“Not murder,” he says. “Ms. Chapman didn’t kill your husband, Mrs. Solberg,” the detective categorically states. He’s inexpressive, staring straight-faced at me. He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t so much as blink.
“You know who did, then?” I plead, desperate for him to tell me without a shadow of a doubt who was behind the wheel of my mother’s car when it ran Nick off the side of the road. If not Izzy, then it must have been my mother. Perhaps my first inclination was right as I sat on my sofa this morning with Maisie on my lap, watching the images of the black Chevrolet load on the computer screen. Perhaps it was my mother after all who slipped behind the wheel of the car, driving off down the road alone because driving, like riding a bike or climbing the stairs or playing the piano, is one of those procedural memories that require no conscious thought and therefore are far less easy to forget. She was trying to get home. To the home she still believes is her home. Is wasn’t intentional, but a case of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. She could have easily taken out another driver, another vehicle on the road, and only by chance was it Nick. A tough break. Bad luck.
That’s it, then. My mother has killed Nick. It wasn’t Izzy. It was my mother all along, though all these presumptions, all this conjecture, is enough to make me go slowly insane. I’m trapped inside a fun house whereby everything is skewed, and my center of gravity is thrown off by centrifugal force. The floor beneath my feet moves, tilting me from left to right, up and down, threatening to plummet my body entirely through a trapdoor so that I’ll soon disappear completely. Everything is distorted; I can’t make sense of what I see.
I need closure. Acceptance.
I need to know with absolute certainty who killed Nick.
“There’s something I need to show you,” the detective says, leaving the room and returning moments later with a laptop in his hands. He sets it on the table before me, typing in a password to bring it to life.
“This won’t be easy to watch,” he says.
“What is it?” I ask as a video loads and a grainy thumbnail appears, and all I can make out are a fenced field and trees.
“The quality isn’t the best,” he apologizes, explaining to me about a man and a woman, a Mr. and Mrs. Konig who live just off Harvey Road in a home that overlooks the road. He shows me a snapshot on his phone. A yellow farmhouse with trim the color of rust. I recognize it immediately, the lemon chiffon farmhouse with its dogwood tree in full bloom. I remember Maisie sitting beneath that tree, her shorts getting soaked by the marshy lawn in the aftermath of a storm.
“I spoke to the couple that lives there,” I say.
“Yes,” says Detective Kaufman. “Mr. and Mrs. Konig. They remember you.”
I nod my head, thinking of the kind couple. I didn’t know their names at the time, but now I do. “They weren’t home when the accident happened. They didn’t see a thing.”
“That’s right,” the detective agrees, and I recall what a great view they would have had from the farmhouse’s front porch, how conceivably they could have watched the whole scene play out before their eyes if only they’d have been home. “A strange thing happened,” he says, setting his phone aside as he strokes his mustache and beard, looking intently at me. “Mr. Konig stopped by the station this morning. There was some vandalism on his property, you see. Spray paint on the barn doors, damage to the horse pasture.”
“What a shame,” I say, though the compassion is lacking from my voice because Mr. and Mrs. Konig suffered vandalism while I’ve lost my spouse. There’s a difference, you see.
“It is,” says Detective Kaufman. “Teenage pranksters, but as you can imagine, the Konigs were upset.”
“I can imagine,” I say, and though I feel sorry for the couple, this doesn’t have a thing to do with me. The detective is stalling, finding a way to tell me he can’t look into Nick’s murder because he’s too busy investigating the defacement of the Konig property. I’m about to make a scene, to demand to speak to someone other than Detective Kaufman, to another detective, one with a higher pay grade, or a captain or deputy chief. “What does this possibly have to do with Nick’s murder?” I ask, sounding incredulous because I am.
“Thankfully for the Konigs, they have a surveillance camera on the exterior of their home. Backing up to the main road, and in such an uninhabited part of town, this isn’t the first time this has occurred on their property. Vandalism. Mr. Konig had the camera installed a few months ago so that he could catch the perpetrators, and he did. We have them on video,” he says, motioning to the thumbnail on the screen before me, a bird’s-eye view of the Konig yard. “Now we just need to identify them,” Detective Kaufman adds, and I look to him in question, my cheeks flaming red. He can’t possibly think I have something to do with the vandalism to the Konig property. Can he?
I suck in my breath. I try not to cry. “You think I know who they are?” I ask, but he shakes his head and tells me no.
“No, Mrs. Solberg. No, I don’t. You see,” he says, handing me a tissue so that I can blot at my rheumy eyes, “the surveillance camera records up to thirty days of continuous feed. After this latest incident, Mr. Konig sat down to watch the recordings, hoping to catch the person or people who trashed his yard. But as it turns out,” he says, pushing Play on the video and sitting back to watch with me, “he found much more than he was looking for.”
The video begins. It’s gritty, the images pixelated, but I can make it out nonetheless. Some techie has no doubt zoomed in on the scene the detective wants me to see, so that the Konig property becomes an afterthought, and instead I’m focused on a lonely, deserted road. The angle of the video is odd, so that the street slopes downward at forty-five degrees. It’s a color video, the trees and the grass a fading green, the street a gray concrete. The wind swooshes through the leaves of the trees, and though the video lacks volume, I imagine I hear it, the rustle of the parched and papery leaves in the blistering air as a squirrel gathers a fallen nut in its greedy little mouth and darts quickly across the street without a sideward glance in either direction. Though the houses themselves have been cropped from view, I spy a mailbox, the edge of a driveway, refuse in the grass. A sagging wooden fence. There isn’t a single car traveling on the road. For nearly two and a half minutes there’s nothing to see.
The date stamp in the corner reads June 23. The day that Nick died.
The time is 5:47 p.m.