“My mother’s caregiver. Izzy Chapman,” I say, and as I start to rattle off the woman’s credentials, I wonder how much of it is true, or whether Izzy lied about them to deceive us, my father and me easily putting our trust in her because we were so desperate for good help we would have believed anything.
“And what reason would Ms. Chapman have for killing Nick? Did she have a motive?” he asks, stepping forward, and when I splutter, not willing or not able to hush my voice for the children’s sake, “I don’t know, I don’t know, but she killed him. I know she did,” Detective Kaufman leads me to an interrogation room and suggests we start at the beginning. But before we do, he phones for another detective, a female detective by the name of Howell—Detective Howell—to come and lay claim to Maisie. Maisie is too young to overhear the conversation that’s about to transpire, and though she doesn’t want to, it’s in Maisie’s best interest that she goes.
“I don’t want to,” moans Maisie, eyes pleading with mine as Detective Howell reaches out a hand and says, “I’m pretty sure I saw cookies in the vending machine. You like chocolate chip?” and Maisie gives in, only for the sake of cookies. Detective Howell has also promised to find coloring pages, and I wonder if, somewhere in another interrogation room much like mine, she will sit Maisie down and ask her about what she saw today, the bat and the blood, Izzy begging for me to stop.
With Maisie gone and Felix asleep in my arms, Detective Kaufman again asks me to explain, and I begin falteringly to recount my story of the black Chevrolet, theIzzycharm I found beneath the seat of the car. My words verge on incoherent. The detective only stares. He’s unimpressed with my fieldwork and displays far more interest in Izzy stealing from my parents than her committing murder. The facts that he bullet points on the legal pad before him have to do with the stolen check, credit card fraud, insurance fraud and more, but when I raise my voice and insist, “She killed my husband,” he gazes at me disinterestedly—or maybe it’s with shame and pity—and asks to know about the blood on my hands.
I open my mouth and commit perjury. “Self-defense,” I allege, saying how Izzy came after me with the baseball bat. How I was only trying to protect myself from her.
“She killed Nick,” I assert. “I didn’t know what she was capable of. I had to protect myself. I had to protect my children.”
“Did you hit her with the bat?” he asks, and I say, “Of course not.”
“When is the last time you’ve eaten, Mrs. Solberg?” he asks, evaluating my dry skin, my hollow cheekbones, my tired eyes. Like magic the baby weight has disappeared from my stomach and hips, and instead of a potbellied pig, I’ve become gaunt. “Have you been eating, sleeping? There are grief counselors, you know,” he says, but I snap at this, telling him I don’t want a goddamn grief counselor. I want him to find the person who killed Nick.
“And where is Ms. Chapman?” he asks then, and I tell him she ran. “Is she okay, Mrs. Solberg? Did you hurt her?” and I shrug drily and say, “Nothing she won’t get over,” but even this is something I don’t know. How hard did I hit her? I wonder now, thinking of the fury with which I swung that baseball bat. Did I hit her head, or was it only her hands? Did her hands protect her head from my repeated blows? Or might there be damage, internal damage, far more damning than a bloody nose?
I check my watch. It’s nearing four thirty. “She could be anywhere by now,” I say, though I beg the detective to send an officer to keep watch over my mother and father’s home in case she returns, and he relents, saying he will. He’ll send someone at once. “You’ll look for her,” I insist. “You’ll arrest Izzy.” But all Detective Kaufman assures me is that if and when his officers find her, they’ll bring her in for questioning in regards to fraud and theft. If my father chooses to press charges, that is.
“And murder,” I remind him, though the expression on his face says otherwise, and I think that maybe it’s not murder after all, but rather manslaughter, vehicular homicide or some other designation of which I don’t know. I’ve gotten the terminology wrong, that’s all. The wrong verbiage.
“Not murder,” he says. “Ms. Chapman didn’t kill your husband, Mrs. Solberg,” the detective categorically states. He’s inexpressive, staring straight-faced at me. He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t so much as blink.
“You know who did, then?” I plead, desperate for him to tell me without a shadow of a doubt who was behind the wheel of my mother’s car when it ran Nick off the side of the road. If not Izzy, then it must have been my mother. Perhaps my first inclination was right as I sat on my sofa this morning with Maisie on my lap, watching the images of the black Chevrolet load on the computer screen. Perhaps it was my mother after all who slipped behind the wheel of the car, driving off down the road alone because driving, like riding a bike or climbing the stairs or playing the piano, is one of those procedural memories that require no conscious thought and therefore are far less easy to forget. She was trying to get home. To the home she still believes is her home. Is wasn’t intentional, but a case of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. She could have easily taken out another driver, another vehicle on the road, and only by chance was it Nick. A tough break. Bad luck.
That’s it, then. My mother has killed Nick. It wasn’t Izzy. It was my mother all along, though all these presumptions, all this conjecture, is enough to make me go slowly insane. I’m trapped inside a fun house whereby everything is skewed, and my center of gravity is thrown off by centrifugal force. The floor beneath my feet moves, tilting me from left to right, up and down, threatening to plummet my body entirely through a trapdoor so that I’ll soon disappear completely. Everything is distorted; I can’t make sense of what I see.
I need closure. Acceptance.
I need to know with absolute certainty who killed Nick.
“There’s something I need to show you,” the detective says, leaving the room and returning moments later with a laptop in his hands. He sets it on the table before me, typing in a password to bring it to life.
“This won’t be easy to watch,” he says.
“What is it?” I ask as a video loads and a grainy thumbnail appears, and all I can make out are a fenced field and trees.
“The quality isn’t the best,” he apologizes, explaining to me about a man and a woman, a Mr. and Mrs. Konig who live just off Harvey Road in a home that overlooks the road. He shows me a snapshot on his phone. A yellow farmhouse with trim the color of rust. I recognize it immediately, the lemon chiffon farmhouse with its dogwood tree in full bloom. I remember Maisie sitting beneath that tree, her shorts getting soaked by the marshy lawn in the aftermath of a storm.
“I spoke to the couple that lives there,” I say.
“Yes,” says Detective Kaufman. “Mr. and Mrs. Konig. They remember you.”
I nod my head, thinking of the kind couple. I didn’t know their names at the time, but now I do. “They weren’t home when the accident happened. They didn’t see a thing.”
“That’s right,” the detective agrees, and I recall what a great view they would have had from the farmhouse’s front porch, how conceivably they could have watched the whole scene play out before their eyes if only they’d have been home. “A strange thing happened,” he says, setting his phone aside as he strokes his mustache and beard, looking intently at me. “Mr. Konig stopped by the station this morning. There was some vandalism on his property, you see. Spray paint on the barn doors, damage to the horse pasture.”
“What a shame,” I say, though the compassion is lacking from my voice because Mr. and Mrs. Konig suffered vandalism while I’ve lost my spouse. There’s a difference, you see.
“It is,” says Detective Kaufman. “Teenage pranksters, but as you can imagine, the Konigs were upset.”
“I can imagine,” I say, and though I feel sorry for the couple, this doesn’t have a thing to do with me. The detective is stalling, finding a way to tell me he can’t look into Nick’s murder because he’s too busy investigating the defacement of the Konig property. I’m about to make a scene, to demand to speak to someone other than Detective Kaufman, to another detective, one with a higher pay grade, or a captain or deputy chief. “What does this possibly have to do with Nick’s murder?” I ask, sounding incredulous because I am.
“Thankfully for the Konigs, they have a surveillance camera on the exterior of their home. Backing up to the main road, and in such an uninhabited part of town, this isn’t the first time this has occurred on their property. Vandalism. Mr. Konig had the camera installed a few months ago so that he could catch the perpetrators, and he did. We have them on video,” he says, motioning to the thumbnail on the screen before me, a bird’s-eye view of the Konig yard. “Now we just need to identify them,” Detective Kaufman adds, and I look to him in question, my cheeks flaming red. He can’t possibly think I have something to do with the vandalism to the Konig property. Can he?
I suck in my breath. I try not to cry. “You think I know who they are?” I ask, but he shakes his head and tells me no.
“No, Mrs. Solberg. No, I don’t. You see,” he says, handing me a tissue so that I can blot at my rheumy eyes, “the surveillance camera records up to thirty days of continuous feed. After this latest incident, Mr. Konig sat down to watch the recordings, hoping to catch the person or people who trashed his yard. But as it turns out,” he says, pushing Play on the video and sitting back to watch with me, “he found much more than he was looking for.”
