“We drove into her garage.”
Alice looked at me for the first time.
“She was waiting when we got there.”
She said Gwen examined the truck and ordered Evan to move it before daylight.
Then Gwen made Alice repeat exactly what she would say if anyone asked.
Alice had spent two weeks moving between fear for her brother, fear for herself, and horror at what happened to Lena.
“I went to the hospital parking lot three times,” she said.
“I couldn’t make myself go upstairs.”
I told her she needed to make a full statement to Detective Brooks.
Alice nodded.
“I know.”
Then she reached into her bag and took out a folded piece of paper.
It was a list of repair instructions written in Gwen’s distinctive looping handwriting.
One line read, “Remove recorder from Claire’s garage before Friday.”
I looked at Alice, unable to speak.
“My mother didn’t just tell us to keep quiet,” she said.
“She sent someone to your house.”
I did not touch the paper until Alice agreed to let me photograph it.
Then I placed it in a clean envelope and wrote down when she had brought it to me.
I called Detective Brooks from the kitchen, keeping the conversation short.
She asked Alice whether she felt safe remaining in the house next door.
Alice looked through the window toward her mother’s closed curtains.
“No,” she said.
Brooks arranged to meet us at the station rather than sending a patrol car that Gwen could watch arrive.
I asked Ian to drive Maya to school, explaining only that I needed to speak to the police.
Alice sat beside me in the passenger seat, gripping the canvas bag in her lap.
On the way she told me that Evan had moved the truck to a storage building owned by his friend Travis Bell.
She said the boxes delivered to Gwen’s garage contained replacement body panels, not new furniture.
I warned her that these were details the detectives would need to verify independently.
“I know what I saw,” she replied.
“But I don’t know everything they did after I left.”
That honesty made her account more credible to me than a dramatic confession that tied every loose end together.
At the station Brooks took Alice into a private interview room.
I sat in the waiting area beneath a poster explaining services for victims and witnesses.
For an hour I watched people come and go with traffic tickets, lost-wallet reports, and children holding stuffed animals.
