“The dairy,” said Ross.
“Right. In his case, it almost made sense. He was in his late sixties, and he had big issues with high blood pressure. His wife, Erica, some years older, is terminally ill with kidney disease. They had no children of their own.
“The other man, Cary Church, wasn’t even forty,” I went on. “He was a healthy man.”
Ross said, “He wasn’t just healthy, he was a fanatic. He was always in the gym or the pool.”
“Those insurance policies would have been costly, difficult to conceal from your wife or your stockbroker. And Felicity almost collected on them. But Cary Church wrote a letter to the police, a letter he never mailed,” I explained. “The letter detailedhow he’d helped Felicity move Emil Gardener’s body from her apartment to a snowbank in a forest near the university’s golf course, giving an exact location. He wrote two letters, in fact, and in the second one, he changed his mind and said that the defendant was not responsible for Mr. Gardener’s death.”
“That’s crazy,” Ross said.
“I have no idea. Almost like he knew he was going to die. But why say two different things?”
“You’d have to ask him, huh?”
“The first guy, they thought died from hypothermia. People sometimes take off their clothes in the last stages of freezing to death. It’s called paradoxical undressing. I looked it up. Like those skiers in Russia, a long time ago? Apparently, the way the blood vessels react, you feel too hot?”
“Paradoxical,” Ross said.
I nodded. Emil Gardener’s clothes were found right beside him.
“That’s pretty horrifying, Reenie. I’m like most people. I’m not really into that kind of stuff.”
“That actually makes you just the opposite of most people, Ross. Have you ever noticed the sheer number of true crime podcasts? And movies? Sad ones? Funny ones? Ones that are only about murders that took place in national parks? There are specialties and subspecialties. It’s nuts.”
“I don’t think many guys listen to podcasts, Reenie. That’s a female thing.”
“Maybe. Lots of men make those podcasts, though. Your students are listening right now!”
“So then the professor...” Ross prompted me.
Several days later, I told him, Cary Church’s wife, Suzanne, couldn’t reach him. He hadn’t come home. She tried for hours. She called his sister. She called his racquetball partner. They all thought he was with her. Finally, when he didn’t show up to take their children to visit their grandparents, she called the police. Theyfound him dead in his own bathtub, naked but with no water in the tub and not a mark on him. Healthy young men in their thirties don’t just climb into an empty bathtub and die.
“I heard about the apartment thing from somebody,” Ross recalled now. “It was this great apartment because Cary Church had a lot of money, some kind of family trust.”
“They were separated,” I said.
Ross told me that they were apparently trying to work things out, as their sons were only four and six years old. He asked me, “Didn’t it say that in the police report?”
I’d read only the arrest report so far and not the rest of the file I’d obtained, but I told him that I didn’t think that those reports detailed the victims’ domestic arrangements. In fact, they might, for all I knew. Admittedly, I hadn’t yet spoken with police detectives, still fearful, despite Sally Zankow’s assurances, that authorities would consider me a lightweight.
The report I’d read did say an autopsy showed no evidence of foul play. One of the forensic pathologists suggested that the victim inhaled a toxin dissolved in the missing bath water—and that toxin would have broken down right away. That was when they exhumed Emil Gardener’s body. At autopsy, complete certainty was not possible about the amount and nature of a toxin, but the condition of Gardener’s stomach tissue strongly suggested a toxic and corrosive agent. The bruises on his head and shoulders probably came from hitting his head against a hard surface, such as the base of the sink and the toilet during his death agonies. Or maybe someone had hit him on the head.
This had happened over this past Christmas break, during what I now knew were the last days of Felicity’s intact family, the final Christmas service that Roman Wild would preach at Starbright Ministry. How long she was there and when she arrived were open to debate, but the visit was her alibi. For how could she have killed anyone from a hundred miles away?
I thought of a previous Christmas, some years ago. The last time I’d had an actual visit with Felicity. It was that brunch that Felicity and I organized with Becky Brompton and Cassandra Sullivan, who had been our high-school classmates. All the guests were female, including a few little kids. We ate too many mushroom-and-chicken vol-au-vents and drank too much cider spiked with too much rum, and laughed that, when we stepped outside, we’d be in Bedford Falls.
After everyone else left, Felicity and I exchanged presents. The gifts she gave me were strange and opulent for kids our age. I loved them. There were simple half-carat diamond stud earrings. After all that fashion blogging, I could spot even the most artful fake and I knew in general terms what they would cost. She also gave me black velvet Saint Laurent over-the-knee boots and a Baccarat crystal paperweight. I gave her a copy ofFuchsia’shardcover “look book” of remarkable photos, an ostrich-leather passport holder, swag from some event, and a gold-plated Montblanc Meisterstück pen we got as a perk from the pen company, which would have cost about five hundred dollars in a store. I figured that everyone likes beautiful pens and I had two of them. Her presents to me would have cost me two weeks’ pay. Mine to her were free. Why didn’t I wonder how a grad student could afford such things? I suppose I simply accepted that Felicity could pull off the seemingly impossible, as she always had.
She told me she would be going to Canada that summer to work with a professor trying to alleviate habitat challenges to endangered cerulean warblers. She showed me a video of a plump little denim-colored bird with a sweet cheer of a call.
Was not one single sentence of any of that true?
Afterward, I wrote to thank her for the gifts and the party. I wrote a couple of times and tried to call. Felicity never answered the notes and the phone number I had was no longer in service.
As a child at Christmas, I used to stand looking down thehilly street from our house at a descending necklace of colored lights, pretending I was a princess who lived high in her castle above all her subjects. I recalled Felicity’s accounts of her bleak, straitened holidays (“Nothing more fundamental than a Christmas with fundamentalists,” she’d say). Back then, the only undecorated house was the Wilds’ house. They didn’t celebrate a secular Christmas with festive lights, a big tree, and piles of presents, but instead with an austere grind of twice-daily church services from December 1 until early January. As the kind of minister he was, Roman Wild must have felt it was his duty as a minister to set an example of putting Christ back in Christmas. The presents the children received were few and practical. Felicity told me that her parents once gave her pajama bottoms for her December birthday and then gave her the top for Christmas.
“Don’t they get that this could backfire, and their children will grow up to hate religion?” my dad said. “Those kids look around them and see all the fun and food and excess other families have, and who can blame them? Puritans must have had more fun!”
