The headline finished on the screen of my laptop: Girlfriend Questioned In Fatal Fire, Released When Witness Changes Story. I read the article through to the last line, and then I read the next one in the folder, and the next. Two little boys, ages four and six, had died in a house on Harrison Street in Davenport in March of 2017. Their father had escaped with burns. The woman who lived with them had been seen leaving ten minutes before the fire started. She called herself Brenda Kowal. Her picture stood in front of the courthouse in sunglasses, long dark hair, a calm mouth.
Owen sat across from me at the kitchen table with his arms folded. Fourteen years old, and he looked like a small detective. He said, “Mom found her in October. She was trying to find out why Dad was acting weird about money. She typed the phone number of Brandi into a website and a different name came up.” Hazel knelt on a chair and swung her feet. She had stacked her ribbons in the order of the rainbow and asked me quietly if she could have a glass of milk. I got it for her with hands that did not feel like mine.
The brass key with the green cover opened a storage unit in Hermantown, the girls found out when I called the facility. Jenna had rented it in November under her maiden name and paid for six months in cash. Owen and I drove up in the whiteout the next morning, following a plow. The unit was ten feet square. Inside was a card table, a folding chair, a space heater, and a file box. On top of the box was a note in the hand of my sister. Amy, if you are reading this, I am sorry. I have tried to do this carefully.
A mother who sees the danger first will spend her last months building a path out of it for the children she cannot take herself.
The box held eleven months of work. Jenna had written to the Davenport police and obtained a copy of the closed case. She had spoken by phone with the detective who ran it, a man named Pruitt, now retired, who told her he had always believed the woman did it and had been unable to prove it. She had found the surviving father, a man named Lyle Beck, living in Cedar Rapids in a care center, still scarred, and he had agreed to a recorded statement. His voice was tired and plain. He said the woman had been the one who bought the space heaters. He said she had been angry about the insurance.
There was a ledger. Jenna had tracked the pattern across three states. In 2011, in Illinois, a widower had died in a fall and the woman had moved in within a month. In 2014, in Wisconsin, a house had burned with a father inside. In 2017, in Iowa, the two boys. Each time the woman changed her name, her hair, and her story, and each time she had been named on a life insurance policy or an account within weeks. The ledger listed her aliases in a neat column. Brandi Lund was the newest. My sister had written, in the margin, She is looking at Kurt now. Kurt has a policy.
I called the detective Jenna had spoken with, and he did not hesitate. He phoned the state police that afternoon. By evening we had two investigators in my apartment, a woman from Minnesota and a tall man from the Iowa bureau, with a laptop open on my counter. They photographed everything in the box. They played the statement of Lyle Beck. At one point the man set down his coffee and said, quietly, “We have been looking for this woman for six years.” The woman beside him did not speak. She was looking at Hazel.
They arrested her on Thursday morning at a motel in Superior, Wisconsin, two miles from the bridge, in the red SUV, with Kurt asleep in the room next door. She had a travel bag, three phones, and a folder of forms from a life insurance company that listed Kurt as the insured. Kurt came out in his socks. When the agents told him what the woman was, his face went blank and gray, and he sat down on the curb in the cold. He did not say a word until they asked him where his children were.
The county took his custody that same week, and he did not contest it. He signed over temporary guardianship to me in the lobby of the courthouse, in pen, with a hand that shook so badly that I had to hold the page. He said, “Amy, I did not know.” I said I believed that. I said it did not change what he had done in the hall of the VFW. He nodded and wiped his eyes with his cuff. He asked if he could write them. I said that depended on them.
The trial of the woman began in the spring. Lyle Beck was wheeled into the courtroom in Davenport and testified from a chair, and the jury listened to every word. Owen was not required to appear, but he insisted on sitting in the back row with me. When the verdict was read, guilty on three counts of murder, the woman looked once at the gallery. I thought I saw her search for the face of Hazel. I put my arm around Owen, and he leaned into my side, and neither of us said anything.
Hazel has her own room in my apartment now, with a window on the park. She keeps the shoebox on the shelf above her bed, and the ribbons are lined up in the order of the rainbow again. Sometimes at night she asks me if her mother is proud of her. I tell her yes, a thousand times over. Then she asks if I will braid her hair in the morning, with the purple one, and I say I will, and I do, and her small face in the mirror looks very much like Jenna.