would be the wiser. Lee could just say that despite all his warnings, Alice had, in her befuddled state, fixed herself a cheese sandwich and a cup of cocoa.”
“Exactly. Lee started feeding Alice foods that would cause another stroke and kill her. One night Olivia even told me he was bringing home pepperoni pizza, so Alice wouldn’t have to cook. Of course, that didn’t set off any alarms, because I didn’t know about the meds.”
“Why didn’t it work?”
“Because he hadn’t factored in how stubborn Alice can be. She realized what was happening, so she refused to eat or drink anything he gave her except water. By then Lee was drugging her big-time, giving her extras of everything the doctor had prescribed, but she managed, somehow, to continue refusing to eat. He disabled the phone and told her the telephone company was slow getting out there to service it. And, of course, he had already staged incidents to make it look like she was losing her mind. I’m sure part of that was to confuse Olivia. That way the poor kid would be afraid to do anything Alice asked her to. It was all pretty diabolical.”
“So she stayed alive by refusing to eat or drink?”
“That’s pretty much it. She was so drugged that he couldn’t really force food down her throat or she might choke, and that would trigger an autopsy. So when she was awake, he just presented her with the forbidden foods and told her they were safe. I guess he figured eventually she would forget, or maybe get so hungry, she would start to believe him.”
“Poor Olivia.”
“I don’t think the kid fully knows what’s up yet. Ken Gray sat her down and told her the basics. She knows Lee was trying to hurt Alice. I don’t think she understands a lot more than that, certainly nothing about her mother. She knew something was terribly wrong, but Lee told her he was trying to keep Alice from going into a nursing home. He probably warned her that the authorities would take Alice away if Olivia told anybody Alice wasn’t eating.”
“She was at a friend’s house when all this went down, wasn’t she?”
“Lee was probably afraid we were about to report him. He’d lost his job at the realty, and he must have known I would find out from Maribel at some point. So he got Olivia out of the house. By that point Alice was so weak, he probably figured it was worth the risk of her choking to try to get enough of the wrong things down her. Then the whole thing would be over with and he could get out of town.”
“He was that sure she’d die?”
“In her weakened state? He was probably right. Plus he was giving her twice the medication she was supposed to have, hoping a bad reaction would be twice as strong. I guess he figured that would take care of it.”
“So how are you with all this?”
Tracy hadn’t had time to think about herself. On Tuesday night, after Lee’s arrest, she had given her statement to the police; then she’d made half a dozen phone calls until she discovered who Olivia had gone home with after camp. Finally she had undergone an extensive interview with a woman from the local child protection agency to make sure Olivia would be safe with her until Alice was released. From that point on, Olivia had been with her constantly, unless the little girl was visiting Janya.
“I just wonder if we could have done anything differently. Of course now that we know what was happening, it seems like we should have figured it out faster. But Lee set this up carefully, and there wasn’t anything we could point to and say ‘Look, here’s proof something bad is happening over there.’ So I guess we did what we could. We paid attention, we cared, we tried to intervene, and in the end, we put ourselves in the middle.”
He reached over and tickled her under the chin, as if he understood she needed to lighten up. “You know what I think?”
His opinion mattered, which was scary. “I’m sitting down.”
“I think if that old guy Herb hadn’t died on your watch, you might have looked the other way. But you learned something.”
“Right, it’s all about taking care of each other. Duh. Can the lessons stop now?”
“For a smart-ass California girl who says ‘duh’ way too much, it took a lot of courage to go in there the way you