I did not go to the address.
Every instinct in my body wanted to drive to those four streets and tear the house apart with my hands, but I had watched enough of my husband’s face in that doorway to know I was standing at the edge of something with a shape I couldn’t see yet.
So I did the hardest, smartest thing I have ever done.
I called the police from the principal’s office, with Junie’s hand in mine, and I did not go home.
The officer who came was a woman named Detective Okafor, and she looked at Junie for a long moment, and then she looked at me, and she asked the principal to pull up Elsie’s student photo on the record.
She held the screen next to Junie’s face.
She went very still.
“Ma’am,” she said quietly, stepping into the hallway with me. “I need you to tell me about your daughter’s death two years ago. Everything you remember. And I need you to prepare yourself, because I don’t think it happened the way you were told.”
Here is what I had been told.
