I wondered, though, if she’d had any luck in the private messages. Or if any of the men that commented publicly had messaged her privately. Unfortunately, the only way to access those messages would be to log into her account. And I had no way of doing that.
I tucked my legs underneath me on the couch and stared at the screen, tapping my fingers on the laptop as I thought. I pushed the cursor so it hovered over the Sign In button and clicked.
I wasn’t signing myself back in. But, after a few failed attempts at different combinations of user names and passwords, I realized I wasn’t going to be signing in as Helen, either.
I closed the laptop and set it back on the ottoman. I stretched my legs out in front of me and chewed my lip, thinking. If I’d had to guess right then and there, I would’ve bet everything I had that Helen had something to do with Olaf’s death. Everything pointed in her direction. I wasn’t sure if she’d done it on purpose or if it had been an accident or how it had happened, but she was the only one with anything negative to say about Olaf. Everyone else seemed to love him. He didn’t have an enemy in town. He’d been pleasant to everyone, including the wife he wanted to divorce.
Even as I thought this, though, the doubts rose like the floodwaters during Spring. Why would she have wanted him dead? Why would she have brought him here, to my house? How would she have gotten him in the house.
I didn’t have the answers to any of those questions and I wasn’t sure I ever would.
But there was one thing I knew for sure.
Helen hadn’t wanted that divorce.
Olaf did.
THIRTY
“I’ve gotta do some makeup, but as long as you don’t mind, I can talk, sure,” Olga said to me the next morning.
I’d tossed and turned all night, puzzled by the conflicting stories I had about Olaf. I didn’t think anyone knew him better than his sister, or at the very least, cared more about him. So, after getting Emily off to school and dropping the kids at a special 4-H project meeting, I drove over to the mortuary to talk some more with Olga.
I followed her down the main hallways, but instead of going upstairs this time, we turned left and entered a large square room with two long tables in the center.
There was a body on one of them.
“Sally Gaadenstern,” Olga said. She snapped on a pair of latex gloves. “Had a heart attack a few days ago, trying to start her snow blower. Husband was inside snoring away.” She shook her head. “He was pretty broken up about it.”
Sally Gaadenstern’s eyes were closed and her skin had a waxy look to it. A sheet was pulled up to her neck and if I hadn’t known better, I would’ve just assumed she was sleeping.
Olga opened a bag sitting on a small metal tray. She pulled out a bottle of foundation and a small makeup sponge. She unscrewed the lid and tilted the bottle.
“So,” she said. She dabbed the sponge at the woman’s face.
“Is that…make-up?” I asked.
Olga wrinkled her brow. “Duh. What else would I be using?”
“I…I don’t know. I just thought maybe you needed to use something different. You know, since she’s…not alive.”
Olga nodded. “Oh, we do. You can’t just use any old make-up on embalmed bodies. Most make-up works with the body’s heat.” She chuckled. “And she doesn’t have any, if you know what I mean.”
She rubbed the foundation in. “I like airbrush foundation myself. Much easier to get good coverage. But ours broke and Larry hasn’t gotten around to ordering a new one. Feel like I’m back in the Stone Age here.”
I assumed Larry worked at the funeral home but I decided not to ask. “Have the police been to talk to you?” I asked, trying to focus on her and not the dead body on the table.
She nodded as she brushed at Sally’s face. “Oh, you betcha. That Detective Hanborn is one tough cookie. A little rough to look at, but she’s been around a bunch, asking me all sorts of stuff.”
As much as I disliked the detective, it was good to know she was doing her job.
“Did she say whether she had any leads?” I asked.
Olga studied Sally’s face intently, then pulled out a round container of blush. She took the round applicator and worked it into Sally’s cheeks, dusting it across her forehead and jawline. The white, waxy hue was slowly fading. “Not really. She was pretty tight-lipped.” Olga frowned. “I tried to get information out of her, but she said it wasn’t any of my business.”
I nodded in sympathy. At least I wasn’t the only one who’d been reprimanded by the surly detective.
Look, I have kind of a weird question,” I said.
Olga lifted her eyes. “About Sally? Ask away, I love talking about my job.”
My eyes widened in horror. “No,” I said quickly. “It’s about your brother.”
Olga waited, the container of blush steady in her hand.
“Did Olaf have any, like, enemies?”
She stowed the blush and pulled out a small container of dark powder. She dipped her pinky finger into the powder and blew off the excess before dusting it in the creases of Sally’s face. Under her nose, a little on her chin, and Sally’s transformation continued. I couldn’t help it; I watched in complete and utter fascination.
“Can’t say that he did, no.”
“So no one that he didn’t get along with?” I pressed. “Or someone that he might’ve not gotten along with.”
She squinted at Sally and leaned over her, studying her intently. “My brother got along with everyone” she said firmly. “It was probably his biggest flaw.”
“How so?”
“The man couldn’t say no,” Olga explained. Lip liner was next. She brought her face within inches of Sally’s, her fingers steady as she traced the pencil along the woman’s closed mouth. “To anyone,” she continued. “Someone asked for help, he said yes. Someone asked for ten dollars, he said yes. Someone asked for a ride down to Rochester, he said yes.” She shook her head. “He just didn’t have it in him to say no.”
That sounded more like the man I’d met at dinner.
“Everyone liked my brother,” Olga said. She straightened and looked at Sally, tilting her head sideways as she studied her work. “And it was like that even when were kids. He always had lots of friends.” She smiled and tossed the lip liner back in the bag. “I used to get mad at him for that. We made a list of our friends one day. I had maybe seven? Olaf listed nearly a hundred kids.” She laughed. “I punched him in the ear.”
Her affection for her brother seemed genuine, not forced in any way. I pictured them as young kids, with Olaf looking out for his awkward younger sister.
“So then it’s fair to say that really the only person he didn’t get along with was Helen?” I asked.
Her smile faded and she nodded. “That’s more than fair to say.”
“But he must’ve gotten along with her at some point if they got married.”
“Oh sure, sure,” Olga said. She unearthed a lipstick and unscrewed the cap. “They met right after college. Helen seemed nice enough then. She’s from North Dakota and moved here because she got a job working for the cable company. Olaf worked there, too—until he couldn’t stand working in an office anymore.
Collecting dead animals for a taxidermist was about as far as you could get from an office job, so it seemed clear that Olaf must’ve gotten really tired of office work.
“So they met there at work,” she said, carefully applying the lipstick to Sally’s mouth. “They dated for a year or so, I think, and she seemed nice. At the time,” she clarified. “She came to family picnics, went ice fishing with us, attended church. They got married and then things went south pretty fast.”
“How did they go south?”
Olga walked around to the other side of the table, still studying Sally’s face. “For one, Olaf wanted to have kids. Helen told him she did, too, but turned out she didn’t really want to.” She glanced up at me. “Think she told him she did just so he’d marry her.”