I can’t tell you what I was thinking when I hit Claudine. I wasn’t thinking anything. I just reacted. The statue was small but heavy. Like, twice what one of my Grammys weighs. I caught her right at the base of the neck, which was probably good. Any higher up and I might’ve killed her like she did with the old man. I’m not sure how I would’ve handled killing someone, even someone as nasty as Claudine. Not just the murders but lying about Mr. Miller’s abuse and planning to do the same with Thomas. That’s so disgusting. If I had killed Claudine, she never would have been dead. Killing her would have linked her to me forever.

At first I felt responsible for Henry’s death. If we’d been able to get the paramedics there sooner, maybe they could have saved him. I wasn’t getting cell service because of the storm, neither was Thomas, and apparently Claudine had locked away everyone else’s phones in the house safe. Nobody knew the combination. I had Dave pry it open with the fireplace stoker. Once they were called, it took them a while to get there, the roads were terrible. That night turned out to be a historic snowfall for Aspen. It missed breaking the single-day record by like an inch. When the paramedics finally arrived, they confirmed that Henry was dead; later on an autopsy indicated his heart had stopped cold. It was quick and probably painless.

Claudine was just starting to come out of it. We had moved both her and Henry into the living room. There was a big conversation about whether or not that was the right thing to do. We had all seen enough crime shows to know you’re not supposed to touch any evidence at an actual crime scene. But Thomas and I had witnessed the whole thing. There was no mystery to solve. What were we going to do, leave them in the snow? We didn’t want Claudine to freeze to death, and it didn’t feel right with Henry out there by himself with the snow piling on top of him. Thomas took a video of the scene before we moved them, in case the police needed it for reference.