Chapter 2: The Mother’s Secret

That severed head rolling to the ground, and Old Mr. Barnes next door beneath the hydrangeas—both kept their silence for five long years.

All we had was a two-year-old boy who survived the carnage, and the odd bundles of money the suspect sent, sporadically, to his eighty-year-old mother each year.

And the second clue? We didn’t get that until five years after the crime.

Mrs. Barnes, feeling the end creeping closer, frail and tired, wanted to see her son one last time. So she came to us and said, “My son—he comes to give me money every year.”

Her voice trembled like the last note of a church hymn fading on a Sunday morning. The picture of her, clutching a faded shawl around her bony shoulders, is something I still see when I close my eyes.