Shortly after we got back to San Francisco, I found out about a great job at Montgomery Securities, another investment bank. This was during the tail end of the dot-com mergers, before the writing was on the wall, and I got the job and hit the ground running. The company was handling some major mergers and acquisitions, and everyone was working at break-neck speed.
A few weeks later, just as I was beginning to enjoy the mad pace at work, Tim asked me to marry him. I’d like to say it was fueled by all the good times and all the family togetherness, but the fact is that I was pregnant. Don’t get me wrong: I knew Tim was the man for me. But I’m a traditional, old-fashioned girl, and I wish things hadn’t been so rushed. In the space of a frenetic month, I planned both my wedding and the reception.
We had a big party at Plumpjack, one of the great San Francisco restaurants, and our families meshed beautifully. Similar sensibilities, similar senses of humor, similar values—and of course a great love of wine.
The wedding took place on August 28, 1999, and the invitation read as follows:
Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Bell Grady
request the honor of your presence
at the marriage of their daughter
Anne Elizabeth
to
Mr. Timothy James Bird
Saturday, the twenty-eighth of August
Nineteen hundred and ninety-nine
at ten o’clock in the morning
Grace Cathedral
San Francisco
The reception was at the Top of the Mark, another fancy restaurant—this one in the Mark Hopkins Hotel. The Petersons were well represented. Jackie and Lee were there, as were Scott and Laci. Scott was wearing a peach-colored shirt that matched Laci’s dress. It was clearly her doing, and it worked beautifully. For her part, Jackie arrived in a light blue outfit that matched the outfits on my bridesmaids, although I don’t think this was deliberate.
With four sets of families there—Tim’s divorced parents and their respective mates, along with my parents and Jackie and Lee—I was a little worried about the chemistry. But the event was a huge success.
Laci went out of her way to tell me that she had loved almost every detail of the wedding, which made me laugh. I don’t think the flowers were up to her high standards.
“I just want you to know I love having you in my life,” she said. “And I’m jealous that you’re pregnant.”
Ryan Bird was born in February, a scant five months after the wedding (just in case you’re doing the math), in our new home, a brick house in Berkeley overlooking the San Francisco Bay. He was a little ball of fire, and he looked exactly like Tim, who decided to call him Mini Me; almost five years later, he still does.
I took three months of maternity leave, and while I was away there was a big shake up and Montgomery Securities was purchased by Nations Bank, and then in turn by BancAmerica Securities. Somehow, however, I managed to survive both purges and stayed until the following May. During those last weeks I was involved in various mergers, and I received a handsome bonus when I left.
The next thing I knew, I was pregnant again. After telling my family, I called Jackie to share the good news. Laci got pregnant just a short time later, and Jackie called to let me know. When I called Laci, she was bubbling over, ecstatic.
“I can’t wait!” she said.
Laci and Scott had finally moved to Modesto after all, and Scott was working for Tradecorp, a fertilizer company. They had bought a nice home with a swimming pool, and Laci was very happy to be pregnant. She was also delighted to be living near her mother, Sharon Rocha, and her stepfather, Ron Grantski.
Now that we’d reconnected, we stayed in touch. Laci came to me for child-rearing tips, since I already had plenty of experience with Ryan, and I came to her for tips on gardening. By now I’d caught Laci’s love of flowers in a big way; I had turned our entire yard into an all-blue garden, with heavy emphasis on blue pansies. I then took a can of blue paint and went to work on the front gate, the front door, and the children’s playhouse. Maybe I got a little carried away, but I loved it.
I also spoke to Jackie from time to time. During one of those calls, she told me that Laci had been complaining about maternity clothes, which she found horrendously overpriced.
“That’s how they get you,” I said. “You’re so hormonal that you don’t know what you’re doing, and you whip out your credit card.”
After I got off the phone, I went to look for some of my old maternity clothes and packed up a few of the nicer outfits and sent them to Laci in Modesto. She was still in her first trimester, and I knew she’d fit into them, although I wasn’t sure they’d be up to her usual high standards.
“I can’t believe this!” Laci said. She was calling to thank me for the clothes. “That was so nice of you!”
“Did you like them?”
“Yes,” she said. “Most of them.”
I laughed. That was another thing I loved about Laci. She was incredibly honest.
Jackie was another story. She wasn’t quite as straightforward as her daughter-in-law. She would call from time to time to make sure I was up on the family news. “They’re not going to be there forever,” she said, sounding less than happy. “They’re on the five-year plan.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning they’re not going to be staying in that town for the rest of their lives.”
I didn’t ask why she disliked Modesto because I thought I knew. There was the reason she’d already told me: She thought it was on the wrong side of the tracks. And there was the reason I sensed on my own: Her golden boy was too far from home.
“That was nice of you to send those clothes to Laci,” she said. “I wonder if she’ll wear any of them.”
I didn’t pursue that line of thinking. I was beginning to understand why Jackie was so critical of Laci. No one was good enough for her golden boy.
What I didn’t understand was why Jackie was so dismissive of Laci’s almost obsessive attention to detail. I thought it was endearing, the way she wanted to leave her mark on everything, and I imagined Scott enjoyed it, too. Whenever I talked to Laci, she was incredibly upbeat, especially lately, with the pregnancy. She seemed thrilled to be living in Modesto, with Scott, with their life together. She seemed especially thrilled about the baby.
I sent her a bunch of baby clothes, too, making sure to include only the nicest outfits, the ones she might actually use, and she called to thank me the minute they arrived. She also told me that she wanted me to meet her family. “You’ll love my mom,” she noted.
In July, when I was already more than eight months pregnant, my brother Don sent his eighteen-year-old daughter and a friend to visit. It was nice to see her again—I hadn’t seen her since my wedding, when we first met—but in my condition it was hard to keep up with two teenagers. Both girls had just graduated from high school, and they were in party mode, and I was fifty pounds past my ideal weight, waddling, and my entire body hurt. I had to wear clogs because I couldn’t bend over to tie my shoes.
One afternoon I dropped onto the couch, exhausted, and called Laci to see if she would take the two girls off my hands for a night or two.
“I wish I could,” Laci said. “I’m too pregnant myself.”
“Really?” I asked. “Wait till you’re my size.”
But there was something in what she’d said that concerned me. For one thing, she was barely in her second trimester; she shouldn’t be feeling “too pregnant,” not yet. For another, she wasn’t as bubbly and talkative as usual.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “Great.”
The conversation petered out, and I went to tend to Ryan and my houseguests.
At the end of the week, my niece and her friend went off to visit grandma Jackie. I had an old sapphire ring I didn’t want anymore, nothing too fancy, more of a cocktail ring, really, and I asked my niece to give it to Jackie. “Tell her she can try to sell it at her antique shop,” I said. I figured Jackie would take care of me if she ever managed to get rid of it, and I left it at that.
Jackie called after the two girls had gone back east.
“How are you?” she asked.
“Good,” I said. “Ready to explode. How were the girls? Did they have a nice time?”
“Yes,” Jackie said. “Have you talked to Laci lately?”
“A few days ago,” I said.
“Did Laci say anything?” she asked. “I think they’re having problems.”
“Not a word,” I said. But I thought back to the last time we talked and how different she had sounded. “Do you know what’s wrong?”
“No. No idea. Those two, I can’t figure them out.”
Then she said she had to go—she had some paperwork to do—and hung up. It was almost as if she was throwing her hands up in despair.
I was worried, but not overly so. If there was one thing about Laci that gave me hope, it was her faith in the potential for perfection. Everything in her life had to be just right. If she was having problems with Scott, I knew she would do everything in her power to fix it.
When my son Tommy was born in late August 2002, my first thought was, We have to go to Disneyland. I know it may sound crazy, going off to Disneyland with a two-year-old and an infant, and I’d like to tell you that I was just being a great mother, thinking of the kids. But the truth is, Tim and I really like Disneyland. Some people might say we even have a little problem with Disneyland. But so what? We all have our demons.
The first person I called was Jackie. “How would you and Lee like to get all the kids together and go to Disneyland in November?”
“You just had a baby!”
“Nothing like walking around the Magic Kingdom to get back into shape,” I said.
Jackie didn’t think Lee would go, but she was game. She said she knew that Scott’s brother John and his wife, Alison, would want to go, and she would try to talk Scott and Laci into going on the trip.
“I thought they loved Disneyland,” I said.
“Yeah, well, they’re having problems again.”
“Again?” I asked. “What kind of problems?”
“I don’t know,” Jackie said, sighing. “Just—you know—men.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s nothing,” Jackie said. “Laci’s tired all the time—with the pregnancy and everything. Forget I said anything.”
I could see she wanted to drop it, so I dropped it. I called John and Alison, and she called Scott, and when we connected later it looked like everyone was on board—everyone except Lee. “Disney-land is not his idea of a good time,” Jackie said.
“But Laci and Scott are coming?” I asked.
“Probably,” Jackie said. “They’re working on it.”
When I got off the phone, I couldn’t stop thinking about Scott and Laci. What did she mean, men? That was so unlike Jackie. She only ever had nice things to say about her golden boy. What could be going on? I couldn’t begin to imagine it. You always heard stories about guys freaking out when their wives got pregnant and running off or having affairs. But Scott didn’t seem like the type. And most men got over it, right?
Whatever it was, I was sure they’d handle it.
In November, we all met at Disneyland. Tim and I and the two boys arrived a day ahead of everyone else, but the trip got off to an unpromising start. We were on the monorail, on our way to the hotel, and it was a hot, windy night. The windows on the monorail were open, and Ryan dropped something, and Tim bent down to pick it up. At that very instant, a huge branch flew through the window and whipped across the top of Tim’s seat. Tim sat up.
“What was that?” he asked.
I couldn’t answer. I felt as if I was watching a movie, but I didn’t know whether it was a comedy or a thriller. All I knew is that Tim had come very close to getting decapitated.
The next thing that happened was at one of the restaurants. We were having breakfast the following morning, and Tommy was in his car seat, and Brer Bear accidentally bumped into Tommy, who fell and hit his head against the table and began to cry.
It felt like half the staff came running over to help us, including Brer Bear, and we eventually got everything under control. Poor Brer Bear kept apologizing, and I had to keep reassuring him that everything was all right, until finally the big stuffed animal went on his way.
The next morning, per our arrangement, we met everyone else at the winery inside Disney’s California Adventure. They had already checked into their rooms, and most of them weren’t happy. We were all booked into the same hotel, but we seemed to be at opposite ends of the place, and no amount of shuffling was going to change that. Jackie was especially unhappy because she was on oxygen and the hotel was so big that just making it to the end of her hallway seemed like an accomplishment. Laci had a similar problem. She was feeling very large and very tired, and Scott had rented a wheelchair for her, more or less as a joke. I kept looking at them, searching for some sign of trouble, trying to figure out what Jackie had meant—“They’re having problems again”—but I didn’t notice anything.
“How are you holding up?” I asked Jackie. I noticed she was fiddling with her oxygen tank.
“Okay, I guess. I’m with two pregnant women and one woman who just gave birth, so I’ll feel badly if I can’t keep up.”
I felt awful. The only people who seemed calm and happy were John and Alison. For a while there, I thought the entire trip—which had been my idea to begin with—was going to turn into a complete fiasco. But we went off to the park and began to enjoy ourselves, and by the time we met for dinner that night, at the Napa Rose, a fancy restaurant inside the Grand California Hotel, everyone seemed to be relaxing.
I had made the dinner reservations, and I had asked for a nice table, and the staff came through for us. We had the nicest table in the house, and Laci had the best seat at the table, with a great view through the tall, ornate glass windows of the roaring fire pit outside. Laci looked amazing. She was wearing a baby doll–style dress over her big belly, and she was full of energy. I have never seen a more excited pregnant woman in my life.
“I can’t wait to have this baby,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “The last month or two is sheer torture.”
“No, not that,” she said. “I’m just excited.”
She asked if she could borrow Tommy, and I handed him over. She bounced him up and down and cooed at him. “How’m I doing?” she asked.
“Great,” I said, laughing.
“Tell me the truth,” she said. “I don’t have much time left to practice.”
“You’re a natural,” I said, amused.
When the menus arrived, I took Tommy and put him in his car seat, and Scott helped me strap him in. He then took the car seat and set it next to him and began to play with Tommy’s tiny hands.
“Are you excited?” I asked, referring to the coming child.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “I can’t wait to play football with the little guy.”
An innocent-sounding comment, I know. But there was something odd about the way he said it. It just seemed flat to me. It almost felt as if he were saying it only because he knew it was the right thing to say; his words seemed completely devoid of emotion. For a moment I wondered if I was looking for some signs of trouble, given what Jackie had told me, but I didn’t think so. There was something different about Scott that night. He was there, and he looked as handsome as ever, and he smiled at all the appropriate times. But there was also something distant about him. There were moments when I felt he wasn’t really there at all.
Then it got stranger. Scott ordered a very nice bottle of wine with dinner, and he never once passed it. He just parked it next to his plate and kept it there all night. Seeing that he wasn’t going to get any of that fine wine, Tim ordered a glass for himself and one for me.
I turned my attention to Laci. “I’m so glad you’re having a boy,” I said.
“Me too,” said Laci. “What do you think of the name ‘Logan?’”
“I love it.”
“I don’t.” It was Jackie, piping up from her end of the table. “I don’t like it at all.”
She said it in a very mean way, and when I looked over at Laci I was surprised by how distressed she looked. It was as if someone had slapped her across the face. This was a girl who was always happy, always smiling; I’d never seen her smile disappear that way before.
“You’ll figure it out,” I said.
And just like that, Laci smiled again: that big old smile. In an instant, she had willed herself to snap out of it. I wondered if the problems Jackie had alluded to were between her and Laci, not between Laci and Scott. And when the food began to arrive, I became more convinced that this was indeed the case. Scott and Laci had split one of those extravagant, six-course, prix fixe dinners, and they compared notes after every bite. The glazed pear salad with walnuts and blue cheese. The cold asparagus. The vegetable terrine. They would take a bite and close their eyes and chew slowly, savoring each morsel, and then turn toward each other and compare notes.
“Unbelievable.”
“That melted in my mouth.”
“Did you taste the spices in that?”
Scott was back to his old self. I looked over at his bottle of wine. He had practically polished it off, which may have had something to do with the sudden change in mood. I looked over at Tim. He was busy flagging the waiter for another glass of the cheap stuff.
In the lull before dessert arrived, Laci looked over at me and smiled that big, dimply smile of hers. “My back’s killing me,” she said. That was Laci: Even when she was complaining about her aching back, she was smiling to beat the band.
“I know what you mean,” I said. “With both boys, my last month was pretty much nonstop whining and moaning.”
“You know what I do?” she said. “I climb into the pool whenever it gets bad. That takes all the weight off my back, and it feels great, just sort of floating there by the edge. No gravity.”
I never thought to ask whether the pool was heated. It was November, and this side of the country usually doesn’t get cold till late in the year. Still, there’s nothing worse than a cold pool in winter.
When dessert arrived, Laci pushed hers toward Scott. “My doctor said I shouldn’t gain more than thirty-five pounds total,” she said, explaining it to me. “I’m trying to be careful.”
“Thirty-five pounds?!” I shot back. “I gained sixty!” Suddenly I felt like Brer Bear.
After dinner, Laci and I went to the ladies’ room, and I was still full of sisterly advice. “There’s something you should do before the baby comes along,” I said. “When I had Ryan, my mother could only stay for a few weeks, and it was really hard without help. So you should try to arrange to get help as soon as you get back to Modesto, before the baby comes. Because after the baby, it’ll be too crazy.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t need help. My mother is going to be there every day.”
I thought this was either naive or wishful thinking, and I thought I ought to tell her so. “That’s what people say,” I told her. “Then they come over a couple of times, and you never hear from them again.”
“Not my mother,” she said. “My mother can’t wait for this baby. She’s as excited as I am. We’ll be fighting over who gets to hold him. You don’t know my mother. She will be there every day.” Laci was adamant on this point.
I reached into my purse for my lipstick and started putting it on.
“What kind of lipstick is that?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s called ‘plumping’ lipstick. It’s supposed to plump up your lips.”
“Does it work?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Look at my lips. Do they look plumper?”
She looked dubious. “How much did you pay for that lipstick?” she asked.
“Thirty bucks,” I said.
“Then it definitely works!” she said, and we both laughed.
When we got back to the table, Ryan was standing by Laci’s chair. He had started calling her Aunt Laci that morning because I’d been referring to her as Aunt Laci, and now I took one of his hands and put it on her belly. “That’s your little cousin in there,” I said. Then I lowered my voice so Jackie wouldn’t hear. “We’re not sure about his name yet, but we still have time to decide. And whatever it is, you’ll get to play with him.”
The bill came and everyone chipped in—some of us paying a little more than we might have, to subsidize Scott’s wine—and we all returned to the hotel. Laci and I ended up walking together, and I felt a little bad because I wasn’t spending any time with either John or Alison. But I couldn’t help myself. By this time, Laci and I had pretty much become sisters.
“Is it scary, giving birth?” she asked me.
“A little bit. At the very end. But then you realize that millions of women have already gone through it, and you know you’ll survive.”
“I’m not looking forward to the pain,” she said.
“I wouldn’t know about the pain,” I said. “I had C-sections with both of them.”
“Really?”
I nodded. “There’s nothing wrong with C-sections, you know. I actually think it’s a lot less traumatizing, for both the mother and the baby. And there’s a plus side: They pop out looking perfect.”
The next morning, Tim and I were up at six because both boys were raring to go. At that point, as any parent knows, you’re in it for the long haul, so we pulled ourselves together, had a slow, leisurely breakfast, and made our way into the park. We were scheduled to meet the others at noon, and we did, but by that time Tim and I were so beat that we begged off. We went back to the hotel to see if we could put the boys down for a nap, hoping we could take a nap, too.
But Tim got a second wind and took off, saying he’d be back within the hour. Before long both boys were fast asleep, and I went over to the bed and stretched out. The moment my head touched the pillow, however, the fire alarm went off. I freaked. I had to carry the two boys down four flights of stairs, alone, and the lobby was crowded with grumbling people. One of the grumbling people was Jackie, who had also gone back to the room to rest—only to turn around and make her way down all those flights of stairs, carrying her oxygen supply. Needless to say, she wasn’t happy.
The afternoon was a bust. We just didn’t have the energy for anything else, and we ended up congregating in Jackie’s suite, where we exchanged Christmas presents. We had to walk down several endless corridors to get there, and I made a mental note to myself to look for a smaller hotel the next time I planned a family vacation.
Laci was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, and she was barefoot, and I couldn’t help but notice that she had a perfect, tomatored pedicure. She was the cutest pregnant woman I had ever seen.
“When I was pregnant, I loved doing my toenails,” I told her. “I took great pride in my feet because the rest of me felt so horrible.”
Scott was on the far side of the room, sitting in the wheelchair and talking on his cell phone. He was doing little wheelies; I remember wondering whether he’d ever been in a wheelchair himself because he was handling it like an expert.
“Who’s he talking to?” I asked Jackie.
“I don’t know. A business call. It’s always business lately.”
This was in November 2002, shortly before Thanksgiving, right around the time he met Amber Frey. I didn’t know anything about Amber in those days, of course. This was long before she revealed herself to be the other woman in Scott’s life and long before Laci and her unborn son were murdered. And I’m not saying that it was Amber on the phone that afternoon. But I do remember that the following year, I was approached by a pushy reporter, who had some theories of his own: “Scott must have just rolled out of bed with Amber before driving home to Modesto to pick up Laci for that trip to Disneyland,” he said.
That horror was still a long way off, and it wasn’t something anyone in that room could have imagined. Well, maybe Scott could have; maybe he was imagining it then. The rest of us were busy exchanging gifts, but not Scott. Scott remained on his cell phone, a man apart, in a world of his own.
Jackie had bought me a pair of Burberry gloves, and she had picked up a Burberry scarf for Tim. I had found a Quimper porcelain figure for Jackie: a little angel.
Laci was impressed by my choice. “I can’t believe how well you know Jackie already,” she said.
“It was easy,” I said. “I saw her admiring these at Pierre Deux, in Carmel. I know she collects them.”
A moment later, I looked around and couldn’t see Ryan, and I began to panic. We were on the fourth floor, and all the windows were open, and I imagined that my little boy had somehow climbed through one of them. For about thirty terrifying seconds, I completely lost it. I ran around the room and in and out of the corridor looking for him and screaming his name. Then Tim called out that he had found him on the balcony—which was certainly frightening enough. He brought him inside and everyone could see that he was fine and we eventually calmed down, but I must say it took my wildly beating heart a while to get back to normal. I looked up and noticed that Scott was still in the wheelchair, still on the cell phone. That struck me as very odd indeed. For thirty seconds everyone in that room had been thrown into a panic by my screams; the entire place was in motion, as Tim, Jackie, Laci, John, Alison—everyone—dashed around looking for Ryan. Only Scott was oblivious.
A short while later we called it a day, said our good-byes, and returned to our rooms to pack. Tim and I and the kids went down to San Diego to spend Thanksgiving with my family, and after a few pleasant days we made the long drive home.
When we arrived in San Francisco, a little note was waiting for us from Jackie. “Thank you for that little angel,” she wrote. “May she watch over us all.”
She had signed it, “Your fairy godmother.”