I was crying by that point. I probably sounded like a crazy person. Even my father—a man who believed in Forrest’s innocence with every cell in his body—seemed not to understand the significance of what I was saying. I was so worked up, I could barely get the words out.
Calories. Bathroom scale. Whipped cream.
“Slow down, honey,” the lawyer said to me. Then he addressed my father, in a tone that made me understand he considered my dad the only person worth speaking to here. “When a witness comes across as hysterical, it doesn’t play well with the jury.”Hysterical: a word applied when a person, usually female, expressed strong emotion.
I tried one more time. “Regina was so mad at Forrest that she wanted to make it look like he killed her, so he’d get into trouble,” I said. “She wrote a note that looked like what he might write if he was faking her suicide. She was faking a fake. The police believed it!”
I managed to get this all out without crying, finally, but I was gasping for breath.
Ted Storm was gathering up papers strewn over the table and putting these into a folder as he spoke. “You need to calm down, honey,” he said. “I don’t think we’ll bring this chocolate cake business into the case.”
“It was a pie,” I told him. “Not cake. Pie.”
Lawyer Ted shot a look at my father. “It’s always complicated putting a kid on the witness stand,” he said.
“But I got to hand it to you, Hank,” he said, chuckling. “This daughter of yours is a regular Nancy Drew.”
96
TheMerriam-Webster Spell-Checker
We were not allowed to pay a visit to Forrest in jail. Seeing him in his suit—too big for him now—as he approached the witness stand was the first time I’d laid eyes on him since the morning after Regina’s death. He was thinner, but even now, after months in jail, he carried himself as if he were walking across a golf course or hopping into his Chris-Craft.
Under oath, Forrest admitted to engaging in an extramarital affair with Brenda Barnett, as well as having had numerous other affairs over the years, with women whose identities the police had been able to track down—an aspect of the case that eventually resulted in at least three divorces among members of the Lake Catherine Country Club.
“I’m deeply ashamed of my behavior,” Forrest said. “But being unfaithful to my wife is not the same as killing her.”
“Objection.” The DA stood up. Her name was Vivian Latournier.
“Strike from the record,” the judge agreed.
About the suicide note: It was true, Forrest said, that he could barely write a sentence in the English language. All his life he’d depended on his friend Hank—meaning my father—to help him when it came to writing.
But he wasn’t an idiot. Putting aside the fact that he loved his wife—he’d said this again:I loved my wife—if he was going to fake a suicide note, he wasn’t so stupid that he’d leave it filled with the kind of errors that would point to him as its author.
“I keep a book called theMerriam-Webster Spell-Checkerin my bureau drawer for times I need to be sure my writing isn’t too bad,” he said. “Go look. You’ll see it there.”
Not likely. The Cabots had long since moved Forrest’s possessions out of Wonderland.
97
Cut a Deal
Brenda Barnett took the stand next. She had cut her beautiful hair—her best feature, I realized now, which meant she didn’t look remotely pretty anymore. Also, she appeared to be pregnant, though not so far along, I calculated, that Forrest could be viewed as a possible father to her child.
Now came the shocker. In exchange for the prosecution dropping all charges against her, Brenda had turned state’s evidence, testifying for the prosecution that it had been Forrest Emerson who had laid out the plan to murder his wife in such a way as to make her death appear as a suicide.
“The man was obsessed with me,” she said, shaking her head. “He kept begging me to marry him. I told him that as much as I cared for him, I couldn’t bear to be involved in any way in such a heinous crime, or bring about the death of an innocent individual.”
She still sounded like a character in a soap opera. “That’s when I broke off the relationship,” Brenda said, looking regretfully in the direction of the jury.
Vivian Latournier didn’t stop there: Now came the pills. She set forth the picture of Forrest having premeditatedly hoarded Regina’s medications over the weeks prior to her death for the purpose ofdelivering a fatal dose. Supporting this claim, she presented pharmacy records indicating that he’d filled her prescriptions three times.
I knew the story, of course, for all the good it did. It was Regina who’d ordered those extra doses, Regina who’d called in her prescriptions.
I sat in the front row, taking in Brenda’s testimony, feeling sick. In the DA’s account of what transpired that weekend, Forrest had set up a boat regatta for the express purpose of keeping everyone out of the house long enough to ensure that Regina was dead. He had even made sure to include his children in the spectacle by outfitting a canoe for them. Not only that, he’d placed his own children’s lives at risk by putting them in a boat that was certain to tip over, as a device intended to keep all guests at the dock, away from the bedroom where, at that very moment, his wife lay dying of the overdose he’d delivered to her not long before.
When the DA got to this part, I glanced in the direction of the jurors, several of whom shook their heads.
