Брайан Фриман - Funeral for a Friend

“It gives Andrea an even more powerful motive to kill him,” Dan pointed out. “Stride, too. What would he have done if he found out that he was confronting the man who’d raped his wife as a teenager?”

“Stride didn’t know.”

“So he says.”

“No one knew, Dan. Ned had every reason to keep it a secret.”

“Maybe so, but we can’t be one hundred percent certain that no one remembered him. Particularly Andrea. If she was face-to-face with her rapist, even after all those years, maybe it triggered a memory.”

Maggie shook her head. “Then why would she go to the town hall to confront Devin? That makes no sense. She obviously still thought Devin assaulted her. No, Andrea didn’t know about Ned, and I honestly don’t see how anyone else could have known, either. It was a fluke that we even discovered it.”

“And yet of all the motives we’ve talked about, I like that one the best,” Dan said. “It’s the only one worth killing over. If Devin or Peter wanted to quash Ned’s story, I think they would have paid him the blackmail to spike it, not killed him. And as much as Andrea wanted to protect her privacy, I can’t really see her or Stride going as far as murder to keep her name out of the papers. But rape? That changes everything.”

Maggie frowned. Once again, Dan was right. “I agree, but it’s too late to ask Andrea about it.”

“So where does that leave us?”

Maggie rocked back in her chair. She knew where that left them. Nowhere. With an unsolved cold case that would be put back in the files. She chewed her lip and tried to think of something she’d missed, and as she did, her gaze drifted to a folder on her desk. She pulled it toward her and flipped open the cover. The printed contents stared back at her.

“What’s that?” Dan asked.

“Andrea’s autopsy summary. Serena said that Stride thought we should check it. She didn’t know why or what he thought we would find. He was still pretty groggy from the surgery.”

“Did you look it over?”

“Sure, but there was nothing unusual about the external examination. It shows what you’d expect. Single GSW to the head.”

“What about the internals?”

Maggie shrugged. She flipped open the report and turned to the page that summarized the internal findings. “Nothing strange there, and I don’t know why there would be. She was a healthy forty-six-year-old female. Lungs normal, gastro normal, endocrine normal, genitourinary shows—”

She stopped in mid-sentence.

“Hang on. Wait a minute.”

“What is it?” Dan asked.

Maggie picked up the report and reread the postmortem examination of the genital organs and reproductive system. After she did, she put the report down and scoured her memory for what she knew about Andrea Forseth. She went over everything that Stride had told her years earlier. About himself and Andrea and their marriage. About her earlier marriage and divorce to Robin Jantzik.

She knew she was remembering the facts correctly. It had come up too many times for her to be mistaken about it. Stride had always told her that the problem in both of Andrea’s marriages had stemmed from her not being able to get pregnant. She was desperate to have a child, and she never did.

And yet there it was in black and white.

“Something’s wrong,” Maggie said. “This doesn’t make any sense. According to the autopsy, at some point in her life, Andrea delivered a baby.”

“A baby? ” Denise said. “No, that’s not right. That’s impossible. My sister never had a baby.”

Serena and Maggie exchanged a glance with each other, because that was the reaction they’d expected. Denise didn’t know. No one knew. It had been the secret of Andrea’s life.

“I’m sorry, but the evidence is conclusive,” Maggie told her. “I checked with the medical examiner again to make absolutely certain there was no mistake. She told me that her analysis of the pelvic area during the autopsy left no room for doubt. Andrea had gone through childbirth. If it wasn’t with Stride or Robin, then when did it happen?”

Denise got up from the kitchen chair in Andrea’s house with a start. Her fingers twitched. She went to the back door, opened it, and lit a cigarette from the pack in her pocket. After she inhaled, she tilted her head and blew smoke into the air. Her chest rattled with a cough. “I can’t believe this.”

Maggie joined her in the doorway and waited as Denise tried to process the shock. “She never said a word about it? She never gave you any hint?”

“None.”

“What about your parents?”

“They didn’t say a thing to me. But I don’t suppose they would.”

Serena got up, too, and looked around the kitchen. She saw it in a new light, now that Andrea was gone. She always felt a keen sense of loss when she entered the house of someone who had recently died. Everything still spoke of their presence. The food in the refrigerator. The mail on the counter. The coffee cup in the sink. The house still acted as if someone would be coming back soon and picking up where they left off. Knowing the truth about Andrea’s life made it even worse.

She wandered to the window, where Andrea had kept her array of suncatchers. She spotted the one that Stride had remembered, the one he’d seen Andrea holding in his dream while under surgery. The sun catcher had been sending him a message.

The stained glass, molded in chips of blue and red, showed a mother holding a baby.

“You said Andrea didn’t know where these sun catchers came from?” she said to Denise.

“No. She said a secret admirer sent them to her. Apparently, it had been happening for years.”

“We’re going to have to take them with us,” Serena said.

“Why?”

“To look for prints. To see if we can figure out who sent them.”

“Why does that even matter?” Denise asked.

“Because there was someone in Andrea’s life that no one knew anything about. It’s important that we find out who it was. Particularly if it’s possible that it was her child.”

A flood of emotions crossed Denise’s face. Confusion. Anger. Regret. And ultimately grief. “My whole life, Andrea and I only saw each other every couple of years. When we did, we had practically nothing in common. I thought when I came back to Duluth, we’d find a way to be sisters again. These last few months, I was hoping we were finally getting closer. Now I realize I didn’t know a thing about her.”

“When did that start?” Serena asked. “When did the two of you begin to grow apart?”

Denise threw down her cigarette and began to cry. “After that fucking party.”

They waited for Denise to get control of herself. She stood outside for a while, staring at the lake on the horizon, her lips pushed together in a hard line. Then she came back inside and slammed the door, and she sat down at the kitchen table again.

“We need to know what really happened, Denise,” Serena said. “Is it possible that Andrea ended up pregnant after the rape?”

Denise gave a long sigh. “Possible? I suppose so. I left town a couple of days later. It was probably two years before I came back for a visit. I’m not the nostalgic type, and I was looking to get out of Duluth. I called home every few weeks, but nobody said a thing. That doesn’t surprise me. This would have been horrifying for my parents. Their little angel getting pregnant? They would have kept it a secret any way they could. But I do remember one thing—”

She stopped.

“What is it?” Serena asked.

“I remember they pulled Andrea out of school in the second semester that year. After Christmas. They told me it was mono. She finished the year at home.”