MARTHA GARDINER
“One more thing.” Martha kept one hand on the conference room doorjamb. Kept her body in the hall. In the room, but not in the room.
“We were talking,” Rachel said. “Are you supposed to interrupt?”
“Rachel?” Jack shot his wife a look. Martha tried to read his face. She felt sorry for him. Yes, they were adversaries, but they played fair, or equally fair. No one was perfect. And winning was the goal for both of them. Only one side could prevail, though. That was the accepted and indelible reality. Signing on to the law was signing up for war.
Martha almost laughed at herself for the unexpected sentimentality.
“One more thing,” Martha repeated. “Rachel, do you remember that day in the car? When you oh-so-casually asked me about cold cases? Like you thought I had no idea what you were really asking about?”
“Don’t say anything, Rachel,” Jack said.
“You asked me, What’s the reason most cold cases are solved? And what did I say?”
Rachel opened her mouth as if to answer, but Jack clamped a restraining hand on her forearm.
“I remember,” Martha said. “I told you—it’s if a new witness emerges.”
Martha turned, with a certain lift in her heart, and opened the door wider. It was dramatic, she knew, and she might have handled it less sensationally. But life was dramatic. The law was dramatic. It revealed the truth.
“I’m sure you all know Nina Rafferty,” she said.
Martha could tell Rachel didn’t know where to look. At Jack or Martha or Nina. But Nina stood framed in the doorway, elegantly cool, hair slicked back and wearing a reserved dress, sleeveless and so charcoal it was almost black, so fashionably effortless it almost didn’t exist. No earrings, no jewelry. Not even a wedding ring.
The senator’s ex-wife stood motionless. Martha had advised her not to sit down, but to stand there, let them see her, and then observe what happened. She was a brave woman, with cards of her own to play and a game of her own to lose. She’d already lost personally, that was for sure. But Martha herself, believing what Rachel North had told Annabella Rigalosa, had—with only the most honorable of intentions—almost ruined this woman’s life. And that’s what made Nina Perini Rafferty brave. That even at such a cost, and even in service of a one-time adversary, she’d come forward to find justice.
Martha might have been furious over what Nina told her. But it meant she’d made a mistake with Nina. Martha had admitted it to her, and then apologized.
“Ms. Perini?” Martha used Nina’s now-preferred surname.
“What’s this all about?” Jack stood, as of course he would. And faced his former client. The one he’d saved from prison. “Nina?”
“Nina?” Martha turned to the woman, giving her the cue to begin. Nina had legal problems of her own. And Martha could never condone what Nina had decided six years ago. But four weeks ago, Nina had called her. And justice delayed, Martha had decided, was justice nonetheless.
“I saw you, Rachel,” she said. “I saw you in the parking lot.”
“Saw what?” Jack said. “When?”
Of course it was only Nina’s word now, Martha thought. But she needed to see what would happen as a result.
“I lied to you, Jack, about where I was.” Nina’s voice was sorrowful. Contrite. “But the alibi was good enough, wasn’t it? And you believed me. And for that I thank you.”
“What?” Rachel rose from her chair, standing, looking at Nina eye-to-eye. Twenty years separated them, and a lifetime of decisions.
“Rachel? I hated her, too, frankly. Danielle.” Nina pressed her palms together and touched them to her lips. Took a deep breath. “It’s embarrassing, and I feel so—guilty. But—I didn’t care that you killed her. She deserved it. She tried to steal my husband. Does it sound old-fashioned to say it? Though he and I had long parted over his statehouse flings. Danielle Zander wasn’t Tom’s first, Rachel. As I’m sure you know.”
“He gave her a gold necklace!” Rachel pointed at Nina, her face flushing, her eyes wide. “A Tiffany necklace. An expensive necklace. And he told me it was for you! How do you feel about that? He lied to you, every single day. Cheated on you.”
Nina put up two palms, stopping her. “There’s nothing you can say to upset me anymore, Rachel. I’m sorry he hurt you. And I’m sorry he drove you to this. But he ruins everything he touches. I managed to leave him, though at that time he was so self-absorbed he didn’t know it. You, on the other hand, didn’t. Leave.”
“Are you kidding me, Nina?” Jack stood now, too. Almost pushed his wife behind him as he widened his arms, entreating. “You perjured yourself? Why didn’t you tell the truth?”
Martha had never seen his face like that, fierce in anger. And sorrow. In court—who knows how many times?—Jack Kirkland weathered whatever surprises ambushed him. This time was different.
“I’m so sorry, Jack.” Nina shook her head, pressed her lips together. “But I couldn’t. If I had said where I was? Who I was with? It would have ruined his life, too. And I loved him too much to do that. But I wasn’t in Maine, I was in a townhouse on Beacon Hill. A townhouse that overlooked the parking lot. Not to mention that you were my lawyer, the best in Boston, and the person I saw was—Well.”
“That’s cra—” Rachel began, but Jack shushed her again.
“If my hearing had gone the other way, I would have told you,” Nina said. “He—and, no, I’ll never tell you who it was—had given me permission to go ahead. But if all went as we hoped, he promised to stick to our story. He’d alibi me in Maine, say we’d happened by chance to be at the same place. And as long as the case stayed cold—I wanted to protect him. I could leave Tom. Let the scandal be his scandal, and not mine. He deserved it. I deserved it.”
“Go on,” Martha encouraged her. It had been obstruction of justice as well as perjury, and Nina knew the sword that was hanging over her.
“But a few weeks ago, Ms. Gardiner’s interns came to see me, to interview me. They said Ms. Gardiner had seen some video and was reopening the case and talking to everyone involved. They told me that you, Rachel, had tried to ruin Tom. Poison people against him. And they asked me if there was anything I hadn’t said back then—anything I knew about Tom and Danielle. But it wasn’t only what Danielle did that I knew about. It was what you did.”