During the time that (as a favor to his sister) Police Chief Samuel Upton spent in the library as a Human Book, Anita Butler, a piano teacher who had “checked him out,” asked a very specific question about his work. Although usually close-mouthed around acquaintances – and always so with strangers – he forgot himself and answered from his heart.

“Chief,” Anita had begun respectfully, “as a law enforcement professional, do you find that over the years, victims of violent crimes blend together in your mind and lose their individuality, or do some of them stand out, larger, sadder, and more tragic than the rest?”

The real Madison Heights police chief, Samuel later mused, would have said that each case is different and he treats all crime victims the same. Then he would have changed the subject. He did, in fact, begin to answer that way. But midway through the first sentence, he looked directly at Anita Butler and said, “Genesee Fallows.”

Later, when he described the library incident to Gillian Pond, his fiancée, she told him this story.

Years ago, she said, she was scheduled to talk to military spouses about her experiences as a war correspondent in Iraq. The combination of a flu epidemic and a hurricane had winnowed her audience down to almost zero. She stood behind the podium and stared out at a virtually empty theater. Then she walked off the stage, took a seat among the few people in her audience and, without planning to do so, talked about what she had endured and observed. She told them things that she had never told anyone else and described scenes of horror that she had not known were still preying on her mind.

That night, she explained to Samuel, an indefinable intimacy permeated the atmosphere, and four people who had entered the auditorium as strangers briefly became friends. One short hour later, they went their separate ways, each in possession of bits and pieces of the others’ souls.

Chief Upton nodded. What Gillian experienced was a variation on a theme of the very same thing that had happened to him at the Madison Heights Library. First, he had responded to Anita’s question by singling out Genesee Fallows. Then he’d begun to talk about the GPS Murder case.

“I will never forget,” he said, “the afternoon we discovered her body. It was hot, muggy, and oppressive, with a hint of honeysuckle in the air.”

He described the twelve-year-old’s bedroom: A pink ballet slipper hung from the knob of a small dresser drawer. There was also a battered baseball mitt on her neatly-made bed; an order form for Girl Scout cookies on her windowsill; a tennis racquet leaning against a chair; and a butterfly net on a bookshelf.

The police chief recalled how, when he was searching the bedroom, Mrs. Fallows walked in carrying a photograph of Genesee taken a week before her death. The heartbroken mother recalled that her daughter loved snakes and had wanted to be a herpetologist when she grew up.

In the photo, Genesee was holding out a long, thin garter snake toward the camera, and impishly grinning from ear to ear. She had enormous brown eyes and a pug nose. Her cut-off jeans revealed freckled knees and girlishly thin mosquito-bitten legs.

She looked as if she were made out of sunlight and joy. She looked as if she would live forever.

Chief Samuel Upton told his little group of listeners that that picture, that smile, and those freckled knees had haunted him from the moment he first saw them, and continued to haunt him to this day. Then he abruptly stopped talking.

For about thirty seconds, nobody said anything. A chair creaked. A man coughed. The woman with the spiky black hair stood up. Her eyes were feverish and her voice was harsh. “What did you think of Olivia Olmstead?” she demanded.

The chief turned to look at her. He studied her face, and his brow furrowed as he reached back in his mind for a memory. Then his forehead relaxed, and when he spoke again, his eyes were kind.

“Olivia Olmstead was Marty Kulik’s alibi,” he said softly. “Her testimony disheartened me.”

“Why?”

“Because I was never able to convince her that she was a victim, too. And because I’ve always felt that I let Olivia down.”

The spiky-haired woman said nothing. She continued to glare at the chief, her hands clenched into fists, and her fierce eyes challenged the compassion that she saw on his face.

For at least a minute, neither looked away. Then the woman’s eyes lost their intensity, her fists unclenched, and her hands fell to her side. When she spoke again, her voice was sorrowful and her expression was bereft.

“Victim?” she murmured helplessly.

“Victim,” Sam Upton repeated with heavy emphasis on the word.

“Three weeks before Genesee Fallows was murdered,” he went on, “Olivia Olmstead turned eighteen. She had been involved with Marty Kulik for two years. A forty-year-old man sexually involved with an under-aged teen is not having a love affair; he is committing statutory rape. I will always regret I couldn’t arrest him for that, too.”

Anita Butler, who had initiated the conversation, raised her hand. “Why couldn’t you arrest him, Chief?”

Samuel Upton answered the piano teacher’s question, but his eyes were riveted on the woman with the spiky hair. “Because Olivia refused to testify against Marty. Because I had no corroborating physical evidence. And because – wrongheaded as it may now seem – the poor child believed that Marty Kulik was Romeo and that she was Juliet.”

The spiky haired woman continued to stare. She rose to her feet and stood, motionless and speechless. Five seconds ticked by. Ten seconds. Fifteen. She tore her eyes away from Samuel Upton, looked down at her hands, and shook her head. When she raised her eyes again, she met the eyes of the police chief and, almost imperceptibly, she nodded. Then, realizing that the attention of all in the small group was upon her, she sat down.

Chief Upton turned away. One by one, he met the eyes of the other people at the table.

“Any more questions?”

Continued next Friday …

Chapter 5 of 8. See previous chapters beginning on Friday, April 12. Or check link to author archive…https://www.evesun.com/authors/31

Copyright © Shelly Reuben, 2024. Shelly Reuben’s books have been nominated for Edgar, Prometheus, and Falcon awards. For more about her writing, visit www.shellyreuben.com