“Like an adult,” he’d amended, with irritating calm. “Shouldn’t she be—I don’t know—collecting stickers and coloring books?”
“She’s not five, Waylen.”
“She’s not thirty-five, either.” He’d had to fight to keep his voice low. He didn’t say the rest of it—the part we’ve hashed out a thousand times. He wants our life to bemore…normal. My obsession with spying, he doesn’t understand. “What are you trying to prove?” he’s asked. But I can never tell him. There’s only one person who truly understands, and that’s Mr. X, who agrees with me.
Now I sit in the courtroom with Collette, who is eleven—and admittedly I do forget she’s not thirty-five sometimes.
The teachers at Collette’s esteemed private school would be horrified to know that I’m exposing her to this case. But I wasn’t much older than she is when I was in a courtroom as a defendant and stood trial for murder.
I already know the verdict will be guilty. The head juror is a petite college student named Mira Hart, and she’s working for me. If there was any evidence of jury tampering that led to this conviction, the courts would have to throw the whole thing out. But that won’t be an issue.
Emma Graham sits tall and straight. Maybe she’s trying to maintain her pride, or maybe she still thinks she can get away with the crime she committed forty years ago. It happened before they had things like DNA testing, and small-town cops thought a man was more likely to take his own life than his loving wife was. This was back when the news media lined their pockets with sad stories of pigtailed girls who were stolen from their beds or snatched from their bicycles.
I found Emma’s story while browsing a thread on Reddit. “What’s a solved case that you think the cops got wrong?” Investigators never looked into Emma’s motives. Just two months after her husband was found, she cut all communication with her extended family and ran off witha man she’d been having an affair with. These could have been the actions of a desperate widow looking to escape her grief. But the case still intrigued me.
Someone on the forum claimed to have a taped confession. He was an Uber driver, and he’d recently shuttled an intoxicated Emma home from a senior center bingo night. She told the Uber driver that he shouldn’t get too cocky about his good looks, because one day he would also be washed up and ugly, like the man she’d murdered for a fifty-thousand-dollar insurance settlement.
Most people assumed the post was a hoax. No shortage of those on the internet. But I reached out and obtained a copy of his dashcam footage. I took on the case—no easy feat—and was able to piece the evidence together.
But I’m not a cop. I’m not even an investigator. I am part of an organization that handles things a bit differently.
Dear Emma,I began my letter to her.Although nothing can bring your loving husband back, today you are given the chance to redeem yourself. In your backyard, below the seashell where you keep the spare key, you’ll find a cassette tape of the night you confessed to positioning your sedated husband behind the wheel of his van, putting it in drive, and watching him roll forward into the lake. Some details the police never released, to prove that I’m serious: You’d given him Benadryl in a late-night smoothie, and he threw up on impact. You had tried to tape a rock to the gas pedal, but it kept falling off, so you had to push it yourself. You tell people that your husband was planning to leave you and that’s why you were having an affair. But after the truth cocktail my contact slipped into your drink at the bar, you confessed. You don’t remember this, but I have the proof.
By signing your latest dearly departed husband’s pension checksover to the safe home for battered women and children, you can save lives like the one you ended and make things right. You will not go to prison if you comply.
I’ll contact you soon with instructions.
—
Sometimes, the criminals I contact know a gift when they see it. Not Emma. She was used to the accusations—all of which had been proven false—and she must have assumed this was yet another hoax. She didn’t shutter herself in the house or call an attorney like some have, but she did become increasingly paranoid. Looking over her shoulder when she sat at the seaside bar, jolting whenever the voices of strangers grew too close as she sunned herself in the sand.
Still, when the police finally showed up at her door, I imagine she was surprised.
Throughout the trial, Emma searched the faces of the jurors and sometimes turned to the people in the pews behind her, no doubt searching for her letter writer. No doubt wondering who was watching, who knew her darkest secret. But now that I’m here in person—rather than watching the recaps in my kitchen as I make dinner—she doesn’t look for me. She’s given up.
The judge, for her part, gives a passionate speech about the abhorrence of Emma’s crime, and then she summons the head juror to read the verdict.
Mira Hart, twenty-one and with a melodic theater major’s voice, reads from the paper in her hands. “To the charge of murder in the first degree, we the jury find the defendant guilty.”
There are more charges, but that was the big one. Collette is perched on the edge of her seat, biting her lip.
When Mira finishes speaking, for a moment it’s quiet enough to hear a pin drop. The judge has instructed all of us that we’d be removed from the courtroom if we caused a disturbance.
I wait until the room is mostly empty before I take Collette’s hand and lead her outside. She’s somber, but when we reach the last step of the courthouse, she leaps into a dancer’s pirouette. “That was really cool, Mom,” she says. “Thanks for bringing me. Now I can tell my friends I was sitting five feet away from a murderer. Her shoulders got all hunched up when they found her guilty.”
“Maybe this should be our secret,” I say, opening the door to the SUV for her. “Your father didn’t want me to take you.”
“Why not?” she asks. “It’s not like she’s going to kill me, too. They had her in handcuffs.”
Collette has Waylen’s gold hair and blue eyes. She has his prowess for art and science, and they both love to bake bougie French desserts.
But even though we don’t match up on everything, Collette is more like me than she realizes. I knew it very early on. Waylen sees it too, and it scares the hell out of him.
“I don’t want this life for her,” he’s whispered to me while we’re lying in bed. He doesn’t mean my day job as an interior decorator, or his salaried job editing manuscripts for a Big Five publisher. He means the thing we don’t say. The life he gave up. The things I do when I disappear for hours at a time, and the reason Emma Graham will spend the rest of her miserable life in prison.
“She can do anything,” he’s told me. “Anything but that.”
—
