Unreliable Witness

by Alana Terry

  Inside the mansion was nothing but mirrors. Each time Justine thought she saw Alice’s face, it was her own image staring back at her.

  Until she got to the far wall. She saw the door, knew she had to open it, knew she was going to open it, knew that once she did open it, her life would be ruined.

  Even as she sat next to her son on the flight to Detroit, she could remember staring at her own hand as it reached out for the doorknob. Slowly turned and pushed it open.

  Alice was inside, her clothes covered in blood, her face distorted by both insanity and rage.

  The knife in her hand was dripping. Disgusting.

  The body at her feet wasn’t Justine’s father.

  It was her son.

  She’d woken up screaming for West. Even when Steve tried to calm her down, she couldn’t stop hyperventilating until she brought her son into bed with them, held him in her arms. Even once she’d managed to convince her logical brain that West was safe, she still couldn’t control her breathing, couldn’t stop her arms from trembling, her mind from replaying the sense of foreboding she felt as she pushed open that door.

  “I think you need to see her,” Steve told her the next morning. She thought he was the crazy one until her therapist repeated the exact same sentiment the following day.

  Justine still wasn’t convinced. It wasn’t until a few weeks later when she had another dream, the one that finally changed her mind.

  It was the same haunted castle. The same freaky mirrors.

  But there was no door this time, no bloody knife, no stabbed son.

  Instead, it was Alice, lying on a bed, holding a little doll and crying. “Where’d she go?” she wailed over and over. She reached out her arms, and for a split second, Justine wanted nothing more than to bury her head against this frightened woman’s chest and tell her everything was okay.

  “Where’d she go?” Alice repeated, her voice so pitiable Justine woke up with tears on her cheeks.

  “I think you need to see her,” Steve repeated the following day.

  And Justine knew he was right.

  Now, she wasn’t so sure.

  In her early twenties, Justine had poured over every single newspaper article she could find dating back to her father’s murder. He’d been a beloved TV reporter, which mean the trial made national news. The story had every ingredient of a good scandal for the time. Her father was white, handsome, somewhat famous, and several decades older than Alice. Alice was black, young, and beautiful, with well-documented mental instabilities and quite a few motives to kill her aging husband. Before their wedding, Alice had fallen into a heap of financial troubles, financial troubles that all went away the moment she signed her marriage license. As far as the public was concerned, Alice had every reason to be profusely grateful to her husband, who gave her every material possession she could desire as well as the best medical care for her mental illness that money and fame could buy.

  But she wanted more.

  A jury member said that he probably would have acquitted her if it hadn’t been for the fact that Alice had taken out three separate life policies on both her husband and their daughter just a week before the killing. That and the fact that the detectives found letters from a secret lover, a lover urging Justine to end her marriage and live with him forever.

  Justine read the reports and realized her mother wasn’t just greedy and insane.

  She was also stupid.

  Fringe groups still believed Alice when she upheld her innocence, in spite of all the evidence against her — her well-documented mental disorder, her secret lover, the multiple life insurance policies. Alice’s supporters argued that the all-white jury and the racial tensions of the time would have made it nearly impossible for her to get a fair trial. And yet her sentence was upheld after multiple appeals, her requests for parole were repeatedly denied, and Alice was doomed to spend the rest of her life behind bars.

  Justine didn’t want to admit it to herself, didn’t want to sound like an ignorant child unable to look at reason. The facts of the trial could hardly be any clearer. Alice had killed her husband. She had even attacked Justine. The scar on Justine’s thigh where the knife blade went into her leg was a daily reminder of her mother’s criminal insanity.

  And yet Justine had to wonder. It was a question she’d never dared to mention to Steve, to her therapist, even to herself except for when she was at her most open, her most honest, her most raw.

  Part of Justine wanted to visit Alice. Part of Justine wanted to hear her mother’s side of the story.

  Part of Justine was dying to believe her mom was as innocent as she claimed.

  CHAPTER 17

  I’d hidden the pills in a sewn-in pocket of a purse I never used.

  Dennis found them anyway.

  I’d been off them for nearly a month. I was finally starting to feel like myself again.

  A week or two earlier, and he would have killed me for sure. But not that Tuesday morning. I was thinking more clearly than I had in years. I felt like me, not some zombie toy of his.

  And I knew I had to save you.

  Save my little girl at all costs.

  Your father had never hurt you before, Justine. I want you to know that. In spite of how wicked and evil he was, he never caused you any type of physical injury. Even when he threatened to, it was only to keep me compliant.

  Dennis shoved me against the wall. He threatened to force-feed me all the pills at once, spelled out how long and painful my death would be if he did. He tried to shove them down my throat, so I bit his hand.

  I knew it was dangerous, Justine. I really did, but he’d never hurt you before. I thought he was just bluffing when he pulled out that knife.

  He wanted me to overdose. He’d already called two of my doctors and told them I’d threatened self-harm. A week earlier, he dictated a suicide letter and made me transcribe it. That wasn’t the first time. And still, I wasn’t nearly as scared as I should have been.

  Then he began to tell me all the other steps he’d taken to make sure my death looked deliberate. The phone calls he made from our home line to the suicide prevention number. The type-written diary pages he’d forged to make it look as though I’d been planning my own death for months.

  There was a time when I would have welcomed death. But then on that fateful Tuesday morning, you woke up and came plodding down the stairs. You were wearing blue fuzzy pajamas, the kind that cover your feet and zip up the front.

  You were so beautiful, Justine, and I knew that I had to live. What kind of life would you have if I let your father kill me? How long would it take before his lust to inflict pain destroyed you as well?

  I couldn’t let him do that.

  He had the knife in his hand. Said he’d kill you if I didn’t take the pills. Told me that he’d filled out paperwork in my name, taken out life insurance on our little baby.

  “Take those pills, Alice,” he said to me, “or I’ll kill our little girl and tell the police it was you.”

  I knew he had the resources to make that happen. I hadn’t heard about the life insurance policies until then, but I remember him forcing me to sign some papers a few weeks earlier, when I was still detoxing from the drugs and couldn’t think straight.

  He had the knife up to your neck. You looked at him and smiled. You thought he was trying to tickle you.

  He underestimated how much stronger I was now that the drugs were out of my system. Now that not only my own life but my daughter’s was on the line.

  You should never underestimate a mother’s fury. Her innate instinct to protect.

  I did what I thought I had to do, Justine. I’m so sorry you got hurt in the process.

  Your father is dead. I killed him that morning. I’m not sorry I did it.

  It was the only way to keep us safe.

  It was the only way to keep you alive.

  CHAPTER 18

  The incident happened so quickly,
it was over before Justine realized it had started.

  Before she realized how much danger she was in.

  “He’s got a gun!” a passenger shrieked.

  A scuffle. Someone got knocked out. And then a man stood up, waving a gun in the air.

  Justine wasn’t even sure if she had blinked. What was going on? She was supposed to feel scared. Logic told her it was the opportune time to panic, but she was too stunned to react at all.

  “The people of Detroit have failed our kids,” the man began. For a second, Justine thought this was some kind of drill. A false alarm. Something staged.

  Then the palpable fear that enveloped the entire cabin told her the danger was terribly real.

  “What’s going on?” she whispered to the woman in the aisle seat.

  “I think that’s the air marshal.” Meredith gestured toward the man who had been knocked out in the preceding scuffle.

  Justine clutched her son, hoping to somehow shield him with her body from the terror in the cabin.

  “I think it’s a hijacking,” Meredith whispered.

  “But why?” Justine had the feeling her brain should be keeping up, but it simply couldn’t. “Who is he? Why is he doing this?”

  “He calls himself General,” Meredith answered. “Says he’s doing this for the kids of Detroit. I really don’t understand it either.”

  West was clinging to Justine’s side. She kept his body pressed against hers, hoping she wasn’t suffocating him in her attempts to shield him from the danger surrounding them.

  Justine didn’t react when Meredith took her by the hand. Somehow it felt calming to have another woman by her side. The physical touch was comforting.

  “I’m going to help you protect your little boy,” Meredith whispered, and Justine felt tears of terror stinging her eyes. Protect her little boy? Did that mean this man might possibly try to hurt her son?

  The gun was probably a prop. That was the easiest thing for Justine to believe. A prop so he could get what he wanted, gain some notoriety, and then the air marshals or traffic control or whoever took over in cases like this would find a way to get all the passengers safely on land.

  But how? The air marshal was knocked out. Maybe even dead. Who was going to protect them? Who was going to keep any of them safe?

  “Mama,” West whined, and Justine tried to shush him.

  “Not now, buddy. Just be quiet and still.” The last thing she wanted was for West to make noise, to alert General to his presence. As long as General was focused on his tirade, as long as he kept talking into the cell phone cameras the passengers were pointing at him, he would ignore her son. She was thankful West was in the window seat, hoping that her body was large enough to keep him hidden from sight.

  “He’s only four,” Justine whispered, her eyes filling with tears. Did God hear her? Did he see? Her little boy was only four. This wasn’t something a child his age should ever have to endure.

  Meredith squeezed her hand once more. “It’s going to be all right,” she whispered, but Justine couldn’t bring herself to believe it could possibly be true.

  CHAPTER 19

  The knife was in my hand. The life was draining out of Dennis’s eyes.

  “You know you’ll pay for this,” he hissed. Even as death stood by waiting to escort him to judgment, your father tried to terrorize me. “Those insurance policies weren’t just for the girl. You know how bad this will look.”

  I didn’t know how bad it would look. How could I? How could I have guessed that just like he made preparations so that my death would look like a suicide, he also made contingencies so that I’d be the primary suspect if he ended up dead?

  Which is exactly what happened.

  It wasn’t just the new insurance policies, although those certainly didn’t help my case.

  There were the forged love letters from some anonymous boyfriend. The police found them stashed away behind the liquor cabinet. They immediately began to suspect I was having an affair, even though they never found out who the mysterious man was.

  Because there was no other man, Justine.

  No other man at all.

  Then there was Dennis’s journal, which he only kept at work. He’d written in it for over a year, notes about how worried he was about my health, how he kept trying to protect me but was afraid I might one day hurt our daughter. He made up imaginary scenarios about coming home and finding you with bruises on your body, bruises I couldn’t adequately explain. The au pair wasn’t mentioned at all. I imagine if the police ever found his journal, Dennis didn’t want them trying to find her for questioning or digging too deep into her disappearance.

  Of course, Dennis had been carrying on with multiple affairs. I wasn’t surprised, but his journal spelled out how I’d discovered love notes from his girlfriend two nights before he died. How mad I’d gotten. How I’d threatened to kill him and our daughter both because I was so angry.

  The doctors who testified at trial didn’t help my case, either. It didn’t matter that for every single office visit, Dennis had gone in with me, planted firmly by my side like the all-loving husband. Had told me what kind of symptoms to claim I had. Often, he injected me with something before I met with the physicians. I still don’t know what it was, but there were times I couldn’t even remember the appointments after I got home.

  In the end, the prosecutors didn’t need anything else. I was a woman, a minority, a gold-digging trophy bride with a boyfriend on the side, a history of insanity, and a well-documented diagnosis of post-partum psychosis which made me dangerous to my daughter.

  I knew I didn’t stand a chance at the trial.

  I was right.

  They even tried to blame me for the cut you got on your leg while your father and I were struggling with the knife. It didn’t help that I couldn’t tell them how you got hurt, if the knife was in my hand or your father’s at the time. You know how it ended. First-degree assault and child abuse for your injury. First-degree murder for your father’s death.

  Two consecutive life sentences.

  I imagine that when you read the news articles about everything that happened, you think I’m a monster for what I did. I don’t know what I have to say to get you to believe me, Justine, but there’s something else you need to know now.

  I’m dying. The doctors doubt I’ll see much past New Year’s. I’ve made my peace with my sentence. I’ve made my peace with God.

  The only hope I have left in this world is that you can hear my story, look me in the eye, and tell me you believe me. That’s all I ask before the good Lord takes me home.

  CHAPTER 20

  “The people of Detroit have failed our kids.”

  General’s loud voice carried throughout the entire cabin, over the hum of the engine, over the pounding of Justine’s pulse raging in her ears.

  “They’ve sold our children’s souls to the devil, building their school on toxic land.”

  That’s what this was about? The elementary school with lead in the soil? Justine remembered her husband mentioning the case, but surely it wasn’t something to murder over.

  Was it?

  “Five minutes,” General was saying. “The governor has five minutes to call me on my personal cell phone before I’m forced to do something desperate.” His gaze swept up and down the cabin. Justine’s stomach flopped like a fish out of water when his eyes locked onto hers. It only lasted for a fraction of a second, but it was long enough to freeze the blood in her veins. Her entire body went cold and numb.

  “Five minutes,” General repeated. “Five minutes before a hostage dies.”

  Justine held West close. Now instead of using her body as a shield so the shooter couldn’t see him, she covered West’s face with her hands so he wouldn’t try to turn and witness the violence erupting all around them.

  Justine couldn’t believe it. Surely the God her husband spoke about so lovingly, so reverently wouldn’t allow something like
this to happen. Not to her. Not to her little boy.

  Justine’s heart pounded in her ears. For a minute, she was afraid she was going to be sick.

  Seconds passed. The wait felt like an eternity. Was this the definition of purgatory?

  The air felt thinner. Had the captain done something to the pressure system? Were they going to suffocate before General could kill them all off one by one?

  General continued to pace the aisle until a single beep sounded from his phone.

  “Time’s up.”

  He walked up to a flight attendant. The woman was visibly shaking. Justine couldn’t pull her eyes away. She kept her son shielded as best as she could as General pointed his gun at the flight attendant’s head.

  They were too far away for Justine to hear what he was saying. In her state of paralyzed shock, Justine convinced herself the entire scene was a giant bluff.

  When the reverberating sound of gunfire deafened her ears, she realized how wrong she was.

  The flight attendant dropped lifeless to the ground, her body heavy, the sound of its thud sickeningly solid. Final.

  West dug his fingers into the flesh of Justine’s belly and started to cry. Justine pleaded with God to keep him safe. It didn’t matter what happened to her. It didn’t matter what happened to anyone else on this doomed flight. Just as long as God protected her son.

  “She’s dead,” a woman screamed, her announcement to the cabin entirely unnecessary. There was no way anybody could have survived a shot to the head at such a close range.

  “Five minutes,” General repeated. “Five minutes before another hostage dies.”

  CHAPTER 21

  You learn a lot serving out a life sentence. Did you know that?

  Like not all criminals are evil. Sometimes desperate people do desperate things.

  I was safer in prison than I ever had been under Dennis’s roof. If it hadn’t been for the stress of the trial itself and the knowledge that if the jury found me guilty I’d never see you again, I could have felt perfectly at peace.