Rosemary Herbert - Front Page Teaser

“I walked along the road for awhile. It seemed a long time but I don’t think it could have been. Then, in a little pull-off, I saw a car idling with no one in it. I suppose someone was walking a dog there. There were dog tracks and boot prints leading away from the car. I got in and drove the car to Boston. The radio was playing ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.’ I listened to the carol all the way through. Then the announcer told the time. I turned off the radio then.

“I realized it was too late to clean up the kitchen, but there was time to keep my hairdresser’s appointment. I don’t know how I remembered that appointment. But I knew if I kept it, it would make it look like I’d had a normal day’s outing. I parked on Boylston Street, where I saw the off-price clothing outlet. There were homeless people in there sheltering from the snowstorm. If I appeared disheveled, I looked no worse than they did. I bought the coat, new slacks, and a sweater. Then, in a Dunkin’ Donuts bathroom a few doors down, I changed my clothes. I stuffed the shopping bag of old clothes in a trash can on Boylston Street by the car rental place and went straight to the hairdresser. After that, I went to FAO Schwarz and bought a teddy bear for Veronica. I knew the Christmas shopping would help make my day look normal, but that isn’t why I bought it. I bought the bear because I love that child ,” she said. She lifted her thorn-torn hands and gazed at them, perplexed, as though she had no idea how they’d been bloodied.

Sitting on the chilly slate floor, amid the rose petals and thorns, Olga said no more.

Liz was silent, too, as she mentally calculated the time it would have taken Olga to take the Green Line to Newton Highlands, pick up her car at Newton City Hall, and drive to Wellesley in the snow. She must have had to turn around immediately upon arriving at her house and drive back to Newton through the storm to collect Veronica from the Johansson house.

But it was difficult to keep her mind on matters of timing as she stood in the doorway between the distraught woman and the view of the lakeshore. So much had happened in the landscape Olga refused to look at from her home. Looking down at Olga as the woman sat, mute now, on the slate, Liz slumped against the doorjamb, staggered with pity.

“You don’t have to report what you know,” a voice told Liz, expressing the thought that was running through her mind. “You should think it through before you do. What do the police have on Erik, anyway? Just circumstantial evidence. You are in the position to let a little girl who’s lost her mom keep her grandma and her dad.”

Liz looked down at Olga. The older woman seemed utterly unmoved.

Perhaps Liz was hearing things. She moved to sit on the floor herself.

But strong hands and arms reached out and supported her. She turned and relinquished herself to Tom’s embrace.

“I followed you,” he explained, “to surprise you with a picnic lunch.” He pointed to the Mexican blanket and a small backpack from which a baguette and bottle of wine protruded. “I didn’t want you to go off with that guy Kinnaird. When you went inside, I waited out of sight here.” He pointed to a spot behind the open mudroom door. “When I heard you confront Olga, I was afraid she’d hurt you.”

“Exactly!” Liz said, stepping back from Tom’s arms—and from the temptation to let Olga go free—in one movement. “That’s just it, Tom! You see, there’s no telling how many times she would kill in order to remain a loving grandmother, in order to stay in Veronica’s life.”

“But if you don’t report it, Liz, she’ll have nothing to fear. She’s not attacking you now, even when you might still report her! Think of Veronica more than your career, Liz! She needs a loving woman in her life. Look,” he said, striding into the mudroom and picking up a framed photo of Veronica blowing out nine candles on her birthday cake, with her grandmother smiling over her shoulder.

Liz stared at Tom, stunned he would support Olga. Then she remembered that Tom had been brought up by his own grandmother in the absence of his mother.

Liz turned her attention to the photo. Hanging around Veronica’s neck was the wedding ring Olga had ornamented with a stone for Veronica—the wedding ring that she had stripped from her daughter’s lifeless finger. It was one thing to do everything possible—even to cover up a killing—to remain in a beloved child’s life. It was another thing entirely to hang a memento of that horror around that child’s neck. As Tom looked on aghast, Liz took out her cell phone and dialed the police.

Even with television and radio reporters covering the arrest of Olga Swenson in the evening news, Liz’s full solution to the crime, set to run in the next day’s Beantown Banner, was a scoop.

“That’s star-spangled reporting for you,” Dermott McCann admitted, lifting a drink to Liz at J.J. Foley’s, a Boston bar frequented by news reporters. “Great legwork,” he added, slapping her on the back and looking down at her legs.

Esther O’Faolin winced. Then she said, “Good job, Liz.”

“Nice that you had that forensics guy in your back pocket,” Dick Manning admitted. “How’d you get ahold of him?”

“That was thanks to Esther, actually. And Dermott, too. They insisted I cover a mystery writer’s conference at the Worcester Public Library.” Liz smiled as Cormac Kinnaird walked in and crossed the barroom where no Irish music played. “I was so fascinated by his bite marks presentation that the rest is history,” she said, winking, as Kinnaird arrived at her side and put an arm around her shoulder. “Here’s the good doctor himself.”

“Liz wrote about your assessment of the crime scene in Plymouth,” Esther said. “Because Olga Swenson confessed, we cut some of it to put the focus on the confession. But I’d like to hear more about it. I gather from what Liz wrote that if the Swenson woman hadn’t confessed and you hadn’t realized there was an ephemeral pond there, the identities of the skeletons might never have been discovered. The police would have thought the bones were too old to have anything to do with the case.”

“Possibly,” Kinnaird said, “although, under ordinary circumstances, the dental work should have been matched to Ellen Johansson’s in a matter of minutes on the police databases.”

“The guy who didn’t enter them into the system is in deep shit, I’ll bet,” the city editor said.

“Not as deep as it might have been if the Johansson case didn’t look like a possible voluntary absence,” Kinnaird said. “Remember, it was not clear murder was done. I think the error would have been caught more quickly once the bones were found if the ME had not been in Manhattan helping out with the remains from Ground Zero.”

“What about the cabbie’s teeth? Didn’t they have dental records for him on the database, too?” Jared asked.

“No one filed dental records for him. The only person who seems to have missed Samir Hasan was the manager of the taxi garage,” Liz said. “And he soon discovered Hasan had given him false information. Hasan was so successful in hiding his true identity that we still don’t know who he was. Ironically, he was killed based on mistaken identity, too. I wonder if somebody, somewhere, cared about him,” she added, running her fingers through her hair and looking across the barroom distractedly.

“Did Mrs. Swenson have any notion why the cabbie was in her daughter’s kitchen?” Jared asked Liz. “Or did she kill him before she could find out?”

“She told me she believed he was the same person who had masturbated at the sight of her scantily dressed daughter when Ellen was just eight years old. She said she shot him, not just because he had a bloody hand over her daughter’s mouth, but because he used an Arabic expression that made her think he was that person come back to threaten Ellen again. She would have liked me to think Ellen never knew about Karl’s perversions. Perhaps she didn’t, but it’s just as likely she killed to keep the family secret.”