Chapter 15
The letter from the Attorney General's office came in the second week of May.
Two men had been arrested in March in Fall River on something else entirely and had come apart on each other inside a week, and there was now a case, and the case had a trial date in September, and the state would like Mrs. Imogen Severin to testify as to the events of the night of the fourteenth of November.
She read it twice at the kitchen table and then drove to Providence on the Thursday and sat in a conference room with a young assistant AG named Petra Faircloth who was extremely good at her job.
"You're the whole case," Petra said.
"I didn't see them."
"You heard them for four hours in a house you know better than anyone alive, and you were nine inches from one of them at three fifty-one in the morning, and you have a phone that was in the building with a battery log and eleven undelivered messages on it.
" Petra turned a page. "Mrs. Severin, you are a defense attorney's nightmare and I am going to be honest with you about why.
It's the pantry. A jury will sit with a woman who spent four hours holding a door and there is nothing on earth that a cross-examination can do about it. "
"All right."
"There's a second thing and I'd rather say it now than in September." Petra put her pen down. "Defense is going to run an entry-and-alarm-failure theory. They'll say the system was chaotic, the timeline's unreliable, nobody knows who was where. And to do that they're going to want the event log."
Imogen sat very still.
"The log," she said.
"The system event log from your residence.
We'll be entering it. It's ours, it helps us — it establishes the glass break at 02:06:58 and it corroborates you completely.
" Petra looked up. "It also has a line in it about a manual seal at 02:07:41, and if I can see that, they can see it, and if they can see it they are going to ask your husband about it on the stand.
Not because it's relevant. Because a witness who's rattled is a witness who's useful. "
"He's on the witness list."
"He's on ours. He was in the house."
Imogen looked at her hands on the table.
"What happens," she said, "if he's asked why the room sealed at forty-one."
"Then he answers it," Petra said, "and how he answers it is entirely up to him and entirely out of my hands, and I want you to understand that I cannot and will not coach it either way."
She sat in the car in the garage for twenty minutes before she drove home.
Because there it was, arriving from the outside, unasked for, on state letterhead: the exact question, in public, under oath, in September, with a court reporter taking it down.
And there were about four ways it could go, and she could see all of them.
He could say the door sealed, passive, true enough, and nobody would push him.
He could say I don't recall, which was the answer four lawyers on Weybosset Street would draft for him inside an hour and would be, in the strictest sense, not disprovable.
He could say it's automatic, which was the sentence she had carried for eighty-three days and which was also true about doors in general.
Or he could say the other thing, out loud, in a room with a reporter in it and a press bench that had been waiting eighteen months for a line on Cormac Severin.
Imogen sat in a parking garage in Providence and understood, with total clarity, that she was going to ask him.
And that the asking would be the test — and that it was not a test she could fail him on fairly unless she named it first, because a test a man does not know he is taking is exactly the kind of thing that had been done to her.
She wrote that night.
Come Saturday. Three o'clock. It's not a social thing and I want you to know that before you drive out.
I'll be there.
Cormac, I'm going to ask you for something.
Good.
He came at three. She had him at the kitchen table and she did not sit down.
"There's a trial in September," she said. "You've had the letter."
"Tuesday."
"Then you know they're entering the log."
"My lawyers have had four days on it," Cormac said. "There's a motion in limine drafted. They want to exclude the line about the seal as irrelevant and prejudicial and they think they'd win it."
"Do you think they'd win it?"
"Probably."
"Right." Imogen stood with her back to the sink. "Don't file it."
He went still.
"I want you to answer the question," she said.
"If they ask it, and they will, because Petra Faircloth told me they will — I want you to say what you did, in a full sentence, on the record, with no lawyer's language in it.
I want you to say that you pressed it at forty-one seconds and that you had forty-nine left and that you took another woman's word about where your wife was. "
The kitchen was very quiet.
"And I want you to understand exactly what I'm asking for," she said, "because I've thought about nothing else for nine days.
That answer is going to be in the paper the next morning.
It's going to be in the paper the same week you're being sued for a hundred and ten million dollars by people who are already saying you lost your nerve, and it is going to hand them the sentence they've been trying to find for a year.
It'll be the first line of your obituary.
It'll be what people in Newport mean when they say your name for the rest of your life. "
"Yes," he said.
"Don't say yes yet."
"Imogen—"
"I'm not finished." She had to stop for a second.
"It may also cost you money in a way I don't understand.
Nuala says there's an argument — she says it's a bad argument, but there's an argument — that if you tell a courtroom you sealed a door on your own wife, somebody with a civil claim could try to do something with that.
She says the insurers will hate it. She says nobody can promise you it's free. "
"I know. My people said it on Tuesday."
"Then say the thing I actually need you to say: that you understand what it costs."
Cormac sat at the table with his hands flat on it.
"It costs everything that's left," he said.
"Yes."
"I understand that."
"Say it back to me."
"If I answer that question in September," he said, "then that is what I am, publicly, forever, and there is no version of the rest of my life where it isn't the first thing anybody knows about me." He did not look away. "And I'll do it. I'd have done it in November if anybody had asked me."
"Don't."
"I'm not performing—"
"Don't," Imogen said, and her voice cracked across the kitchen.
"Don't tell me you'd have done it in November, because you didn't. You had fifty-two days and a study with the rain coming down and I asked you for all of it, and you didn't. So don't stand in my kitchen and tell me what you'd have done. Tell me what you're going to do."
He took that.
"I'm going to answer the question," he said.
"And there's a second part," she said.
"All right."
"Before September. Before the courtroom and the press and the part where it's brave." She crossed her arms. "You're going to drive to Wickford and you're going to say it to my mother's face."
Cormac Severin went the color of the table.
"With me in the room," Imogen said. "And nothing softened, and no context, and no lead-in about how the protocol says do not search.
You're going to sit in that house and tell Augusta Tillinghast what you did on the fourteenth of November, in the plainest words there are, and then you're going to sit there while she says whatever she says. "
"She'll—"
"Yes."
"She'll be extremely polite," he said.
"Yes."
"That's much worse."
"Yes," Imogen said. "That's the point."
He put his hand over his eyes for a second.
"Why her," he said. "And I'm asking because I want to get it right, not because I'm negotiating."
"Because a courtroom is strangers." She had rehearsed this part and found she did not need to.
"Strangers cost you money and reputation and those are things you've got.
My mother costs you something you've never once been able to buy in this state and you have wanted it since the day I married you, and you know that, and I know that, and there is no point pretending either of us doesn't."
"That's true."
"And because—" She stopped.
"Go on."
"Because I lied to a table of fourteen people in Newport in January and you let me," Imogen said, "and everybody who matters to me has spent eighteen months with a wrong version in their heads, and I've been the one carrying it.
I'm tired. I'd like one person in my family to have the real one, and I'd like not to be the one who has to say it. "
Cormac nodded slowly.
"When," he said.
"June."
"All right."
"You agree very fast."
"I'd have agreed to worse," he said, "and you know that, and that's the problem with asking me for things. So I'd like to say one thing that isn't agreement."
"Say it."
"You should watch me do it," he said. "Not watch me say yes. I said yes in the study in December as well."
Imogen looked at him for a long moment.
"That's the first thing today you've said that I believe," she said.
Petra Faircloth made her do the pantry four times.
That was the last week of May, in the same conference room, with a court reporter present for the third and fourth runs because Petra wanted Imogen to hear what her own voice sounded like being transcribed.
"Again."
"I've done it three times."
"You'll do it eleven times before September and you'll do it twice more the morning of." Petra did not look up from her legal pad. "Mrs. Severin, I'm not doing this because you're bad at it. You're extremely good at it and that's the problem. From the top."
So she did it again, and about two-thirds of the way through Petra put her pen down.
"There," she said. "Stop. What did you just do?"
"I don't know what you mean."
"You said 'and then there was a period of time in the pantry.'"
Imogen sat back.