Strangers at the Feast (34 page)

“The key is,” O’Shea continued, “it’s different from state to state. Funny little nitpicky things. For instance, in Connecticut, the law gets into the difference between reasonable physical force and deadly force. A whole section of this law specifies that a man has to reasonably believe a trespasser intends to commit a violent crime. So if a
trespasser wasn’t inside the premises, and wasn’t waving a weapon, there would have to be verbal threats of violence. Anyway, it was an interesting show.”

They arrived at the station and O’Shea guided the family up the stairs into the waiting room. Their jittery energy had faded, and they quietly settled into the chairs.

He gave Gavin Olson a little while for what he’d explained to sink in, and by the time O’Shea announced, “Now I’ll need you to come down the hall and tell me the events at the house. I just need the chronology. I’ll be recording it. Understand?” The man nodded.

As O’Shea read him his Miranda rights, his family looked up as if he were being led to slaughter. “This is just so everyone is clear, and everyone is protected. This shouldn’t take long.”

In just under thirty minutes, O’Shea got the details of the day, beginning with the broken oven in Mamaroneck, leading up to the moment, at the end of dinner, when they heard footsteps upstairs. Gavin Olson did his part describing how the second boy charged the house. He spoke flatly, with little of the embellishment that often accompanied false statements.

“He threatened us verbally,” he stated, then cleared his throat. “From the yard, he threatened to kill us. As did the boy inside the house. I felt it my duty to protect my family.”

When he led Gavin Olson back into the waiting room, his family looked up anxiously. The youngest child had wrapped herself in a red checkered blanket and was splayed across her father’s lap.

“So folks, now I’ll need to bring you into the interrogation room one by one, just to go over the sequence of things and to get your statements on record. We need to determine how the perps entered the house, if anyone has a connection to the dead boys. Completely routine. Mrs. Olson, wanna start us off?” he said to the grandmother. She was staring dully at the clipboards hanging on the Most Wanted board; she seemed a pale marble statue of a woman. “Mrs. Olson?”

Finally, the redheaded woman stood: Ginny Olson, the professor
from Mamaroneck. She still hadn’t uncrossed her arms. “Detective, I think we’ll phone a lawyer first.”

After all that. Who knew how long it would be before their lawyer showed? Meanwhile, O’Shea was stuck there waiting for the call from Captain Briggs. He fixed himself a cold plate of what was left of the buffet—all the white meat had been picked over, the gravy had turned to gel, and the stuffing had stiffened into globs.

But he had a big appetite. The Olsons turned one by one to watch him eat, with an almost meditative fascination, and O’Shea realized he was chewing with his mouth open, sucking noisily at bits of turkey caught in his teeth. His wife often complained about this, and now he grabbed a dusty napkin from a drawer and quietly wiped his mouth.

Finally the phone rang and it was Briggs. “I’m headed your way soon. What’d you get out of them?”

O’Shea stepped into the next room. “Zilch. First grandpa confesses, I get his statement. Everything’s fine. But the rest lawyered up.”

“I can see why,” Briggs said. “We’ve got some odd shit here.”

DOUGLAS

As soon as Douglas heard the intruder get close, he sprang into the foyer and swung the candlestick. It caught the man in the chest—he was tall—and he doubled over long enough for Douglas to get his arms around his back and wrestle him to the floor. His father, wielding his own candlestick, struck at the intruder’s legs. Across the slick floor, sliding and flailing, Douglas grappled to get the man in a Nelson hold and took an elbow to his jaw.

He was aware of his father running along the foyer swinging both candlesticks, looking to see if other intruders were coming, but he did not see Denise go past.

Her voice took him by surprise. At first it sounded like
Please,
until she said it again, louder, insistently, nearly shrieking through the house as she descended the stairs: “Freeze.”

At the sight of the gun in her hand, Douglas jumped off the man. Denise moved fast down the stairs, charging toward the figure on the floor. She moved so close Douglas thought the man might grab her ankles.

“Shoot!” coughed Douglas, scrambling back against the wall.

The intruder slowly raised his hands over his head and began to sit up. Douglas saw his wife hesitate.

“I’m not—” the man began.

“Denise!”

Denise closed her eyes and the shot rang out. The circle of blood on the man’s black shirt was at first imperceptible. But the sudden curling
of his body signaled to Douglas the bullet had struck. The intruder writhed, releasing an almost childlike whimper, and smeared blood across the white floor as he kicked one leg rhythmically in an attempt to get a foothold. He turned his face frantically from side to side, as though he couldn’t quite see, at which point Douglas realized he had some kind of stocking on his face, flattening his nose and lips grotesquely. Saliva bubbled through the mesh of beige fabric.

Douglas stood frozen for a moment as his father set the candlesticks on the floor and removed his belt. His father pinned the flailing intruder beneath his knee and fastened the man’s arms, tugging tightly at the belt ends.

Denise had not moved from where she had pulled the trigger; she stood on the bottom stair, the gun still pointed directly at the man.

The children emerged from the dining room, one by one. Behind them, with blank eyes, a disheveled Ginny took in the bound intruder, the blood on the floor. She made a dazed attempt to stop the children, pawing at their shoulders. But of their own accord, the children stopped in their tracks when they saw their mother holding a gun.

Douglas pried the gun from her fingers. “I’m going to check the rest of the house.” For a moment, her arm remained raised and he gently set it at her side. “It’s okay, his hands are tied.”

“Be careful,” Denise mumbled.

As he slowly mounted the stairs, they were all silent, until Ginny’s voice seemed to bounce off the ceiling.

“Wait, where the hell’s Mom?”

DETECTIVE BILL O’SHEA

Briggs explained the strange evidentiary details: when forensics dusted the gun, instead of fingerprints they found a perfumed lotion, like from a hand wipe. The coroner, called in for a preliminary exam, determined that the boy inside the house had been shot while lying prone. The boy outside, although struck with two bullets, had been fired at four times.

Briggs had gone through the entire house and determined what the spray paint was about: the word
Blight
covered the upstairs bedrooms. They identified the bodies, and neither boy had priors. One attended Jefferson High, where Denise Olson worked. The other had gone there but transferred a month earlier. Two blocks from the house, a van with a dead engine from a reading light that was left on was recovered in the woods.

O’Shea hung up, uneasy that the gun had been wiped down.

He looked at the family, still waiting on their lawyer. Exhaustion showed on their faces, but was there also some hint of fear? O’Shea decided he’d toss the group a softball to see who might swing. “You don’t have to answer, but you might want to churn over if the word
blight
means anything to you all.”

Denise Olson was the only one to stir; she turned and glared at her husband. O’Shea could see in her face that the adrenaline was wearing off, that an emotion other than shock had taken hold of her. “It means something to my husband,” she said.
The first signs of defection,
thought O’Shea. Someone always broke from the pack.

“Which I will explain when our lawyer is here,” her husband answered.

Finally, at about ten past ten, Todd from the
Advocate
called.

“Happy Thanksgiving, William, my man,” he said. Todd had just graduated from Princeton and was always trying to win O’Shea’s respect with his diligent but awkward use of street lingo. “What’re our stats for today, my man?”

O’Shea ran down the disorderlies, the aggravated assaults, and finally said they had a B&E in the North Side with two dead perps.

“Killed?” he asked excitedly. “Licensed or unlicensed weapon?”

“Licensed.” O’Shea could hear boredom blowing out of Todd’s mouth. The kid had set his career sights higher than the police blotter; he wanted to be covering citywide scandals. He didn’t realize he was getting the first whiff of a story that would fill the papers for weeks.

Come on,
thought O’Shea,
ask me how many slugs were in the bodies, ask me where the bodies were, ask me who was white and who was black.

Instead, Todd asked, “You getting off duty soon?”

O’Shea couldn’t resist giving a young person a shot at something big. The story was going to break, no matter what.

“As soon as the captain gets back from the scene.”

What a bone he threw! The captain at the scene! Wake up, kid!

“Okay, my man. Don’t keep the old lady waiting up too late.”

“Todd,” O’Shea said. “You gotta get yourself a real job.”

GINNY

Ginny opened the pantry door and tugged on the light. In the far corner, her mother lay sideways, hugging her knees, a bucket over her head. She lay completely still, as though sleeping, except that from beneath the bucket came a steady, breathy whimper.

“Mom, it’s me.” Ginny crouched and stroked her mother’s hip. “Mom, are you okay?”

From beneath the bucket, in a muted voice that sounded faraway, a voice that sounded like it came through speakers, came one desperate word: “Ginny?”

Her mother unclasped her knees, swung her arms about confusedly, and pushed herself up. Slowly, Ginny lifted the bucket off, revealing a shiny and horrifying version of her mother’s face. Rivulets of mascara and blush marbled her cheeks, orange flecks of vomit clung to her chin. Her sweat-flattened hair made her head look small, disturbingly fragile. Her mother closed her eyes firmly in disbelief, then opened them.

“Everybody is fine, Mom. You can come out.”

As Ginny began to stand, her mother gripped her wrist and tugged her down with astonishing force. “Oh, Ginny, sit with me.” Then she whispered, “Please.”

Ginny settled at her side and stroked her shoulder, while her mother wrung her hands through the memory of what had happened, or what had almost happened. As they sat, occasionally her head twitched, or she released a guttural moan. Then, in a rush of affection, she touched Ginny’s
chin, fingers tapping Ginny’s cheeks like a blind person. Unsure of how to calm her mother, Ginny held still until her mother seemed convinced of her presence, then she tore open a package of cocktail napkins and wiped the edges of her mother’s mouth. Ginny finally took her mother’s hand and guided her, slowly, into the kitchen. Her mother flinched at the bright lights. Her eyes darted nervously around the stools and the center island as she wobbled across the marble floor. They finally passed into the dining room, where Priya and her cousins, seated at the table, stared blankly at the upturned pitchers and broken plates.

“The poor dears.” Her mother looked at the children and pressed her fingers to her lips. “What was done to them?”

Ginny, still exhausted from the shock—whose stomach reeled at the sight of Priya’s dress and the memory of the intruder’s footsteps—found herself snapping, “Nothing, Mom. Everyone’s okay.”

But her mother stood still for a moment and began to gnaw her bottom lip; as they finally entered the foyer, she let out a gasp. Blood had begun to pool beneath the bound man. Her mother shook her head, grabbed Ginny’s elbow.

“Where’s Douglas?”

“He’s upstairs, making sure everything is okay.”

“Douglas!” she screamed. She bent forward, using her entire torso to harness her voice. “Douglas, where are you? Get down here right this instant!” Her chest heaved almost asthmatically from the exertion, and she gripped the banister. Over her shoulder, she kept her eyes trained on the bleeding man, until Douglas’s footfalls on the stairs above summoned her attention.

“Get down here!” she shrieked.

But Douglas descended slowly, his face ashen.

“Was anyone up there?” Ginny asked.

He shook his head, set the gun down on the entryway table, and stared hard at the man he’d been struggling with minutes earlier. He sat on an upholstered bench beside the door, leaning down so that his face was inches from the bleeding man’s.

“You
know
me?” Douglas asked.

The man sucked down saliva, wrestling noisily with his own tongue. “I’m not… afraid of you.”

He spoke like a man with a swollen lip, or a lisp, but something else in the voice struck Ginny as strange. Douglas, too, seemed curious. He kneeled down and reached for the panty hose. Peeling them back, inch by inch, he revealed the neck, the chin, and, eventually, the frightened eyes of a face that looked to be no more than seventeen.

Douglas gripped his own head. “Oh, bloody Jesus.”

The boy huffed, holding back tears. His eyes moved around the foyer, from face to face. He tightened his mouth, struggled to get the words out. “I’m not afraid. I’m… not,” the boy began, but the effort of speaking seemed to set off a spasm of pain. He grunted and his legs bucked, knocking Douglas momentarily off balance.

As Ginny watched Douglas steady himself, she became aware of a sound coming from outside the house, a yelping, high-pitched baying. Douglas, her father, and Denise all fell silent as the distant sounds took on the shape of words.

Whoop, whoop, whoop. Look at me! Whoop, whoop, whoop, see if you can catch me!

Slowly, Ginny opened the front door, where a boy with a stocking over his head zigzagged across the lawn, waving his arms like a drowning man signaling for help. He lunged from side to side, dancelike and frantic, then stiffened his arms into propellers, dipped his head, and sprinted in a vague figure eight.