Chapter 8: Diane
Hargrove ran the name that afternoon.
Diane Hale, née Diane Carver, had been married to Robert for three years before their divorce nine years ago.
No children together.
The divorce had been uncontested.
She currently lived forty minutes away in a town called Millhaven.
"Has she been in contact with Robert recently?" I asked.
"We're looking at his phone records now," Hargrove said.
"But if your daughter saw emails between them eight months ago, there's a pattern of contact worth examining."
"Why would his ex-wife help him build a strategy to discredit Maya?"
Hargrove was quiet for a moment.
"Sometimes people stay loyal to someone who frightens them.
Sometimes they're being compensated.
Sometimes they believe what they've been told." He paused.
"And sometimes they've been through the same thing your daughter went through and they made a different choice about it."
That last possibility sat in my chest like a stone.
I found Diane Hale's phone number through a public directory.
I stared at it for a long time before I called.
She picked up on the second ring.
"I wondered when you'd call," she said.
"You know who I am?"
"Robert described you.
He said you were unstable.
Easily led.
That your daughter had you wrapped around her finger." A pause.
"He said the same things about me, once."
I sat down.
"Diane—"
"I'm not going to testify for him," she said.
"I want you to know that first.
Whatever he's told Fitch about me, whatever he thinks I'll say — I'm not doing it." Her voice was steady but thin, like wire pulled tight.
"He contacted me eight months ago.
He said Maya was becoming a problem and he needed someone who could speak to her pattern of behavior.
He wanted me to say I'd witnessed similar behavior in other young women I knew.
He wanted me to give it credibility."
"Did you agree?"
"I said I'd think about it." A long pause.
"I've been thinking about it for eight months."
"What made you decide?"
"I saw the news this morning.
I saw Fitch on the steps." Her voice shifted.
"I heard the words *troubled young woman* and I remembered being twenty-six years old and sitting in a room very much like the one your daughter is probably in right now, and deciding that no one would believe me either." She stopped.
"I was right, then.
But I don't think I have to keep being right about that forever."
My hand was shaking around the phone.
"Diane, will you talk to Detective Hargrove?"
"I already called his office twenty minutes ago," she said.
"He's sending someone to Millhaven this afternoon."
After I hung up, I sat in the small shelter room with the thin curtains and the single lamp and I thought about Robert moving through his life collecting silences.
Eleven years of mine.
Eight months of Diane's.
Two years of Maya's.
Longer, maybe, before that.
He had built his safety out of other people's fear.
And now, one by one, the silences were ending.
I called Maya's room down the hall.
"There's something I need to tell you," I said when she answered.
"Is it bad?"
"No," I said.
"For once, it isn't."
But when I walked down the hall to her room, I found her door open and Carol standing just inside it, and the look on Carol's face stopped me in the doorway.
"What happened?" I asked.
"Robert Hale posted bail an hour ago," Carol said.
"And his attorney has filed an emergency motion to have Maya placed in a psychiatric evaluation facility pending the trial."
Maya was sitting on the edge of her bed, very still, looking at nothing.
May you like
"He said he would," she said quietly.
"He always said he would."
