CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

JENN

December 31 Two and a Half Months before Drowning

New Year’s Eve was wonderful. We even found a way to get a babysitter that I felt comfortable with: a seventeen-year-old honors student trained in CPR who came over after Ivy was in bed for the night. Essentially, we’d be paying the girl to do homework or watch TV in a quiet house in case there was an emergency. Even though Rick thought I was going a bit overboard—and maybe I was—he was glad to get out of the house together for the firm’s New Year’s party.

I had to admit that getting myself glammed up, from hair to earrings to formal dress, was a breath of fresh air. I had bought a new dress because I had a good twenty pounds or so of baby weight yet to lose—and my shape might not ever be the same as before, no matter how much I lost. But when I looked in the mirror—black dress, red heels, red lipstick, an updo—I liked what I saw, and I smiled. Even my smile looked happy.

When the new year rang in, everyone toasted and kissed their significant others. The kiss Rick gave me was hot and intense, hungry in the way I hadn’t felt from him in a long time. He pulled back, slightly out of breath. I was breathing heavily too. He grinned. I grinned back. At that moment, I felt as if we’d found our old selves again, that maybe we could work out after all. That I wouldn’t have to run from him with our little girl.

For that brief spell, I was able to love him as I once had, to hope for our future, and forget the contention and stress of the past months. Maybe I’d made far too much of everything.

Maybe we really could be a forever family after all.

I wanted it so much. I wanted to believe it. I wanted to live it. That night, when he kissed me again and led me to our room, my knees melting as they hadn’t since before Ivy was conceived, a little corner of my mind whispered questions.

Not tonight. I mentally slammed the door and let myself fall into Rick’s embrace.

22 February About Seven Weeks before Drowning

After a Saturday morning of grocery shopping, I took Ivy from the car and got her settled into her highchair so I could unload the groceries more easily. When I returned on my last trip, she wasn’t in the highchair but in Rick’s arms at the top of the stairs.

Leaning over the banister edge, he held Ivy, suspended in the air with a thin blanket slipped over her head.

“What are you doing?” I gasped, grocery bags forgotten at my feet.

Rick laughed. “Aaah,” he said in a sing-songy tone, once with every bounce of his arms. “Aaah, aaaah! Don’t move, Ivy, or I might drop you!”

I raced toward the stairs, having nearly lost my mind. “What are you doing?” I repeated. “Pull her back up!” Before Rick said another word, I’d taken Ivy into my arms, yanked the blanket off her head, and held her close. “What were you thinking?”

“Sheesh. It was a joke,” Rick said. “Remember how Michael Jackson did that with his baby?”

“How he endangered his baby?” I snapped. “Yeah, I remember. Not funny.”

Ivy began to fuss, whether from her own fear or because she sensed mine, I didn’t know. I made soothing noises and patted her back as I headed down to the kitchen.

“Lighten up,” Rick said, following from behind. “It was just one floor indoors. He was outside a high-rise, dangling the kid a hundred feet above concrete. She’s fine.” He patted Ivy’s head, then sat at the table. He scrolled on his phone, and I let the silence settle in as I put away groceries, never putting Ivy down.

With the groceries away, I felt uneasy and had to get out of the house. I decided to go to the gym, bringing Ivy along to be in the daycare there rather than at home with Rick. I didn’t know when I’d feel safe leaving her with him again.

After getting Ivy fed and changed, I put some gym clothes on and gave Rick a quick kiss goodbye. “Off to work out.”

“Good job,” he said, eying my figure.

I forced a smile and headed out with Ivy. I worked out almost every weekday morning, though not every weekend. Today was an exception. I needed to work off the nervous energy from before and maybe read more of my research that I’d printed out and kept in my gym locker.

Sometimes that meant reading PDFs on my tablet. On other days, it meant listening to various true-crime podcasts at one-and-a-half speed. I found two devoted to Rick. Rather, one was about his parents’ deaths, and the other was about Chloe’s death and his trial.

As I started up a treadmill with my tablet propped on it, I thought through what I’d seen at home. Would Rick eventually hurt Ivy? He could easily have dropped her, and he could have pleaded an accident. No shaken-baby syndrome or anything like that. A horrible accident where she fell fifteen feet.

The more I learned about Rick’s past—so much more than losing his first wife—the more I worried about me and Ivy. Things had been so much better between us since New Year’s Eve. I’d let myself exercise without thinking about Rick’s past, hoping that whoever he’d been, he was different and we would be different.

But seeing her held over the banister . . . that made my blood run cold.

He wasn’t different. He’d always been this person.

Why hadn’t he walked away from me and Ivy already? He’d never had a wife as long as this, never had a child before. He’d always moved on.

I shook my head and increased the speed on the treadmill. I pulled up a blog post from the podcast I’d listened to about Natalie’s death. It included all kinds of things they’d talked about on the show—episode transcripts, photos, and more.

The text was plenty big to read even while running. As I went through one page after another, I looked for any mention of either of his wives or his parents. There was nothing about them. In all of my research, I hadn’t found anyone else who connected the other deaths to Rick in any way. Was I the only one?

After finishing one article, I went to another, one that discussed Chloe’s autopsy. One claim nearly tripped me right there on the treadmill. I steadied myself on the side rails and zoomed in on the actual report to read the text myself.

Chloe had been six months pregnant when she died.

I knew everything else on the report: drugs in her system, accidental drowning declared the cause and manner of death. But she was pregnant. Estimated thirty weeks along.

Rick had told me that he wondered if she’d been pregnant. He had to have known she was. At thirty weeks, the baby would be moving like crazy, and Chloe would have been showing a lot. The baby had probably been viable if it had been given the chance to breathe.

Still standing on the rails of the treadmill, my breathing sped up as if I were still running. I slowed the belt to a walk and kept reading. The article pointed out that one of the most common ways for a pregnant woman to die was by murder at the hand of the baby’s father. It went on to list Scott Peterson and other notorious murderers that fit the type.

A shiver went through me despite the heat of the room and the sweat on my forehead. I wiped my face with the hand towel I’d brought, hoping no one in the room wouldn realize that some of it was from tears.

Time to focus, not get emotional, I ordered myself. I took a long drink from my water bottle, then dove back in, but I went to a different post altogether, one under the site’s Victimology tag, which would mean talking about who Chloe was, not about her death.

I learned that she’d been a special education teacher. Her students adored her, and she got a state award in Oregon for her work with special-needs students. The file had several stories in newspapers from towns so small that even minor events were written about. Like the one about her work with a nonverbal autistic boy, who, at the end of the school year, did what no one had believed possible—he gave her a hug. He didn’t look her in the eye as he did it. His father was quoted:

It was a breakthrough moment. We’ve prayed so hard for such a small thing, and we’d almost given up hope. When I saw it on the last day of school, I cried like a little kid, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

The more I read about her life, the more it seemed eerily similar to mine. Before college, she’d gone through the foster system, bouncing from one house and school to another, thanks to her drugged-out birth parents. They eventually lost their parental rights, but she was never adopted. As I had, she’d simply aged out of the system.

I never met her, but I’d met dozens of girls like her. I was just like her. Her young-adult life mirrored so much of my own, with only minor details tweaked, like names and locations. The pain from my teen years and beyond roared back as I read about her.

Like me, after she’d graduated from high school, she had no family and she was on her own. With no one to support her emotionally or financially—not even a distant aunt or cousin—she had to pick her way through the jungle of new adulthood she suddenly found herself in.

The treadmill stayed at three miles per hour. I couldn’t go back to running, not with my heart beating painfully from flashbacks of my own early adulthood. Couch-surfing when I could. Sleeping outside when I couldn’t, sometimes on the less-visible side of a big tree in a city park, hoping no one would see or hurt me.

Eventually, as Chloe had, I graduated from college and ended up with a stable job doing what I loved—helping children find a love of books and learning, helping older patrons access the resources they needed to find employment and housing. Librarians had been a lifeline for me, and then I became one. I got to be that help and mentor to others. As my final triumph over the odds, I’d gotten married to a successful litigation attorney and had a child.

Would I become another sad statistic after all? Not an aged-out-of-the-system cautionary tale—I had overcome those odds—but a victim of the man I hadn’t known I’d married.

Climbing out of the hole of my childhood wouldn’t matter if, in the end, Rick took my life and the life of my baby girl.

I wiped my face again and kept walking on the treadmill, slowly, needing to keep reading. I took a short break, though, to gather my emotions.

Through college, Chloe had worked a variety of jobs, from retail to dog walking to custodial work at her community college. She applied for and received Pell Grants and scholarships.

Nothing I found explained how she met Rick, but I could’ve provided an approximation of what their courtship probably looked like: romantic, amazing, passionate, filled with gifts and attention, and, most of all, it had been fast. So had mine.

Clearly, Rick had a method that worked. Part of his pattern was to make a woman feel special, even though each of us was simply the next link in his chain. We were nearly identical as far as our lack of family. Regardless of what he said, how much adoration or gifts he showered us with, we weren’t special at all. I found myself belonging to a terrible club of women who’d fallen for Rick Banks.

After my workout, I secured the research in my locker, as usual, then picked up Ivy from the daycare room. I held her so tight that she protested and tried to wriggle free. I kissed her head and laughed, thinking she’d start crawling as soon as she could figure it out.

I got her settled in the car and turned it on. And sat there for several minutes, thinking—processing.

If Rick had killed both Chloe—along with their unborn child—and Natalie, why had he let Ivy be born at all?

That’s when the answer came to me, so clearly that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before. Ivy and I still served a purpose. More than anything, Rick wanted to make partner, but he couldn’t unless he was married . . . and had a family.

He had both now. If my suspicions were correct, as soon as he made partner, our lives would be worth nothing to him. No one would take away a promotion after his poor wife and daughter died in a tragic “accident.”

How much longer would it take him to make partner? Months? Years? Hopefully long enough for me to figure out how to extricate Ivy and myself safely.

The truth was glaring, now that I let myself look at it. Rick’s hope of making partner was the only reason I was still alive. It was the only reason Ivy had been allowed to be born.

I felt sick. I sat in the car, gripping the steering wheel, holding back tears of shock and fear. Would I be able to make sure Ivy got to grow up?

She had lived long enough to learn how to roll over and sit on her own. Would she fully transition to solid foods? Learn to walk and run? Say Mama?

I had more research to do, not only about Rick but about how to escape, assume new identities, and most of all, hide from someone who already knew how to do all of that.

Someone who’d disappeared after committing murder. More than once. Someone who’d know how to find us.

Somehow, I had to get Ivy away from Rick in time.