Cut a Deal
Brenda Barnett took the stand next. She had cut her beautiful hair—her best feature, I realized now, which meant she didn’t look remotely pretty anymore. Also, she appeared to be pregnant, though not so far along, I calculated, that Forrest could be viewed as a possible father to her child.
Now came the shocker. In exchange for the prosecution dropping all charges against her, Brenda had turned state’s evidence, testifying for the prosecution that it had been Forrest Emerson who had laid out the plan to murder his wife in such a way as to make her death appear as a suicide.
“The man was obsessed with me,” she said, shaking her head. “He kept begging me to marry him. I told him that as much as I cared for him, I couldn’t bear to be involved in any way in such a heinous crime, or bring about the death of an innocent individual.”
She still sounded like a character in a soap opera. “That’s when I broke off the relationship,” Brenda said, looking regretfully in the direction of the jury.
Vivian Latournier didn’t stop there: Now came the pills.
She set forth the picture of Forrest having premeditatedly hoarded Regina’s medications over the weeks prior to her death for the purpose of delivering a fatal dose.
Supporting this claim, she presented pharmacy records indicating that he’d filled her prescriptions three times.
I knew the story, of course, for all the good it did. It was Regina who’d ordered those extra doses, Regina who’d called in her prescriptions.
I sat in the front row, taking in Brenda’s testimony, feeling sick.
In the DA’s account of what transpired that weekend, Forrest had set up a boat regatta for the express purpose of keeping everyone out of the house long enough to ensure that Regina was dead.
He had even made sure to include his children in the spectacle by outfitting a canoe for them.
Not only that, he’d placed his own children’s lives at risk by putting them in a boat that was certain to tip over, as a device intended to keep all guests at the dock, away from the bedroom where, at that very moment, his wife lay dying of the overdose he’d delivered to her not long before.
When the DA got to this part, I glanced in the direction of the jurors, several of whom shook their heads.
It was hard to look at Forrest as he was now, seated at a long wooden table next to the only lawyer he could afford—a man so young, he appeared to be dealing with acne. Now Vivian Latournier called me up to the witness stand. I took an oath to tell the truth.
As he always had—with the exception of during his brief and disastrous affair with Brenda Barnett—Forrest listened intently to every word I said.
Even when I found myself delivering what I came to see was coming across as incriminating testimony, I saw no sign of anger or resentment on his face. Only sorrow. Only regret.
Forrest and I had not exchanged a single word since the night of Regina’s death. Now was the first time we’d been in the same room together since then.
The DA wasted no time. “We understand you kept a diary while you lived at Wonderland,” she said.
A diary? Maybe they were talking about the little spiral notebook I’d kept in the pocket of my shorts, where I’d scribbled down times Forrest went off for his swim or his bike ride, and the rest of it.
If so, this was bad, but I knew already that the police had found the notebook on Regina’s bed, the first day of their investigation.
Only it wasn’t my little spiral notebook the DA was talking about. She reached for an oversized manila envelope. Slowly, she pulled out my long-lost leatherbound journal. Somehow it had ended up in the hands of the police. Someone must have given it to them.
The room started to spin. I knew well what that journal contained. I wished I were dead.
“That journal was just . . . crazy things I thought up,” I said. “I used to like making up stories.” Used to. That was over. Like riding my yellow bike and playing tennis. Like my summer in Wonderland.
“You like making up stories, Frances?” the DA said. “Maybe you’re making up more stories now?”
She opened my leatherbound journal. There were those birds on the cover, those thick, creamy pages.
Vivian Latournier shifted her stance in such a way that she was partly facing me, but more so directing her performance to the jury.
She began to read out loud from the pages I’d written the summer before. Her voice was low and husky.
“His finger made its way down my neck and my chest. Then further down.”
“‘Don’t ever change,’ he told me. ‘I love you just the way you are.’”
There was more, but I tuned out the rest. Page after page of the words I’d written in my little bed that summer, looking out at the stars. Pretending something was happening that wasn’t.
“This is your handwriting, isn’t it, Frances?”
“You don’t understand,” I said.
I looked out to the people assembled in the courtroom, starting with the members of the jury, looking uncomfortable.
Regina’s parents. Prudence. Pam Oliver, even.
My mother hadn’t come with us to Maine, but there sat my father.
He didn’t look angry, or shocked, even. Just heartbroken.
Then I spotted someone I hadn’t expected to see there: Jonathan.
Unlike my father, my tennis coach—my friend—did not look down as he heard the words I’d written in my journal that summer.
Not unlike how it was when I was playing my match at the tennis tournament—the one and only tennis match of my life, which definitely wasn’t going well—his eyes met mine.
I could hear him speaking to me, though he wasn’t really, of course.
Forget everything else. Just focus on your breath.
Eyes on the ball.
From somewhere far away, I heard the voice of Forrest’s public defender, Ted, utter the word, “Objection.” He said it as though it were a question.
Overruled.
The DA turned another page of my journal. She started reading again.
“As we were clearing up the dishes in the kitchen after dinner, he leaned over and whispered in my ear, so nobody else could hear him. ‘I wish I could take you out on the lake tonight,’ he told me. ‘Just the two of us in the moonlight. I think about you all the time.’
“‘I’d love that too,’ I said. ‘I never stop thinking about you.’
“‘I want to wrap my arms around you and never let go.’”
It all seemed so long ago now. Feeling that way. Wanting to be with Forrest Emerson that way, without even knowing what being with Forrest that way would look like, without knowing what sex actually was. Just knowing it was something important.
Then wanting to please Regina. Wanting to do whatever it was that might make one of them love me, when it felt as though nobody ever had.
I looked over to Jonathan again. I pictured myself hitting my five hundred balls against the backboard. I remembered how strong I’d been then. I didn’t feel strong anymore.
“I made all that up,” I said.
“You told Officer Reynolds you’d seen a tattoo on Forrest Emerson’s buttocks,” the prosecutor said. “Did you ever see Forrest Emerson’s naked body?”
“It wasn’t what you think.”
“So even though you took an oath to tell the truth, you’re telling us now that you lie. Is that right, Frances? No wonder it’s hard for the rest of us to figure out when you’re telling the truth.”
Where was Forrest’s lawyer now? Wasn’t this a moment for him to object?
“I’ll remind you again that you’re under oath here. There are serious consequences for lying in a court of law.” The prosecutor stood in front of the witness box, but in such a way that the jury could see her, shaking her head. “Were you in love with Forrest Emerson, Frances?”
“Yes,” I told her. I could have added I still love him. Just not the way you think. But I left it at that.
“And did Forrest Emerson ever suggest that your feelings were reciprocated?”
There had been that day we sat together by the lake, after he broke things off with Brenda. He’d put his arm around me. And so many other times, too, that had meant the world to me. It wasn’t just the words he said. It was how he treated me.
“You don’t understand,” I said. Even I could hear the tone of pleading in my voice.
The previous summer, when I learned about Forrest’s affair, I had come to believe that I never mattered to him after all. But I knew now that Forrest actually did love me. In a different way from how I’d described in my journal, was all. A more precious way, actually. More real.
That’s when our eyes met in the courtroom, Forrest’s and mine.
Just for a moment. He nodded almost imperceptibly.
You couldn’t call the expression I saw on his face one of happiness, but I saw kindness there.
Other than Jonathan, he was the only person I could find in the courtroom that day displaying any sign of true kindness.
They were the only ones on the planet, possibly.
I didn’t dare smile at him, but the faint trace of a smile passed over Forrest’s lips. He closed his eyes as if what he saw now was something he’d prefer not to behold. His future.
Now came the part none of us could have anticipated. As terrible as things were, I didn’t know yet they could get worse.
The DA having set forth, through the testimony of Brenda Barnett, a scenario in which Forrest Emerson could have held out no hope of a future with her, the question hung in the air: Why, then, would Forrest Emerson have killed his wife?
There was still the motive of the insurance money, of course.
But the DA chose to go further. Having worked to establish the portrait of Forrest as a man obsessed with sex, she evidently wanted to portray him as setting his sights on a new relationship, now that Brenda had rejected him.
Once he’d gotten his ailing and demanding wife out of the way.
This was when Vivian Latournier turned back from addressing the jury and faced me again, pointing her finger directly at my heart.
“Is it not possible, Frances, that you saw yourself as having a future with Forrest Emerson?” she asked me.
“The man whose wife had entrusted you with the care of their two young children just weeks before? You thought if she was out of the way, you could replace her? Isn’t it possible that Forrest Emerson encouraged you to believe this, by telling you he loved you? ”
No. No. No. No. I wanted to say the words, but none came out.
“You stated on record that Forrest Emerson has a tattoo on his left buttock. What kind of a man displays his naked body to a fourteen-year-old?” she demanded.
“It wasn’t like that—” I said.
Now Vivian Latournier started to read from my journal again—words I’d forgotten until now, written sometime early in the summer, after that boat ride together probably, describing a picture of Forrest and me, some unspecified date in the future, when the children were off at boarding school maybe, and Regina simply .
. . gone. A fantasy featuring the two of us heading out to the island on the boat, his arms around me as I took the wheel.
Then came another of my journal entries, written late in the night, a time—one of the many—when I’d felt frustrated by Regina’s endless demands.
“If I never see her again after this summer, I won’t miss her. She’s always talking about killing herself. Sometimes I wish she’d do it.”
“Perhaps there were two people who wanted Regina Emerson dead that summer,” the DA said. “Her husband was one. Weren’t you the other?”
Up until this moment, Forrest had been sitting quietly at the table next to his attorney, listening to the testimony without apparent bitterness or rancor, making notes occasionally. But when the DA spoke these words, Forrest rose up out of his chair and shook his fist.
“For god’s sake, let her alone,” he said. He didn’t yell, but the anger in his voice was almost frightening. You might even describe it as murderous. In my whole life, nobody had ever stood up for me as Forrest Emerson did at that moment.
“Frances didn’t do anything,” he said. “She’s just a kid. It’s all my fault. Everything. If it wasn’t for me, my wife would be alive today.”