grandparents did—looking for a better life.
“My mother hated me marrying a foreigner and one with no college degree. I suppose that’s why I could sympathize with Lydia—her mother saw Hector as a foreigner, a Communist, someone who was leading her daughter astray.” Elisa smiled sadly, twisting the wedding ring she still wore. “That’s why I put up with Lydia’s extreme emotions for a long time. She didn’t seem to realize I was in mourning, too. We might have ridden it out, if only she hadn’t been called to testify at the killer’s trial.”
The Kansas state police had caught Arthur Morton fairly quickly. He was hiding in the hills near Ellsworth, Kansas, where he’d built a makeshift cabin and had stored his cache of rifles, guns, ammunition, and bullet-resistant clothing, along with food and water.
“Did you ever think Lydia knew Arthur Morton, or anyone in his family, before the killings?” I ventured.
Palurdo’s mouth tightened in anger. “You know this kind of slaughter is meaningless. The FBI, their forensic psychologists want to dig into the killers’ motives, but that’s always superficial. Such people have weapons, they have anger, they find a target. Anyway, if this creature was targeting Lydia he could have killed her easily—she’d flung her body over my son’s.”
I didn’t say anything, but Palurdo laughed derisively. “Oh, you think maybe he wanted Hector out of the way so he could have Lydia? What drove Lydia to the brink was at the trial he was represented by an expensive law firm. They were able to plead his sentence from the death penalty to life in prison. For me, that was—I don’t want to say it was okay—but what good would taking his life do? But Lydia—she was confused. She opposed death, she opposed war and senseless slaughter, but they had to restrain her in the courtroom—she tried to attack the killer right there, at his attorney’s table.”
Elisa Palurdo stopped to take a bottle of water from her handbag and drink. Her face was covered with beads of sweat.
“She screamed that she wanted to pull the heart from his chest with her own fingernails. I—I wouldn’t have thought such cries would affect someone capable of that kind of slaughter, but in fact, a week after the sentencing hearing, the killer did commit suicide.”
“What? Was he out on bond?”
“In his cell.” Palurdo’s lips set in a tight line. “I had zero interest in his fate so I can’t tell you the how’s or if he’d shown signs. All I can tell you is that his death didn’t assuage Lydia’s anger: she attacked the lawyers. Not physically, mind you, but with emails and letters. She stood outside the building downtown where they have their offices, holding a big cardboard sign. They got a restraining order on her and she tried to stay with me again, but by then—oh, my God, having her here was awful.”
“The law firm was here in Chicago?” I interrupted.
“The main office is here. Who knows where the vermin or his family found money to pay those kind of fees.”
I asked for the name of the firm, but Elisa couldn’t remember it.
“You think she might be hiding in their building, hoping to kill them? This long after the trial?” Her eyebrows rose in skepticism, but then she shrugged. “Anything is possible when everything that anchors you to the planet is taken from you.
“Lydia even destroyed her music. She gave a concert in Hector’s memory, and then she took an axe to her favorite guitar and chopped it to bits. ‘An axe for the axe,’ she said. She made a bonfire of the guitar and her sheet music and sang the Irish ballad ‘The Minstrel Boy.’ Over and over. She was—it was as if she was skidding in the atmosphere, cloud-surfing. I couldn’t persuade her to get medical help. I couldn’t persuade her to respect my own grief. She said the medication fogged her mind and made her forget Hector and she never wanted him far from her mind. It was terrible, terrible.”
She covered her face with her hands. I didn’t try to touch her, just sat quietly. The woman with the whining child had vanished at some point. Another woman approached our space, felt the level of emotion, moved on.
At length Palurdo drank more water and looked up at me, her eyes bleak. “I rented an apartment for her, but I couldn’t be around her. And then I found she had moved out, and was living on the streets. Hector had