The Best American Mystery Stories 2005

But Del and Billie Jean sent Carlos to the church school. By then Danielle had graduated, and Marya, to pursue her basketball career, was boarding with a family in Colorado Springs. Carlos was in ninth grade, and when he was taken out of the public school, we heard about it. Carlos was the star the other children looked to, the one whose existence made theirs hopeful. He was the boy about whom they would talk the rest of their lives. “I knew this boy once,” they’d say, “Carlos Olshansky, who was the most beautiful boy in the world.”

And then he was gone.

We all admit that was one of the signs. When he was sent to that school we knew something was wrong, but we couldn’t see it clearly. Perhaps we were afraid to look. The social service agencies, the sheriff for all his vigilance, the community volunteers — the people you’d expect to observe such things — didn’t notice anything particularly wrong. Carlos went to the church school. It was the Olshanskys’ choice. They had the right to send him there.

Of course, there were small details we thought about later — Danielle’s missed appointment at the dentist, Billie Jean’s not showing up a day here or there at work (though she called in sick each time), Marya’s coming home for two weeks in the middle of basketball season. But what should we have read into these things? What did they mean, separately or taken together? A family in chaos, a dissolving of a psyche, a catastrophe about to unfold? Besides, we had our own lives to lead, our own grocery shopping, mortgages to pay, children to raise.

It was the fire through the snow that first caught Frieda Darius’s attention out her kitchen window. She was making soup for Ivo, laid up in bed. It was February, a Thursday, early dark. The wind was hurling snowflakes sideways, and when she saw the flames, she thought the pinon trees were on fire. Ivo couldn’t get out of bed, so she investigated in her Jeep, getting close enough to see the Olshanskys’ trailer burning.

By the time the fire trucks got there — they carried their own water — most of the trailer had melted. There were two bodies burned beyond recognition in the kitchen, and one in the neighboring bedroom. The fire chief said chicken grease had ignited on the propane stove. But when the forensics experts identified the bodies — Billie Jean and Danielle in the kitchen, and Marya in the nearer bedroom — we learned they’d all been shot beforehand.

We couldn’t find Del or Carlos. The truck wasn’t there, so the first theory was that Del had done it and had taken off with his boy. The sheriff put out an all-points bulletin on Del and the Dodge, but almost before the APB had circulated, Claudia Reese, the rural mailperson, found Del’s truck, with Del’s body in it, parked in front of the Jeffersons’ house on County Road 268. He was slumped against the passenger door with a single gunshot wound in his forehead.

The sheriff dusted the wheel for fingerprints, but it was cold, and whoever shot Del was probably wearing gloves. The window on the driver’s side was open, and snow had blown into the cab. Whatever footprints there might have been were obliterated by snow, and underneath the snow, the ground was frozen rock-hard. Being on the passenger side, Del could have been shot anywhere and driven there, but of course then there would have had to have been at least two of them, two perpetrators, because they’d have needed another car to get away.

The Jeffersons’ ranch house was the only house within a quarter of a mile of the truck, the original homestead on the mesa, where a five-acre subdivision had been recently approved. Emily Jefferson was home that night — Larry was in Pueblo at a seminar on computer programming — but she hadn’t seen or heard anything. It had been windy and snowy, and she’d built a fire in the stove.

Random chance: That was the next predominant theory. A couple of psychos had turned off the highway — that explained the extra car — and the first place they’d come to was the Olshanskys’. They’d wanted money. In what was left of the trailer there were signs of a hurried search. In the back bedroom, drawers had been ripped open, and a purse was opened. But why kill everyone? Why was Del in his truck two miles away? Why had they kidnapped Carlos? Or had they killed him too? We searched for Carlos’s body in a half-mile radius around the trailer, but found nothing but deer scat and rabbit tracks in the snow.

So there we were without clues. No insight. Nothing. All that weekend we talked about the Olshanskys — who they were, why they’d come to town, why anyone would want to kill them. So far as we could ascertain, they were ordinary people, like other families everywhere, nothing special.