Say Nothing

by Brad Parks

  Except, of course, it now made me wonder: Having gotten away with that small lie, did she think she could get away with a much bigger one?

  * * *

  Making the excuse that I felt a headache coming on and wanted to lie down, I escaped the kitchen as soon as I could.

  For the sake of my children—and my own sanity—I had to pull myself together and think about this. But not like a husband. Husbands are too prone to emotion, to letting their feelings get in the way of drawing a logical conclusion.

  I had to think about this like a judge.

  What if a defendant accused of kidnapping came into my courtroom with the kind of evidence Alison currently had against her? And let’s just say it was a bench trial, where the defendant waived her right to a trial by jury and was instead asking me to make the determination of guilt or innocence. How would that trial play out?

  Prosecution Witness No. 1: A very credible grandmother type with absolutely no motive to lie—Miss Pam from the Montessori school—had identified Alison as picking up the children from school. This was beyond the kind of eyewitness ID you might get from a stranger. Miss Pam knew Alison well. And it was part of Miss Pam’s job to note who was driving the car. She had even been able to add details like the ball cap, the sunglasses.

  Prosecution Witness No. 2: A little boy, while somewhat shaky on the stand, also identified his mother as the driver of the vehicle. And, yes, he had been shredded on cross-examination, eventually admitting that he had mostly been paying attention to the television screen. But still.

  Prosecution Exhibit No. 1: A video of a car identical to one owned by the defendant, with the children getting into the car at exactly the time Miss Pam had noted. It showed a woman who certainly looked like Alison driving.

  Then came Prosecution Exhibit No. 2: Transcripts of text messages from the defendant’s cell phone to the father of the kidnapped children. The first one said she would be picking up the kids. Another one said the father should come home instead of trail a potential suspect.

  And, oh, how the defense attorney had tried, during pretrial motions, to keep the transcription of all the text messages out of evidence. He said there was no evidence they really came from the defendant’s phone. And the prosecutor had countered by pointing out there was also no evidence they hadn’t come from the defendant’s phone.

  Any judge would have no choice but to allow Exhibit No. 2 into evidence and give the defendant the opportunity to testify she had never sent the messages. And she seemed credible enough while doing it.

  Except there were other parts of the defendant’s testimony that were deeply troublesome. For one, she had insisted—insisted!—that neither she nor her husband would involve law enforcement. And isn’t it always the guilty person who wants to stay away from the cops?

  Second, she had been caught in a lie about going to the Living Museum with her son. The prosecutor didn’t even need to harangue on the subject, because judges didn’t have to be told: Witnesses who lie about one thing are often lying about a lot more than just one thing.

  There was also the unanswered question of what she had done during that time. Had she, perhaps, met with her coconspirators? Or visited her daughter?

  And, sure, the defense tried to get fingerprint testing done. It had also testified about its efforts to set up a guard at the house. But that was starting to feel like an elaborate, O. J. Simpson–style dodge: We’ll stop at nothing to find the real killer! And, of course, the guards wouldn’t catch anyone and the science would neither prove—nor disprove—anything.

  After that, the defense rested. That’s all I had on which to base my verdict. And where did that lead me?

  To a totally absurd thought. But it was one I couldn’t help but having anyway. Did Alison have something to do with this?

  The overly emotional husband in me was screaming: No! Absolutely not! No mother—much less a mother like Alison—could subject her children to that kind of terror. She birthed those children. She nurtured them through infancy, toddlerhood, and now childhood. She loved them with a selfless ferocity.

  And what possible reason would she have to do something like this? Because she wanted Denny Palgraff to have his patent? Because she wanted to protect ApotheGen’s shareholders? There was no motive that made a shred of sense.

  But what did the logical judge in me think?

  The judge would have known the prosecution was not required to prove motive. The judge would have looked at two witnesses, a video, and text messages all pointing to the same conclusion.

  The judge would have convicted her and then slept very well that night.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Unable to extricate the husband—or the father—from the judge, I slept terribly.

  Part of it was simply the pain: the roiling in my gut, the inability to catch my breath, the bone-deep ache that came from a stress beyond anything I had ever experienced. Thinking about strangers kidnapping my children, as I had for the past four days, had been agony enough. Thinking about that kind of betrayal coming from the person I shared my life with—my partner, my soul mate, and the mother of my two children—was a visit to a chamber of hell I never knew existed.

  If it was true. And I was still deeply divided on whether it was. As the night wore on, I cycled through every interaction and every sentence Alison and I had shared over the past week, month, and year, looking for some indication in either direction, finding none.

  There were times when I lay there, just staring at her in her sleep, battling the temptation to shake her awake and confront her with what I knew. But I knew I couldn’t. If she really had done it, all I would be doing was inviting another fabrication. If she hadn’t done it, merely making the accusation would tear something essential in our relationship, something that couldn’t be mended. Some lines cannot be uncrossed.

  Sometime in the middle of the night, I slipped out of bed. I had become convinced that, no matter how careful she might have thought herself, she had to have left some trace of her activities behind.

  My first stop was her phone. I checked her texts and found nothing out of the ordinary. Then I went to her sent and received calls. It was mostly, “Karen Cell” or “Mom Home” or “Work” or other names that linked to her contact list. There were only two foreign numbers. But when I Googled them, they turned out to be our doctor’s office in Gloucester and the forensics lab in Williamsburg. Nothing suspicious there. Her e-mail was also clean.

  Though, of course, all of that could have been sanitized. Or she could have a second phone she used to contact her coconspirators.

  Next I went through her purse, thinking there might be something incriminating: a receipt, a note on a scrap of paper, whatever. But, again, I came up empty.

  I thought hard. What would be the kind of small thing where she wouldn’t think to cover her tracks? I went to my laptop and accessed our E-ZPass account, trying to see if there was any unusual toll activity on any of the bridges or tunnels in our area. Nothing seemed out of place.

  But at that point, being that I was already on the computer, I hopped over to her Facebook account. Alison rotates between three passwords, so it wasn’t hard to guess which one she used.

  Once I was in, I scrolled through six months’ worth of updates—mostly cute posts about the twins or family photos—then through her friends list, to see if there was anyone I didn’t know. Nothing popped. Then I went over to her messages.

  The first few were benign. But then, from about a month back, there was a message from none other than Paul Dresser, Alison’s high school beau.

  He was writing to say he had changed cell phone numbers and was giving her his new one, along with the suggestion that it had been too long since they had spoken, that he had some news he wanted to share, and they really needed to catch up.

  Alison’s reply: “Definitely. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

 
I tried to tamp down the brief—and surely irrational—rush of jealousy that greeted this message. Yes, Paul Dresser had been her high school boyfriend, her first love. They had been together for two hot-and-heavy years while their fathers were stationed at Fort Bliss, outside El Paso. But then, the summer after graduation, her father was reassigned. Then his was. So not only were they heading off to college; they wouldn’t even be able to see each other during semester breaks. They called it off rather than attempt an untenable long-distance relationship. Alison had once told me it took her all of freshman year to get over it.

  But that was, what, a quarter century ago? Surely, I was being ridiculous.

  Just as surely, I clicked over to Paul’s profile. I went to the pictures first. I had never met him, but there was no doubt he was a good-looking guy: a head taller than me and broad shouldered, with the chin of a movie star. A photo of him at the beach—with the simple caption “Tahiti!”—showed off a toned physique and an impressively flat stomach. Another showed him skiing in Aspen. In yet another, he was rock climbing in Switzerland. The man’s life seemed to be one fabulous vacation after another.

  I thought back to all the times she had joked about Paul Dresser: how Paul was going to sail by our dock in his yacht and sweep her away from her humdrum life, how Paul would buy her jewelry and cars, how Paul would take her on fabulous trips. The constant theme was that she was only biding her time with me until Paul came back along.

  They were jokes, right?

  None of the photos showed him with a wife or children, so I went over to the “About” section to see if he was in a relationship.

  He wasn’t. His status was listed as “Single.”

  He was also listed as living in Alexandria, Virginia, which I found a little disturbing, inasmuch as globe-trotting Paul was now within easy driving distance.

  But there was something else in the “About” section that was far more menacing, something that filled my body with a dread chill. It was under “Work.”

  There, Paul Dresser listed his employer as “ApotheGen Pharmaceuticals.”

  * * *

  Even as my head pounded, my hands shook, and my racing heart felt like it was going to rupture, it was not difficult to put together a scenario that now seemed, if not probable, at least nightmarishly possible.

  I could imagine Paul sitting in a meeting where the lawsuit was being discussed—what else would people at ApotheGen be talking about?—and discovering the judge in the most important case in the company’s history was none other than his ex-girlfriend’s husband.

  He likely shared this fact, and the other executives had urged him to reach out to Alison. Maybe Paul—hunky, glamorous, dimple-chinned Paul—could rekindle with his old flame to some advantage for the company. Or at least he could reach out to her to see if he could learn anything.

  And maybe that’s where it started. Just a ruse to get close to me and the case. But when he had contacted Alison, they hit it off. Obviously, there had been attraction there once. First loves have a hold on us that way. I know: Alison was mine.

  It wasn’t hard to imagine Paul being wowed all over again by Alison. She was, in some ways, more beautiful at forty-four than she had been at eighteen, if only because she had aged so well in comparison to peers who had not been as genetically fortunate.

  But was Alison similarly taken by Paul? It wasn’t out of the question that she had never truly gotten over him. He had always been her what-if, the guy taken from her by fate and circumstance. And now these two star-crossed lovers found themselves orbiting each other once again.

  Was the kidnapping—in addition to having enormous professional benefits for Paul—merely stage one of a plan where Alison and Paul ran off together with the kids and started a new life together? A life that started after I rendered my verdict and they found some convenient way to dispose of me?

  It was bizarre to even ponder. And yet it was also strangely prosaic. I remembered reading not long ago about a church in New Jersey that forbade its deacons from signing up for Facebook because the pastor was tired of counseling couples whose marriages had been imperiled by cheating that started with old relationships renewing on social media.

  I tried to calm myself down, to remind myself this was pure speculation. All I really had was one Facebook message; the phone call that seemed to have followed it (though Alison’s call log didn’t note one, she could have used our landline or a burner phone); and the fact that he worked for ApotheGen.

  An hour’s worth of Internet searches did little more to clear things up. Paul Dresser was definitely employed by ApotheGen Pharmaceuticals. He seemed to be in sales and marketing. But neither ApotheGen’s website, nor LinkedIn, nor a page for a professional association he belonged to, would tell me his exact title or explicate his role in the company.

  But those were just details. The more fundamental question was—and this, truly, was the world war–size conflict raging between my ears—would Alison really do something like this?

  Up until a few days ago, I would have told you that while I didn’t necessarily know much, I did know my wife. She was at the core of whatever epistemology I thought I had. We had been together for twenty-five years—basically, our entire adult lives. I had a hard time remembering when there hadn’t been an us.

  After The Incident, when that bullet ripped me open in so many ways, one of the first conclusions I reached was that Alison had been the one source of perpetual good in my life. From our days as undergraduates, through law school, through my clerkship, through the workaholism that nearly consumed me during my time with Senator Franklin, she had done nothing but love me.

  Even when I didn’t necessarily deserve it. Or understand why. I had come to accept that, for me, her love was like the speed of light: a mathematical constant true throughout my universe.

  So how could I create any order out of a cosmos that included a betrayal this depraved?

  Something a divorced friend told me kept coming to mind. He talked about that shocking moment, as his marriage was fragmenting into tiny pieces of accusation and hatred, when he realized his wife was essentially a stranger to him; that her behavior had become so inexplicable within the context of what he thought he knew, he had to acknowledge the person he thought he knew didn’t exist.

  Was that now happening to me?

  The cruel irony was that the person I most wanted to discuss this with—Alison—was essentially unavailable to me. I couldn’t say anything to her until I was sure. And it was difficult to have a real conversation with her while I still suspected her.

  All I could do was watch her. And pray like hell this wasn’t so.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The next morning, Alison made two suggestions I found immediately alarming.

  Part one, she asked if she could go to church. Alone.

  The church part didn’t strike me as being strange. The alone part did. One of the main reasons we had become churchgoers since coming to Gloucester was for the family aspect of it. We didn’t want to push religion on our kids—what they did when they became adults was their own business—but we did want to at least expose them to faith. And we did that as a unit.

  Her explanation for wanting to go by herself was that we couldn’t very well go as a three-person family when we were normally four; but that she, going solo, could offer the explanation that I had been under the weather and she didn’t feel like dragging the kids by herself.

  Besides, she said, she had a lot to pray for.

  Then she presented the second part of her plan: that I should go to Blake’s fund-raiser.

  Apparently, his secretary had e-mailed both of us the details about it. Alison, as predicted, had absolutely no desire to attend. But she thought it would be a good distraction for me, a chance to escape the unrelenting pressure of home and work. “Just go out and have a good time with Blake and try not to think about things,”
she said, as if that was possible.

  In truth, I didn’t like any of it. But I agreed to her proposal, mostly because I didn’t know how to explain my objections. In the meantime, it only fueled my dread.

  Was her desire to go to church strictly spiritual?

  Or was this another excuse to slip away and visit Paul and Emma?

  I spent the morning splitting my time between Sam and my nascent efforts to either prove or disprove this awful thing I suspected, making no further progress.

  At one point, as I made Sam’s breakfast, I flipped on the small television we had in the kitchen. It was tuned to CNN, where Andy Whipple—my brother-in-law’s boss’s boss’s boss—was being interviewed about his charitable works. From what Mark had told me, Whipple had become something of a celebrity in his world when he anticipated the bloodbath of 2008, pulling out all his investments at the right time and plowing the money into safe havens. As others took a pounding, the Whipple Alliance’s largest fund returned an astonishing twenty-eight percent, cementing his legend.

  For a supposed master of the financial universe, he didn’t look like much. He was small statured and round middled, with receding hair he had chopped short and one chin too many.

  He was donating twenty-five million dollars to an inner-city Boys & Girls Club, for which the interviewer was lauding him. I watched his mouth move as he spoke, but I wasn’t really hearing him. I was fantasizing about his money. If I had twenty-five mil, would I be able to buy myself out of this current mess? Could money get Emma back?

  This led to more daydreaming about whether Mark might be able to connect me to Whipple, who might then offer me a loan that I would happily spend the rest of my life repaying if it ensured Emma’s safe return.

  Or would twenty-five million not do anything? Would Whipple, with all his monetary resources, be just as helpless as I was, with all my judicial resources? Were there really things neither money nor power could buy?