“Did you make any more progress on the case?” Michael asked, and at that, Max suggested they sit down and listen while we explained.
We went over it all, not in detail but the big picture. It didn’t take long before Reba jumped back up. “Not Carl!” she shouted. “Not after all we did for that boy, raising him like a son. It’s not possible that he’d do this to hurt us. Jacob treated him like a brother.”
But as we laid out more of what we’d uncovered, slowly they came to agree that it had to be Carl. All the evidence pointed to him. Everyone but Reba, who couldn’t seem to make that jump, appeared to accept it.
The room dissolved into a mixture of tears and cries, shouts of anger and pain. Michael tried to calm his wife as he asked us more questions, Reba in the background swearing that the only one responsible for her family’s horrific tragedy had to be Myles Thompkins and that we’d failed the family by not focusing on him.
Jacob remained quiet, until he grabbed a pen and paper off the bed tray and wrote: CARL WAS MY FRIEND
I then told him about Carl’s suicide note, and that he’d asked us to tell Jacob that he was sorry.
Jacob dropped his head, and Naomi slipped between the older Johanssons to put her arms around him. She whispered in Jacob’s ear, and he closed his eyes, as if to shut out the world.
As Max and I left the hospital, I phoned Mullins. It went right to voicemail, so I got in touch with dispatch. “I just hung up with Detective Mullins. He’s on his way here to talk to you,” Kellie said. “He knows about Carl Shipley. The detective sounded kind of relieved.”
I dropped Max off on my way. Only a handful of protesters congregated on the sidewalk outside the station, and they seemed less dedicated, not bothering to shout at me. When I walked in the back door, Mullins was sitting at his desk. He had his head propped up on his fist, and he looked like he’d been to war. Maybe he had. I approached him, and he stood, and tears flushed his eyes as he threw his arms around me. “Thank you, Chief,” he said. “I am sorry that I kept interfering. I knew you two would solve the case, but Laurel was my little girl, and I worried that…”
Overwhelmed, he couldn’t seem to form the next words.
“Let’s go in my office,” I whispered.
Mullins never asked me what had happened when we arrived at Carl Shipley’s trailer, what we saw. He seemed to know about the hanging and the note, probably from someone at Max’s office or mine. It appeared that he had closed that chapter; the angry father of a murder victim role was gone. Now, for the first time, he gave himself permission to grieve.
“Chief, let me tell you about my girl,” he whispered, his voice breaking with the deepest of pains. “From the beginning, Laurel was special…” The rest of the day dissolved in memories.
Thirty-Seven
My sleepless nights endured. I lay in bed well past midnight, my mind roiling. By four, I was again awake, the lights out in my room, staring into the darkness, troubled. Everyone else considered the case over, but I couldn’t get there. Was I being compulsive, hanging on when it was time to put it to rest? Maybe Mother Naomi’s assessment of me was right; perhaps I simply didn’t understand when to let things be.
An hour after sunrise, I walked through Alber’s cemetery. The headstones at the front were obelisks and flat panels so worn by the decades, some more than a century, that the names were barely legible. A scattered dozen or more were sanded off by the winds and rains until whoever lay below would remain anonymous for eternity. With time to spare before the funerals began, I lingered at the graves of my sister Sadie and one of my four mothers, Constance, who’d passed away years earlier. In an area where clusters of Jefferies were laid, I was surrounded by family history: great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, a few cousins, many of whom I’d never known.
For a long time, I sat on the ground at the foot of my father’s grave. No one around, I whispered, “Did you ever regret what you did to me, Father? Giving me away to such a man, when I was little more than a child?”