by Brandi Reeds
“Let’s walk through the evidence against you, shall we?” I pour myself a glass of chardonnay. “We have the embryo—yours. We have the handwriting on the suicide note—also yours. We have fingerprints on the cash on the counter—ditto. Blood on your shirt, which you tried to conceal—is that Margaux’s, too? Your prints on a knife in her kitchen. A cut on her cheek with a blade similar to the one in said knife. Underwear in your pocket—Margaux’s. Money gone from our accounts. By. The. Boatload. We have a note dropped to a neighbor hinting that Margaux knew something bad was going to happen to her. Another neighbor witnessing an argument between you two. Pictures on flash drives. Your cousin’s wife and a headstrong firefighter who figured you out, and they’re all going to testify against you. Am I missing anything else? The state’s attorneys don’t need to call me, because they can call any of these women to testify as to your choking fetish.”
“We have a medical expert who says the bruising on her neck occurred at least an hour before death. His testimony proves suicide.”
“And the state’s medical expert disputes that.”
“And a specialist who can testify the chair tipped over in accordance with suicide—studies about her body weight, and the way the chair would have fallen are consistent with what they found at Margaux’s apartment.”
“And I’m sure the state can find someone who says the scene was staged. You’re flipping a coin, Ian. Take the plea.”
“But she was alive when I left. She had a pulse. She’d passed out, but she was breathing. Even if she somehow died after I left, I’d take the plea. But she was hanging. I didn’t hang her. I didn’t stage the chair or sign the note.”
“But you were there. A plea’s not a bad idea.”
“The sexual nature of this case, Kirstie, the felony homicide . . . if I take the plea, I’m disbarred,” Ian says. “It’s called moral turpitude. It’s an immediate disbarment.”
“Well, how’s that for poetic justice?” I sip my wine. “Both of us, starting over at age forty.”
“We’re not getting divorced,” Ian says.
“I already have the papers drawn up.” I pull them from the drawer where I stashed them earlier. “Doug gave me the name of a good lawyer, so—”
“But we can beat a civil case. The evidence is highly circumstantial.”
“Yeah. But where are you going to find a jury to acquit? You’re the most hated man in Chicago right now. Ask Doug: if you go to trial, they’re going to convict.”
“Not if we establish doubt. We have to play the Patrick card to establish doubt. I know we don’t want to, Kirstie, but—”
“Stop.” I close my eyes and gather every breath of patience I can find. “Sign the papers. I want sixty-five percent of everything. My lawyer tells me this is a textbook maintenance case, but I don’t have confidence in your ability to pay me maintenance. Buy me out of the firm, and as part of the settlement on the business front, I want sole ownership of Barrett Enterprises.”
“Barrett?” Ian begins to flip through the terms of the divorce.
I grin. “I have a good lawyer. He found a lot of assets I didn’t know about. You established a company in Nevada. Very tricky. You established it in my name—my maiden name. Trickier still. Since it’s already mine, I want it. Along with the house in Tahoe, which of course I’m going to sell. But the firm is marital property,” I tell him. “And I’m entitled to a percentage of your shares. I want two point five million.”
“Two point five.” Ian chuckles. “You’re out of your mind.”
“I’m actually entitled to three. Doug sent the net worth of the practice, and together, he and my lawyer find two point five more than fair, considering I’ll be footing the bill for the rest of Quinn’s studies.”
“Doug wouldn’t do that.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have taken liberties with his wife. Just saying.” I toss a pen to the half ream of paper on the table in front of my soon-to-be ex-husband.
“Buy something nice for yourself,” he says as he signs.
“I will.”
I’m thinking of heading to Have a Heart Rescue . . . for a husky pup.
THEN
MARGAUX
She came to with a gasp and a headache that just wouldn’t quit.
And her throat hurt, inside and out.
The rope still dangled from the rafters above.
The underwear he’d torn from her body still lay, discarded, on the floor.
And, adding insult to injury, the wine and roses were gone, but the pile of cash remained.
Maybe he thought she was dead. And he left her.
He’d gotten his way after all. The joke was still on her.
But the day wasn’t over yet.
Margaux trod past the rope, to the bathroom.
A mark was already forming on her neck.
He’d been extra rough with her. She wondered . . . would things have been different had he known she still carried his child? Had he wanted the child, would he have been loving and gentle with her?
She walked back to the scene, which he’d left untouched, then circled around to the kitchen. She fixed her gaze on the note he’d been writing when she walked in.
Well. It just about said it all, didn’t it?
I’M SORRY. I JUST CAN’T DO THIS ANYMORE.
She picked up the pencil and began to sign her name. Halfway through the M, she stopped. Was she being silly and dramatic about this whole thing?
She pressed the pencil back to the M and continued to write: M-A . . .
She paused again, brought a fist to her lips, and sobbed. She then pressed the tip of the pencil back to the paper, about to scrawl an R, but thought better of it and formed a G. He should know he was the reason she was doing what she was about to do, and no one but he called her Maggie.
But should she do it at all?
There were plenty of reasons to go through with it, but were there any reasons not to?
What did she have to live for?
Everything that mattered was gone.
She wrote another G, then paused.
Not everything. There was her baby.
But what kind of life could she provide for a child? She looked around the apartment. Where would she even put a child in this place?
And then there was the heart of the matter: no matter how or where the child grew up, he’d have her as a mother. A few hours ago, she’d intended to terminate the pregnancy. She was an unemployed practitioner of deviant acts in the sack. A slut, as Ian often reminded her. A pushover. She was an orphan. Friendless. Put here on this earth to be used by even the man who’d adopted her years ago.
She brought a fingertip to the raised flesh on her right breast, where Ian had carved his fake initials. Branded a fool.
She finished the signature with a flourish. Signed Maggie.
Then she wrote another note to her neighbor downstairs: If anything happens to me, tell them it wasn’t an accident.
She picked up the panties Ian had torn from her body and tossed them into the trash. She threw on a dress and took the trash outside. At the last second, she hurled the bag over the fence, and it landed in a neighboring dumpster. That way, if the authorities found it, it would look like someone had deliberately tried to hide it. On her way back up to her apartment, she slipped the note under the neighbor’s door.
She then climbed the stairs and entered her apartment for the last time. She didn’t bother to lock the door behind her. She’d save them the trouble of taking an ax to it.
She pulled off the dress, so they’d find her in the nightie Ian bought for her, and reapplied her lipstick.
One last look in the mirror. She touched the scar on her cheek.
She thought of her mother, her father. Her sisters, Chelsey and Kendall.
“I’m coming home,” she whispered a moment before slashing at the scar with the knife Ian had used to cut the foil from a bottle of wine he’d never opened.
The end of the rope that
used to bind her limbs became a loop, and she placed it around her neck.
They’d suspect him, considering the evidence:
His handwriting on the suicide note.
The name she’d signed on it.
And there were witnesses, people who saw them together at Aquasphere, and the concerned third party. The neighbor downstairs, who could testify to hearing her screams. Her friend, the recently married Donna Fordham.
There was the crust of his ejaculate on her inner thighs.
His baby in her uterus.
Marks on her neck that surely could be matched to his fingers, his thumbs.
And his fingerprints on the knife she’d just used to slash at her cheek.
He’d go down for this.
The police were smart. They’d find him.
The moment she stepped off the chair, she caught sight of a red brassiere flung to the corner of the room in the midst of his passion, but it was too late to pick it up.
The world went black.
Chapter 51
KIRSTEN
Helen’s article—Justice for Margaux—went to print this morning on the front page of the Trib, the very morning arguments closed in the State of Illinois v. Ian Holloway.
The alderman is being arraigned down the hall, but Helen isn’t present in his courtroom. The charges against him range from arson—one of his cronies will testify to torching the Aquasphere to conceal the alderman’s history there—to child molestation to extortion.
Once Helen and I started working together, we confirmed that the twenty grand per month had been deposited into the alderman’s campaign fund. From there, it was transferred into various accounts—one of which was established in Margaux’s name. It seems he was reimbursing Margaux’s tuition fund all along.
Helen and Richard Akers offered to return the money to me, but I opted for another, more philanthropic recourse. “The money will go to the Margaux Stritch memorial scholarship,” I tell Ian. We’re in a conference room at the courthouse, awaiting the jury’s decision, and although our divorce was uncontested and final last week, I’m here anyway. I’m not here for him; rather, I’m here to ensure justice is served.
Furthermore, this could very well be the last time we speak without Big Brother listening in on the line.
“I might need the money Akers extorted for an appeal,” Ian says.
I shrug. “Oh, well. I think it’s put to better use this way. You have thirty-five percent of our marital estate, should you need an appeal.”
“Did you take a pill this morning?”
“Why?” I pull my feet up under me and lean back in the chair I’m occupying and flip through my Pinterest boards on my phone.
“Why? Because Quinn tells you she’s leaving for school early, and you have a psychotic episode. I could be put away for a good, long time, and you’re about to take a nap. What gives?”
“First of all, my episode? It wasn’t about Quinn going to college. I lost my mind because I’d learned a few things I didn’t care to know. See, one morning the previous week, a package arrived at the house. Enclosed was a flash drive.”
“Oh, Christ. You’re not actually hinging this belief on the alderman’s accusation—”
“Do you want to talk? Or do you want me to explain? You can’t have it both ways.”
Ian throws his hands in the air.
I continue, “I didn’t plug in the drive. I wasn’t ready to face it. I didn’t see what was on it until I rediscovered it in your Hustler after Margaux died. But I started following you and learned you had a girlfriend. One night, I followed you into a bad neighborhood. You called her a whore, and you fucked her up against a wall—very violently.”
Ian looks pale. “You’re mistaken.” He fiddles with the band on his watch. “It couldn’t have been me.”
“It brought back memories of Oak Street Beach, what you did to me there, and I couldn’t sleep that night. I didn’t know what to do, and then, at the farmers market, it all crashed down on me. There I was, pretending everything was fine, and Fiona was babbling about everything coming to an end, and I lost it. My life was a lie.”
“You don’t know what you saw.”
“And then you suggested a move to the country. To the Secret Garden. Very aptly named home, don’t you think, considering the multitude of secrets you were keeping? But the move, I’ve recently figured out, wasn’t really to give me space or a fresh start. It was because your cousin decided to marry a girl you’d been involved with, and they were living down the street in Evanston. You needed to distance me from her because you assumed she’d tell me everything. And you know what? She did anyway. It just took Margaux’s death to get her talking.”
“You can’t believe everything—”
“It wasn’t until I started hearing the name of your archrival from the past—Jack Wyatt—that I realized this thing was bigger than you and some young girl you’d met and hooked unaware. It wasn’t about the number of other women you’d flirted with over the years and even screwed when you thought I wasn’t looking—yes, I suspected it was happening all along.”
“I’m sorry.” He hangs his head. “But it’s all in the past.”
“But if you want to know the last straw, it was when I saw her face on the news. Margaux was dead, and even if you didn’t kill her, it was your fault. I started thinking about all the other women you’d ruined, all the women who were fragments of what they used to be . . . because of you. I knew then and there: you deserved to pay. But I had to be patient about it. Had to play my cards close to my chest. You had to keep thinking I was clueless if I was going to hem you in so tightly you wouldn’t be able to wiggle out of it.”
“Kirstie, I love you.”
“You’re still stuck in a world where you have to prove your strength because you’re not quite good enough for first place. Stuck in a world where you take a girl when she’s not ready instead of taking your time because what if she’s never ready? Stuck in a world where you’re just a scared kid staring at a positive pregnancy test.”
“You’re exaggerating things.” He flips his watch around his wrist again.
“And then, when I call you on it, you tell me I’m imagining things. You tell me I need a sedative. You lie through your teeth, and you want to know how I know that? Every time you tell a lie, you play with the band of your watch.”
He snaps his hand away.
Doug peeks in. “Verdict.”
“Do you feel better now?” I ask. “Knowing I know everything? Knowing you’re not nearly as mysterious as you seem to think you are?”
“Kirstie?” He reaches for me, but I don’t fold. “You can’t believe I’d actually kill someone. Could you?”
“It doesn’t matter if you did it or not. You deserve whatever punishment they give you.”
I walk back into the courtroom and slip into a row in the back. We form a chain, grasping hands: Donna, me, Jessica, and standing in for Margaux, Helen.
“All rise.” We stand as a united front.
Quinn and Patrick didn’t come, and it’s just as well.
Not a single jury member looks at my ex-husband as they file in.
But we, the four of us, those he’d hurt and stolen dignity from, stare him down when he looks at us over his shoulder.
His one fatal flaw: he never dreamed we’d band together.
He thought what he could offer us was more than what we’d offer each other.
The verdict: guilty.
The women on either side of me squeeze my hands.
I squeeze back.
Chapter 52
KIRSTEN
“If I have to take a few years off before continuing my education,” Quinn says via FaceTime, “I don’t mind.”
“Absolutely not.” I’m walking Brady, my new husky pup, who’s growing way too fast for his own good, through the woods today.
“Are you honestly going to stay in that big, empty house?”
“It’s growing on me.”
<
br /> “But that house was Dad’s decision.”
“I’m renovating.”
“That must cost a lot, too. I want you to be able to go Door County, Mom. I want you to be able to do something for you, after all you’ve been through.”
“I’m doing plenty for me. Don’t worry about your tuition,” I tell her. “Your father and I had saved quite a bit, you know, and one of the reasons he agreed to a quick split was to protect our assets for your education.”
“That’s your money, and you have far less earning power left than I do.”
“Thanks, kid. But I’m not exactly ancient, you know.”
And I know I came away with slightly more than my fair share of the nest egg. When Ian’s time is served, he’ll be searching for a new career. He’ll start from ground zero in planning for his retirement, too.
It’s only fair. I have to start there, and I didn’t commit a crime of moral turpitude. All I did was raise good people and believe in the man who helped me conceive them.
“Mom?” My daughter looks really sad. “Why did he do this? To all of us?”
Someday, maybe, I’ll tell my daughter it was all an accident, that Ian hadn’t meant for things to get out of hand. Or maybe I’ll tell her the truth. That sometimes, infidelity is murder. Other times, it may as well be suicide. In the case of her father, it was both.
But for now, I say, “Someday, I hope we all understand why, Quinn. It’s going to take us a long time to heal, but it’ll happen.”
“You know, I think it’s a good thing. For you. You get to start over.”
“I do.”
“And speaking of starting over . . . see that cute guy there? On the bench?” She flips her camera around to afford me a view of a kid in a leather bomber jacket. “We’re going out tonight.”
“Very cute, Miss Holloway.”
“Speaking of . . . Patrick and I were talking, and we want to change our last name.”
Of all the things I expected my children to do in the aftermath of this mess, this one practically floors me. “Really? Do you think that’s fair to your father? To your grandparents?”