Part 4 — My Daughters Were Killed in a Yogurt Shop, but When the Police Brought Their Belongings, the Investigator’s Face Changed

The telephone almost fell from my hand.

“My daughter’s voice?” I asked.

“Yes. And I have not yet listened to the recording to the end.”

“Do not hang up. Tell me the address.”

An hour later I stood in front of Brashers’s old house. The house stood on the outskirts of the city, near the railroad line. In the night air there was the smell of wet wood.

The stairs leading down to the basement creaked.

The house’s new owner, a woman named Nora, handed me a small tin box.

“I found it behind the wall,” she told me. “This was lying at the bottom of the box.”

Inside lay a silver miniature recorder. It had three scratches on its side. I ran my finger over it and remembered Sarah’s hands, when she kept things as if everything had its own place.

We listened to the recording at three o’clock at night in the police laboratory.

First there was a rustling sound.

Then Jennifer’s breathing.

“Sarah, don’t let go of my hand,” she said.

I closed my eyes.

The second voice was a man’s.

“No one will come. Everyone will forget.”

Then the door slammed. The recording ended, but those few seconds returned twenty-nine years to us.

Hart lowered his head.

“Now it is impossible to say that we did not know.”

“You knew,” I told him. “You simply did not want to think about it.”

The next day the prosecutor called David.

“The verdict against you will be overturned,” he told him. “It will be officially recognized that the confession was obtained under coercion.”

David asked:

“And who will return my lost years to me?”

The prosecutor was silent for a long time.

“No one.”

It was the only honest answer I heard in this case.

Mark was released as well. Journalists stood in front of the courthouse, and cameras shone into our faces. One of them asked me:

“Do you feel relief because the murderer’s identity has finally been established?”

I turned toward him.

“Not relief. I felt the truth. Even this is a lot for the families who spent their whole lives waiting.”

Brashers was no longer alive, so no one could put handcuffs on him in the courtroom. But the city said his name for the first time as it should have said it—as the murderer’s name, not in place of the names of two innocent boys.

After leaving prison, David rented a small apartment. In the very first week he came to me.

“Why are you helping me?” he asked.

“Because you too are a person lost after my children.”

He lowered his head.

“I thought you hated me.”

“I hated the people who destroyed your life in my daughters’ names. Not you.”

In a few months the police published an official apology. The city planted a garden in memory of the four girls. They carved Jennifer’s name on the largest stone, but I stood for a long time by Sarah’s name. I held her small elephant-shaped clip in my hand.

The clip had not been in the folder that night. I found it on Sarah’s room floor, behind the curtain, after the murder. For years I could not tell anyone that I had kept the object. It was as if, if I threw it away, I would throw away Sarah’s last moment too.

Eight months later I moved to a new city. I began working in a small library. Every morning I recommended books to children, and in the evening I walked in the garden. At home I no longer had a television constantly turned on. At night every sound of the door no longer woke me.

One day David asked me:

“Do you still hear that recording?”

“Sometimes.”

“And what do you do?”

“I open the window.”

In winter my niece, Leah, came to me. She drew a small figure in the snow and told me:

“These are four stars. They are not alone anymore.”

Her words stayed in my heart. For the first time in a long while I cried in such a way that the crying was no longer only pain.

Years later investigators rechecked all the old cases connected with Brashers’s name. Some families received answers, and some received only suspicion. I already knew that a court cannot stitch every wound closed.

One evening I received a letter by mail. David’s lawyer had sent it to me. David wanted to return to me, to restore the old friendship, to talk about the years that had been very difficult for both of us to talk about.

I read the letter several times.

Then I wrote a reply:

“I no longer want to live in the past. But I am grateful that we found the truth together. I wish you peace.”

It was not a refusal spoken out of revenge. It was a door that I finally closed with my own hand.

That night I placed Sarah’s clip on the windowsill. The first snow was falling outside. The silver star that I had sewn onto Jennifer’s shoe I kept in an old box. And the names of the four girls were already visible forever in the city garden, on the surface of the stone.

I no longer waited for a knock at the door.

I no longer waited for a call.

I no longer waited for the truth ever to come.

It came—very late, but it came.

Sarah’s little elephant shone in the light of the snow.

This time I closed the door myself.