Chapter 6 — A Crime Scene, Not a Funeral

The detective who came was a lean, quiet man named Novak, and he took one slow look around my living room — the casket, the wreaths, the family in a hurry — and he stopped the funeral where it stood and declared the third floor a potential crime scene.

Forensics went up the stairs my brother had been so eager to reach first.

They found screws stripped and torn out of the doorframe of the master bedroom.

They found the deadbolt gouged and scarred where something had worked at it from the wrong side.

They found broken glass swept hastily under the dresser.

Someone had tried to clean that room — tried, in the narrow window they’d had, to make it look like nothing had happened in it — and they had done the job the way frightened people do, missing everything that mattered.

Down in the living room I sat with Bryn in my lap while a soft-voiced woman from the county spoke with her, and my daughter, without being led, without being asked the way you’d have to ask a child who was inventing, told it again the same as she’d told me: the door kicked in, her mother screaming, her grandmother taking the phone, the lock turning from the outside.

My mother kept saying it, over and over, to anyone who would hold still.

“She was unstable.