A Regular Nancy Drew
It was late April when the trial got underway.
When the call came from the DA’s office, informing me that I was required to show up in court to testify, I considered running away. If I said the wrong thing, I would incriminate an innocent man I’d loved all my life. I was terrified of saying the wrong thing again.
My father tried to keep it from happening, but in the end I had no choice. The two of us drove up to Maine together—a very different ride from the one I’d taken just short of a year earlier with Forrest.
For my court appearance, I wore the only dress I owned that seemed like something a person would wear when testifying at a murder trial—the blue Fourth of July party dress Regina had bought for me. It was a little tight by this time. I’d finally developed breasts.
The public defender assigned to represent Forrest, Ted Storm, looked as if he’d graduated from law school ten minutes earlier.
Though I’d been called to testify as a witness for the prosecution, the plan was that in his cross-examination of me, I’d manage to convey a different side of the story—one that would support his client’s innocence.
He said little about what might be asked of me in court.
“Should be pretty cut and dried,” he’d told my father and me when we’d spoken on the phone a few days before coming up to Maine.
Ted Storm was one of those people who gave you the impression he was opening his mail while you talked with him.
Maybe, at the same time, he was watching a ball game with the volume off.
“There’s something you should know,” I told Forrest’s lawyer. “I think it’s important.”
Then I told him about the night—Regina’s last—when I’d seen her eating the Boston cream pie. I described to him how I’d seen her in the kitchen, not long before her death, shoveling spoonfuls of pie into her mouth.
“One thing everyone knew about Regina,” I said. “She was terrified of gaining weight. Regina counted every calorie that went into her body. But she was scarfing down that pie like there was no tomorrow,” I told him.
Like there was no tomorrow. It was a phrase that applied with chilling accuracy to that night.
“I don’t get the significance here,” Ted, the lawyer, said, sounding bored.
I tried to explain. “The only way Regina would have let herself eat that pie was if she knew she was about to kill herself,” I told him. Meaning, it was Regina who took the pills. Nobody gave them to her. Here was proof of Forrest’s innocence.
To support my theory, I told Ted about the scale in Regina’s bathroom that she weighed herself on two times a day.
The celery sticks she kept in sealed baggies in the refrigerator, that she gnawed on at mealtimes.
The way she removed the bread from her tuna sandwich, eating only the filling, and hardly any of that either.
I was talking very fast. Too fast, probably, because I was excited.
I had spent a lot of time thinking about my theory.
Offering it in court would give me a chance to right the terrible wrong I’d committed the previous summer when I’d led Regina to believe that Forrest had been in on Brenda’s scheme to murder her.
It was too late to save Regina. But offering my testimony about the Boston cream pie might be my only chance to make things right for Forrest.
At some point during my speech about the pie, the name Karen Carpenter probably came up.
The word anorexia, which I’d learned about from reading Seventeen, and another word (also learned from the pages of Seventeen) that actually applied to Regina, as I’d learned that time I saw her leaving the bathroom with the towel over her mouth: bulimia.
“Once she knew she was going to kill herself, it didn’t matter anymore,” I told him.
I was crying by that point. I probably sounded like a crazy person. Even my father—a man who believed in Forrest’s innocence with every cell in his body—seemed not to understand the significance of what I was saying. I was so worked up, I could barely get the words out.
Calories. Bathroom scale. Whipped cream.
“Slow down, honey,” the lawyer said to me.
Then he addressed my father, in a tone that made me understand he considered my dad the only person worth speaking to here.
“When a witness comes across as hysterical, it doesn’t play well with the jury.
” Hysterical: a word applied when a person, usually female, expressed strong emotion.
I tried one more time. “Regina was so mad at Forrest that she wanted to make it look like he killed her, so he’d get into trouble,” I said. “She wrote a note that looked like what he might write if he was faking her suicide. She was faking a fake. The police believed it!”
I managed to get this all out without crying, finally, but I was gasping for breath.
Ted Storm was gathering up papers strewn over the table and putting these into a folder as he spoke. “You need to calm down, honey,” he said. “I don’t think we’ll bring this chocolate cake business into the case.”
“It was a pie,” I told him. “Not cake. Pie.”
Lawyer Ted shot a look at my father. “It’s always complicated putting a kid on the witness stand,” he said.
“But I got to hand it to you, Hank,” he said, chuckling. “This daughter of yours is a regular Nancy Drew.”