolted me. I got up to tip it into the trash.
“You see why he was so confused now,” I said.
“Maybe. You’re thinking this girl, this...”
“Emily. Or Esme. Emily Lindquist. Emily Lundgren.”
“You’re thinking that this girl just told him all this before the police got there and he heard it somehow and believed it. As much as he could understand.”
“Something like that.” Then I asked, “Are you going to arrest her?”
Pete Sunday blinked. “Arrest her? I don’t even know who she is yet.” If only I’d heard from her recently. I personally had called every one of those numbers and every one of them was disconnected. Could Pete find out who’d used them and how, in previous months? That depended, he said, on what kind of phones they were.
“This is important,” I insisted, just north of a whine.
“It is, but, Thea, it’s an old case, and yes, it’s a priority, but I have other cases. A guy who just robbed and beat up six women who’ll get away if I don’t find him. I don’t even work for that jurisdiction anymore, so I should just hand this box and your thoughts over to them. I just can’t bring myself to do that. So I’m going to have to ask my boss here if I can use my own time to chase this down.”
Frustrated, I asked him how long this would take. Conservatively, days if not weeks, he said.