Why Not Murder

19. Review

19. Review

Maya was carving the portrait of her guardian angel into the tree trunk. Another day, another beautiful day, so many days, one strung after another in an order that became entangled in her memory and imagination. Maya was thinking that memory/imagination is like space/time, not one without the other. She needed to sort her ideas out. Only one thought was in her awareness at a time. If thoughts were like threads, she wanted to weave the various threads related to a single topic together in a meaningful way. The clouds were getting heavier, sinking closer to the earth. She felt damp and went to her cabin. She took wood out from under her cabin, went inside and made a fire. She read through her notes, jotting each separate thought on a small piece of paper and then organized them into piles, each pile representing an aspect of her investigation.

One pile related to the alleged theft of Hudson's sports car. She spread them out on the floor and looked down on them noticing how links between thoughts presented themselves to her. She was there as the observer and the recorder. It was the creative spirit which brought the links into her awareness, something like a bottle in a lake that gets washed up onto the shore and there is a message inside. The flow of thought, and her awareness of that, was not under her control. Then she had the feeling that she understood and took a large piece of paper and wrote down her summary of what she knew relating to the car theft.

This is what she wrote: "Hudson commissioned me to find out who stole his sports car. He doesn't believe that it was taken by someone in the household for a joy ride as the police concluded. I found the car, the same morning that Hudson reported it missing to the police. It was nosedived into the lake, not far from shore, having fallen over the cliff. There was a dead man behind the steering wheel. The door on the driver's side was stuck shut and the door on the passenger side was open. I removed his body out the passenger side, hoping he was still alive but he wasn't. I buried him. Later I found the grave had been dug up by a huge bear and the body dragged away, evidenced by paw prints, drag marks and broken branches."

Maya continued writing: "The current consensus is that either the car fell over the cliff by accident and the driver escaped, or the driver got out of the car and then pushed it over the edge. The road is sharply curved there. There are no warning signs. It is unlit and especially treacherous at night. In the case of an accident, the driver would have escaped at the last second, although this conflicts with the fact that the driver's side door was shut and the passenger door open. However, since in reality there was a dead man behind the wheel, either he drove over the cliff and died as a result of the fall, by accident or suicide, or, he was already dead or unconscious, or already trapped in the car, and was pushed over by someone else, in which case, the person who pushed the car must wonder what happened to the dead man. Other than this possible person, I am the only one who knows there was a dead man in the car."

Maya added: "Winnie's cell phone found near where the car was found and the repair kit to her bike found at the top of the cliff suggest strongly that Winnie was there. She had motive for killing Warren Lockmere, the dead man identified by the driver's license found in the wallet which was in his pocket, because he was Winnie's lover and he knew that Winnie was pregnant, evidenced by the messages on her cell phone. Winnie did not want anything threatening her marriage to Hudson. If Winnie had taken the sports car to be with her lover, then the police were right, the car was not stolen but taken by someone in the household."

Maya continued writing: "The dead man was found on the road not far from there, mauled by a bear, his face bitten off. He was identified as Wyler Roberts, the husband of Hudson's lover on the basis of his dental records and also because the dead man's wife recognized the torn clothes he had on. I also recognized them. Hudson believes that the dead man must be the thief and that this same man is the perpetrator of the threatening letters Hudson has received and the bombings at Hudson's construction sites. The basis of his conviction that the dead man was the thief is partially because the vehicle of Wyler Roberts has not been found and because of jealousy."