Guilty Wives

by Patterson, James; Ellis, David

  “Linette!” I started to crawl toward her, passing Lexie, when I heard something from one of the guards and then it hit me, square on the mouth, a blow from the baton.

  My head snapped back. My eyes rolled back in my head. And then everything went black.

  CHAPTER 81

  I WOKE UP vomiting on a stained concrete floor. My jaw ached so badly I thought it might be broken. My face felt puffy. I was so dizzy that I couldn’t maintain my balance.

  I surveyed my surroundings. The room was about six, maybe seven square meters. A high ceiling from which a lone lightbulb hung. Walls covered with mildew and laden with graffiti. Stains all along the floor.

  This was segregation. Solitary confinement, as it’s known in the States. Le Mitard, they called it here.

  I crawled over to the faucet, which jutted out from the wall like an outdoor spigot, and turned it on. The pressure was weak, the water lukewarm. I held a hand under it and splashed it on my face. Drank a little. It was potable, but bitter with the taste of iron. I spat blood into the drain on the floor.

  The intercom, up high on the wall, crackled. “Mettez votre dos à la porte et les mains par l’ouverture,” the voice said.

  I forced myself to my feet. My knees were dirty and bloody and stiff. The front of my shirt was covered in blood and vomit. I was woozy but I managed to comply with the guard’s directive. I stood against the door and placed my hands behind me, through the opening. A pair of handcuffs slid over my wrists.

  “Reculez-vous de la porte.”

  I complied again, standing back from the door, my hands cuffed behind me. A guard entered and grabbed me from behind by my handcuffs, directing me out of the cell.

  “What happened to Linette?” I asked. “Qu’est-il arrivé à Linette?”

  The guard didn’t answer. She just marched me back to my cell. My head was ringing and my nausea was replaced with a sense of dread.

  The guard opened my cell door. Inside, the place was a disaster from the guards tossing it, searching for contraband. Four of my cell mates sat silently, as if in shock.

  Josette, the leader. Penelope, the Spaniard. Camille, the drug addict. Lexie, the deranged arsonist.

  Mona, of course, was dead from the aborted escape.

  That left Linette as the only one unaccounted for.

  “Où est Linette?” I asked.

  Josette was the only one who would make eye contact with me. Her expression was as hard as ever, but her eyes were brimming with tears.

  She shook her head slowly.

  It took a moment before it registered, before I absorbed it. “No!” I cried. I collapsed to the floor. “No!” I pounded on the concrete and just screamed, guttural cries, my throat filled with anguish and venom. Another wave of nausea surged through me and I retched several times, dry-heaving bile, the contents of my stomach having long been expelled.

  “Not Linette,” I pleaded in vain. Not when she was only months away from release, when she was going to marry the love of her life, Giorgio.

  After a while I was merely panting like a rabid animal.

  “Ils l’ont tuée,” I said. They killed her.

  Josette looked up at the ceiling. “C’était un accident,” she said. “Elle est tombée et a frappé sa tête.”

  “What?” I raised my head. “She didn’t slip and hit her head. This wasn’t some accident. Lucy killed her! Lucy killed her!” I repeated.

  “Non.” Josette’s voice trembled. “Un accident.”

  I stared at Josette, then at the others. They were all nodding along with Josette. I realized I’d been mistaken. My cell mates weren’t in shock. They were terrified. Scared to death. Even Josette, the hardest of the bunch, was singing the company line: Linette had fallen and struck her head. Nobody was willing to say that Lucy had beaten our friend to death.

  Because if they did, the next “accident” would be theirs.

  “We can’t let them get away with this!” I said, getting to my feet. I repeated myself, this time in French, but I could see it didn’t matter which language I spoke.

  “Nous n’avons pas un choix,” Penelope said.

  “Of course we have a choice,” I pleaded. “Of course we do.”

  But I was arguing in vain. There was nothing I could say that would talk them out of their fear.

  Linette, my dear friend—our dear friend, everyone’s friend in JRF—was dead, murdered by Lucy, and we were going to turn our backs and pretend the whole thing was a slip-and-fall.

  “Murderers!” I banged on the buzzer for the intercom, screaming into it. Josette and Penelope rushed from their beds and grabbed me, restrained me. I fought them off initially and kept whacking at the intercom, which never answered me. Finally they tackled me to the ground, where I lay sobbing and hyperventilating until the lights went out at eight o’clock.

  CHAPTER 82

  “YOU SHOULD SAY something,” said my husband, Jeffrey.

  Six days had passed since Linette’s death. Six days of staring at the walls of my cell, at the bed once occupied by Linette, hardly eating, hardly speaking other than when I went to the infirmary for my job. The prison had conducted its typical “investigation” into Linette’s death and come back with the unsurprising “finding” that Linette Giselle Moreau had died when she slipped in her cell and struck her head on the floor. Four of her five cell mates, in their interviews, corroborated this version of events. I was the lone holdout. The official paperwork described me as peu coopératif—uncooperative—and “unwilling to give a suitable account of the event.”

  The guards had been shrewd in their write-up. They estimated the time of death as falling between 7:30 and 8:30 in the morning, which placed the occurrence right near the 8:00 a.m. shift change. This, I had come to learn, was how it worked when fatal “accidents” occurred at JRF. If there were ever an official inquiry by the Ministry of Justice and Liberty, not only would it be difficult to isolate a particular guard as the culprit, but it would be impossible to even identify which shift of guards was on duty at the time—the crew that was ending at 8:00 a.m. or the one that was just starting.

  “Anything,” said Jeffrey. “Tell me what you think.”

  Across from me, dressed comfortably in a button-down shirt and blue jeans, sat my husband. This was Jeffrey’s first time visiting me. It only took him three and a half months. Sometimes he’d tried excuses—the move back to the States, getting settled back into civilian life at Georgetown, spending weekends with the kids, who were still having a really tough time with all this. Take your pick: Jeff could invent a reason not to visit.

  Sometimes he didn’t even bother with an excuse.

  I couldn’t totally fault him. We hadn’t parted on good terms, after all, and it wasn’t like our marriage was in fabulous shape before my arrest.

  “Abbie, c’mon,” Jeffrey repeated. “Talk to me.”

  I gave him a cold smile. “You pass on a dozen chances to visit. You wait almost four months before you show your face. Then, within ten minutes of gracing me with an appearance, you tell me you want out of our marriage. And now the burden’s on me to say something.”

  “Abbie—”

  “How about, ‘Fuck you’? Does that work, Jeff?”

  A large part of me wasn’t surprised. I guess I should have been grateful he didn’t just drop the divorce papers in the mail.

  “Listen, Abbie,” he said, knifing a hand on the table. “We both made some mistakes—”

  I laughed out loud. “You have a speech prepared? Are you kidding me?” I leaned into him. “Yes, we both made mistakes. Letting you talk me into dropping my career and moving to Switzerland, for starters, so you could fuck the ambassador while I stayed home waiting like a helpless little housewife—”

  “And I believe the entire world knows of your indiscretion,” he hissed back. He read the expression on my face. “Oh, what—your little romp in the hay was different? It doesn’t count if it’s with a movie star?”

  Incredibly, thi
s was the first time we’d ever discussed the topic. Both of our “indiscretions,” as Jeff put it, became part of my trial, part of the overall story, part of the tabloid hysterics the world over. But we avoided talking about it one-on-one.

  “You’d already broken us,” I replied. “You, with your damn affair. What I did was wrong, and I take responsibility for it. But it wasn’t some planned, long-term relationship, sneaking around behind your back and inventing all sorts of excuses. It was an impulse, after I’d drunk more alcohol than—”

  “Oh, just spare me that ‘spur-of-the-moment’ crap, all right?” Jeffrey waved a hand. His face was crimson and his eyes rabid. “Like you didn’t go to Monte Carlo looking for it. Like you weren’t looking for it earlier that day at that pool. You were carrying on like a little tramp! Giggling and flirting at the pool in your skimpy little bikini—”

  One of the guards slapped a hand down on our table. “Si vous ne restez pas tranquille, votre mari devra partir,” he said, threatening to end the visit if we didn’t quiet down.

  “Excusez,” Jeffrey said in apology. He took a breath and settled down.

  My blood had gone cold. I just stared at Jeffrey, my body still as a statue but my mind racing. I was pretty sure that the color had drained from my face.

  Jeffrey let out a long sigh. “I’m sorry for what I did. I’ve paid a pretty damn high price for it—but I’m sorry all the same. But now it’s a—”

  I felt myself get up from the table. Suddenly, I couldn’t be in the same room with this man. “You can have the divorce,” I said, or words to that effect. I don’t know what I said. I just wanted to get away from him. I needed to think.

  Like you weren’t looking for it earlier that day at that pool.

  Carrying on like a little tramp. Giggling and flirting at the pool in your skimpy little bikini.

  “I really am sorry,” Jeffrey said. “But really, Abbie—you can’t be surprised.”

  Surprised? It depended on what he meant.

  I wasn’t surprised that he was asking for a divorce. I knew that day would come.

  But I was very surprised indeed to learn that Jeffrey had been in Monte Carlo on the day that President Henri Devereux was murdered.

  CHAPTER 83

  I STOOD AT THE door of my cell at twelve forty-five, standard operating procedure when moving about the prison. Stand at your cell fifteen minutes before your assignment—work, library trip, visitation, whatever—and wait for the guard to escort you where you needed to go. My shift at the infirmary started at one o’clock.

  My brain was buzzing from what Jeffrey had told me this morning. Not the divorce, of course, but his comments about my behavior at the Monte Carlo Beach Hotel on the afternoon before President Devereux’s murder. It was a slip of the tongue, in the heat of the worst kind of argument—one between unhappy spouses, in which the rawest of emotions surface. Jeffrey hadn’t even realized he’d said it. He apparently had no idea what he’d just revealed to me.

  I thought about it over and over. Yes, the evidence presented at trial established that we had spent some time at that hotel swimming pool. But there weren’t any photos of us. Zero. And there wasn’t any mention of us flirting with anyone, or of my wearing a bikini. Nobody had said one word about how we conducted ourselves at that pool.

  No. Jeffrey would have had to see these things himself, personally.

  Jeffrey was in Monte Carlo that day.

  I didn’t know how to process that information. I didn’t know what, exactly, it meant. He never told anybody, that much was clear. In fact, he’d lied about it. But what did it mean? I hadn’t, for even one second, considered the possibility that Jeffrey—my husband—no, it couldn’t be. No.

  No?

  All I knew for sure was that certain avenues, previously closed to me, were now open. I needed to talk to Winnie.

  I was handcuffed and frisked and escorted to G wing. I gave my ID number to the guard stationed there and then walked the corridor unescorted. I passed a door on my right, which led down to the underground parking garage for the prison staff, accessible only by a key card and monitored by a guard at a secure booth. I walked past another door that I had been told was a fire escape. I stopped at the red line before the infirmary, where another guard was stationed in a secure booth, complete with a weapons arsenal, security cameras looking inside the infirmary, the whole thing.

  “Hi, Abbie.” The guard was named Cecile. I liked her. One of the decent ones who treated us civilly, either out of compassion or because she realized that we were easier to manage when treated with some measure of respect.

  After a loud, echoing buzz, the door marked INFIRMERIE released with a hiss.

  I squinted into the bright light and fought off the impulse to gag when I inhaled the wretched smell of bodily secretions and powerful disinfectant. It was like not showering for a week but bathing yourself in cologne. Like riding in a cab in New York City.

  The beds were filled, as usual. Pack two thousand people into a space reserved for roughly half that many and even the most mundane virus or malady becomes an epidemic. Plus, being sick gave people an excuse to get out of their cells. But it cost them. Unless you were really sick, getting the okay to visit the infirmary was like everything else around here. It wasn’t free.

  I saw Winnie at the far end, wrapping a bandage on an Arab woman’s foot. Her shift was ending. The warden didn’t allow us to communicate, so they tried to arrange our shifts so we never worked together. It wasn’t a perfect system, but typically we only saw each other, as we did now, in passing.

  “Hey.” She whispered in her lovely British accent. Her fingers touched mine. “I heard what happened. You okay?”

  Everyone had heard about Linette. She was a favorite around here. “Living the dream,” I said. “You?”

  She wasn’t in the mood for humor. “Movie night,” she whispered. “I’ll save you a seat. Love you.”

  Movie night. I would tell Winnie tonight. I would tell her what Jeffrey had inadvertently blurted out to me. She could help me figure this out.

  “Love you, too. Get some rest.” Our fingertips released.

  I quickly went about my assignments. This job, the chance to help people, was about the only thing propelling me forward now. I did some bandage wraps. I helped flush some minor wounds. I fetched some drugs from the pharmacy across the room for the nurse. An hour passed. Two o’clock was a shift change for the guards, and out the window I could see various cars driving up the ramp from the underground garage. Pulling up to the large main gate. Swiping their key cards to open it. Waving to the attendant, who was raised ten feet off the ground in a fortified booth. Driving off to freedom, once the gate opened.

  Another half hour later, I heard the commotion as the hydraulic door buzzed open. I had my back turned to the entrance. I was helping a nurse dress a laceration wound to an inmate’s rib cage when one of the nurses shouted, “Urgence!”

  Emergency. Not uncommon. We had a suicide a week in JRF. I turned as guards and a nurse wheeled in an inmate on a gurney.

  “Oh, God, no.” I dropped the gauze pads I was holding. I started running before the realization had fully formed in my head. The shock of black hair hanging below the gurney. The look on the face of one of the nurses, who had turned back from the commotion to look at me, to see if it had registered with me who the new patient was. Everyone knew the four of us as a group, after all.

  “Winnie,” I whispered.

  The guards saw me coming and restrained me. I fought them, tried to break through them, as the doctor worked feverishly on Winnie. I cried out as the guards forced me to the ground, slamming my head against the tile.

  This was too much. Overload. Not Winnie, too. Not Winnie.

  I fought and I screamed and I pleaded. The doctor stopped working on her and called out the time of death and I shouted and kicked and I felt something inside of me die, something that would never return.

  CHAPTER 84

  OVER THE NEX
T ten hours I put it together.

  I awoke in Le Mitard, solitary confinement, handcuffed to the metal ring protruding from the wall. Blood in my mouth, burning pain in my ribs, bruises on my wrists.

  My first instinct was to scream, but my vocal cords were worn raw. And I’d cried enough already. I’d shed enough tears to fill the Seine. That reservoir was now dry. And another emotion had overtaken my sadness: fear.

  I gave myself a window of time, eyes squeezed shut, thinking about my dear friend Winnie, my neighbor for so many years in Switzerland, all the times we’d shared a bottle of wine while our diplomat husbands were off on their travels, how many times I’d wiped the noses of her children. She’d been more like a sister than a friend. She’d made mistakes, yes, but she hadn’t deserved what came her way the last year. I would remember her for her generous soul, her animated spirit, while the rest of the world would remember her as a cold, calculating killer.

  But then, after a couple of hours, I took a deep breath and refocused my mind. Because if I was understanding things correctly, my own window of time would be closing soon, too.

  It wouldn’t do any good to mourn Winnie if I was dead, too.

  So I lay in the solitary cell and just thought.

  They’d killed Winnie as they had Linette, right around a shift change for the guards. Winnie’s time of death was called at 2:40 p.m., but clearly she’d been poisoned earlier than that. No doubt the official investigation would place the time of her poisoning just before, or just after, the 2:00 p.m. shift change. Just as they had with Linette, the guards, once again, would have cover.

  Two murders in six days. First my best friend inside this place, the person I saw on a daily basis. Then my best friend, period.

  Not a coincidence. Not even subtle. Just the opposite. They were sending me a message. They wanted my confession desperately, more intensely with each passing day, as my appeal quickly approached.