Chapter 7 #2
Maya chuckles, taking another sip of her drink, drawing out the movement to an almost agonizing crescendo. “Well, the guy’s a complete scammer. I didn’t have to use any of my training to figure that one out.”
Wren nods, snickering along with her. “Yeah, he’s someone who needs to act out a role in order to come off normal. When you get him alone and he has no purpose, he starts to shed the mask a little bit.”
“How so?” Maya asks, leaning forward, suddenly interested. Wren can see the investigator bursting inside her.
“When John and I spoke to him about his connection to Jeremy Rose, he started off strong, very beloved pastor–like. He was in his church, in his domain. But then we got him alone in his office, where there was no one to fall for it. We weren’t charmed or looking for salvation.
” She shakes her head, remembering how combative that interview was.
“Once he knew he couldn’t manipulate us or take full control of the conversation, you could see the rage bubbling up inside him.
He couldn’t keep it friendly, even though it was clear he was trying to. ”
Maya nods. “Interesting.”
“And, Maya, I can’t shake the feeling that there is more of a connection between him and Andrea Meyers in Salem.” Wren can feel her fears spilling forth like water from a broken dam.
Maya’s eyes widen, but not with shock. “I am with you on that one, girl.” She takes a sip of her drink, swirling it in the glass in front of her before placing it down carefully.
“After you snagged a copy of Andrea’s case file from Corinne Matthews, I probably read through it over a hundred times.
Every time, I can’t help but go back to the boyfriend, Phil. ”
Relief floods Wren’s system as Maya validates her own thoughts about Andrea’s murder and who could potentially be her killer.
“There is more to Philip Trudeau than I think we are even prepared to learn. My gut tells me he’s a monster, a …
a werewolf in sheep’s clothing,” Wren says, finding herself lost in the enormity of worries.
When she finally looks back at Maya, she can see something flicker behind her expression. “Tell me what you know,” she says.
Maya hesitates for a second, then unlocks her phone screen, scrolling to something and sliding it over to Wren. “I am thinking your assessment of this guy might be right on the money,” she says.
Wren arrives back home around eleven p.m., propelling herself through the quiet house and straight to the study.
To her surprise, a delicious smell hits her like a train: notes of vanilla and cinnamon are thick in the air, and she immediately gets a pit in her stomach.
Looking to the corner near her desk, she can see the faint flicker of a candle, still lit, forgotten from before she left to meet Maya.
She quickly blows it out, and a thick pillar of smoke snakes its way out of the jar as it extinguishes.
She scolds herself, realizing that she could have burned down the entire house with her carelessness.
All she can think about is how Richard would have lost his mind had he seen her walk out the door with an open flame still burning in the empty house.
She has only made this mistake once before, right after they moved into the house, and when they came back in later that day to the smell of peppermint, Richard gave a sermon about fire safety that would have Smokey Bear quaking in his boots.
For a second, she chuckles to herself, once again recognizing how out of sorts she is without Richard.
Wren has never been scattered, but now it feels like her default setting.
Collapsing into the desk chair, she scrolls to the photo she took of Maya’s phone screen at the bar and then turns on her computer.
The room smells more like a campfire now, still cozy, but it’s a harsh reminder of her sloppiness.
She ignores it as best she can, furiously typing the website address from the photo into the browser’s search bar.
After watching the rainbow wheel spin for an agonizing amount of time, it finally pops up on the screen.
A deeply buried police report involving Philip Trudeau and a domestic dispute lights up the screen.
There is scant information, but the log entry reveals enough to send a chill down Wren’s spine.
The initial log is dated from before he and his ex-wife, Kathryn, were married, and it doesn’t even identify him, but it does have the general location of the incident and the words Domestic Abuse Battery.
She sees a second report farther down the page, and even though the charges were eventually dismissed due to “insufficient evidence,” Trudeau is named this time.
“How is he still so supported?” she asks the empty room, hoping for some kind of divine answer.
Her fingers move almost independently as she scans social media, eventually finding entire groups dedicated to getting some kind of deranged justice for who they considered to be the wrongly accused pastor.
The more Wren reads, the clearer the picture becomes.
This man has brainwashed people to such a degree that his entire congregation stood behind him, and it would appear his wife was bullied into dropping the charges and letting things return to “normal” with him again.
Kathryn was admonished publicly, and it’s very clear that she had little to no support in her community or in her congregation.
To his followers, Philip is the star of the show.
The loyalty they feel to him borders on dangerous, and it seems like he was able to weather that storm without any damage to his pristine reputation.
Maya led Wren to this because she knew there was likely more that Wren could uncover. Wren’s half-hearted research before leaving for Massachusetts months ago had only scratched the surface, and now she’s ready to settle in and dig.
After clicking through names, marriage announcements, and local newspaper coverage for a while, she begins to feel as if she is on a fool’s errand, trying to turn over rocks that don’t exist. But something tells her he just can’t be that clean.
So she clicks on some of the more obscure search results, and that’s when she finds exactly what she has been unknowingly searching for.
She sucks in a deep breath and begins to read the public juvenile criminal record for Philip Trudeau. It’s tragically light on details, but there is enough to understand that this man was once a very disturbed and violent child.
The record is from an incident that occurred when Philip was fourteen years old, and it’s a vague but chilling document.