To perform the toxicology report, he squeezed the spleen: spleen blood is less costly to test than brain or liver tissue, and he was saving taxpayers a little money. We would have to wait a few weeks for those results, but no one expected any surprises.
And then, of course, there was this: that small strip of fabric that was found on the dead twig of a dying maple.
The investigators returned to that patch of the riverbank, hoping for a miracle. A clue. A trace of someone else’s DNA.
They found none.
Neither my father nor Paige wanted breakfast the morning of my mother’s funeral. I wasn’t hungry, either, but I drove to the bakery in Bristol and brought back a dozen maple scones and then brewed a pot of coffee. My grandparents—my mother’s parents—were staying with us for the funeral, and I figured when they awoke they would want something. They did. My grandmother, falling deeper almost daily into the fog of Alzheimer’s, had gotten lost in the second-floor bathroom. But she loved the scones, and food seemed to ground her with us in the moment. My grandfather offered to scramble some eggs to go with them, but the idea of eggs made me nauseous. I passed. Our father was going to give the eulogy, and he was alone in the den, editing and rehearsing his remarks. My aunt and uncle and my younger cousins—two rambunctious blond boys, one in the fourth grade and one in the first—were staying at a country inn in Middlebury, but they were already at our house for breakfast, too. Paige rather liked them both, because (like all boys, I had already decided) there was no sport involving a ball that did not interest them. Like my sister, they were energetic and competitive; they traveled that autumn with a soccer ball and a football.
It had been a week since the body was recovered and three days since the medical examiner had determined that Annalee Ahlberg hadn’t drowned.
I had laid out on my bed three dresses I was considering, all appropriately dark and all inappropriately summery, revealing, or cheerful, when Paige came into my room. She was already wearing the black dress our aunt had bought her the day before in Burlington. She sat down on the edge of the mattress beside the clothes.
“I think you should say something,” she told me.
“You mean at the service?”
“Yes.”
“Dad will be way more articulate. And I don’t think I’d be able to keep it together up there. I’d be a disaster.”
“You’d be fine. But I wasn’t even thinking about what you’d say.”
“Then what?”
“I was thinking about what you’d see.”
I paused and said nothing. I didn’t understand what she was driving at. When I just looked at her, she went on, “You could see people’s faces in the pews. Their reactions. You might be able to see who did it.”
She was absolutely serious. “Who do you think you are, Cam Jansen? Nancy Drew?”
“Don’t you think it’s possible that whoever killed Mom will be in the church?”
“Not for one single second.”
“Criminals always return to the scene of the crime.”
“They don’t.”
“And they’re never as smart as they think they are. In the end, they always do something stupid.”
I knew what she was referring to: Gavin’s boss, the head of the Bureau of Criminal Investigation in Waterbury, had said essentially that to the media after the medical examiner’s findings were released. He’d said if Annalee Ahlberg had been murdered—and even the head trauma did not definitively support that hypothesis—it was likely that whoever had killed her had made a mistake at some point. I was less confident. Gavin was, too. I had only seen him once in the last few days, and I missed him. But it was difficult for me to get away with my grandparents and aunt and uncle and cousins in town. Moreover, the state police had been energized by my mother’s corpse. They were looking once more at my mother’s clients and friends and—it was clear to me—my father. They insisted that none of us needed to be afraid, though how they could be so confident that whoever had killed my mother had no interest in the three of us sometimes left me perplexed. In any event, Gavin himself was busy, though he had told me that he would be at the service.
“Usually they only do something stupid in the movies,” I said to Paige.
“Or around here. Some of the dumbest criminals in the world live around here.”
“I’ll give you that,” I agreed. A few weeks earlier, a guy my age had tried shoplifting a couple of hunting knives from a sporting goods store near Burlington. He had hidden them, unsheathed, under his shirt. When he was running from the store, he had tripped and stabbed himself in the stomach. He’d nearly bled to death in the parking lot.
“So you’ll do it? You’ll say something about Mom?”
“No. I told you, I’m not capable. I’m just…not. But I will see who’s there, okay?” I tried not to sound patronizing.