I did not drive to the house on West Twenty Sixth Street. I drove to the Erie Police Department, with the compact disc in a padded envelope on the passenger seat and my steno tape folded in my purse, thirty seven feet of paper covered in the small black marks of the last four minutes of the life of my mother. The desk sergeant was a young man with a crew cut. I said, “I am Denise Kowalczyk, a court stenographer. I want to report a murder.” He looked at me, and then at the envelope. Then he picked up the telephone, and his voice changed.
The detective who met me was a heavyset woman in her fifties named Roxanne Tuttle, with a notebook already open. She listened to the disc once in an interview room, her eyes closed, her arms folded across her chest. When the voice of Glenn came on, saying, Just sign it, Helen, her jaw tightened. When my mother said, Carol knows what you did to the truck of Daddy, she opened her eyes. She said, “Mrs. Kowalczyk, I have heard a lot of recordings. This is the first I have heard where the victim names her killer in her last breath.”
I told her about my sister. About the telephone call, and the whisper, and the will in the hand of Glenn that was not the one we signed. Tuttle did not waste a second. She called a judge at home. She called the county coroner, and then she called a sergeant named Pruitt in the state police, and within the hour, a warrant had been drawn up for the house on West Twenty Sixth Street. “We go now,” she said. “Before he has time to burn a single page.” I rode in the back seat of her unmarked car, gripping my purse in both hands, my heart going like a gavel.
What a mother says with her last breath is more faithful than any witness and more patient than any lie.
They went in through the front door with the pastor of Saint Mark standing helplessly on the porch, a casserole in his hands. Glenn was in the kitchen in his bowling shirt with a cup of coffee, and he turned with a look of such mild, injured surprise that I almost laughed. Carol was in the pantry. I found her there among the cans of beans with her knees pulled up and her hands over her ears, the way she used to hide from thunderstorms when we were girls. When she saw me she began to sob, and she said, “I am so sorry, Denny. I am so sorry.”
She told the whole thing to Detective Tuttle on the kitchen floor, in pieces. In 2012, Glenn had been dating her for two months. Daddy had caught him stealing parts from the railroad yard and threatened to report him. The week before the accident, Glenn did a brake job on the pickup. Carol saw him do it. She saw him cut something with a small wrench and wrap it with black tape. She had not understood what she was seeing until the night Daddy died, and then it was too late, and she was in love, and frightened, and silent. For twelve years.
“I thought if I never said it aloud, it would not be real,” she said. I did not say anything for a long time. I had never in my life been so angry at my sister. I had also never been so sorry for her. A woman can live a dozen years beside a man she knows to be a murderer, and tell herself every morning that the coffee is hot and the sky is blue. Then one day she hears the voice of her mother on a recording, and the whole lie falls in on her like a roof. I helped her stand up. I did not let go of her hand.
The state police exhumed my father in November. The pickup itself had been sold for scrap in 2013, but the brake line, wrapped in black tape, was found in a coffee can at the back of the garage of Glenn, where he had kept it, God knows why, for twelve years. A mechanic from the Pennsylvania crime laboratory held it up under a lamp in the courtroom and said, “This line was cut with a pair of side cutters. A clean cut. Not a failure.” Glenn Pawlak stared at his hands. He pleaded not guilty. The jury took ninety minutes.
He was convicted of the murder of Helen Kowalczyk, and of the murder of Walter Kowalczyk, and of attempted fraud. The judge, a gray haired man with a deep slow voice, gave him two life sentences with no possibility of parole. Carol testified for the prosecution. She was given eighteen months for failure to report a crime, suspended, with probation and counseling. She sat in the courtroom in her black dress and did not look at Glenn once. When the verdict came, she folded forward like a leaf and I held her, in front of everyone, and the jury looked away.
The will that Glenn had wanted our mother to sign turned out to be a forgery he had drawn up himself, leaving the house to Carol and everything else to him. The real will, written in the careful organist handwriting of my mother, was found in her hymnal at the church. She had left the house to both of us, and her piano to the choir, and a note to be read aloud. It said only: Girls, be kind to each other. I read it to Carol in the empty living room, and we sat on the floor beneath the piano, the way we did when we were small, and listened to the silence.
We play the organ recording on Sundays now, my sister and I, the old church tape that Mama made in 1985. It is not a pretty piece. It is a plain Bach chorale, played slowly, with one wrong note near the end that she always laughed about. I type the notes in my head, the way I type everything. And when we come to the wrong one, Carol and I both smile, and I say, “There it is.” And she says, “There she is.” And the house, for the first time in a year, feels warm.