A Good Marriage

by Kimberly McCreight

  Amanda closed the folder and clutched it to her chest. She couldn’t even call Country Day now to find out, because they were closed for the first two weeks of summer. And how could she ask Zach about the emails without revealing that she’d discovered them by rifling through his desk?

  She’d have to figure out a way. She couldn’t let Zach’s absurd rules, the ridiculous standards she’d come to accept, get between her and protecting Case. She’d already let Zach haul them to Brooklyn in the middle of the year, which was probably what had caused the school problems to begin with. It had been a mistake not to speak up then. It would be a mistake not to speak up now—about her dad, about these emails, about her right to a voice. She would not, could not, let her son pay the price for her weakness any longer.

  Lizzie

  JULY 10, FRIDAY

  I stood there, ears ringing, as the guard at Rikers walked away and left me holding Zach’s signed power of attorney. The paper trembled in my hand.

  Zach’s been hurting himself. Zach’s been hurting himself.

  What. The. Fuck.

  I went to sit outside the Bantum building, letting bus after bus back to the Rikers main exit come and go. I couldn’t stay there much longer without somebody telling me to move. Attorney or not, you couldn’t just hang out on Rikers Island. But I also couldn’t leave without confronting Zach.

  I let one last bus pass before going back inside, hoping the guards would be willing to let me talk to him again without requiring I go all the way to the main building to make a formal request.

  “Excuse me,” I asked the same guard who’d helped me with the power of attorney. I smiled helplessly. “I forgot to ask my client something.”

  “About the face thing, huh?” The guard looked vaguely annoyed, but also sympathetic.

  I nodded. “I’d really appreciate it.”

  “All right,” he relented. “Just this once.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Zach and I were seated again in the same interview room.

  “Couldn’t get enough, huh?” he asked, eyes darting down. Leg bouncing.

  I stared at him in silence. Where to even begin.

  “Why did you lie?” I asked finally.

  “Sorry, you’ll have to be, um, more specific,” he said. “There are quite a few allegations swirling around at the moment.”

  I pointed at Zach’s face, even though he was looking down, then clasped my hands tight so they wouldn’t shake. “You did all that to yourself.”

  Zach’s leg froze. And for the longest time, he didn’t move.

  His head lifted first, eyes meeting mine, then his hands came to rest on the metal shelf in front of him as he sat up straighter. He blinked, once, his gaze strong and steady. He was suddenly someone I did not recognize. Someone I had never seen before.

  “Surprise,” he said. And then he smiled. “It took you long enough.”

  I squeezed my hands tighter, my fingernails digging into my flesh.

  “Why?” I asked, the word scratching the back of my dry throat.

  “Why am I surprised it took you this long?”

  “No, why me?” My voice was too loud. The guards might come. But I couldn’t help it. “There are so many other lawyers. You have so many other lawyers.”

  “Well, we’ve already established that you’re loyal to a fault.” He smirked. “Determined, too. Once you started helping me, I knew you wouldn’t give up.” He motioned to his face. “This was added incentive.”

  “Is this because I didn’t want to date you?”

  “Please, Lizzie,” Zach huffed. “That’s patronizing. This isn’t some love thing. Though what you did back then—both you and I know it was wrong. You used me.”

  “We were friends.”

  “It wasn’t that simple,” he said, casually. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter now. Like I said, it’s not like I’ve been sitting around thinking about you all these years. You’ve seen what Amanda looked like, right? I did okay in the wife department. This is just me wanting to get the hell out of jail.”

  I pushed to my feet. “I’m withdrawing from your case, effective immediately. I’ll find you replacement counsel.”

  “You and these fucking referrals, Lizzie.” He laughed and leaned back in his chair, arms crossed. “Nope. No thank you. You need to see this through.”

  “Zach, I am not representing you. You can’t force me to,” I said. “This is over.”

  I turned for the door. I needed to get outside, to the fresh air.

  “You know, Young & Crane asked for that financial disclosure for a reason,” Zach called after me. “They don’t hire associates with significant credit issues.”

  Breathe.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked without turning around.

  “Come on. Your husband’s lawsuit is a joint obligation. You knew that,” Zach said. “Creditors can go after you just as much as they can poor wayward Sam, the drunk writer. And because that debt is a joint obligation, you were required to include it on your financial disclosure form. And yet you left it off.”

  I reached out to the wall to steady myself, then turned back to face him.

  “How do you know about that?”

  “That’s a valid question,” Zach said. His voice was restrained, but the look in his eyes could only be described as glee. “But the more important question is, if I found out, how can you be sure Young & Crane won’t, too? Honestly, Lizzie, it’s pretty brazen, lying to that kind of law firm on that type of document. And you, of all people. Has Sam destroyed your ethics, too?”

  My stomach lurched.

  “What do you want?”

  “I didn’t kill my wife, Lizzie,” Zach said. “All I’m asking is that you stick around and help me prove it.”

  “And if I won’t, you’ll get me fired?”

  “If you won’t, I’ll be sure your firm knows the truth about what you did,” he said. “So you’ll get you fired. Blame yourself. Or blame Sam. He’s the drunk.”

  My hands trembled the whole drive back from Rikers. At one point, I had to pull over on the frenetic Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to dry heave. Was Zach always this monster, and I’d somehow missed it? Or had I known deep down? Was that why I’d been glad when he cut ties? It didn’t matter now, of course. I just needed a way out. But every path I considered ended in the same brick wall: the financial disclosure form. Young & Crane would almost certainly fire me if they found out—they might even bring me up on ethics charges. And without my job, my professional reputation, what was I? An orphaned, childless, disbarred liar, married to an alcoholic and saddled with massive debts. So much like my parents in the end. Except the person who had defrauded me wasn’t a stranger. It was my own husband. And now Zach.

  The only way to wrest myself from this situation was to get Zach out of Rikers. That meant a trial, which could take months, if not years. I couldn’t survive living under Zach’s thumb for that long. Find the real killer—that was a much better alternative. If I did that, and could prove it at least to some reasonable degree, maybe even get some press, Wendy Wallace would have no choice but to dismiss the charges against Zach.

  Of course, this approach depended on one critical fact: that Zach hadn’t actually killed Amanda. And right now, he seemed guilty as hell.

  Lynch, it turned out, was an extremely popular last name in St. Colomb Falls, shared by more than a dozen men. I studied the list of names on the computer screen once I was back in my office at Young & Crane. I was trying to focus on the task at hand—find Amanda’s dad—and not on the fact that I was being blackmailed into doing it. That was the only way forward now: to pretend.

  A search on Amanda Lynch had already yielded nothing; not a single Facebook account or article, not even a reference from an old school paper. But then, Amanda Lynch had become Amanda Grayson at only seventeen or eighteen. She’d barely existed before she met Zach.

  I sorted the male Lynches by age—I guessed Amanda’s father would now be at least fifty—and
was left with a list of eight people: Joseph, Daniel, Robert, Charles, Xavier, Michael, Richard, and Anthony. I cross-referenced those with the sex offender registry. If Amanda’s dad had assaulted her, maybe he’d assaulted others. But every name came back clean. Within a few minutes, I had a phone number for each of them. A direct approach wasn’t exactly subtle, but it was efficient. And I was pressed for time.

  I dialed the first number: Joseph Lynch. It rang and rang before I finally got a voice mail. My entire investigative approach was predicated on people answering a call from a number they didn’t recognize. Who did that anymore? But I had no better options.

  “Hi, this is Josephine,” a gruff woman’s voice intoned. “Leave a message at the—”

  I hung up. “Joseph” was probably Josephine. I took a deep breath and moved on to the second number: Robert Lynch.

  I was startled when somebody actually answered on the second ring.

  “This is Robert.” His voice was loud and excessively jovial.

  “Oh, hi. My name is Lizzie. I’m trying to find Amanda Lynch. We went to high school together, and we lost touch.”

  The old friend: a casual, innocuous gateway to disarm Amanda’s father into accidentally identifying himself.

  “Amanda?” Robert Lynch repeated enthusiastically. “I’m sorry, I don’t believe I know any Amanda Lynch. I’m afraid you’ve reached the wrong number.”

  “Sorry to have bothered you.”

  “That’s okay,” he said, like my call was the highlight of his day. “Anything else I can help you with?”

  Zach. Help me with Zach.

  “I don’t think so, but thank you for your time.”

  “You have a blessed evening.”

  Charles Lynch was next. Straight to a recorded message: “The number you are trying to reach has been disconnected.” Three down. Four to go. Fuck. There were other avenues to try, probably more unlisted Lynches out there, and a disconnected number alone certainly didn’t rule someone out. Amanda’s dad could also have moved from St. Colomb Falls. I took another deep breath as I dialed the next number: Xavier. I repeated the name in my head. Biblical. Righteous. The name of a prophet, not an abusive father.

  “Hello?” The voice was low and clipped.

  “Oh, yes, sorry. My name is Lizzie Kitsakis.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m trying to find Amanda Lyn—”

  A click. Distinct but quiet.

  “Hello?” I asked. There was no answer. “Hello?”

  I redialed and immediately got a recorded message: “This number is not receiving calls at this time.” It was what happened when someone blocked your specific number. I knew this because we’d blocked the Anglers’ lawyer when he’d started calling our home at all hours.

  Was it proof that Xavier was Amanda’s father? Of course not. But it was suspicious.

  I ran a search on Xavier Lynch and was immediately swamped with results. There were two Xavier Lynches in the United States with a substantial digital footprint. One was a thirty-one-year-old dentist from El Paso, Texas, the other a nineteen-year-old sophomore at Florida State University who had a half-dozen vlogs of himself playing different video games. I got distracted for a second scrolling through the irrelevant links before adding St. Colomb Falls to my search. And there he was right at the top: a third Xavier Lynch. He was mentioned in the St. Colomb Falls Methodist Church newsletter from a year earlier, in an article about a church rummage sale. It was the very same church that Amanda had written about in her journal.

  Xavier Lynch’s name appeared only once, in the caption below one of the photographs. In the photo, he was standing next to a much older couple, who each held a birdhouse in their hands. “Susan and Charlie Davidson and Xavier Lynch about to Treat Some Birds Thanks to Our Annual RUMMAGE!” Xavier Lynch was a very large man, several inches taller than the couple and very, very broad, with short gray hair, a wide face, and heavy-framed glasses. He was standing stiffly, with not even a trace of a smile.

  Now what? When I’d been a US attorney, the answer was simple: send the FBI to shake the truth out of Xavier Lynch. But I didn’t have armed professionals at my disposal anymore. Managing law clerks paid fines. They didn’t go interview murder suspects.

  “Um, hello?”

  When I looked up, my legal assistant, Thomas, was standing in my office doorway, knuckles resting against the door as though he’d already knocked once. He was dressed in slim-fit pants and an expensive-looking bright-yellow-and-orange-striped polo shirt. Thomas had lively eyes and a sly grin that always left me feeling like he’d just heard some gossip, maybe about me. He’d proved a great legal assistant, though, and a loyal ally.

  “What’s up?” I sounded more annoyed than I’d intended.

  He raised an envelope like a shield. “The warrant documents from Philadelphia?” He stepped forward to hand them to me. “You wanted me to bring them to you as soon as they arrived?”

  The warrant. What difference did it make now? The judge knew it had been cleared, and she’d refused to grant bail on the murder charge.

  “Right. An unpaid loitering ticket?” I asked.

  “I deliver envelopes; I don’t inspect their contents unless specifically directed to,” Thomas said. “Remember?”

  Thomas was looking at me like I was supposed to know what he meant.

  “No, I don’t remember.”

  “Oh, right, that was before your time,” he said. “I don’t want to call myself a hero or anything, but the partner who got fired? I was the whistleblower. He sent me to pick up something at the printers and, overachieving legal assistant that I am, I decided to take it out of the envelope so said partner wouldn’t cut his fat fingers. Let’s just say the envelope did not contain the contracts I’d expected.”

  “What was it?”

  “Compromising photos of a certain female legal assistant, obviously taken without her knowledge.”

  “Ugh,” I said, disgusted. What was wrong with everyone.

  “You know, I think the other partners would have let it go if it wasn’t for Paul. He’s a maniac, but at least he has a modicum of integrity.”

  “Yes, a modicum,” I said dryly as I reached for the envelope.

  I opened it and quickly skimmed the warrant until I spotted the bottom line—it was indeed for loitering.

  “You all right?” Thomas’s voice had lost its snarky edge.

  “Not really.”

  “Can I help?” he asked, and quite genuinely.

  “Thank you, but no,” I said, avoiding his eyes. “I don’t think anyone can.”

  The Brooklyn DA’s office was in a newer, taller building than the Manhattan DA’s office, yet somehow the lobby smelled the same—cardboard with a dash of urine—and the longer I sat there, the more it was getting to me.

  I’d been told by reception that, despite our 11:45 a.m. appointment, Wendy Wallace had yet to arrive. It was already 12:15. Sitting there waiting, staring up at oil paintings of DAs gone by, it occurred to me that maybe Wendy had only agreed to meet because she’d never intended to show.

  Finally I heard high heels down the marble hallway from the elevators, like a clacking of knives. Wendy Wallace. Surely she assumed I was there to discuss a plea deal. She was not going to be pleased by the bait and switch and the last thing I wanted was to be asking for her help. But if I could somehow manage to get the prosecution to look into Xavier Lynch themselves, it would be a far better alternative.

  When Wendy Wallace emerged from the hallway, she looked even more beautiful than she had in court: pale blue eyes set off by her silver hair, sharp gray linen suit and black heels. She held her head up, peering down her nose like a sphinx. I stood, hoping it would make me feel less intimidated. It did not.

  “Counselor,” she said, expertly unreadable. “Come back to my office. You’ll be more comfortable there.”

  Would I, though? Everything with Wendy Wallace felt like a puzzle encased in a lie. Surely this was why Paul remained stuck
on her. She was probably one of the few people who had ever left him choking on dust.

  Wendy Wallace’s office was crisply decorated with a few designer touches—a Herman Miller chair in the corner, a signed print on the wall—that probably reflected the money she’d gotten from Paul. Certainly they were not paid for with her ADA’s salary alone. But nothing too ostentatious either. Precisely enough to signal that she was worth substantially more than her yearly income might suggest.

  Wendy motioned toward a guest chair. “What can I do for you?”

  I sat. But too upright. And once Wendy was seated across from me, I had no choice but to maintain my overly erect, exhausting posture.

  “I need your help,” I began.

  “My help,” she repeated with an awful calibrated flatness.

  “I’ve found Amanda Grayson’s father.” I pulled Amanda’s most recent journal out of my bag. “He was stalking her.” I held up the journal for emphasis. “I believe there’s a very good chance he killed her. He needs to be interviewed, immediately.”

  It was a risk, pulling this ace out of my sleeve. Wendy would now be ready for this alternate theory of the crime, once we got to trial. But if this case got that far, I had to hope I’d have figured a way out of representing Zach by then.

  “Her father?” Wendy’s eyebrows pulled together and her nose wrinkled slightly. She eyed the journal.

  “I’m not one hundred percent sure I’ve found him, but I think so,” I said. “He raped her as a child, and he’s been harassing her since they returned to New York. He’s been in Park Slope, following her. It’s documented in her journal.”

  “Your client killed his wife, Counselor. I don’t need to consult her journal or talk to her father to know that.”