The Girl in the Woods (24 page)

“She told you this?” Kendall asked.

“Yeah, she did. I told you my mom isn’t like other people. She didn’t want to end up back in Gila County with her mom and the rest of the trailer trash that she grew up with. She had—we all had—a really great life in Scottsdale. I cried and cried about leaving there for here. Mom told me, she
promised
, it wouldn’t be for long.”

Birdy could see that Ruby knew her mother was devious, but her last remarks indicated something she wondered if the teen quite understood. How was it that Jennifer knew they wouldn’t be in Washington long? The explanation was clear to her. Ted had been a mark. He’d been snared in one of Jennifer’s traps. Killing him was a means to an end. When Jennifer was convicted, and Birdy was sure she would be, she would face the death penalty. Kitsap County more so than others in Washington had a prosecutor who believed that certain killers shouldn’t be shown any mercy.

Jennifer Lake Drysdale Roberts was easily going to qualify for the death row club.

“Tell us about when your stepfather, Ted, died,” Birdy said. “What happened?”

Ruby’s tears started anew. “I don’t like thinking about it.”

“We need to know,” Kendall said. “What happened?”

Ruby looked down at the floor as she spoke. “My mom got me up. It was around four a.m. She told me that she needed my help. I was like a zombie. It had been a late night and I wanted to stay in bed. But I got up. She made me. She took me into Ted’s room. She’d moved him into the guest room like a month ago. She turned on the light and told me to check to see if he was breathing.”

“And did you, Ruby, did you check?” Kendall asked.

The girl looked up “Yeah. I did. He wasn’t. I felt his chest but it wasn’t moving at all. It wasn’t going, you know, up and down, like a living person’s would.”

The dryer room at Desert Enchantment was warm. Too warm. But there was no way anyone was going to leave that space. The tumbling noise of the machinery was like a drum, padding each word with emphasis.

“What happened next?” Kendall asked.

“Okay,” Ruby said. “This is really hard to talk about. I mean, this is my mom I’m talking about, but it’s also something I did. I don’t want to go to jail.”

“You didn’t give him any poison, did you?” Kendall asked.

She shook her head. “Oh no. Never. But maybe you’ll think I was an accessory because I helped her. But I had no choice.”

“Telling the truth like you’re doing, you’ll be fine,” Kendall said. “I promise.”

Ruby, for the first time, looked a little relieved. She was still trembling a little, and obviously shook up, but Kendall’s words seemed to give her the courage to carry on—to do the right thing. The teenager swallowed hard.

This was not easy. Despite the poster promoting an after-tan lotion that hung by the dryers, life was not a day at the beach. Ruby’s day certainly hadn’t been.

“My mom was in a tizzy,” she said. “She said she didn’t know how she was going to explain why, if he was so sick, she didn’t check on him all the time. Or have a nurse. She gave me some washcloths that she had got wet and soapy and told me I had to help her clean him up. He’d thrown up in bed. It was totally gross but I did it. She told me that we needed to go back to bed and then get up and act like it just happened.”

One person had been left out of the conversation.

“What about your brother?” Kendall asked.

Ruby acknowledged the weirdness of her brother being so absent from the action with a shake of her head. “Micah slept through the whole thing. He could sleep through anything.”

“Did he know about what was happening?”

Ruby thought he did. “Yeah, but not as much.”

“So did you go back to bed?” Kendall asked. “Is that what you did?”

Ruby looked away from the detective as one of the dryers pinged. She went over and twisted a knob for an additional ten minutes.

“Yeah, the next morning Mom fixed breakfast,” she said. “She even made Ted a plate of food although he was dead and she ate some of it to make it look like, you know, it just happened. But really he’d been dead for at least three hours. It’s all so crazy.”

“You’re going to need to come to the sheriff’s department so we can put this all in writing.”

“Look, I don’t know. You mean that I would have to testify against my mom?”

Kendall looked deep into Ruby’s eyes. “You have to do what’s right, Ruby.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think I can. My mom can be scary.”

“You can do it. You can be stronger than her. The truth is very powerful.”

“What about my brother?”

“It depends on what he knows.”

“Only enough to know that there’s something seriously wrong with our mother.”

The trio returned to the front desk. Birdy unlocked the deadbolt and pulled the OPEN sign light back on. Ruby went to the restroom to pull herself together. She’d promised to come to the office and give a statement the next day, after school. She’d convince Micah to come with her. In other cases, Kendall would have insisted she come right at that moment. But with Birdy there witnessing the interview, there was backup for everything Ruby had said. Ruby came out of the restroom with her hair in a ponytail and an application of fresh makeup. She looked better, but not great.

“Are you going to be all right?” Birdy asked.

“I think so,” Ruby said. “I have to work. I promised my boss. And, really, I don’t have any money. The house is paid off, but I don’t know if I can stay there or what. Ted’s family hasn’t come around yet. But if they do, they’re probably going to want it back.”

Birdy and Kendall sat in Kendall’s car in the parking lot in front of Desert Enchantment to debrief.

“I didn’t see that coming,” Kendall said. “At least not that easily. She just spilled her guts out.”

“It’s a lot to hold inside,” Birdy said. “She’s been carrying that around like a cancer and she just wants to get away from all the ugliness that her mother foisted on her and her brother.”

“Can you imagine having a mother like that?”

Birdy didn’t answer. She did have a mother a little like that. Not as bad, but one who was immensely cruel.

“In some ways, I’m not completely stunned by what she said,” Birdy said. “What she said makes perfect sense. The autopsy showed no food in his stomach, but Jennifer said she’d fed him French toast and orange marmalade.”

The windows started to fog and Kendall turned on the defroster.

“The timeline matches what Molly said too,” Kendall said.

“The liver temp was a little off too, not so much that I’d have red flagged it. Rigor hadn’t occurred yet either. That takes anywhere from two to four hours. I remember that he’d stiffened up considerably during the autopsy.”

“Unusual?” Kendall asked.

“Nothing’s really unusual,” Birdy went on. “There are always reasons for variance in nature. Outside of cicadas every seventeen years in the Northeast and the swallows in March in Capistrano, the rhythm can be erratic.”

“I feel sorry for her,” Kendall said.

“I do too. My mom was bad, but not like hers.”

“She knows about your mother.”

Birdy opened the car door and looked toward her Prius. “I guess that surprised me more than anything,” she said. “Elan will have some explaining to do.”

T
he turnout for Theodore Allen Roberts’s delayed-for-too-many-reasons-to-list memorial service at St. Gabriel’s in Port Orchard was red, white, and blue. None of the forty-two-year-old’s immediate family was in attendance—his wife, of course, was in jail. His stepchildren were absent at the request of their mother who was concerned about the media bashing that had started to follow her. Ted’s sister, Megan Casper from Boise, was there as were Molly O’Rourke and elderly neighbors Lena and Sam. The coffin was draped in an enormous flag. After the ceremony two of Ted’s friends from the navy folded it into a triangle and handed it to Megan.

A newly hired reporter for the
Kitsap Sun
waited for Megan and Molly outside the chapel. He was looking for a short comment from someone close to Ted that he could use as proof to his editor that he’d showed up to cover the service.

He asked the dumbest question that anyone covering a funeral or memorial service could ask. And he got an earful.

“How do you feel about everything that’s happened?”

Megan, a silver-haired woman in her late forties, let him have it.

“How do I feel? That my brother married a ‘black widow’? That he was murdered? How do I feel about
that
?”

The reporter’s face turned apple red. “Yeah, sorry.”

“Fine,” Ted’s sister said. “I’m feeling a million things right now. I’m not a liar. My brother and I were not close and I didn’t have the . . . let’s say
opportunity
to meet Jennifer. I came to settle a few things with his estate, but the whole trip has been a complete bust.”

The young reporter was embarrassed, but he knew enough to ask a follow-up question. He’d only had this job for a month and he didn’t want to lose it.

“What’s going on with his estate?” he asked.

She glared at him while Molly O’Rourke stood there, not sure what to say.

“How old are you?” Megan asked.

The reporter switched on an eager-beaver attitude. “Twenty-three next month,” he said.

Megan waved her finger at him. “First of all, never say what your age is next month,” she said. “It makes you sound like a four-year-old saying you’re ‘four and a half.’ ”

He blinked. “Thanks, I guess.”

“You can quote me on that,” she said.

He wrote that down in his notebook.

“What about the estate though?” he asked.

While mourners, mostly navy men and women, filed past and acknowledged her with sympathetic looks, Megan clutched the flag.

“That’s the story you should be working on,” she said.

The kid thanked her. “I’ll get on it,” he said.

Ted’s sister turned to Molly, who was standing there with her jaw wide open.

“Nice to meet you, Molly. I’m glad you got to know my brother. I never did. He had issues. We all do.”

She watched the reporter get in what she was sure was a hand-me-down car from his parents.

“I’m glad I live in Idaho,” she said. “We don’t put up with this kind of bullshit.”

 

 

The next day, Birdy Waterman unfurled her rolled-up newspaper. There had been suspicious activity at the submarine base in Bangor, up in the northern part of the county. Neither the paper, nor the base spokeswoman, indicated that it was a terrorist threat, but everything like that seemed to be.

At the bottom of the front page, her eyes were seared by a headline:

She read and dialed Kendall at the same time.

“Did you see the paper?” Birdy asked.

“Huh? No,” Kendall said. “I haven’t even made it to the office. Steven has a job interview. I’m driving him to the airport.”

Ordinarily Birdy would have asked all about that. But not now. She didn’t even tell Kendall to wish him well.

“Listen to this,” she said.

“ ‘An investigation by the
Sun
has revealed that Jennifer Roberts, who is being held for the murder of her husband, might indirectly reap more than one million dollars—even if convicted of the crime.’ ”

Kendall piped up. “That can’t be true.”

“Let me finish,” Birdy said, now skimming. “Says that Jennifer filed insurance claims the morning her husband died. Says there are three ‘known’ policies each worth between two hundred and fifty and three hundred and thirty grand.”

“I thought there were only two,” the detective said. “A third is a bonus, but doesn’t change our case.”

“Right, Kendall, but here’s what’s so fascinating. The article says that Jennifer is the primary beneficiary and in the event that she is unable to claim the money her children will get the cash.”

“But he didn’t adopt them,” Kendall said.

“Doesn’t matter. His estate passes to her, hers passes to them. Listen to this quote from Ted Roberts’s sister Megan Casper.

“ ‘I think it is a travesty that someone could marry someone just to kill them and have their children get the insurance money. I mean, really? Any woman or man for that matter who wants to send their kid to college just has to kill their spouse. This is all right? This is America. Makes me sick.’ ”

“It makes me sick too,” Kendall said.

“You may need to pull over to throw up,” Birdy said.

“What now?”

“Listen to this quote from Ruby Lake.”

“I’m not going to like this, am I?”

“Good guess,” Birdy said, deadpan.

“ ‘When reached at her home in Port Orchard last night Ruby Lake said that she was not testifying against her mother despite rumors that had been circulating around members of law enforcement.

“ ‘ “I said some things to the detectives and they took it the wrong way. My mom is not going to prison for something she didn’t do.” ’ ”

“Just wow,” Kendall said.

Birdy agreed completely. “Yeah.”

“I’m heading over to the school to see Ruby,” Kendall said.

“Where are you now?” asked Birdy.

“Just got off the Narrows Bridge.”

“You might pass her coming the other way,” Birdy said. “Here’s the closing line of the article.

“ ‘Lake, 18, says she’s returning to Arizona to stay with family until her mother’s trial this fall.

“ ‘ “I don’t want to be harassed anymore,” she said.’ ”

“Birdy, you’re going to have to try to catch her before she leaves. See why she’s flip-flopped on us.”

“Shouldn’t a deputy do that?” Birdy asked. “Maybe Gary?”

The last encounter with Ruby in the dryer room had made things a little personal when Ruby invoked knowledge of Birdy’s relationship with her mother. Birdy would have preferred not to see her again. Mostly because she knew the girl was right. Birdy didn’t have her own house in order and she knew it. Her relationships with her mother and sister were messed up.

“We don’t have time for that. You know the case better than anyone. Certainly better than Gary.”

“He’s a very good deputy, Kendall.”

“I didn’t say he wasn’t. But he’s not you. I’m counting on you. We’re a team on this case, remember?”

Birdy couldn’t argue against that. That was the whole crux of their working together—improving relations between the departments.

“I’ll go,” she said without much enthusiasm. “I guess I have to, but this team work is wearing me out. I have an old man in the chiller waiting for me. Tell Steven good luck. I forgot to ask. Where’s the interview?”

“Portland,” Kendall said.

Birdy didn’t like that at all. “You won’t be moving there, will you?”

“No,” Kendall said. “That’s the hiring office. You’re stuck with me. Steven says hi back. Bye.”