by Jance, J. A.
Gordon might have been ambitious, but he was also self-involved, relatively weak, and not particularly kind. He had died of a heart attack at age thirty-eight, but all through their marriage he managed to sneer at his wife for not having the benefit of a college education. As far as Gordon was concerned, spending time in a finishing school was no substitute for a college degree, and Eddie, mirroring his father’s attitude, had done the same thing.
But Hannah had learned that, degreed or not, whatever she might have lacked in diplomas, she made up for with a strong streak of pragmatism and common sense which, along with her unfortunate looks, had come down to her on her father’s side of the family tree. She had used that pragmatism to advance Gordon’s political prospects while ignoring his occasional dalliances and indiscretions. It was a time when divorces just weren’t done, but she had retaliated by keeping a very tight hold on the family purse strings and by making sure Gordon understood that the money was hers rather than theirs.
Since common sense and pragmatism had seen her through any number of difficult situations, she fully expected the same would be true today.
With Marco carefully shepherding the Rolls through traffic, they made their way into the city. It might have been noon, but traffic was already a nightmare. The drive from Santa Clarita to the country club, a distance of only a bit more than thirty miles, took an hour and twenty minutes, but the extra time gave Hannah a chance to settle into her comfy leather seat, close her eyes, and plan her strategy.
Try as she might, Hannah continued to regard her former daughter-in-law’s death as no great loss. She had adored Jeanette, Eddie’s first wife. When her son had thrown Jeanette over for a bottle-blond floozy named Dawn, who happened to be his then nurse/receptionist, Hannah had been beyond furious. The poisonous level of antipathy that sprang up between the two women had been instantaneous, mutual, and utterly unrelenting.
Hannah and Eddie had been estranged the whole time he and Dawn were married, and that had continued to be the case even after she’d helped him survive his second divorce. But when her son’s carefully constructed world began to implode again, he’d been forced to come to his mother looking for help. Hannah had decided early on that if he ever showed any interest in reconciling, she would welcome him with open arms. Eddie might have been arrogant and obnoxious growing up, but she’d loved him all the same. If his being in crisis was the only way she could have her son back in her life, then Hannah would take whatever she could get.
When it came time for him to shuck off Dawn, Hannah had been more than happy to step in and foot the bill. She’d had her own attorney negotiate the divorce settlement, thinking that would give them the best deal. Things hadn’t quite gone their way, and the settlement had been more generous than Hannah had anticipated. Still, from her point of view, if it meant getting rid of Dawn, it was money well spent.
The problem was, unloading Dawn wasn’t nearly the end of Eddie’s troubles. About that same time, Eddie’s formerly prosperous fertility clinic began running into difficulties. Some of his earlier patients—people he had assisted in their quests to conceive—had begun claiming that he’d misled them concerning the donors he’d used. Hannah was offended. What was wrong with those people? Without Eddie’s help they never would have had kids in the first place, and now they were complaining about the very children Eddie had helped provide? Talk about ingratitude!
It wasn’t until after Dawn’s death that Eddie had finally told her that some of those same dissatisfied former patients, now part of a group called the Progeny Project, were initiating a class-action lawsuit against him. Hannah had immediately swung into action. She sent in an attorney who, for a pretty penny, had managed to have the case dismissed. But just because the lawsuit went away, that didn’t mean the ugly rumors did.
As long as Eddie remained a person of interest in the murder of his ex-wife, it was hardly surprising that his practice continued to nosedive. His nurse, Kaitlyn, quit—or maybe Eddie simply let her go, Hannah never knew which. Patients dropped him left and right. New patients stopped showing up. He tried selling the practice, but in view of all the scandal surrounding it, no one was interested. For a long time, Eddie continued going into the office every day even though he no longer had patients to see. Eventually, though, he was forced to close his doors and put the building itself on the market. Disgraced, out of business, and now under arrest for murder, Eddie might have led a life of utter failure, and yet his mother was determined to do everything in her power to help him.
Marco Gregory dropped Hannah off at the clubhouse’s front door with barely ten minutes to spare before her one thirty luncheon appointment. Just as she’d requested, the hostess led her to one of the prized tables next to the windows. This one happened to overlook two of the course’s more challenging sand traps. Hannah wasn’t all that interested in golf, but her guests generally were, and she liked to make sure the immaculately kept course was front and center in their line of sight.
Shortly after she was seated, the hostess returned, leading a confident-looking man Hannah pegged to be somewhere in his mid-fifties. She’d expected someone older and more seasoned. He had a trim, athletic build and boasted a full head of silvery hair. He approached her with a self-assured smile, dressed in a designer suit topped by a neatly tied bright yellow bow tie. It was a look designed to intimidate and put people in their place. Hannah wasn’t impressed.
“Ms. Gilchrist?” he asked, holding out his hand. “A pleasure to meet you.”
“Mrs. Gilchrist rather than Ms.,” she corrected primly. “Won’t you have a seat?”
Calvin Wilkins sat, passing a business card across the table as he did so. She studied it, frowning in displeasure.
“This says Calvin Wilkins Jr. I believe I distinctly said that I wished to conduct my business with Calvin Wilkins Sr.”
“Calvin Wilkins Sr. was my father,” the man explained. “Unfortunately, he suffered a massive heart attack and passed away almost a year ago.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Hannah offered.
“My son, officially Calvin Wilkins III, finished law school third in his class and passed the bar exam on the first try three years ago. He works in the firm, but it’s still a little early to bring him in as a managing partner. I’ve left the name on the wall as is for the time being, while we give him a chance to grow into the role. As the granddaughter of Augustus and Alberta Anderson, I’m sure you understand the value and importance of carrying on with a legacy name.”
Hannah nodded her assent, pleased that in the time between her original phone call and now, her selected attorney had done some homework. He knew who she was without her having to tell him. Whether he was Junior or Senior meant little as long as their meeting was off to a good start. She had prepared a check for him before leaving home. Pulling it out of her purse, she slid it across the table. Calvin picked it up, looked at it briefly, and then slid it into the inside pocket of his jacket.
“Your son will need to sign off on your paying for his representation prior to the bail hearing. I have the form with me, so he can sign it this afternoon when I go to the jail to meet him. That won’t be a problem, will it?”
“Not at all,” Hannah answered. “Beggars can’t be choosers.”
Their waitress arrived at the table. “Can I get you two something to drink?”
“Since I need to head north to meet with my client right after lunch,” Calvin said, “I believe I’ll stick to coffee.”
“And you?” the waitress asked, turning her attention on Hannah.
“I have a car and driver waiting outside,” Hannah told her. “I believe I’ll have a dry martini.”
15
Santa Clarita, California, January 2011
Eddie’s preliminary hearing turned out to be a complete disaster. Hannah arrived at the courthouse fully prepared to post whatever bail the judge might deem necessary. In terms of strategy, it was probably a bad idea on Hannah’s part to have Marco drive her to the
courthouse in the Rolls. The judge involved wasn’t someone Hannah knew personally, but the prosecutor was.
The assistant district attorney’s wife and Hannah had served on the board for the local Friends of the Library for several years. At those gatherings Hannah had never made a big deal of who she was, but it was one of those things that went without saying, unless of course you counted the catered afternoon tea she hosted at her home each September—the home Ambrose and Isobel Anderson had built and gifted to the newlyweds shortly after their daughter’s marriage to Gordon Gilchrist, a Santa Clarita native. Compared to Hollywood mansions, the place would be considered modest, but by Santa Clarita standards it was distinctly upper-crust.
Naturally, when asked how he pleaded, Eddie, with Calvin Wilkins at his side, announced clearly and distinctly, “Not guilty.”
But then things went sideways. “The defendant is a long-term member of the community,” the ADA allowed, “but his business has recently failed and his house is in danger of going into foreclosure.”
Hannah sighed when she heard that telling detail. It was one more thing Eddie had neglected to mention.
“Nonetheless,” the ADA continued, “with his mother’s Rolls-Royce parked outside the courtroom, I believe it’s fair to say that Dr. Gilchrist still has access to considerable financial resources, and that makes him a flight risk. Given that as well as the seriousness of the crime, the prosecution asks that the defendant not be allowed to post bail.”
Calvin Wilkins objected, of course, but to no effect.
“The defendant will be returned to the county jail facility here in Santa Clarita, where he’s to be held without bail pending trial,” the judge announced with a quick rap of his gavel. “Next case.”
No trial had been held—no guilty verdict rendered—but the rap of that gavel at midafternoon on a Wednesday sentenced Hannah Gilchrist to the next stage of her life as surely as if her son had already been convicted. And three days later, on a Saturday morning, it began in dead earnest.
That day and every Saturday afterward, from then until the end of the trial, Hannah got up early, ate her solitary breakfast, made herself presentable, and then headed off for the jail. Just because her son had hit a rough patch, that didn’t mean she was going to abandon him, not at all.
With Marco behind the wheel and Hannah once again in the backseat of the Rolls, she was dismayed to notice, for the first time but not the last, that the Santa Clarita jail was located on Magic Mountain Parkway. There was nothing magic about it.
At the jail Hannah exited the car, leaving behind both her purse and her phone. She had done some checking in advance. Hannah knew she’d be required to pass through security in order to gain access to the visitors’ room, and she had no intention of allowing some grubby jail guard to paw through her belongings. She’d also learned that in order to be given a pass, she’d be required to provide photo ID. Hannah had never learned to drive, so presenting a driver’s license was out. Instead she brought along her passport.
“I expect I’ll be about an hour,” she told Marco. “You don’t have to wait here. If you have something to do in the meantime, feel free.”
She breezed through the metal detector and then went to a scarred Formica-topped counter where, after signing in and presenting her passport for examination, she was issued a name tag and a visitor’s lanyard. Eventually she found herself in a grim, airless anteroom, waiting with a small crowd of people outside a locked metal door with the word VISITATION painted in heavy black letters on thick, wire-reinforced glass. Once the door was unlocked, Hannah was the first person in. A guard examined her lanyard, made a notation on a clipboard, and then motioned her inside.
The barren room was lined with narrow cubicles divided by tall panes of plexiglass that kept the prisoners on their side of the cubicle and visitors on the other. There were no chairs in the room. Each cubicle came complete with a pull-out metal seat permanently attached beneath a gray Formica countertop. No physical contact was allowed. There were no pass-throughs. The only means of communication between one side and the other was by way of a pair of old-fashioned telephone receivers mounted at shoulder height on the walls on either side of the glass partition.
“Wait here,” another guard told Hannah, directing her to a cubicle. “I’ll have someone bring Mr. Gilchrist right out.”
The fact that Eddie’s identity had already been divested of the word “doctor” made Hannah want to weep, but eventually she got a grip. She was here to support her son, not to fall apart. She sat up straight, folded her carefully manicured hands in her lap, and waited. At last a guard escorted Eddie into the room. It pained her to see her son dressed in an orange jumpsuit and shuffling along in prison-issue slippers. With his fading and thinning ginger hair, orange was definitely not a good color for him, most especially in a room lit by ugly fluorescent fixtures. There were dark circles under his eyes, so most likely he hadn’t slept well. Neither had Hannah for that matter, but the makeup she’d carefully applied before coming here had helped.
She waited until he was seated before picking up the telephone receiver. “Good morning,” she said.
Holding the phone to his ear with his shoulder, Eddie used his hands to send his mother a signed response. “It sucks,” he said.
When Hannah’s father, Ambrose, had come down with mumps at age five, his mother, Alberta, had been stricken with mumps as well. She had recovered eventually but was left profoundly deaf. As a result, her husband, Augustus, had decreed that everyone in the household, hired help and their son included, should learn sign language. For Ambrose sign language really became his second language, something he had passed along to his own daughter once Hannah arrived on the scene. The fact that Ambrose and Hannah could carry on private conversations in Isobel’s presence without her being able to understand what they were saying was something that had driven Hannah’s mother crazy, but not so crazy that she bothered learning the skill on her own. And remembering how she and her father had navigated around Isobel, from the time Eddie began learning to talk, Hannah had taught her son sign language.
Armed with the same steadiness that had once allowed Hannah to prop up a weak-willed husband, she had come to the jail fully prepared to prop up Gordon’s weak-willed son. And in view of the fact that the signs outside clearly stated that all phone calls in the visitors’ room were recorded, being able to resort to using sign language was a real boon. As they chatted back and forth, sometimes speaking and sometimes signing, Hannah Gilchrist couldn’t help but think she was doing exactly what mothers are supposed to do—supporting her son. She did so with no idea that she had just taken the first step on a very dark road.
For the next thirteen months, while Eddie awaited trial, she was there at the county lockup every Saturday morning, come rain or come shine, dropped off early and picked up an hour later. Over time she and Eddie managed to sort out a shorthand version of sign language that required only one hand and was less likely to be spotted by the guards. Eddie never told her that she was his only visitor, but the lady at the check-in counter did. Other than occasional visits by someone from Calvin Wilkins’s legal team, Hannah was it. She was the only one who cared.
Finally, after what seemed forever, the trial started, and Hannah was there for that, too, every single day. It was only then, in the courtroom with Judge William Ratcliff presiding, that Hannah finally learned the truth about the charges lodged against her son and about the many betrayals that had destined him for that spot at the defense table in a murder trial.
The first time Hannah entered the courtroom, she took her place in a front-row seat directly behind Eddie’s chair. Looking around, Hannah was reminded of the two separate churches that had been the sites of Eddie and Dawn’s wedding and of Eddie and Jeanette’s wedding before that. In both instances the pews had been divided by a central aisle into two separate sections—one side for the bride’s guests and the other for the groom’s.
The layout for the courtroom gall
ery in Santa Clarita was eerily similar. On one side, the prosecutorial side, were Dawn’s family members and friends, along with people from what Hannah now recognized as the Progeny Project—the ultimate source of Eddie’s downfall. In the months leading up to Eddie’s trial, the ugly realities behind his once-profitable fertility practice had become common public knowledge.
Unfortunately, the results were there in the courtroom for all to see. Two women—the original founders of the Progeny Project, Alexandra Munsey and Cassie Davis—were there, as were their two sons, Evan and Rory. The two young men looked so much alike that they might have been twins, and together they both bore a striking resemblance to Eddie.
Hannah considered their visible presence to be prejudicial, as far as the jury was concerned. Calvin Wilkins went so far as to move that the two young men in question be barred from the courtroom—a request Judge Ratcliff denied. They, along with their mothers, were there every single day for the duration of the three-week trial. And every time Hannah looked at the two young men, she felt nothing but loathing. These were not her grandchildren. If they along with their mothers and surrogate fathers were Eddie’s sworn enemies, they were hers as well.
The courtroom was filled almost to capacity every day of the trial, but on Eddie’s side of the room Hannah alone occupied the front row, with the seats on either side of her left conspicuously empty. The rows behind her contained even more of Eddie’s former patients as well as a motley crew of media types. None of them were there on Eddie’s behalf. Rather than offering Hannah or her son any moral support, they were there for no other reason than to witness his total humiliation and cheer his undoing. Eddie’s former patients might have lost out on their ability to sue him for damages, but they were on hand partake in his final defeat.