Chapter 9: Carol Marsh
Carol Marsh was fifty-three years old and drove a sensible gray sedan and shook my hand with both of hers when I opened the front door.
She had her father's eyes — something I knew from the photograph Diane Forsythe had included in the blue envelope.
Wide-set, dark, with the particular steadiness of someone who has been waiting a long time for a conversation they were told would never happen.
"Thank you for seeing me in person," she said.
"Come in," I said.
"There's coffee."
We sat at the kitchen table — the same table where Michael and I had sat that morning, where Sabrina had stood four months ago and asked me which cabinet held the good glasses.
I had shown her.
I had been glad she wanted to know.
Carol wrapped her hands around her coffee cup the same way Michael had wrapped his.
"My brother thinks I should let it go," she said.
"He says Dad is alive, he's being cared for, and dragging it back into the open will only hurt him more."
"What do you think?" I asked.
"I think she'll do it again." Carol looked up.
"She's done it before my father.
There was a man in Providence — his family contacted us two years ago, but he died before anything could be documented.
And now she's married your son." She paused.
"How old is Michael?"
"Forty-one."
Carol nodded slowly.
"She'll wait," she said.
"She's patient.
That's the thing people don't understand about her.
She doesn't rush.
She builds trust and she waits and she is very, very careful about what she touches and what she leaves alone." Her jaw tightened.
"Except she wasn't careful with you."
"No," I said.
"She wasn't."
"Why do you think that is?"
I thought about the note on the mirror.
The cheerful little heart.
"Because she thought I was already beaten," I said.
"She thought the years of giving and apologizing and shrinking myself had made me someone who wouldn't fight back.
She didn't miscalculate the risk.
She miscalculated me."
Carol looked at me for a moment.
"I have a meeting with the district attorney's office in Hartford on Thursday," she said.
"They've been waiting for corroborating testimony from someone outside the family.
Someone credible." She paused.
"Would you be willing to speak with them?"
"Yes," I said.
"And I'll bring Avery Whitman.
He'll have the recordings and the documentation ready."
Carol exhaled — a long, slow breath that seemed to carry something she had been holding for a very long time.
"My father asked about her last month," she said quietly.
"He has good days and bad days.
On the good days, he still asks if she's coming to visit." She looked at her coffee cup.
"I tell him she's been delayed."
I didn't say anything.
There was nothing to say that would help.
"I want her to face what she did," Carol said.
"Not just to my father.
To all of it.
I want there to be a record somewhere that says this happened and she did it and it was real." She looked up.
"Does that make sense?"
"It makes complete sense," I said.
We sat together in the kitchen for another hour.
Carol showed me the documents she had compiled — bank statements, medical records, a timeline she had built over fourteen months in a folder she kept in the trunk of her sensible gray sedan because she didn't trust leaving it at home.
When she left, she shook my hand again with both of hers.
I stood on the front step and watched her drive away.
My phone showed two missed calls from Sabrina and one from a number I didn't recognize — a Hartford area code.
I called the Hartford number back.
A woman answered.
"District Attorney's office, Hartford County."
May you like
"My name is Beatrice Langford," I said.
"I believe you've been expecting my call."
