In the charges she filed, the district attorney for Franklin County, Maine, asserted that Forrest was a serial cheater and sex addict with a long history of deceit and betrayals. The DA alleged that Forrest’s motive lay in his desire to end his marriage and his intention to create a new life with a woman named Brenda Barnett. She pointed to the fact that just weeks before her death—with her husband’s encouragement, no doubt—Regina had named her husband as beneficiary of a three-million-dollar life insurance policy in the event that she died before him.
Now more accusations spilled out over the pages of thePortland Press Heraldand beyond: the theory that Forrest had stockpiled sleeping pills with the intention of giving his wife—whose pill usage he oversaw—a lethal dose. In an attempt to replicate the manner in which Regina would have crafted a suicide note—and to avoid handwriting analysis—he’d typed the letter meant to look like a suicide note.
But Forrest had made a grievous mistake, the DA contended. Given the spelling errors in the note he allegedly laid beside his wife’s body—errors of a kind Regina herself would never have committed—heidentified himself, a man known to have struggled with literacy, as the true author of the note.
Then he’d administered the drugs that killed her.
Now Forrest Emerson was charged with first-degree murder, locked up in a jail, awaiting trial.
94
Trash Folder
My father and I were having lunch at the diner he used to take me to on Sunday afternoons, when he filled me in on what was happening. This diner gave you two hamburgers for the price of one and your first beer on the house.
“The case won’t hold up in court. Everyone knows Regina talked about taking her life for years.” He didn’t know yet—because I hadn’t told him—about the Polaroids I’d taken, the tapes, the spiral notebook in which I’d documented Forrest’s comings and goings that summer, including Brenda’s words to her friend that day at the Caboose about the plans to make a life with Forrest. And more.
The next Sunday—lunch with my father again—he told me the latest news. The police had succeeded in getting a search warrant for Brenda Barnett’s computer. It had taken them all of ten minutes to locate the draft she had written of what she’d constructed as Regina’s suicide letter, located in her trash folder. (I had figured this out long before: In addition to being a really terrible person, Brenda was also a stupid one.)
On the basis of the draft of the fake suicide note, along with corroborating evidence in the form of the photographs I’d taken, Brenda Barnett had now been charged as an accomplice to murder, facing a sentence of twenty-five years to life.
95
A Regular Nancy Drew
It was late April when the trial got underway.
When the call came from the DA’s office, informing me that I was required to show up in court to testify, I considered running away. If I said the wrong thing, I would incriminate an innocent man I’d loved all my life. I was terrified of saying the wrong thing again.
My father tried to keep it from happening, but in the end I had no choice. The two of us drove up to Maine together—a very different ride from the one I’d taken just short of a year earlier with Forrest.
For my court appearance, I wore the only dress I owned that seemed like something a person would wear when testifying at a murder trial—the blue Fourth of July party dress Regina had bought for me. It was a little tight by this time. I’d finally developed breasts.
The public defender assigned to represent Forrest, Ted Storm, looked as if he’d graduated from law school ten minutes earlier. Though I’d been called to testify as a witness for the prosecution, the plan was that in his cross-examination of me, I’d manage to convey a different side of the story—one that would support his client’s innocence.
He said little about what might be asked of me in court. “Should be pretty cut and dried,” he’d told my father and me when we’d spoken on the phone a few days before coming up to Maine. Ted Storm was oneof those people who gave you the impression he was opening his mail while you talked with him. Maybe, at the same time, he was watching a ball game with the volume off.
“There’s something you should know,” I told Forrest’s lawyer. “I think it’s important.”
Then I told him about the night—Regina’s last—when I’d seen her eating the Boston cream pie. I described to him how I’d seen her in the kitchen, not long before her death, shoveling spoonfuls of pie into her mouth.
“One thing everyone knew about Regina,” I said. “She was terrified of gaining weight. Regina counted every calorie that went into her body. But she was scarfing down that pie like there was no tomorrow,” I told him.
Like there was no tomorrow. It was a phrase that applied with chilling accuracy to that night.
“I don’t get the significance here,” Ted, the lawyer, said, sounding bored.
I tried to explain. “The only way Regina would have let herself eat that pie was if she knew she was about to kill herself,” I told him. Meaning, it was Regina who took the pills. Nobody gave them to her. Here was proof of Forrest’s innocence.
To support my theory, I told Ted about the scale in Regina’s bathroom that she weighed herself on two times a day. The celery sticks she kept in sealed baggies in the refrigerator, that she gnawed on at mealtimes. The way she removed the bread from her tuna sandwich, eating only the filling, and hardly any of that either.
I was talking very fast. Too fast, probably, because I was excited. I had spent a lot of time thinking about my theory. Offering it in court would give me a chance to right the terrible wrong I’d committed the previous summer when I’d led Regina to believe that Forrest had been in on Brenda’s scheme to murder her.
It was too late to save Regina. But offering my testimony about the Boston cream pie might be my only chance to make things right for Forrest.
At some point during my speech about the pie, the name Karen Carpenter probably came up. The wordanorexia, which I’d learned aboutfrom readingSeventeen, and another word (also learned from the pages ofSeventeen) that actually applied to Regina, as I’d learned that time I saw her leaving the bathroom with the towel over her mouth:bulimia.
“Once she knew she was going to kill herself, it didn’t matter anymore,” I told him.
