When I left, the police had no leads. Not all that surprising. And because they had no leads, it is only natural for them to come to the conclusion that the missing son is somehow responsible for the deaths of his mother and his sisters. They hate having to think that. It doesn’t feel natural. It doesn’t feel acceptable.
It’s neither of those things… but they are right. And they are wrong.
The boy did kill his sisters, just as Paul Jr. had done. I am certain of that. By me, that fact is undisputed. But he is not responsible for their deaths. At least not as he was. Not the boy from the picture on the wall. That boy was dead before his body committed the horrendous acts for which they now place blame. The police hold the boy on the wall responsible, because, as much as they hate the idea of it, they want to believe in the alternative even less.
And the one act which they cannot wrap their minds around, the one that seems too stomach-churning to even deliberate on, he didn’t carry out, but they will never know that. And they blamed the pills on him too, the sleeping pills that killed his mother, the prescription bottle beside her that was emptied and poisonous. They assumed she was forced to swallow them. No surprise, considering the condition she must have been found in.
But neither the boy, nor his mentor, committed the act of the woman’s murder, though they had every part in her death. What the police won’t ever know, because they don’t want to ponder all of the merciless possibilities is that the woman was left alive, lying shattered in a room with her dead twins, and she found just enough strength to get to the medicine cabinet, gather her means, and do it herself.