Which meant I had an empty house that I could attack.
I didn’t love housework. But I needed something to take my mind off of Olga and Helen and Elliott and the cast of characters who’d suddenly taken center stage in the my life.
I swept and mopped the kitchen. I gathered baskets full of laundry and took them down to the basement to wash, making sure I avoided looking at the newly identified coal chute. I went back upstairs and filled a bucket with soapy water and got down on my hands and knees and scrubbed the stairs. And the wood floors.
The kids came inside at noon on the dot and I fed them warmed-up beef stew and bread. Nick declined the stew and ate half a loaf bread instead, his crusts piling up on his plate. I opened my mouth to comment, then stopped. He’d expand his eating horizons eventually. I hoped.
They finished their lunch by eating the last of the cookies, chattering about the improvements they’d made to the track and boasting over who’d gone the farthest. Grace lifted her bangs and showed me her forehead. There was a small red mark just above her eyebrow.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“I hit the trampoline with my head,” she said. “So I went the farthest!”
I stared at her pupils for a second, trying to remember what I was supposed to look for as signs of a concussion. I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary and made a mental note to tell Jake that we needed to move the trampoline further away from the house. When the snow melted, of course. Which might have to wait until August.
The kids dumped their dishes in the sink and suited back up and headed outside. I wiped the puddles of melted snow off the kitchen floor and then went back to my mental list of chores. I dusted every horizontal surface in the house and finally batted down the cobwebs decorating the bathroom ceiling. I retrieved laundry and folded it and put everything away.
I glanced at the clock mounted in the hallway just outside of the upstairs bedrooms. It was two o’clock. I’d managed to keep myself occupied with something other than the mystery of the man in my coal chute for six solid hours. I nodded, a satisfied smile on my face, but it disappeared quickly.
Because I was done cleaning…and that meant I was bound to start thinking about it. And thinking usually turned into digging.
I went downstairs and peeked out the kitchen window. The kids were still in the backyard, their coats and hats bright against the white snow. Grace was sitting on a sled and Sophie was pulling her through the yard. Will was in a tree, a rope dangling from his hands. Sophie pulled the sled in his direction and Grace waved at him, pointing to the rope and then a spot on the back of the sled. I took a deep breath and looked away.
Exploring, I told myself. That’s what they were doing. Experimenting. Learning.
I just hoped a trip to the emergency room wouldn’t be a part of today’s lesson plans.
I plopped down on the couch and picked up the laptop that was sitting on the ottoman. I opened the web browser and tried not to think about Detective Hanborn’s comments the previous night. I didn’t like that she’d told me I was getting in the way and that I needed to step back. I felt like I had the right to dig; after all, Olaf had been found in my house. And even though I had started asking questions and poking around on my own, the initial confrontations—from both Olga and Helen—had not started with me. I’d be a little more discreet with my digging, I decided. But I wasn’t going to quit.
I stared at the screen for a minute, the cursor blinking in the search box. I started typing and hit the return key. The home page for Around The Corner loaded. It was the most logical place to return to. After all, it had helped me find Stuff It and it was the one place I knew I could find information about Olaf that was from him and not filtered through anyone else.
I found Olaf’s page again and read through it carefully, sifting through everything that was on there. But, after nearly a half an hour, I realized I wasn’t seeing anything new. Everything I read were things I already knew or didn’t give me any new information to go on. I clicked around a bit, but I just kept rereading the same things over and over.
And then I thought about Helen.
If everything I’d heard from Olga and Elliott were true, she’d spent a long time trying to get his attention. When that backfired, she’d seemingly taken a different tact, trying to make him jealous. I wondered if she’d taken that further than just flirting with Elliott Cornelius.
My fingers hovered over the keyboard for a second. I bit my lip and typed her name into the search bar on the ATC web site.
And there she was.
I stared at her profile picture. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a chunky, cable-knit sweater, a matching cap perched on her head. She really was an attractive woman. Deep green eyes. Strong cheekbones. A nice smile. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she looked like a really nice person.
I scrolled through her page. Lots of photos of her looking happy and active. She described herself as a woman who had extricated herself from a toxic marriage and who was looking to see what was out there and meet some new people. As I scrolled down the page, I looked through some of the conversations that she hadn’t put behind a private wall. On Around The Corner, you could comment on anyone’s page, much like on Facebook, and that person could respond. You usually didn’t see much more than a hello or safe, benign comments. ‘I like your that picture of you with your dog,’ or ‘I like that restaurant, too’ or ‘We don’t live too far from each other.’ At least that was what I’d remembered from my brief stint on the site.
Helen’s was a bit different, though.
There were plenty of men who’d taken a moment to say hello and make a benign introductory comment.
And she’d responded to all of them.
Which in and of itself wasn’t all that weird. But it was the way she responded that made me sit up and take notice.
A man named Jason D. with a beard and a goofy smile commented that he liked the picture of her on her bike. He asked if she was a mountain biker.
“Well, I used to be,” Helen responded. “But it was something I used to do with my ex-husband and I’ve tried to make sure I stay away from anything that reminds me of him and bikes. Bike paths definitely remind me that I made a huge mistake marrying that dunderhead!”
Jason D. did not respond.
A man named Ken W. commented on a T-shirt she was wearing in one of her photos. It had Las Vegas emblazoned across the front in sparkly rhinestones.
“Not anymore,” she wrote. “My ex-husband took me there a couple of years ago and he spent the entire time ogling the cocktail waitresses while I waited for him to notice me! He never did so I dumped his rear end!”
Ken W. did not respond.
A man named Walt K. noted that she was wearing a Twins hat in one photo and asked if she went to a lot of games.
“I used to,” Helen wrote. “But my ex-husband was really the baseball fan. We’d spend hours at the stadium while he chased foul balls and ate too much food that made him too fat. So I’m not sure you’d call me a baseball fan as much as you would call me a fan of divorcing a baseball fan!”
Surprisingly, Walt K. did not respond.
All of her responses were like that, bringing up her ex-husband and denigrating him in some way. She made Olaf look like a moron in half of her comments and like an egotistical jerk in the other half. If I hadn’t met him, I would’ve thought he was the biggest jerk that had ever walked the planet.
But I had met him and I knew that wasn’t true. Or I’d been fooled by the greatest actor of our time. I didn’t think Olaf was an actor. And I didn’t think Helen had a clue as to what she was doing on Around The Corner.
If she had truly been interested in meeting someone, she’d gone about it the wrong way. She spent her time being unbelievably negative and she focusing almost exclusively on her ex-husband—two massive no-no’s for people reentering the dating pool. It wasn’t a coincidence that no one had engaged her in conversation. She came off like she was still hung up on her ex-husband and I was pretty sure that no guy wanted to fight that fight.