Still, she said nothing.
“You knew if you rented a car in Ellen’s name some days after she disappeared, it would suggest she was still living, that she had exited her kitchen, if not voluntarily, at least alive. And covered with snow, the car might take some time to be found. You had your daughter’s purse, Olga, didn’t you? Her credit card, her driver’s license, even her fountain pen. You must have been bundled up when you rented the car, wearing a hood, perhaps. It was an awful risk to take but you were in luck, with a clerk who was more interested in painting her nails than in taking a good look at you. Perhaps she was lax, too, in providing you with a pen. You didn’t want her to look up from her manicure so you used Ellen’s fountain pen to sign the car rental agreement. The pen Erik gave Ellen to celebrate their anniversary. Not the anniversary of their wedding, but the anniversary of their meeting: August eighteenth.”
Olga tore another petal off the rose and dropped it to the floor. And another. Then another.
“The earlier phone call, on Veronica’s birthday, in June: Anyone could have made that call. Even a cabbie might draw that date out of a passenger while making small talk. Erik hardly dared hope it was Ellen who made the birthday phone call. But a call on August 18? Well, that was different. It had to be significant that a call arrived from Ellen’s cell phone on that date!
“But Erik and Ellen are not the only people who know that date’s import. You know it, too, Olga, don’t you?”
Olga raised the rose before her eyes and scrutinized it. Without a word, she tore off two more petals, dropping each to the floor.
“Then panic set in and you became sloppy. After you guessed I’d spoken to Ali and after you accidentally revealed that you knew his Middle Eastern background, you had to suggest Ellen was still living, didn’t you, Olga? And after you saw me looking at your coat collar, with its label stamped by a cheap discount store, you had to throw the suspicion on someone else, didn’t you?
“How convenient for you that Ellen’s husband had a cell phone that was identical in appearance to your daughter’s. One that doesn’t even reveal the phone’s own number when you consult it to find out the time. If you substituted it briefly for Erik’s, he’d never realize it was not his. And then, with your entrée to his house, you could easily retrieve the phone after you knew he’d made a call on it.”
Olga peeled another petal from the rose. She held the petal out before her on the palm of her hand and blew it off. It fell to the floor slowly, without a sound.
“You couldn’t know the bodies would be found while he had the phone in hand, though, could you? If you’d known they would be found then, you’d have made another wordless call yourself, wouldn’t you? The idea was to suggest she was alive, after all.
“And you couldn’t know he would phone me, of all people, could you? He might have called anyone, even perhaps the police. How bizarre that would have been! The most likely suspect in the murder of his wife phones the police on his wife’s cell phone—the very phone that has been used for months to suggest she is alive—to request information about the scene of the crime.
“But, in any event, he did not phone the police from Ellen’s phone. It was the trace on his line that led the police directly to the most likely suspect: the missing woman’s husband.
“You had to know the press would have a heyday with this, the perfect target. How could anyone help but think Erik had sought out the man with whom his wife presumably disappeared, and done him in? And after September eleventh, it is so easy to vilify anyone of Middle Eastern extraction. The public would support Erik’s wrath even as he was condemned for it legally.”
Removing the last three petals from the rose, Olga looked Liz directly in the eye with an expression that could only be read as challenging. Still, she said nothing.
“You don’t think I can produce any evidence, do you? Well, you’re wrong there. Remember, Erik phoned me—the one journalist who’s more concerned with the truth than with a sensational headline about a jealous husband, the one reporter who knows and cares about your daughter. When you found out he was on the line with me, you interrupted him, didn’t you? I heard him say ‘Oh!’ as if he’d been distracted. But it was the start of your name, wasn’t it? He was beginning to say ‘Olga’.”
Olga’s face came alive as she made a disdainful snort.
“You’re right, Olga. That would never convince anyone in a court of law. But, you see, there’s something else to worry about. After I received that cell-phone call from Erik, I went to see him. He showed me his cell phone. Yes, his cell phone, not your daughter’s. Sure, he might have hidden hers. But I know he didn’t, because when Ali came out to the summerhouse yesterday to revisit it after all those years, he found it in the hiding place there. He started to make a call on it—later, when he realized he’d nearly used an important piece of evidence to make a call to his boss, he said he “almost blew it.” But he stopped dialing when he recognized your voice calling to the dog.
“He replaced the phone and hid up there, behind the summerhouse. And he saw you retrieve the phone and heave it, like a dog’s toy, into the lake. Only this time you had Hershey on a leash, didn’t you? The dog strained to leap into the lake, but you did not let him.”
Olga picked up the pair of rose cutters. Centering the rose stem between two small bites in the blades, she closed the scissors and pulled the flowerless stem between them, shearing off the thorns, one by one. With little sounds like time ticking away, they hit the cold slate floor between Olga and her challenger.
“With Erik in police custody and the convincing suggestion made that he had been using the phone all along, that phone had no more usefulness to you. You’re counting on a jury to find such ramblings mere speculation. But that’s not all, Olga. I, too, was there yesterday afternoon, photographing two young women you would call ‘coeds’ in the topiary garden. You didn’t see me? Well, I saw you. And my heart went out to you when one of the young women called out the name ‘Ellen.’ But the photograph I took of those girls tells another story. You see, you and Hershey appear in that photo, too. Hershey is straining at the leash as the ‘toy’—no, Olga, the cell phone you had just tossed—is frozen by the camera in its trajectory into Lake Waban. I have no doubt police divers will be able to find it there.”
Olga considered the rose stem. Placing it between the flattened fingers of her two hands, she rolled it back and forth. A bit of thorn must have remained on it to prick her. At long last, the flower arranger flinched. And her blood flowed.
“The place where the bodies are, near Plymouth, that’s not the scene of the murder, is it? You killed your daughter in her own kitchen when you came upon her with the swarthy-skinned man. You feared Ellen would confront you—even broadcast to others—the secret you’d hidden for decades: Her father and your husband—Karl Swenson—was a pervert. When you saw the cabbie, you thought he was the boy, all grown up now, who witnessed your husband’s masturbating over his own daughter. The same boy who phoned you on the anniversary of that awful day, year after year after year after year in December. So you killed them both, Olga.
“I wouldn’t have thought you capable of murder, Olga. Not until I realized you were cruelly capable of feeding Veronica false hope by making that call on her birthday. And not until I saw that you would stoop to implicate the only parent Veronica has left. Not until I saw you cared more about your husband’s reputation and your own freedom than about the well-being of your granddaughter. I thought you loved your granddaughter.”
In a sudden movement, and with a sound like a snarl, Olga shoved Liz into the doorjamb and reached past the several coats that were hanging on the wall. She wheeled around, training a rifle on Liz.