Chapter 6: The Night His Mother Stopped Smiling
Carol's lawyer was named Ruth Halstead.
She arrived at Carol's house at half past midnight in a gray wool coat with a yellow legal pad under her arm and reading glasses already on her face.
She shook my hand, shook Diane's hand, poured herself a glass of water without being offered one, and sat down at the kitchen table.
"Talk," she said.
"All of it."
We talked for ninety minutes.
Ruth listened, wrote, interrupted occasionally with sharp specific questions, and listened again.
When we were finished she had filled fourteen pages of her legal pad and her water glass was empty.
She looked at Diane first.
"You said there was no divorce decree."
"Correct."
"And you were legally married in this state?"
"Yes.
I have the certificate."
Ruth looked at me.
"Which means your marriage certificate has a defect that may render the ceremony void.
That is actually useful to you, not harmful.
It means you entered the contract under false pretenses and were deceived from the beginning." She tapped her pen against the pad.
"Combined with the recording, the financial documentation, and the surveillance photographs — what you have here is not a divorce case.
What you have here is a fraud case.
Possibly a criminal one."
The kitchen was very quiet.
"His mother," I said.
"She orchestrated all of it."
"I heard the recording," Ruth said.
"She named herself.
She named amounts.
She named a lawyer." She set her pen down.
"That lawyer is going to have a very difficult few months."
Carol refilled Ruth's water glass without being asked.
Ruth nodded once in acknowledgment.
"What happens now?" I said.
"Tonight, nothing.
Tonight you sleep.
Tomorrow morning I file for an emergency protective order and begin the process of securing the original documents and the USB drive as evidence.
I will also make a call to someone I know in the financial crimes division." She looked at me steadily.
"I need you to be prepared for this to become larger than your marriage.
His mother has done this before.
You may not be the only complainant by the time this is finished."
"The girl in Portland," I said.
Ruth's eyes sharpened.
"Say that again."
I repeated what his mother had said through the ceiling.
*The girl in Portland is already waiting.*
Ruth picked up her pen.
She wrote for a long time.
When she looked up, something in her expression had shifted.
Not alarm.
Something colder and more purposeful than alarm.
"Try to sleep," she said.
"Both of you.
I will be here when you wake up."
I did not sleep.
I lay in Carol's guest room and stared at the ceiling and thought about a woman in Portland who did not yet know that her photographs were already somewhere in a basement wall.
At 4 a.m.
my husband called my phone.
I watched his name light up the screen four times.
I did not answer.
May you like
On the fifth call I pressed decline, and his name went dark, and I set the phone face-down on the nightstand.
By morning, Ruth had already made three calls I didn't know about yet.
