Once she was alone, she sat at her desk and looked at the framed picture she kept there. It was a picture of Greg with Timmy and her at a friend’s beach house in the Hamptons. Only three months later, a man would approach Greg while he pushed Timmy on a playground swing set and end his life with a single shot to the forehead.
After Greg died, she went through a period where she could barely make herself work, and then suffered a string of failures at the studio. She realized that she had been holding back her best idea—a show that reinvestigated cold cases through the eyes of the people affected by them—because she was afraid of being seen as the damaged widow, immersing herself in unsolved murders because she still had no idea who killed her husband.
Once she finally launched the program, it was a hit. More surprisingly, the police were finally able to identify the killer whom Timmy had described only as Blue Eyes. Since then, she saw Under Suspicion as more than just a job. She saw it as a way to help people.
Now looking at Greg’s face in that photograph, she finally realized what was really bothering her about the Virginia Wakeling case. It wasn’t entirely about Ryan’s involvement. It was the way the case came to her—with an introduction to Ivan Gray. Yes, Ivan had said that he loved Virginia and wanted to marry her. But he sounded more like a man who wanted to clear his name than a man who had lost the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with.
She wasn’t attached to the case, because she didn’t yet feel a connection to anyone who was affected by Virginia Wakeling’s death.
But Ivan Gray wasn’t the only person in Wakeling’s life.
She opened her Internet browser and Googled Virginia Wakeling obituary. The write-up in the New York Times was lengthy. She couldn’t help but notice that it began, not with any accomplishments of Virginia’s, but with a summary of the work done by her husband, Bob. The developer had made a fortune by transforming what was once a run-down industrial area of Long Island City into a thriving neighborhood of high-rise luxury apartments and trendy restaurants, all within minutes of Manhattan.
The obituary then went on to note Virginia’s work as a philanthropist after she was widowed five years earlier. She endowed a charity that promoted childhood literacy by providing new books to inner-city children. She was recently honored by Dress for Success, a charity that provided professional attire to women working toward self-sufficiency. A long list of arts and cultural organizations and institutions followed. Mrs. Wakeling is survived by her daughter, Anna Wakeling; son-in-law, Peter Browning; son, Carter; and grandchildren, Robert III and Vanessa.
It was too early to know whether Ivan Gray could be trusted or not, but she believed him about one thing: Virginia had spent decades as a wife and mother, and had begun a remarkable new phase of life on her own. She had to have been loved, if not by Ivan, then by others. She had two children who lost their father, and then their mother only five years later. They, like Laurie and Timmy at one time, went to bed each night unsure about who had killed their mother, if indeed anyone had killed her, and why.
When she looked at the case from their perspective, and not Ivan’s, Laurie found herself caring. She had promised to keep an open mind, and now she would.