“Myhusband? You think I want to do all the things we’ve been doing ... with myhusband?”
Forrest looked down at his golf shoes. It occurred to me that this wasn’t the first time he’d faced an angry woman in the waning days of a Lake Catherine summer.
“Your marriage isn’t my concern, Brenda. I don’t have a right to offer an opinion on that.”
Now Brenda had placed her hands on his shoulders, but not as a sign of affection this time. She was shaking him.
“We were going to Hawaii!” she screamed. “We were going to live in your house! The only thing that stood in our way was your miserable, scrawny, frigid, depressed, suicidal wife.”
“You don’t understand about Regina ...,” he said. I had never heard Forrest sound this way. Pleading. He was practically crying.
Suddenly Brenda’s voice became chillingly calm. “I told you I had that part all figured out,” she said. “I had a plan. She just had to be dead, and everything was going to be perfect.”
She’d said it. Plain and simple. There was no misinterpreting her words.
“I never wanted Regina to die,” Forrest said quietly. “I would never have done anything to hurt my wife. Not in a million years.”
“She’s basically half dead already.” Brenda’s voice had gone to a whole other octave now. I felt like calling out to Forrest,I knew she was a terrible person from the first time I laid eyes on her!But I held my tongue, of course.
“All we had to do was work out the fine points together,” Brenda said. As she spoke—yelled, actually—she was doing this odd thing. Itwas sort of like punching, but because the person doing the punching was Brenda, it came off looking more like tapping. She did this repeatedly, her palms landing on Forrest’s beautiful golf shirt, which, I happened to know, Regina had purchased for him at a boutique in New York City, back in the days when they took trips.
Still tapping, Brenda went on with her tirade. She had even drafted the suicide note. I detected a note of pride in her voice as she told him this. She had it all set, on her laptop.
“I made the note sound just like Regina,” she told him. Now she started to recite it, almost as if she were auditioning for a role in a movie. Or a soap opera.
“Please forgive me ... I can’t go on anymore ... I just want you and the children to be happy ... I don’t want to be the weight around your neck, holding you back ... You deserve all you ever dreamed of ... I’ll love you forever.”
The words Brenda said sounded nothing like Regina Emerson. They didn’t sound like Brenda Barnett either. There may have been a little of Dolly Parton in there, performing “I Will Always Love You.” It was almost as if Brenda were on a stage, only instead of belting out a song, she was performing this speech.
“You wanted to murder my wife,” Forrest said. His voice was so quiet, I could just barely hear him. Maybe he wasn’t the brightest person, and maybe her intentions hadn’t completely sunk in until now, but he finally got it. “You thought I’d be your accomplice.”
“Not murder, exactly,” Brenda said. “We were just going to ... clear the way for the inevitable.”
“I’m ashamed that I ever cared about you,” he said. For the first time, I could see his face. He didn’t look, anymore, like the stupid, lovestruck person he’d been for most of the summer. He looked horrified. He took a step backward, almost as if Brenda’s body—which he had made love to not so long ago—were radioactive.
“You disgust me,” he said. His back was to her. “And I’m disgusted with myself for having anything to do with you.”
“You’re an asshole!” she screamed. “You’re a stupid, pathetic, loser asshole.”
Just for a moment, Forrest turned around to face Brenda for what was surely the last time. “I’ve got to hand it to you, Brenda,” he said to her. “You’re right about that.”
He took a few steps toward the Porsche, then turned back one more time.
“My wife has every right to hate me now,” he said. “If she knew about you and me, she’d have every reason to want me dead. I couldn’t blame her if she did.”
As I’d done on my successful stakeout mission on the island, I waited for Forrest to leave before retrieving my bicycle from its hiding spot in the weeds. I stayed there for several minutes, crouched outside the Barnetts’ back porch while, inside, I heard the sound of Brenda weeping.
When I was sure the coast was clear, I biked back to Wonderland.
72
A Great Imagination
Later that afternoon, back at the house, Forrest was taking a shower. The children were off with friends. Regina was out on the patio.
It seemed like a perfect moment to take her aside and tell her what I’d learned.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” I said.
