Chapter 6: The Interview Room
Gwen’s second interview lasted three hours and, according to Ruiz’s careful summary, produced more lawyer than light.
I was not in the room. I sat on a plastic chair in a corridor that smelled of coffee and floor wax, my nephew beside me with a bottle of water I did not drink. Every time the door opened I expected a miracle or a verdict. Neither arrived. What arrived was Ruiz with her notebook closed and her face arranged into professional neutrality.
“She’s maintaining that the inheritance talk was family noise, not threat,” Ruiz said. “She denies knowing the collector. She admits debts in that period. She admits she was angry Clara controlled the Mercer account. Anger isn’t a bridge.”
“Clara’s letter is a bridge,” I said.
“Clara’s letter is a statement from a woman who feared something. We’re treating it that way.” Ruiz sat for a moment as if her feet hurt. “The associate’s story wobbles when we press for who was on the bridge. He wants immunity conversations he’s not going to get from me over a vending machine. This is slow.”
Slow I understood. Forty years had been slow. What I did not understand was how to go back to my nephew’s guest room and pretend the house was only real estate.
That afternoon the department allowed me, with an officer present, to listen to the archived recording of Gwen’s original missing-persons call. Her voice came through the tin of old tape: high, broken, Andrew, they never got here, the roast is drying out, I’m scared. I had believed every syllable. On the plastic chair I listened for a crack in the performance and could not be sure I found one. Con artists and terrified sisters can share a pitch.
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My nephew drove me home—to the house we were still not selling. On the porch he asked whether I wanted him to take the children’s remaining boxes to storage. I said leave the shelves. Empty rooms with shelves are still rooms where names lived. He nodded and mowed the lawn without being asked. Kindness without interrogation. I had forgotten it existed outside of memory.
Night settled. I placed Clara’s first letter under a clear weight on the kitchen table, not as a shrine, as a working document. Don’t trust Gwen. The ink had not faded as much as I had. I slept in the recliner because the bedroom still felt like a question I could not answer in the dark.
