by Lisa Regan
“Just because you were there the day Molly jumped doesn’t make you trustworthy,” Lacey told her without looking up from hers.
The waitress arrived with their coffees. Jocelyn ordered eggs and bacon. Lacey asked for French toast. Once they were alone again, Jocelyn said, “Yeah, I get that.”
“You used to be a cop, didn’t you?” Lacey said. “I can tell. You have that look.”
Jocelyn dumped two sugars into her coffee along with some creamer and stirred. “Yeah, I was on the job a long time. I’m a private investigator now.”
Lacey’s shoulders shifted up just a fraction with tension. “Who hired you?”
“No one,” Jocelyn said.
“Then what were you doing outside of Molly’s house?”
Jocelyn sighed. “I need to know why she jumped.”
Lacey sipped her coffee black. “What do you care?”
“I have some, uh, issues keeping my anger under control. That day, I didn’t react well. She tried to leave the scene and I blocked her. I got out of the car yelling. Called her a bitch. Next thing I know, she’s over the railing.”
Lacey laughed, drawing Jocelyn’s gaze to her face. “You think it was your fault.”
“I think if she hadn’t hit me that day, or even if I’d just let her flee the scene, she’d still be alive.”
“I didn’t peg you for stupid,” Lacey remarked.
“I know, I know. If she was suicidal, it wasn’t because of anything I did or said. But I was the last straw. I can’t leave it alone. I have to know.”
Their food arrived. Lacey took a large bite of her French toast and spoke around it. “Did you talk to Evan?”
“I was there when the police notified him.”
“Well,” Lacey said, “if it wasn’t obvious then, it should have been obvious this morning. He’s a mega douche. You want to know why Molly jumped? Evan Porter.”
“How do you know?” Jocelyn asked. “How do you know the Porters?”
“The Porters,” Lacey scoffed. “I don’t know the Porters. I knew Molly. The ‘Porters’ cut me out of her life after they got married.”
“How long were you and Molly friends?” Jocelyn asked, finally picking at her eggs.
Lacey shrugged. “Since we were kids.”
“So you knew her when she was Star?”
Lacey’s fork clattered onto her plate. “What did you say?”
Jocelyn explained how she had found out about the notorious ‘Star’ video.
Lacey hung her head. “There were a lot of videos.”
“Of you too?”
Lacey nodded.
“Did you know her before...?”
“Before we became prostitutes?” Lacey asked, her tone harsh. “No. We met in New York. We both had the same pimp. Molly was twelve when she was first brought in. Dumb as a rock, naïve as could be. I was a couple of years older. The other girls, they hated her. New girls are still being groomed, which means they get treated like little princesses until they get broken in. Seeing them always reminded me of when I got there. Made me sad. Some of the other girls took it worse. A few made it their mission to make her life hell. More than it already was. She was so doe-eyed. I couldn’t take it.”
“You took her under your wing?”
Lacey said, “More or less, yeah.”
“How did she end up there?”
“Her story was the same as most.”
“Meaning what?” Jocelyn asked.
Lacey answered, “You know, inattentive parents or no parents at all.”
“Which did Molly have?”
“None at all. Never knew her dad. Mom died of an overdose when Molly was still a toddler.”
“Who raised her?” Jocelyn asked.
“Her aunt.”
Jocelyn thought of Olivia—how she had taken over care of her when Camille’s drug habit proved her unfit to parent. “Being raised by an aunt doesn’t automatically set you down the path to prostitution,” she pointed out. “Lots of kids are raised by relatives and turn out just fine.”
“Sure they do,” Lacey agreed. “But lots of kids don’t have the shitty self-esteem Molly used to have. All it took was a guy lavishing her with attention, making her feel like she was special.”
“Again,” Jocelyn said, “I would argue that’s what every woman wants—a person who lavishes us with attention and makes us feel special.”
“Yeah, ’cause most women understand that they deserve to be treated that way because they’re worth something,” Lacey said. “We’re not talking about most women. We’re talking about girls who start out with virtually no self-worth. Nothing. That kind of attention is everything to you when you think you’re nothing.”
“You and Molly thought you were nothing?”
“Less than nothing. For us, attention was currency. The more special you could make us feel, the more we would do for you. Anything. And we got in so deep and fell so hard that by the time the guy suggested having sex with other men for money, we thought it was a brilliant idea. Next thing we know, we’re being pimped out a dozen times a day. One day you wake up and you realize you’re not living a goddamn Cinderella fantasy, and that a man who makes you fuck strangers all day for nothing in return except the back of his hand doesn’t actually love you. It was a hard lesson for both of us.”
“I’m sorry,” Jocelyn said.
Lacey shrugged. “We got out.”
“How?”
“I had parents. Like, real parents. I ran, went home, and took Lacey with me. By then we were both getting older. We’d run before and not gotten very far—we stayed in the city and stayed with someone we knew. Our pimp found us, beat the shit out of both of us, put us on the street ’til we bled nonstop for a week. We figured out we needed to get as far as we could. Our pimp, he’d kill us for sure, but he wasn’t driving hundreds of miles to track us down. He had a business to run, new girls to break in. Molly said he’d tell everyone he killed us and let us go if we could get far enough away.”
“You came to Pennsylvania.”
Lacey nodded. “My family lives in Bucks County. Far enough away from New York City. My parents let Molly stay with us. By that time we were both eighteen, so there was no need to involve the authorities. We laid low for a while, tried to put our lives back together. Molly worked her ass off waiting tables to save up for college. She stopped going when she met Evan.”
“I take it Evan wasn’t the knight in shining armor she hoped for.”
Lacey barked a short laugh. “Girls like me and Molly don’t get happy endings.”
“Why did she marry him?”
“It was a long con,” Lacey explained. “Just like our pimp pulled. He was everything any straight woman could ever dream of—until after the wedding. Then he got controlling, started hitting her, keeping her in the house, isolating her. I got cut out.”
“How do you know he hit her?” Jocelyn asked.
“I’ve got emails,” Lacey said. “Molly wouldn’t go to the cops because she didn’t want her past dragged into the light. Especially not after she married into some fancy Main Line family. It would have been mortifying, not to mention she would have had no credibility.”
“Did Evan know about her past?” Jocelyn asked.
“Not at first. Not until after they were married. It was before he showed his true colors. Molly told him in a moment of weakness, believing he would accept her anyway. Give her all that unconditional love he promised.”
“But he didn’t.”
“No. He almost killed her. There was actually a hospital visit after that. He took her outside, threw her into the street, made her tell the police she was in a hit and run.”
“Why would he stay married to her?”
“Are you kidding me?” Lacey said. “It was perfect for him. He got to amp up his abuse a hundredfold. He enjoyed it. Calling her whore and slut. Knocking her around and feeling totally justified because she lied to him. He got to feel so superior every single day of their
marriage. After that, she documented it all, photos and everything.”
“You’re saying every time Evan Porter hit her, Molly emailed you about it?”
Lacey nodded. “She had a secret Hotmail account. Evan didn’t know about it. It was the only way we could communicate after he banned me from their ‘perfect’ life.”
“But if she had all that evidence—”
“No cops. Under any circumstances,” Lacey said.
“Then why bother?”
“Because of Christopher.”
“The baby—did he ever hurt the baby?” Jocelyn asked.
Lacey shook her head. “Not that I know of, but according to what Molly said in her emails, he barely paid any attention to the kid. I’m afraid of what’s going to happen when he has to parent little Christopher himself.”
“Is that why you were there?”
Lacey shrugged. She speared a piece of French toast with her fork but didn’t eat it. “Molly made me promise that I’d sue Evan for custody of Christopher if anything ever happened to her.”
“Jesus,” Jocelyn said. “Evan’s his father. You’re not even family. That’s going to be an uphill battle.”
“I know. That’s why Molly documented everything in her emails.”
“She planned to kill herself?” Jocelyn asked. “At some point?”
Lacey shook her head. “No, she was afraid Evan would kill her. I guess she just couldn’t stand it anymore.”
“Molly paid the babysitter to watch Christopher every Tuesday while she went out. Two hours every week. She even paid this girl not to tell Evan. Where do you think she was going?”
“I don’t know. Wherever it was, though, she must have been sure Evan would murder her if he found out, or she wouldn’t have jumped.”
“Do you think she was just running? Maybe she thought she’d survive the fall?”
“Nah. Molly never learned how to swim. Better to do herself in than let Evan kill her, I guess.”
~~~
Three Months Later
Jocelyn was seated at the Rush and Grant Investigations office conference table reviewing their current caseload when Anita burst into the room. “Your press contact just called. She said you need to turn on the news right now.” Without waiting for a response, Anita swept across the room, scooped up the remote control, and flicked on the television mounted on the wall in the corner of the room. She flipped channels until she came to a newscast, a perky, blonde reporter standing outside of the Municipal Services Building at 15th and Arch Streets. Beneath her the copy read: “A Mother’s Secret Life?”
She spoke into her microphone, her expression serious. “It’s been three months since Molly Porter took her own life by jumping into the Schuylkill River after a fender bender. Although her body has not been recovered, authorities do not believe there is any chance that she survived. They suspended their search after two weeks.”
The screen cut to a member of the Philadelphia Police Marine Unit, standing on the riverbank. “Unfortunately, we don’t have the resources to search indefinitely. There is still a chance that she could surface. When a person drowns, the gases eventually build up in the body and give it buoyancy. We might be able to recover her then.”
The screen cut back to the reporter. “The Porter family isn’t willing to wait that long. Last month they called in a private search team, the Garden State Underwater Recovery Unit. It is a nonprofit based in New Jersey whose mission is to help families recover drowned loved ones when the police have expended all their resources.”
A montage flashed across the screen. Boats in the river, divers emerging from the water with nothing. While it played, the reporter continued, “While it is believed that one of Molly Porter’s shoes and her shredded sweater have been recovered, divers have not yet found her body.”
The screen cut to Evan Porter emerging from the family court building, an attorney beside him, and then Lacey exiting shortly afterwards with her own, more shabbily dressed attorney trailing behind. The reporter said, “In the wake of Molly Porter’s suicide, disturbing details have emerged from her past. Her friend, Lacey Gaither, a Philadelphia resident, filed a petition for custody of the Porters’ one-year-old son. Gaither alleges that Evan Porter was abusive toward his wife. She produced emails and photographs going back three years, which her attorney offered in court today. Evan Porter’s attorney dismisses Gaither’s claims out of hand.”
On-screen, Porter’s sharply dressed attorney stopped for the cameras. The sound picked up as he addressed the topic of the emails and photos. “Clearly doctored,” he said. “Made up. She can’t prove these documents and photographs are actually from Molly Porter. Molly’s not here to corroborate the outlandish story she’s trying to sell. This is a woman with an ulterior motive. She sees an opportunity for personal gain here. She doesn’t care about Christopher. She has no right to custody. This is a waste of the court’s time, and we’re confident that the judge will rule in Mr. Porter’s favor. Once that happens, we’ll be looking to sue Ms. Gaither for defamation of character.”
The camera returned to the reporter, whose face was pinched as she delivered the final bit of news: “One of the things that Evan Porter’s attorney alleged in court today was that Gaither and Molly Porter met while they were prostitutes many years before Molly met her husband. While Gaither has three prior arrests for solicitation, Molly Porter had no criminal record and our sources weren’t able to uncover any evidence that Molly Porter was ever a prostitute. In a new twist, Lacey Gaither’s attorney has asked the court to force Mr. Porter to submit to a DNA test. Porter’s attorney tells us he will gladly prove his paternity to put an end to all this so the focus can return to finding his wife and laying her to rest. Denise, back to you.”
Anita muted the television. “Well,” she said. “All the dirt is coming out now. You think this Lacey chick is right—that Evan Porter’s not the father?”
Jocelyn tore her eyes from the screen and looked at Anita. “No. I think she’s grasping at straws. No judge is going to take custody away from a child’s father and give it to a non-family member with an arrest record when the father is a law-abiding, upstanding member of the community. Porter’s attorney was smart—it would cost a lot of money to track the source of the emails and photographs and even then, it might not show definitely that Molly was behind them.”
“You think it’s true? That Evan Porter is abusive?”
“Yeah,” Jocelyn said. “I can see it.”
Anita turned the television off. “I guess we know why she jumped then. She had a past and married a guy who would one day kill her. She snapped. Shame for her son though.”
Jocelyn’s fingers fidgeted with a pen on the table, spinning it round and round. “But why that day? What was she doing? Where had she been? I keep thinking maybe she was planning to leave him somehow, but if she was planning to do that, why would she jump? She went out every Tuesday for all those months for exactly two hours.”
Anita folded her arms across her chest. “I know these loose ends bother you, Rush, but really, it doesn’t matter. If she jumped off that bridge at a moment’s notice, she was already headed in that direction. She would have found another way to leave this world—and if she didn’t, her husband would have probably helped her out. I mean, there’s really no way to even find out, is there? Unless someone came forward, and no one’s going to put themselves in the middle of that circus. The woman is gone. You’re gonna have to let this one go.”
But Jocelyn was already thinking of a way she could find out where Molly Porter had been that day. She was fairly sure there was one—she would just need a little help.
To Anita, she said, “How’s your head?”
~~~
Attorney Lonnie Burgess was a solo practitioner operating out of the Germantown section of the city. He had helped Jocelyn solve the cold case murder of his high school girlfriend a couple of years earlier, and they had kept in touch, which was why he saw her immediately and without
an appointment when she showed up at his office and explained what she wanted to do.
He smiled at her from behind his desk, steepling his hands together. “You think there is some way that I can help you get the GPS records from Molly Porter’s vehicle? I’m a lawyer, Jocelyn, not a miracle worker.”
“There has to be a way. A lawsuit of some sort. You could subpoena them.”
“What kind of lawsuit?”
She shrugged, standing before him instead of sitting because she had been sitting all day, and her lower back still bothered her. “I don’t know. That’s why I’m here.”
He swiveled his chair from side to side as he thought about it. “Sit,” he said.
“I can’t. My back hurts.”
“From the accident?”
“Well, yeah. It hasn’t stopped bothering me.”
“What about Anita?”
“She had a concussion.”
He lifted his chin and smiled at her. “I know how we can get them.”
“Tell me,” Jocelyn said, excitement spiraling up her spine.
“We’ll present personal injury claims for you and Anita. Normally, I would write to Molly Porter’s auto insurance carrier and say you were injured, put the company on notice that we’re pursuing claims for your injuries. Until we start litigation and the discovery process, there’s little chance I’d be able to get her GPS history, but if I present a claim against the manufacturer, allege a defect in Molly Porter’s vehicle that caused the accident, rather than her negligence, I can get the vehicle inspected. Of course, I’m not going to pay for an expert to inspect it.”
“I will,” Jocelyn said.
“And you understand you’re going to need someone who can get the GPS information from the vehicle.”
“I can get someone, but it’s been three months. Would the vehicle still be available?”
Lonnie shrugged. “I would say yes. Even if it’s been totaled or sold, if we have the VIN, we can track it down. If Porter had it repaired and kept it, even better. But keep in mind, there’s no way to do this without him finding out you’re suing.”
