I could see the judgment on his face. It was so long ago, I’d never had to explain it to anyone before. Ryan knew, but he just thought it was funny. Said he was the last to judge, since he’d had two DUIs when he was younger.
“I was young and broke and stupid. There was this new lipstick that Angelina Jolie was advertising for MAC and I wanted it so badly, even though I didn’t get paid much at my job as a hostess at Outback. I was with a friend at Macy’s, and she talked me into stealing it. I slipped it into my purse, thinking I was too slick to get caught, but just as I was about to leave the store, a security guard stopped me. My mom hired a lawyer and it was amended down to attempted shoplifting and I got sixty days probation. That’s all there is to it. I’ve been a law-abiding citizen ever since. I’m sorry, but what does any of this have to do with Ryan’s death? Why are you wasting time with me when you could be out there looking for the real killer?”
“And you work as a paralegal, is that right?” He had completely ignored my questions.
I sighed. If this was what it took to figure out who killed Ryan, so be it. “Yes. At Logan and Logan. Why?”
“No reason. Just curious. All right, let’s take a look at your cell phone records.”
I watched as his eyes scanned the page. He flipped to the next page and used his sausage-like finger to follow along the lines as he continued reading.
“There’s really no point to all of this,” I said, growing frustrated with the intrusion into my personal life.
“What’s that?”
“I said, there’s really no point. As you can see, I only talk to my mother, Ryan, my friends, and sometimes my boss. Again, you’re wasting your time, detective.” I fought back tears of frustration. I wanted the questioning to end. I wanted to get back to my grief and start making arrangements for my husband’s funeral.
“I don’t think we’re wasting time at all. In fact, I think I’m sitting right across from your husband’s killer now.”
“Excuse me?” I asked incredulously. I knew they would suspect me at first, but figured it was just “standard procedure,” and that once they did a background check, they would realize they were wasting their time. I had no idea they would really suspect me of murdering my husband. “You really think
I
killed Ryan?”
“Let me lay it out for you, Mrs. Carter,” Dorne began as he patted the table between us with his meaty hands. “You are the only other person who was in the house when your husband was killed. There are no other possible suspects, and in my experience, when there are no other obvious suspects, it’s usually someone who knows the victim. And by your own testimony, Ryan had no enemies. So, you tell me…did you murder your husband, Mrs. Carter?”
I leaned back in my chair. So this was how it was going to go down. I was the official suspect. They weren’t going to even look for anyone else. And I couldn’t even remember what had happened, so there was no way I could defend myself against his allegations. There was no other choice. There was nothing else I could say.
“If I’m not under arrest…” I waited for him to respond. He just shook his head. “Then I’d like to leave now.” I tilted my chin upward and steadied my trembling hands under the table. I wanted him to think I was not afraid, when the truth was, I was terrified.
Detective Dorne begrudgingly told me I was free to go, but he stopped me as I was exiting the cold interview room and asked if I’d first be willing to submit to a gunpowder residue test first.
Being
pretty
sure I didn’t kill my husband was not quite the same as being one hundred percent sure I didn’t. But, if I refused, I would look even more suspicious, so I acquiesced.
A few minutes later, a scrawny Asian forensic technician approached me with a long Q-tip-looking thing and swabbed my hands, focusing on the area between my thumb and forefinger. He put the Q-tip thingy in a large Ziploc baggie.
I started to leave again.
“One last thing. We need your clothes as evidence. But before you change, we need to take some photographs.”
Again, what choice did I have? I nodded my head slightly. Dorne guided me back into the interview room and asked me to stand in front of the bare wall opposite the door. I pressed my back against the cold, hard surface, feeling very much like a criminal being booked into prison. The same forensic technician produced a large, professional-grade camera and began snapping away. He took pictures of me from the front, back and both sides, never speaking a word. I wondered if he was a mute.
Then Jones came in with my spare clothes and told me to change. I gave her a look which begged for privacy, but she just shook her head and said she had to stay in the room. Dorne and the silent forensic technician left, and I pulled the bloody shirt over my head and handed it to her. I covered my breasts—I wasn’t wearing a bra—with my left arm and tried to shimmy down my pajama bottoms with only my right hand. Once the pants were free of my body, Jones tucked the shirt and pants into an even larger Ziploc baggie and sealed the top. She handed me my spare clothes and I pulled them on quickly and slid my feet into the cold rubber flip-flops.
“Now may I go?” I asked with exasperation.
“You can go,” Jones said, still looking at me with suspicious eyes.
But I had nowhere
to
go. My house was still a crime scene and I had no friends in town. At least, none I wanted to know about my current situation. Plus, the only people I knew in Nicholasville were all friends or family of Ryan’s. I realized my only option was to finally call my mother, who lived thirty minutes away in Richmond. Jones had begrudgingly offered me a ride to wherever I needed to go, but I told her I’d walk.
It was nearly daylight by the time I walked out of the station and onto the vacant streets of my hometown. Well, it was vacant except for the black truck parked in the Pizza Hut parking lot directly across from the police-fire station. The windows were tinted dark so I couldn’t see inside but I got the eerie feeling the person or persons inside were watching me. It was a ridiculous thought, which I brushed aside immediately as I began walking as fast as I could away from Detective Dorne and his minions.
Lake Mingo Park was adjacent to the police-fire station, so I walked the hundred yards or so to the park until I found a bench to sit on, where I could collect my thoughts and call my mother. And Ryan’s mother. That was a call I didn’t want to make, so I put it off as long as I could.
I dialed my mother’s contact on my cell phone and waited as it rang several times. She finally answered.
“Hello?” she said cheerily. My mother always woke at dawn, no matter what day of the week it was.
“Mom, something terrible has happened.” I told her everything. From the time I woke up to the moment I walked out of the station.
“Oh, my God, Libby!” Mom sighed into the phone. “Where are you now? I’ll come get you.”
I told her how to get to Lake Mingo Park. When she pressed me for more details, I told her I’d explain everything when she picked me up.
The next call was going to be even harder. God damn it. I did not want to call Ryan’s mother. But someone had to, and I wanted to tell her before the police got to her.
It was just as bad as I had feared. She fell apart on the other end of the line. I could hear her wailing and praying to God to make it not be true. I tried to comfort her as best I could, but there was nothing else I could say, so I just told her I loved her and hung up the phone.
As I sat waiting for Mom to arrive, I watched the ducks glide across the pond. The baby ducklings trailed behind their mother, leaving a wavy pattern in the water behind them. Babies. Ryan and I had never had babies. Not for lack of trying, mind you. In the early days, we tried like champions, doing everything we could think of and following every suggestion I could find on the internet. But every single fucking stick I peed on showed only one line, not two. Eventually, we gave up and lied to ourselves and each other that we were happy without kids and that we didn’t need them to make our marriage complete.
Mom pulled up in her minivan—the one she bought years ago in anticipation of the grandchildren she would drive around to play dates and Chuck E. Cheese. I never told her we gave up two years ago, so every time I would see her, she’d ask me when she was going to become a grandmother.
Never
, I should have said. Like ripping off a Band-Aid. Just get it over with. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t look in her eyes and see the disappointment that would take over once she realized she was never, ever going to be a grandma. So I lied to her. Every single time. Told her we were still doing fertility treatments when in reality, our fertility doctor, Dr. Ashish Patel, had told me two years ago I had no ovaries left. The endometriosis had literally devoured them. There was no surgery, no treatments left to try. It was over. Caput. Finito.
I opened the door and slid into the passenger seat. Mom reached across the armrest and pulled me into a tight embrace. Just when I thought I was all cried out, big, ugly, animalistic sobs racked my whole body. Everything that had happened came pouring out of me, like I was vomiting information all over my mother. I told her about waking up next to Ryan with his head blown off, about my headache—which was finally dissipating—and my interview with Detective Dorne.
“There, there,” she said, squeezing my hand. “Mommy’s here now. You come back to my place and get some rest, okay? Maybe you’ll feel better after a shower and a nap. Then we can talk about where we go from here.”
When we arrived at my mother’s house on Jacks Creek Road in Richmond, I did just as my mother had suggested. I took a nice hot shower and then laid down for a nap on my former bed. But I couldn’t sleep. I lay there in the daybed I had slept on until I was eighteen, looking around at all the changes Mom had made to my room. The bed was the same. The furniture was the same. The decorations, however, were different. Gone were my posters of Marky Mark and New Kids on the Block—yes, I freely admit this—and all the pictures I had tacked up on the wall of friends and boyfriends from high school. In their places were neatly arranged photos my mother had taken of the roses in her rose garden.
I lay there on my back with my feet crossed at the ankles, thinking about Ryan. Everything I had told Detective Dorne about Ryan and our marriage was one hundred percent accurate. We were in love. He did make me happy. He was my best friend.
But now I had lost my best friend. I was utterly alone. No more would I get daily texts telling me he loved me. No more would we curl up on the couch and watch movies on Netflix. No more would I hear the sound of his laughter at his own silly jokes.
Sure, things had been a little rocky over the last year or so, but all marriages go through slumps, right? That’s all it was—a slump. We had grown complacent in our lives together. Perhaps a bit too comfortable with one another. But that did nothing to diminish my love for Ryan, or the memories we had created over the past seven or eight years.
I tried to force these thoughts from my mind and I prayed I would fall asleep, but no matter how long I kept my eyes shut, sleep just wouldn’t come. My body was physically exhausted but my mind was also filled with disturbing images of Ryan lying there in the bed and the many questions that came with them.
Who would kill Ryan?
Why would they kill Ryan?
Why not kill me?
Why couldn’t I remember anything?
Why the horrible headache?
Did I kill my husband?
Finally, realizing sleep was going to evade me for quite some time, I gave up on the nap and walked down the stairs to find my mother standing in the kitchen, making coffee.
“Would you like some? I don’t have cream, but I have organic skim milk.”
“Sure,” I said with a wan smile. “Thanks.”
She poured me a cup as I sat down on the barstool next to the kitchen counter. She pushed forward a package of Sugar in the Raw. My mother only ate organic, non-processed foods, so the raw sugar didn’t surprise me, nor did the lack of coffee creamer. I stirred in the coarse brown crystals until they dissolved and then added a bit of skim milk.
“You need to hire an attorney,” Mom said matter-of-factly. “You work in the legal field; maybe one of your bosses could help you out.”
“I don’t want my bosses intruding in my personal life. But thank you, Mom. I’ll call someone today.”
“You know, my friend at church, her daughter is an attorney,” she said as she sipped on her completely black coffee. “Maybe she can help.”
“Are you talking about Megan Taylor? Mom, she’s like, what, twenty-three? Plus she works in corporate law. I need a criminal defense attorney.”
“Well, we could use—”
“No, don’t even say it, Mom.” I knew exactly where she was headed. She was going to suggest we call the same defense attorney who had represented my father twenty years ago. But he was a dinosaur—old and way past his prime. Plus, he had represented my father, and in my mind, only a fame-hungry idiot would take on a client like Randall Terrance McLanahan.
“All right, all right,” she said, holding her hands up defensively. “It was just a thought.”
“I appreciate it, Mom, really I do. But I want nothing to do with that man, or his attorney. As far as I’m concerned, he doesn’t even exist.”
“Honey, he’s still your fa—”
“Mom, don’t,” I said, holding up my hand as if that would magically stop her from continuing. “Why do you even care? Mom…he did what he did, all while married to you and pretending to be my father. Why do you insist on me going to visit him?”
Mom just shook her head. Tears were coming to her eyes now, and I instantly felt guilty. But it was true. My father was what he was and nothing was ever going to change that. Mom’s continued insistence that I go see him in prison always confused me. Here was a man who would come home at night, crawl into bed with her, make love to her even, all the while knowing exactly what he had just done. We never had a clue—who ever does?—what he was up to. All I knew was that my father was a truck driver which explained why he was never home.
My father ultimately repented of his sins and is now a “changed man,” so my mother takes pity on him and visits him from time to time, despite their divorce, and she never stopped trying to coax me into visiting him too.
“Honey, your father loves you,” she said, leaning forward on the marble countertop. “I know what he did was awful and I know how badly he hurt you, but he
is
a different man now. He’s found his way back to God, and I believe he is truly sorry for his crimes and for hurting us.”
“So, what? You’re just going to take him back? Remarry a man who’s never going to set foot outside of a prison? Please tell me you’re not considering going back to him, Mom.”
I looked at her and for the first time in a long time, I saw her as a person, not just my mother. She was still so beautiful, despite her age and what she’d been through. Her dark blonde hair was curled, using hot rollers circa 1987, and fluffy, her bangs swept to the side, just like I had showed her. Her eyes were hazel, like mine, but today they looked mostly green against her blue button-down blouse. There was sadness in those eyes, a sadness that penetrated so deep it never went away, even when she smiled, which she did right now with a shrug.
“No, honey. Don’t worry. That ship sailed a long time ago. I just want you to think about it. He asks about you all the time. What harm can come, hm?”
“I’ll think about it.” It was a bold-faced lie right to my mother’s face, but if I didn’t agree to at least consider it, she would go on and on and on.
“Good, that’s all I ask.” My mother, Kaye Barrett, nee McLanahan, was a force to be reckoned with, which was why I chose to give in and say I’d go see my father, even when I had no intention of doing so. She was kind-hearted and had a gentle spirit, but had the potential to be a tad bit controlling. Not in a bitchy kind of way, more in an
“I like things the way I like things”
sort of way. But I loved her. She was my best friend, especially now that Ryan was gone.
Ryan. With the conversation about my father now ending, my mind was free to wander back to the terrible thing that had happened to my husband.
Mom must have seen the obvious change in my demeanor, because she set down her cup of coffee and said, “Honey, what’s the matter?”