The man began to run . . . his wife and children cried out to him. “Come back! Come home!” The man put his fingers in his ears and ran on.
—Paul Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress
WE IMMEDIATELY BOMBARDED Norma with questions, but she brushed them off, intent on getting the bag of sunflower seeds open and spread on the ground.
“Most of the crows have gone south, but a few chose these woods for a winter roost. I haven’t fed them since before the storm. I hope they didn’t get too hungry.”
As she stepped out of the circle, the crows began to caw. Norma looked skyward, smiling. “Yes, they’re still here.”
Norma quickly repaired the rope, then led us away from the circle so the crows could feed. On the way back to the trailer, Brainert introduced himself with a heartfelt apology.
“I . . . We’re all terribly sorry to have invaded your privacy—”
“Yes,” I explained. “We were looking for some hint as to where you might have gone. We feared that . . . Well, that something bad had happened to you.”
“And of course,” Brainert continued, “until I read your manuscript, I had no idea that you were—are!—one of America’s literary lights.”
Norma brushed off the compliment the way she initially brushed off our questions, offering only a pragmatic reply.
“Well, I’m glad it was you who found my trailer. The last time I was stuck, my home was looted. They stole my radio, my camera, even my typewriter—and I had just purchased the parts to fix it.”
Back at the campsite, Norma unwound her scarf, took off her hat, and shook out her pixie cut.
“We don’t understand why you ran,” I said. “Me, Fiona, Sadie—even Deputy Chief Franzetti—we all knew you didn’t steal those jewels. We’re terribly sorry we invaded your private life. We were looking for answers, that’s all.”
For the first time since I’d known this jovial woman, I heard a note of heavy sadness in her voice.
“Answers? I’ve been looking for answers for nine years,” Norma said, then the cloud lifted, and she smiled. “But you shouldn’t have to wait that long, and it’s about time I told someone.”
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, while Brainert, Seymour, and I sat on folding chairs in a semicircle around her, Norma revealed her story.
“You ask me why I ran from the Finch Inn,” Norma began. “I can only think that it was instinct. Animal instinct, a psychologist might call it. You see, I’ve been running for nearly a decade.”
The morning sun rose in a near-cloudless sky, dappling the muddy waters of Millstone Creek with hues of yellow and orange. In the woods, the crows cawed, grateful for the bounty of sunflower seeds their loving caretaker had brought them.
Their provider sat in the teardrop trailer’s open door, clearly relieved to be home at last. The disposable cup of instant coffee Norma sipped from steamed in the morning chill. The mysterious manuscript sat in her lap. As she spoke, she fiddled with its crinkled pages.
“Ten years ago, I had a different name and a temporary job working as a domestic at the Ballard family’s Palm Beach mansion. The family made its fortune in pharmaceuticals, turning a chain of drugstores into a manufacturing empire. But when I joined the staff, the family was in turmoil. Julian Ballard Sr. had recently passed and the business he founded was in disarray.”
Norma shrugged. “Of course, I didn’t know any of this when I took the job. I have never been a part of that world. Never have, and never will. I was a housekeeper, that’s all.
“I worked conscientiously for a few weeks and impressed the head butler when I cleaned and polished a neglected Victorian picture frame in the dining room. He set me to work restoring the picture frames in the library, as well. He had workmen take the paintings down and line them up along one wall—there were over a dozen. I was supplied with tools, paint remover, varnish, and a month to complete the work.”
Norma smiled. “The library was lovely; you should have seen it. It held an astounding collection of books, some of them ancient. I could have spent my whole lifetime there, reading them all.
“Even better, it was the kind of work I adore. Alone with my hands and some wonderful object I can make beautiful, my mind was free to wander, and the troubles in this world vanished, like that.”
She snapped her fingers. “But it wasn’t long before my solitude was shattered, and that’s where the trouble began.”
“On my fourth day of work, a young man came into the library to study. He introduced himself as Julian and told me he was working toward his bachelor’s degree. Though the academic year was over, he was taking summer courses to speed up the degree process. He was a young man in a hurry, and I soon found out why.”
Norma told us that man was Julian Ballard Jr. the oldest son of the billionaire who’d founded Ballard Pharmaceuticals. Julian was destined to inherit the business when he came of age, and he wanted to be ready. He was twenty, just a year shy of his “coronation.”
“Over the next few days, I cleaned and varnished, and Julian studied. We began to chat. He was fifteen years younger than me, smart and sensitive, but troubled, too. Julian had a demon he could not control—an addiction to alcohol, which began, he confessed to me, when he was just twelve years old and sneaking drinks from the family’s bar.
“As the days progressed, he opened up more and more. Julian told me he never knew his real mother, and he had nothing but contempt for his ‘trophy-wife stepmother,’ as he put it. But Julian reserved most of his disgust for his half brother, Hal.”
Norma explained that she did not know the stepmother but thought Julian a good judge of character, so she took him at his word. Hal was another story.
“My brushes with Hal were always unpleasant. The staff hated him as much as they feared his temper. He was arrogant, abusive, spiteful, and just plain mean. Unfortunately, Hal’s mother—Julian’s hated trophy wife—treated her child like a prince. And if you were to ask me, that was the problem,” Norma said.
“Though Julian’s half brother Hal was barely sixteen, he had already gotten into minor scrapes with the law. He even assaulted a teacher at his exclusive prep school—an incident that cost the family almost a million dollars to cover up.”
Norma admitted Julian was no saint, either.
“When he drank—which was only on weekends because he kept a strict study schedule—Julian became angry and sullen. On several occasions he loudly vowed to cut his stepmother and half brother out of the family fortune as soon as he took control.”
With a shake of her head, Norma paused to finish her coffee.
“Eventually my assignment in the library ended, but Julian and I didn’t stop meeting there to talk. I was under the impression that he saw me as an older sister, or perhaps even a mother figure.”
Norma spat a bitter laugh. “I was wrong on both counts.”
“One Friday night in mid-August, after Julian quarreled with his stepmother and followed it up with too many shots of bourbon, he met me in the library. Only that night, he didn’t want to talk . . . Julian wanted something else.”
Visibly distressed, Norma fell silent again, this time to compose herself. When she spoke, her voice was low, her tone sad.
“I suppose what happened next was technically a sexual assault, but the whole thing was pretty pathetic. I easily fended off his advances, and Julian ended up tearfully apologizing.
“He got sick and dizzy after that, and I cleaned up his mess and helped him stretch out on the library couch. I covered him with my sweater, then I left the mansion and returned to my van, which was parked a few miles away at a trailer camp.
“The next morning, on the radio, I heard the horrible news. Poor Julian Ballard, my Julian, had been murdered, bludgeoned to death in the library with a fireplace poker. The news reporter said evidence had been recovered at the scene which implicated a member of the domestic staff.”