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.

I wondered, though, if she’d had any luck in the private messages. Or if any of the men that commented publicly had messaged her privately. Unfortunately, the only way to access those messages would be to log into her account. And I had no way of doing that.

I tucked my legs underneath me on the couch and stared at the screen, tapping my fingers on the laptop as I thought.  I pushed the cursor so it hovered over the Sign In button and clicked.

I wasn’t signing myself back in. But, after a few failed attempts at different combinations of user names and passwords, I realized I wasn’t going to be signing in as Helen, either.

I closed the laptop and set it back on the ottoman. I stretched my legs out in front of me and chewed my lip, thinking. If I’d had to guess right then and there, I would’ve bet everything I had that Helen had something to do with Olaf’s death. Everything pointed in her direction. I wasn’t sure if she’d done it on purpose or if it had been an accident or how it had happened, but she was the only one with anything negative to say about Olaf. Everyone else seemed to love him. He didn’t have an enemy in town. He’d been pleasant to everyone, including the wife he wanted to divorce.

Even as I thought this, though, the doubts rose like the floodwaters during Spring. Why would she have wanted him dead? Why would she have brought him here, to my house? How would she have gotten him in the house.

I didn’t have the answers to any of those questions and I wasn’t sure I ever would.

But there was one thing I knew for sure.

Helen hadn’t wanted that divorce.

Olaf did.

THIRTY

“I’ve gotta do some makeup, but as long as you don’t mind, I can talk, sure,” Olga said to me the next morning.

I’d tossed and turned all night, puzzled by the conflicting stories I had about Olaf. I didn’t think anyone knew him better than his sister, or at the very least, cared more about him. So, after getting Emily off to school and dropping the kids at a special 4-H project meeting, I drove over to the mortuary to talk some more with Olga.

I followed her down the main hallways, but instead of going upstairs this time, we turned left and entered a large square room with two long tables in the center.

There was a body on one of them.

“Sally Gaadenstern,” Olga said. She snapped on a pair of latex gloves. “Had a heart attack a few days ago, trying to start her snow blower. Husband was inside snoring away.” She shook her head. “He was pretty broken up about it.”

Sally Gaadenstern’s eyes were closed and her skin had a waxy look to it. A sheet was pulled up to her neck and if I hadn’t known better, I would’ve just assumed she was sleeping.

Olga opened a bag sitting on a small metal tray. She pulled out a bottle of foundation and a small makeup sponge. She unscrewed the lid and tilted the bottle.

“So,” she said. She dabbed the sponge at the woman’s face.

“Is that…make-up?” I asked.

Olga wrinkled her brow. “Duh. What else would I be using?”

“I…I don’t know. I just thought maybe you needed to use something different. You know, since she’s…not alive.”

Olga nodded. “Oh, we do. You can’t just use any old make-up on embalmed bodies. Most make-up works with the body’s heat.” She chuckled. “And she doesn’t have any, if you know what I mean.”

She rubbed the foundation in. “I like airbrush foundation myself. Much easier to get good coverage. But ours broke and Larry hasn’t gotten around to ordering a new one. Feel like I’m back in the Stone Age here.”

I assumed Larry worked at the funeral home but I decided not to ask. “Have the police been to talk to you?” I asked, trying to focus on her and not the dead body on the table.

She nodded as she brushed at Sally’s face. “Oh, you betcha. That Detective Hanborn is one tough cookie. A little rough to look at, but she’s been around a bunch, asking me all sorts of stuff.”

As much as I disliked the detective, it was good to know she was doing her job.

“Did she say whether she had any leads?” I asked.

Olga studied Sally’s face intently, then pulled out a round container of blush. She took the round applicator and worked it into Sally’s cheeks, dusting it across her forehead and jawline. The white, waxy hue was slowly fading. “Not really. She was pretty tight-lipped.” Olga frowned. “I tried to get information out of her, but she said it wasn’t any of my business.”