Unleashed

by Jami Alden

  Perched in the hills east of the San Francisco Bay, Piedmont was an oasis of wealth and privilege. James, his first wife Susan, and their daughter Kate had fit in perfectly. Then James had courted scandal by marrying a trophy wife over twenty years his junior and moving her into his dead wife’s house less than two years after poor Susan was cold in her grave.

  Aside from James’s closest friends, Caroline had been tolerated, but never truly accepted by his circle. The wives, especially, treated her with a veneer of courtesy that barely disguised their disdain. And fear. Fear that one day their husbands might find themselves charmed by a young, beautiful bartender who served drinks at their spouse’s favorite after work spot.

  But the scandal that erupted when James appeared at the tony Oakland Hills Country Club with his twenty-four-year-old trophy wife at his side was nothing compared to the hell that broke loose when James was murdered a little over six months ago. And Caroline was named the prime suspect.

  Kate huffed and heaved another box on the shelf. “I can’t believe they wouldn’t set bail. I mean, rapists and gangbangers get out on bail all the time. It’s a travesty.” Kate’s cloud of red curls shook with indignation.

  “They thought I was a flight risk,” Caroline said. “So no bail.” She hoped Kate would pick up on her tone and consider the conversation over. Kate was always trying to get her to talk and share about what it had been like those two months she spent in jail, convinced that if Caroline would just talk about it, she’d get over her insomnia and get a full night’s sleep.

  Caroline had no desire to go there. No desire to think about the loss of freedom, the complete loss of dignity and comfort. All she wanted was to cherish every single day of freedom she’d been granted, and do everything in her power to make sure she never ended up back in a cell.

  Besides, she knew, and she supposed Kate did too, that talking about her time behind bars wasn’t going to cure her insomnia. The only thing that would accomplish that was finding the real killer before the DA had a chance to rebuild his case and take Caroline back into custody.

  “At least the judge didn’t have her head up her ass, unlike everyone else involved,” Kate said as she whipped out a Sharpie marker and scrawled the word “shoes” across the top of a box before pushing it onto a low shelf.

  Caroline stopped her. “Shoes go on the second shelf,” she said, indicating the other neatly labeled boxes. Kate rolled her eyes but moved the box to the second shelf. Caroline knew her need for organization bordered on OCD, but she liked having everything in its properly designated space. Besides, her penchant for organizing everything—even a garage storage space no one would ever see—had turned into a surprisingly lucrative side business organizing household spaces for Caroline’s friends and acquaintances. Not that she’d seen much business since she’d first been arrested for James’s murder.

  “The judge didn’t have much choice other than to dismiss the charges. The police didn’t have a warrant to seize my computer. Without those e-mails, they didn’t have a strong enough case.” Not that they had a particularly strong case even with the e-mails Caroline had written to her oldest, closest friend, Diana Vasquez, the only person Caroline had really kept in touch with after she married James.

  Sure, Caroline had bitched about the state of her marriage, and her desire to somehow get out of it without dealing with divorce and the financial messiness that would ensue. She might have even expressed a moment’s regret that she would have to figure out how to support herself, her parents, and her brother once he got out of jail on the amount stipulated in their prenup. Sure, five million was generous, but it wasn’t infinite.

  But somehow the DA had twisted Caroline’s cabernet fueled ramblings into a motive for murder. When combined with an accusation from a former cell mate of her brother’s it had been enough for the DA to bring her up on charges.

  The sad truth was, and as Caroline had tried to explain to the police and later the DA, Caroline had known her marriage was in trouble long before James had actually filed for divorce.

  It wasn’t just James’s late nights and long absences for business travel. Even if James had continued to be the most attentive husband on the planet, Caroline knew they weren’t going to last. Caroline had loved him, but she wasn’t in love with him. She’d loved his friendship and the security he gave her, but after ten years she was starting to chafe under the confines of being married to James. She was starting to resent the compromises she’d made, the dreams she’d chosen to give up. But as their relationship faltered, Caroline had to face the brutal truth that she had a lot of years left, a lot of time to still have the things she was missing in her life. Things she wasn’t ever going to get if she stayed married to James.

  When she’d found James with another woman one Saturday afternoon, Caroline had been almost relieved. She’d come home after her weekend at Disneyland with Kate and Michael was cut short when Kate came down with the flu. It didn’t take a genius to see what was going on between her husband and the beautiful, oh so young woman who was sobbing in James’s study. Caroline had frozen in shock, and heard several seconds of muffled conversation before James noticed her.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t give you what you want,” James said, frustration in every line of his body as he stood next to the leather club chair where the woman sat.

  “You must,” she sobbed, her voice accented and thick with tears. “You are the only one, the only one.”

  James started to pace as he raked his fingers through thick hair only recently gone completely silver. He was still strong and fit as he approached his fifty-sixth birthday, his shoulders firm under his broadcloth shirt, his belly barely bulging over the waistband of pressed khakis. He lifted his gaze, staring at nothing until it caught on Caroline, standing in the doorway.

  “I guess I don’t have to ask why you haven’t returned my calls,” Caroline said in response to his horrified gaze.

  After the shock wore off, Caroline thought that, along with relief, she was miffed that James would bring another woman into their house. But as she listened to James order the woman to get out she realized she wasn’t very hurt. As she’d confessed to Diana in her long, rambling, e-mails, Caroline had been fooling herself for a long time, hanging on by a thread to a marriage that wasn’t making her happy and never would.

  Then again, she hadn’t exactly been in the best frame of mind when she’d accepted James’s proposal. When she’d met and married James, she’d been reeling, coming off the tail end of the worst time in her life. She’d gotten it into her usually resilient and levelheaded brain that James was exactly what she needed. Capable. Responsible. Reliable.

  Rich.

  Call her a shallow greedy gold digger, but at the time the security of James’s wealth had felt as warm and reassuring as the world’s coziest fleece blanket.

  When they first got together and for the first five or so years of their marriage, he’d seemed to be everything she needed. And for the next four years Caroline had shoved aside her doubts, refused to acknowledge that maybe she’d given up too much in the name of security. That maybe she shouldn’t waste too many more years on a childless and increasingly passionless marriage. James was good and generous—not only to her, but to her family. And, as always, there was Kate and Mikey, whose pure little boy love Caroline soaked up like a sponge, hoping it would plug up the gaping hole left in her soul so many years ago.

  But the justification wore thin, especially after Kate and Mikey moved out when Mikey was almost two. Mikey’s absence reignited Caroline’s desire for a baby with a vengeance. But no matter how hard she pleaded, James wouldn’t budge. He was finished having children and had the vasectomy to prove it. He wouldn’t consider adoption or artificial insemination as an option. Caroline’s resentment grew and James grew increasingly distant. She soon found herself bouncing off the walls of her perfect home, bored out of her skull in their perfect enclave of suburbia.

  So when James had filed for divorce t
hree days after the Disneyland Debacle, Caroline had taken it with a little bit of sadness and a lot of relief.

  Until three days later, when James turned up with a bullet in his head, and a former cell mate of Caroline’s brother, Ricky, claimed Caroline Medford had approached him and offered him five thousand dollars to do the hit. Caroline’s protest that she’d met Hector Ramirez once, at a barbecue for her brother during one of his brief stints on the outside, fell on deaf ears.

  “Well if you ask me, the DA is a total fucktard,” Kate continued, jarring Caroline out of her unpleasant memories.

  “Mommy, what’s a fucktard?”

  Kate jumped at Mikey’s high pitched inquiry. “Uhh—”

  “It’s a not nice word for somebody who does something silly,” Caroline jumped in to explain. “Don’t use it.”

  “Yeah, that’ll work,” Kate said as Mikey marched around Caroline’s car, chanting “fucktard,” in time with the stomping of his rubber booted feet. “They can’t still think you did it,” Kate said, wincing as Mikey repeated the profanity for the dozenth time. “The whole life insurance thing is a crock of shit. I told the DA myself. I mean, you’d think of all people, I would be gunning to get my wicked stepmother behind bars, right? So if I’m in your corner, it should say something, shouldn’t it?”

  Caroline grabbed Kate in an impulsive hug. “It means a lot to me that you’re on my side,” Caroline said. Especially when that number could be easily counted on one hand. There was Kate, and James’s friend Patrick Easterbrook, who was in his class at Stanford way back before Caroline was even born, Patrick’s wife Melody, and Caroline’s defense attorney, Rachael Weller. And Rachael probably didn’t count because she took Caroline’s case mostly for the publicity, not to mention a hefty thousand dollar per hour attorney fee.

  Even her own mother asked her why she had to get her brother’s name mixed up in it.

  Right. Ricky was the one in prison for manufacturing and selling meth, but Caroline was the fuckup.

  “Hey, you had my back even when I treated you like crap.” The tiny emerald stud in Kate’s right nostril caught the light as she shot Caroline a wry smile. “The least I can do is return your loyalty.” Kate paused in labeling the boxes and took a deep swallow. “Seriously Caroline, what’s going to happen to us if you go to jail?” She flicked a glance at the door to make sure Mikey was still occupied outside. “And yeah, I know exactly how self-centered that sounds. But Mom’s gone, Dad’s dead, and you’re the only one who really stuck by me through everything.”

  Caroline swallowed back her own tears and wiped her nose on the sleeve of her fleece pullover. Now was not the time for yet another sobfest. “Everything will be fine. I’ve got Rachael Weller, for Christ’s sake. She was able to get Bryan Roberts off and I’m pretty sure that guy was guilty.” Her bravado was thin even to her own ears. She’d gotten a reprieve when the judge dismissed her case, but she knew it was only a matter of weeks at best before the DA fortified his case against her and tried to put her back in jail.

  “And worst case scenario,” Caroline said as she stacked the boxes along the shelves so their edges perfectly aligned, “you and Michael will be fine. I already signed over your trust, and as soon as everything settles out one way or another, I’ll sign the house over to you, too.” The only reason she hadn’t yet was because she didn’t want it to look like she had something to hide. She also didn’t want Kate to have to deal with the reporters that would no doubt swarm the house as soon as the case went to trial.

  “I don’t want the house,” Kate said with a shudder. “I don’t understand why you’re still living here after what happened.”

  “It would look weird for me to sell it right now,” Caroline said. She hated living in the house where her husband was murdered. Yet with its new state of the art alarm system, it was one of the few places she still felt safe. “As soon as everything settles down, you can sell it.”

  “But it’s the house I grew up in.”

  “Then don’t sell it. I don’t care. One way or another, I’m not going to be living here much longer.”

  Caroline sat back on her heels, speared with guilt as she took in Kate’s tight mouth and damp eyes. She knew Kate was scared of having no one to fall back on. Caroline didn’t bother reminding her that she had the financial security to go to school and hire top notch childcare, and would always have a more than adequate roof over her head. Having someone die or go to prison wasn’t the end of the world, even though it might feel like it at the time.

  “And look on the bright side,” she said, flipping open a box to check its contents before she stacked it. “If you and Mikey decide to move in, half your stuff will already be here.” She poked around a pile of clothes and shook her head. “Why do you keep all of this? You’re as bad as your father.” She yanked on a sleeve and held the purple sweater up to the yellowish light. “I think you had this when I met you!”

  Kate shrugged. “It has sentimental value.” She pushed off the floor and slid open a drawer to the metal filing cabinet. “But no one has anything on Dad. He probably has my vaccination records from elementary school in here. He saved every piece of paper from—”

  Caroline looked up as Kate choked off mid-sentence.

  “Why do you have this?” Kate was staring, white lipped, at the contents of a binder.

  “What?” Like she didn’t know exactly what was in there.

  Kate hurled the binder in Caroline’s direction. It clipped her knee before hitting the ground and splaying open to display a news article, clipped and covered by a three hole punch plastic page protector.

  Grieving Wife or Black Widow?

  She flipped the binder closed. It was thick with clippings, each in its own individual protective cover. All with similar headlines. All having to do with the murder of James Medford and the probability that his wife did it.

  “Why the hell would you keep all of those?” Kate shook her head. “It’s like inviting bad karma into your house, you know? You’re creating negativity in your space and right now you need to fill your life with positive things. It’s like that book The Secret.”

  Caroline shoved the binder back into a drawer and let Kate ramble. She didn’t have the heart to tell her that a wish on a bulletin board wasn’t going to bring James’s real killer to justice. Besides, she didn’t have an answer for why she saved the clippings. Morbid curiosity? A pathological need to know exactly what the press was saying about her so she’d know what she was up against?

  She had no idea. But from the second she’d come across that first article, she’d been compelled to save it, slicing it out of the paper with her Exacto knife in a clean, straight cut before sliding it into the plastic.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d found herself morbidly, obsessively collecting and saving news clippings. She had another similar binder, in her old bedroom in her mother’s house across the bay in Redwood City. An even thicker binder full of clippings that essentially said the same thing in fifty different ways. Anne Taggart was missing, and no one had any idea where to find her.

  She’d left the binder behind when she’d moved in with James, as she’d left all of her past behind.

  But in the past few days Caroline had found new articles to add to that old binder. A now familiar stab of pain lanced through her chest. It hit her hard, stopped her in her tracks as it had several times a day for the last three days since it was front page news on The San Francisco Tribune. The body of Anne Taggart, along with another as yet unidentified woman was found after a landslide exposed their remains.

  “Look, I’m sorry I got all over your ass about it,” Kate said, mistaking the cause of Caroline’s distress. She bit her bottom lip uncertainly. “I’m going to go fix Mikey a snack, and then we’ll get out of your hair.”

  “No,” Caroline squeezed the word past her throat. “Stay. I Tivo’d some movies for Mikey and got us some stuff to make for dinner.” Not that she expected to have any more of an appetite than
she’d had for the past six months. “Let me finish organizing this and I’ll be right up.”

  Kate nodded and went out to collect Mikey. Caroline sat back on the floor, clutching the fabric that covered her chest, as though that could stop the deep ache that stole her breath.

  Danny. How was it possible to hurt so much for him, after all this time, after everything that happened? It had been over ten years since she’d so much as laid eyes on him or heard his voice, and yet as soon as she saw the news it all came roaring back. The anger. The hurt. The love. The bone deep ache of knowing how much he must be hurting right now, and her irrational desire to find him, comfort him.

  As though he’d ever take comfort from her. As though she could keep her own anger under control if she ever saw him face to face.

  She swallowed back tears and stood up to turn off the light. As she did so her gaze landed on one of the boxes Kate had brought from her old apartment.

  DAD’S BOOKS, Kate had scrawled across the top in a sloppy hand.

  She’d been through every single paper, document, book, file, there and at James’s office, looking for the smallest hint of who would want James dead. There was nothing to be found here, she told herself even as she pulled the top off the box. Yet her curiosity had to be satisfied.

  She heard laughter outside, Mikey’s followed by Kate’s as she chased him into the house. Caroline pulled one book after another out of the box, not really disappointed when she saw it was exactly as Kate had described. The box was full of leather bound legal text books, with an occasional hardback mystery thrown in.

  Still, she didn’t stop until the box was empty and the books were piled high on the concrete floor. She pulled out the last book. The spine was cracked because another book had gotten wedged inside. It was too small to be another textbook or hardback novel. Probably one of Kate’s paperback romances had gotten mixed in the bunch.