Chapter 19 #2
She must’ve seen his hesitation, for she asked, “If you had refused to take the case when Perry’s boss approached you, what would’ve happened?”
“The shipping company would’ve gone to the second best corporate fraud investigative lawyer in the country and he or she would’ve found the same trail of evidence I did and prosecuted Winston Perry.”
“Would he have still killed himself when he got sentenced for his crime?” she followed up.
He smiled a little in spite of himself. “Ahh, ahh. That’s a trick question, Counselor. According to your logic, we don’t know what he would have done because he’s the only one who knew for sure why he chose to kill himself.”
She smiled even more broadly. “And?”
“And you make a compelling argument,” he allowed.
She said modestly, “I’ve been spending a lot of time lately with a lawyer. I’ve picked up a few things here and there about how to make a point.”
“I’m in so much trouble if you learn how to out-logic me,” he muttered.
She laughed outright at that.
He called the banker from the porch with the lake going dark and the cat threading figure eights around his ankles. He told George Hughes to give Susannah Perry his name and phone number and to tell her she’d be welcome in Cobbler Cove whenever she wanted to come.
“You’re sure?” Hughes said.
“No,” Reno answered honestly. “But do it anyway.”
She came on Saturday.
Reno had been useless all morning. He’d burned the first batch of pancakes badly enough that even Lily, the most loyal customer he had, declined the offer of a replacement and opted for cereal.
Grace took Lily over to the farm at ten to spend the afternoon with Makayla and Loretta.
She’d come back to the cottage, made coffee and pulled cinnamon rolls she’d made last night out of the frig and popped them into the oven.
After they cooled, she iced them, and then she changed into a clean blouse that was nearly as pale and delicate a pink as her cheeks.
At two o’clock a gray sedan with out-of-state plates turned into the drive slowly, the way people did when they were checking a number against a mailbox.
Reno watched from the front window, his feet stuck to the floor.
He had a clear picture of Susannah Perry in his head. The front row of that courtroom, every day for weeks. A navy dress that got a little looser as the trial wore on. A young mother with a baby on her lap who slept through most of the government’s case.
Whenever the infant woke up, she carried the child out. She always came back a few minutes later with the child calmed and cared for and sat back down composed. She never looked at Reno once during the entire trial.
At sentencing she hadn’t cried. He’d watched for it, braced for it, half wanted it. She’d just gone still, the kind of still that costs a person everything to hold, and stared at the back of her husband’s head.
The woman who got out of the gray sedan today was older than his mental picture by more than three years.
Grief did that. He knew. She wore jeans and a cardigan and penny loafers, and she stood by her car for a moment with one hand on the roof, appearing to gather herself before she came up the walk.
Grace opened the door before she could knock and welcomed her with the sincere kindness Grace extended to everyone.
Gratitude poured through him for Grace’s thoughtfulness. The first face Susannah Perry saw in this house was not the man who’d destroyed her husband, but a petite blond woman with icing under her nails who said warmly, “You must be Susannah. I’m Grace.”
And Susannah Perry, who’d braced her shoulders like a woman walking to her own execution, smiled back at Grace as her shoulders relaxed a bit.
“Sunny,” she said. “Everybody calls me Sunny.”
“Sunny it is,” Grace said with a smile, stepping back to let her in. “Please do come in out of the wind.”
Then Sunny saw him.
They looked at each other across Grace’s living room, the lawyer and the widow, and for one terrible second he was back in that courtroom and so, he could see, was she.
“It is you,” she said. “I told myself the whole drive it wouldn’t be. That it would be some retired exec from the shipping firm. Or an accountant who covered for him. Or maybe a juror with a heavy conscience.”
She shook her head slowly. “When the checks started the month after the funeral, I thought, who does that? Who in the world looks at what’s left of a family and decides to .
. .” She stopped. Pressed her lips together.
“And then I saw your name in a legal notice. In a town I’d never heard of.
The same town my money is coming from.” She let out a breath.
“You don’t have a forgettable face, Mr. Steele, particularly after I stared at it for weeks. ”
“Mrs. Perry—”
She interrupted, “I’ve reverted to my maiden name, Carter. I changed the children’s last names to Carter, as well. None of us need to be associated with my former husband’s sins.”
He nodded and corrected himself, his voice rough with emotion, “Ms. Carter. There’s no version of ‘I’m sorry’ that isn’t an insult to you.
So I’m not going to say it. I’m going to say I’ve owed you a conversation for three years, and I was a coward to avoid it for this long.
I’m grateful that you’re braver than I am. ”
“Come sit on the porch, both of you,” Grace said quietly, “before one of you falls down.” She led them into the kitchen. He ushered Sunny out to the porch, and Grace brought out the coffee and cinnamon rolls.
Sunny took the chair; he took the end of the couch. She held her coffee cup in both hands without drinking it, as if she mostly wanted something warm to hold.
“I came to say some things,” she said. “I rehearsed them. Now I’m here, and they’re all jumbled up in my head.” She took a breath. “So I’ll just say them out of order. Is that all right?”
“Say them however you want to,” Reno replied.
“Winston told me, three or four times during the trial, that he was never going to see the inside of a prison.” She said it flatly, like a fact she’d long since stopped flinching from.
His gaze dropped to her fingers, which she twisted together until they turned red. “I thought he meant he was going to win the case. By the second week, when it became clear he’d done all the things he was accused of, I understood that he really meant he would run before he went to jail.”
Reno listened with intense focus, but out of the corner of his eye noted that Grace was also listening intently.
Sunny continued, “I knew he had a secret bank account, somewhere. But I had no idea where and no idea how much money was in it. He had a passport in a fake name that I did find. But I never confronted him about it. I sat in that courtroom every day doing the math on whether he was going to take us with him or leave us behind.”
Grace made a tiny, involuntary sound of sympathy.
“Somewhere in the third week, when I knew for sure the kind of man he really was, I also knew the answer to my question. He was going to leave us behind.”
Reno winced. That had to have been impossibly hard, to sit there, learning in front of a courtroom full of strangers what a terrible person her husband was.
Her mouth twisted. “I’d been married to him eleven years and I had no idea who he really was and what he was capable of until a stranger—you—,” she glanced up briefly at him, “laid out exactly who he was for that jury and me.”
The porch was very quiet.
“The man you took apart on that witness stand,” Sunny said, and now she did look right at Reno, dead level, “I’d been trying to see him clearly for eleven years.
And I couldn’t. I loved him and you didn’t, and so I kept finding reasons for the things I couldn’t explain.
He’s stressed. He’s ambitious. Everybody cuts corners.
I was so na?ve back then. It never occurred to me to wonder how a man that made a half million dollars a year lived a ten million dollar a year lifestyle.
“At the end, when you stood up and said . . .” Her voice caught.
She steadied it. “You said he was a man who took whatever he wanted from whoever was nearest and called it success. And I knew you were right. You said he’d looked every person who trusted him in the eye and lied, and gone home and slept fine.
And I knew from sleeping beside him for eleven years that you were right about that, too.
You said he wasn’t a man who’d made a mistake.
He was a man who’d made a choice, over and over, for years, and the only thing he was sorry about was getting caught.
” She took a shaky breath. “And you were right about that, too.”
“I remember,” Reno said. He remembered all of it. He’d gone for the jugular. He’d been proud of it for about twelve hours until he’d gotten the call that Perry was dead, and he’d been ashamed of it for three years.
“You said to his face, in front of God and the jury and me, every single thing I had been trying to make myself say to him as the trial progressed and could not.”
Tears trickled down her cheeks now, but her voice held.
“I couldn’t say what you had the courage to look him in the eye and say.
He was the father of my children. By the end of the trial, he was a complete stranger to me and I was scared of him.
I didn’t know what more he was capable of doing.
Maybe he could harm me or the kids if I confronted him. And so I kept my mouth shut.”
Another soft, sympathetic sound slipped out of Grace, and Sunny sent her a tiny, fleeting look of gratitude. Then her gaze swung back to Reno. “You stood up in that courtroom and you said everything for me. Clean. Out loud. Where I could hear it and where he had to sit there and listen to it.”
Reno could not have spoken right then if the house had been burning down.
“That’s why I came looking for you,” Sunny said quietly. “Not because of the money, though God knows that money is the reason my kids never knew how close to the edge we came.”