A comedy of stupid errors. A succession of stupid lies. Like dominoes, one set off the other until they couldn’t be stopped.
Faith couldn’t tell Jarrod about the second man.
He was a litigator. He was board-certified in both criminal and civil trial practice, was ranked in the top tier of trial lawyers by Chambers Global, and last year had been named as one of Broward County’s best trial attorneys in Think magazine. Faith’s father had been a lawyer, too – a general practitioner who was never afraid to go to court. She’d lived with lawyers her whole life and they all shared certain character traits. First, they were quick to react – forming opinions as the facts came in, constantly crafting and revising a closing argument in their heads. Unlike a doctor who’d listen to all of a patient’s symptoms then run some tests, and then run some more before delivering a diagnosis, a lawyer was always ready to make a closing. Second, they could think on their feet, already forming their next three questions before the witness had finished answering one. And third, lawyers don’t back down. Even if you showed them documentation that water was wet, they would successfully argue it’s not, burning your hand with a slab of dry ice to prove their point. But it was the criminal defense attorneys who held a particularly dangerous skill: they could focus in on some weird, seemingly innocuous fact and somehow spin a whole argument around it – changing the paint color to match the speck of dirt they’d managed to spot on the wall. They could turn a character witness into a prime suspect in the minds of jurors just so they could create reasonable doubt.
Faith knew Jarrod was forming those opinions, phrasing his questions, crafting that closing as she was telling him what had happened while they sat on the stairs – he couldn’t help himself. She could feel the anger in him swell and saw his body tense when she related certain parts. Because he already knew the ending: the girl was dead. What he didn’t know was how she got that way. He didn’t know the story, so he wasn’t sure where the plot points were. She’d proceeded carefully and delicately, navigating through his sighs and comments and emotional interjections like she was driving through a field dotted with landmines. There were things he did not need to know – namely, that she’d been drinking that night, that she’d had an accident, and that she’d had the car fixed. She had to describe the landscape without blowing herself up.
He was mad at himself: mad that he hadn’t gone with her to Charity’s; mad that he hadn’t insisted she stay at a hotel and not on her sister’s couch; mad he hadn’t bought her a new car with GPS. Then his mad had moved to others: Nick, for having a party during a tropical storm; Charity, for letting her drive home in it. Anger then turned to relief that nothing had happened to his family, that it wasn’t their bodies being carried out of a cane field this morning.
Finally, the anger and indignation and relief subsided and the ginormous wave of shock was pulled back out to sea, exposing those landmines embedded in all the muck. Then came the questions. It was what he did best, after all.
‘Why did you leave? Why didn’t you stay at a hotel? You say this girl looked dangerous – did she have a weapon? Could you hear with the windows up? Why didn’t you try to run this guy over? Did he have a weapon? Did you ask Maggie if she was OK? How did you not know she was awake?’
The questions came like rocket fire – often he didn’t wait for a full answer before moving to the next one. He wasn’t trying to discredit her, rather, he seemed to blurt out questions as they came to him, like a stream of consciousness, and because they were coming from a lawyer, thoughts came out in the form of questions. Her story was being dismantled before it was even finished being told. Her every action or inaction was being called into question. He hadn’t found it yet, but he would – that damning speck of dirt on the wall.
That was when Faith decided at the last second to avoid another landmine, turning right before she ran over it.
‘So this guy,’ Jarrod had said, his hands clasped before him as he sat on the stairs, ‘when he tried to open the car door, what did the girl do? Was she just standing there?’
Maggie was the first to respond: she nodded.
‘She didn’t run away?’ he asked.
Maggie shook her head.
Faith shook her head, too.
‘And when he pointed and told you to shush, where was the girl? Still standing there alone?’
Maggie thought for a moment, then nodded again.
As it turned out, from her limited vantage point in her car seat coupled with the fogged windows, Maggie could not see across the street. She never mentioned the creepy Deliverance guy. She never spoke about how he’d taken the girl back into the wooded lot with him. And that was because, Faith realized, Maggie didn’t know he was there. She’d never seen him.
Faith had looked at Jarrod at that moment and a sickening thought had come to her: if he was looking at her this way now, barely masking his disdain for her silence and inaction, if he was doubting her claim that she did not think this Santri girl was in danger when he believed only one man was involved, what would he think of her if he knew there was another?
That was the speck of dirt.
Faith had sat on the stairs of her pretty house, looking at the family pictures that lined the walls, following them down into her living room, at the corner where she and Jarrod always put up the Christmas tree, at the couch where they’d made love dozens of times, at the front door, the threshold of which he’d carried her over when they moved in. Memories of the life they used to have before Sandra rushed back. It was a life she wanted to believe they could have again. A raw fear gripped her then – the realization that this could all be over. Forever. He’d walked away before. He’d taken up with that girl and emotionally left the marriage when things were perfect. Now, if they weren’t, if she wasn’t, why would he stay?
Why would he stay?
And she panicked.
Faith wasn’t histrionic. She didn’t love Real Housewives, she didn’t like confrontations. She wasn’t like Charity. But Jarrod had never looked at her the way he’d looked at her today. It was a look that betrayed what he was thinking: I don’t know you right now. I don’t like you right now: what you did, what you didn’t do. You are not the person I thought I knew.
He looked at her as though she were a stranger.
Until the phone call that changed everything she’d never fretted about The End before. She and Jarrod had had fights over the years, but they were nothing major, nothing that would have readied her for that phone call. Jarrod was her first real love. He was her life. She would follow him wherever he wanted to go, not because he was the head of the house or the breadwinner, but because she thought he had all the answers for them both. She thought he held the secrets of their future together, and she trusted him implicitly with it, never doubting that he knew where to take them, how to invest financially to get them there. Even after Sandra, when she’d abruptly realized that her trust had been misplaced, that it could all end and that she’d have to take charge of life on her own, she … couldn’t. It was like she was a newborn, with arms and legs that were useless for all practical purposes: she didn’t know where to go, how to get there, how to do it on her own. And no matter how much she hated him for cheating, no matter how much she wanted to tell him sometimes to take his stuff and get out because he had ruined everything, she couldn’t. Because she didn’t know a life without him. She didn’t want to know a life without him, as pathetic as that sounded. So she’d decided to stay and try to forget all the disturbing, intimate things that her brain had imagined he’d been doing with that woman for months while she was at home playing stupid. She’d decided to hope it didn’t happen again.
Maybe it was crazy, panicked thinking, but if she’d admitted there was a second man out there who had physically taken the girl into the woods, she knew Jarrod would never look at her the same again. For all intents and purposes, in his eyes, it would be as if she’d killed that girl herself and it would truly be The End of their marriage. If she could go back and redo that night, make different decisions, call the police, face the consequences of drinking too much at a party because she was upset – she would. In a heartbeat she would.
But she couldn’t.
So in a split second she’d made another decision, one that might prove every bit as stupid as the others. And that was to say nothing about the second man – at least nothing about him to her husband. It wasn’t a lie – it was just not telling him everything.
It only officially became a lie a few hours later when they were at the police station …
‘Mrs Saunders, did you see anyone else on the street besides this, ah, this man dressed in black?’ Detective Nill asked, while Detective Maldonado took notes. The chair creaked under his girth as he swiveled to face her. ‘Any other possible witnesses?’
She’d thought that they’d interview her and Maggie separately and without Jarrod. She really did. Just her and the detectives, like she’d seen on Law & Order. And she’d thought that at that time she’d tell the detectives about the Deliverance guy. She’d then let the detective know that she wanted to keep that information from her husband and why. The detective would understand, she could sit and look at mug shots for the second man and that would be it.
But that wasn’t reality. That didn’t happen and, again, the best-laid plans went awry. The interview was conducted in the conference room with everyone present: the two detectives, Maggie, Faith and Jarrod. And it was recorded.
She looked over at her husband, who was watching her intently from across the table, as the detective waited for an answer to his question. She was about to make it all official with an on-the-record lie. Not a dodge, or a half-truth, or a fudge, but a lie.
Another one.
Her hands were melting and her mouth went dry as cotton. She tried to think of the best way out of this mess, but the whole truth and nothing but the truth was not going to work. Not at this moment. She’d have to drive back up to Palm Beach tomorrow and make another report with the detectives. She’d have to explain her decisions to Detective Nill later, and she’d do whatever it was the detective needed her to do then: look at mug shots; work with an artist; make another recorded statement, detailing why she had not been completely truthful. But at this moment, at this very moment, her marriage – her whole life – was at stake. She had no choice but to lie.
Faith had looked at Nill when she answered, avoiding Jarrod’s stare. ‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘I didn’t see anyone else out there that night, Detective.’