As she moved through the progression, her eyes filled with tears for the second time that evening. The look in her eyes when she returned her gaze to me was part horrified, part resolved. She asked, “Who has seen these?”
“That’s a DA question. Not a mom question. Please.”
She didn’t vocalize her next thought. Her expression said it all. It was, Why didn’t I know about these before?
I shook my head. “Can we have that conversation later? Please. It was still your case that night. The deputy DA’s case. I didn’t know if—I didn’t think I could risk—”
She held up a hand to stop me. She swallowed before she said, “Okay. Okay. That’s between you and me. We’ll do that later. Right now? Jonas cannot testify about this. About what he saw. It—He—We can’t put him through that. We can’t let that happen to him, Alan. Never.”
“No,” I said. “He can’t. We can’t.”
“How did he—He had a way to get into the house, obviously.”
“Yes. I asked him about that. Peter had installed a disappearing latch on one of the awning windows near the basement door. Press on some trim. Pull down on a lever that popped out. Then the whole window, frame and all, opened on a hinge. It was a secret entrance to the house. Jonas has used it all his life when he didn’t have his key. And he’s been using it to sneak back into the house since he moved in with us. Both before the sale and since.
“I think he’s been going over there for a while, using some little handsaw, or some other tool, to try and remove the carved plaque from the wall inside the entrance to the cubby. The panel the carving is on is hardwood—very tough to cut. Without the right tools, it might take hours and hours for a kid to remove it. Jonas must have been afraid we wouldn’t let him keep the carving.”
“God,” Lauren said. “We have so much parenting to do, don’t we?” I nodded. She scrolled through the pictures again. The second time through was more deliberate. “These are in order?” she asked.
“Yes. The way he left them for me.” I explained how I found the phone with the carving on his bed the night of the fire. “I’ve not talked with him about the photographs yet. I tried. He’s not ready to discuss any of it. Not even close.”
She looked me in the eyes. “He’s going to need help,” she said. “What he saw? My God. We have to get him some therapy. He has to see someone.”
“I agree. We probably waited too long already. I misread him. His grief. His coping. I take responsibility for that. I will make those calls—I will find someone good for him.” I almost added, We need some help, too, Lauren. Our marriage. But that conversation could wait a day. That night, we needed to keep our focus on Jonas.
She tapped the phone with her fingernail. “You have a story? That fits these pictures?”
She was wondering if I had managed to superimpose a narrative over the progression of images documented in the photographs. She wanted the graphic-novel version of the night’s events.
Many of the details I knew came from my supervision with Hella. I didn’t plan to tell Lauren about my supervision of the victim’s therapy. I didn’t have a right to do that.
My wife was asking for a story. I could tell her the story. “Yes,” I said. “I have a story that fits.”
“I would like to hear it,” Lauren said.
I hesitated, tempted to seek a final assurance that I was speaking only with my son’s mother and not with the deputy district attorney. Lauren made my question superfluous. She said, “I need to know what my son saw. Everything.”
AT SOME POINT after almost all the guests were gone, Mimi Snow suddenly transformed herself from charming hostess to pack-up-your-things-now-and-get-out-of-here boss lady.
Her change in demeanor with the caterers was sudden and unexpected. Her cell records will probably confirm that the precipitant for the change was a phone call, or text, from her son. Emerson Abbott called or texted to let his mother know he had arrived on the edge of Spanish Hills. He’d be at the new house in minutes. Fifteen tops.
Maybe she’d argued with him, told him not to come, urged him to go back up to school. But Emerson was not an obedient kid. Discipline had been a growing problem since the divorce. He wasn’t supposed to leave campus. Emerson knew he wasn’t welcome in Boulder; his stepfather was adamant that he was not allowed in the house. Not until he’d cleaned up his act.
Lauren’s eyes were asking me how I knew all that. I said, “Diane.”
Mimi panicked at the news her son was somewhere nearby. The bartender had just walked out the door. She rushed the last few guests from the house. Then the chef, the caterers.
Moments before the chef left the house, he made a what-do-I-have-to-lose advance on Eric, one of the caterers. Eric shot him down. Eric was probably a jerk about it. That is Eric’s nature.
Lauren asked, “You know all that, too?”
I explained about Nicole, the other caterer.
Preston Georges drove away in his pristine old Camaro. A few minutes later the two caterers followed him out the lane in their white van.
Eric was upset about a lot of things as he drove the big van away from Spanish Hills—he was nicotine deprived because Mattin didn’t permit smoking in his zip code; resentful about being hassled to hurry to finish work by the party’s hostess; offended, or excited, by the homosexual advance from the chef; aggravated at the possibility of entering the weekend without a chance to have his dealer replenish his stash; and irritated by his fellow caterer’s insistence on being dropped off across town at The Sink.
Distracted about all those things, Eric almost ran over Fiji and me on the lane just before he entered the first bend of the S-curve.
Seconds later, he almost ran into another pedestrian as the van exited the second bend. The second pedestrian was a man in a hoodie and ski cap who was wearing a day pack.
Lauren said, “That was Mimi’s son. That was Emerson.”
Only minutes before the catering van almost hit Emerson on the lane, Preston Georges was the first to have spotted him. The chef was determined to find some companionship for the evening. He stopped his Camaro and offered Mimi’s son a ride somewhere. Or maybe he invited him out for a drink. Or maybe, who knows, Preston Georges suggested something even more overt than that.
The young man declined. Maybe he, like Eric, was offended by the offer. He was a kid; maybe it even left him determined to prove his heterosexuality at the next opportunity.
Emerson kept walking toward his mother’s new house. He lit a cigarette. Smoking was undoubtedly something else his parents didn’t want him to do. When he dodged the caterer’s van, he dropped the cigarette, which started a small fire adjacent to the lane.
I reached into my bedside table a second time. I handed Lauren a small zipper bag containing a charred cigarette butt and some burned grasses. “For what it’s worth,” I added.
Emily actually sensed some commotion down the lane before I returned to the house with her and Fiji. The big dog had tried to alert me that something was going on, but I didn’t pay attention to her signals.
Only a solitary car, a little SUV, remained parked outside Mimi and Mattin’s house as the dogs and I got back home.
I thought Jonas was asleep in bed—I had already checked on both kids before I went out with the dogs. I didn’t check a second time. When I climbed into bed after the walk, Lauren reminded me that I had a meeting the next day with Raoul.
“I remember,” Lauren said. “That’s when Jonas snuck out? After you came to bed? Is that what you think?”
“Yes.”
I thought that’s how it happened. Earlier in the evening, Jonas had overheard our discussion about the planned renovations, how the guests at the housewarming were being encouraged to offer their two cents’ worth. He was curious. He snuck across the lane and entered the house through the special awning window on the basement level. He could still hear people walking and talking upstairs. He waited, hiding out in the basement. That’s where he was when the
young man with the hoodie and ski cap entered through the basement door. Mimi had probably gone downstairs to leave the door unlocked for her son. Or maybe she had told him on the phone where he could find the spare key under the rock.
The first photo in Jonas’s phone is of Emerson Abbott walking through the basement door. Ski cap. Hoodie. Day pack.
Certainly, Mimi had told her son to stay down there and stay quiet. She must have warned him not to come upstairs under any circumstances.
Upstairs, Mattin was already busy trying to convince the sole remaining guest to spend the night in the guest suite. He was unaware his stepson was in the basement.
Mimi knew what her husband had planned with the young widow. Maybe Mattin had given Mimi a sign earlier in the evening. Maybe they’d planned the whole thing out in advance. Probably they’d committed the same felony before with other women.
Mimi might have initially resisted her husband’s rape fantasies but at some point she lacked the will or the resolve to fight him. Along the way, she’d learned there were consequences to be paid for not going along.
“Do you know those consequences?” Lauren asked.
“The deputy DA,” I told her, “should have no trouble learning that as part of the plea bargain negotiation.”
Mimi did her part setting the stage. She prepared the guest room. Found pajamas for her guest, collected fresh towels, and retrieved a bottle of water for the bedside. The woman, the prey, continued to sit by the fire, drinking wine with Hake. Perhaps Mimi took her son a plate of food during the interval she excused herself to prepare the guest suite.
Jonas was likely still downstairs, listening to the interactions between Mimi and her son, watching only some of it from wherever he was hiding.
Mimi probably insisted that Emerson eat his meal in one of the primitive rooms in the back of the basement, where he couldn’t be inadvertently discovered by Mattin.
Jonas scooted upstairs during the time period when Mimi was shooing her son into the back of the basement. Once upstairs, Jonas may have gone into the kitchen pantry. He knew that there was a hidden door behind the pantry that led to the shaft of the defunct dumbwaiter. It was another secret place his father had built. A great place for a kid to hide.
Or maybe Jonas went straight to the living room. Regardless, he ended up there, behind the sofa, on the other side of the freestanding fireplace that divided the family and living rooms. His position had him facing toward the family room. That’s where he was when he took the second picture.
Mimi is back upstairs by then. The second photo shows Mimi, Mattin, and the young widow, by the fire, drinking wine. They are all still dressed in their party clothes. Mimi is sharing one big chair with her husband.
The young widow is in the other chair. She looks tired.
Mattin appears ebullient. I can easily convince myself that Mimi looks distracted.
The third photo comes a short while later in the narrative. A slightly different angle. Jonas has moved a little, a foot or two. One of the two leather chairs is in the foreground of the frame. It’s the one the young widow had been sitting on in the earlier shot, but it’s empty. Both chairs are empty. In the background Mimi and Mattin are standing at the kitchen island. On the counter, off to the side near a bowl of apples and a tray of olive oils and vinegars, is an amber prescription bottle. In front of Mimi is a small stone mortar. In her right hand Mimi is holding a pestle. Mattin is at the narrow end of the island. He is cradling a tall bottle. I think it’s port. He seems to be waiting for his wife to finish what she is doing with the mortar and pestle.
What she is doing is grinding a tablet or two from the prescription bottle into powder. For someone with even a little imagination, the photo documents that husband and wife, together, are preparing to drug their guest. Their victim. Preparing to dissolve the powder in the thick, sweet port.
“Would it dissolve?” Lauren asked.
I said, “They know. They’ve done this before.”
“The woman is in the guest room at this point,” Lauren said. “Changing for bed.”
“Yes. She was thinking the night was over. She was content.”
Mattin gave her time to get changed and settled before he knocked on the guest room door. He invited her to come back out for one last drink. Maybe she resisted. But he was persistent. Maybe he said the nightcap was Mimi’s idea. Maybe he said something about not wanting to disappoint his wife, who was eager for more company.
Jonas’s fourth photograph is yet another picture of the two chairs by the fire. Mimi is absent this time. Both Mattin and the young widow are in different clothes. She has changed into pajamas and a short robe. Her ensemble is modest, but her feet are bare. She is holding the sole of one foot out toward the warmth of the fire. Mattin has changed, too. He is dressed as though he’s heading to a Pilates session and he’s thinking everyone will be impressed with the way he looks in snug clothing.
The picture shows the young widow on the same chair as before. She is sipping her doctored port. The glass is literally at her lips. Mattin is in the adjacent chair. There is fire in his eyes. Anticipation, maybe? All his attention is focused on his victim.
“Mimi is where?” Lauren wanted to know.
I said, “Unclear at that moment.”
Perhaps she couldn’t bear to watch the setup to the rape. Perhaps she was standing guard at the basement stairs, just beyond the frame. Mimi had to be terrified that her unpredictable son would do something unpredictable. She had to feel that she was in an impossible place, trying to protect her son from her husband and her husband from her son.
She knew she was protecting herself, too, from both of them. She also had to know that no one was protecting her young widowed friend.
The next photo in the series was the first one I showed Mattin the morning after the fire, just after I suggested he consider doing the right thing. I didn’t tell Lauren about showing Mattin the picture.
The sedated young widow is still sitting in the big leather chair by the fire. But her robe is open. Her pajama top is unbuttoned all the way. Her breasts are exposed.
Her head is lolling back against the leather chair, her face tilted away from the camera lens.
Lauren asked, “Is she still awake at that point? Can you tell?”
“I don’t know. Yes, no. I would say the drugs have started to take effect.”
Mattin is sitting on the arm of the same chair as the woman. He’s in the same outfit as before, but he has covered his head with a surgeon’s cap.
With his left hand, the one that was not burned, he is holding the woman’s right hand to his crotch. He is leaning forward and seems to be speaking to her.
Behind the victim and the rapist is an empty kitchen. Mimi is somewhere beyond the lens of Jonas’s camera phone.
The photo that follows moves the story forward. Mattin has changed his position. He is standing beside the woman’s chair. He has lowered the pants of her pajamas to her ankles. He has lowered his own pants, too, but only a few inches. He is well prepared for this moment. The cap with the sailboats. His pubic region is shaved. His feet and forearms appear hairless, too.
He is leaning down toward the young widow. She is looking in his direction, her mouth open. Her eyes are dull. She seems to be struggling to keep them open.
“Does he have his waistband behind his . . . scrotum?” Lauren asked. She was not believing what she was seeing.
“Yes.”
The widow’s face isn’t far from Mattin’s not-quite-erect penis.
“God,” Lauren says. “God.”
God, I thought, was taking a break.
I point out that the kitchen in the background remains unoccupied.
The next photo shows that things are starting to go very wrong for Mimi and Mattin.
“Some of this next part of the story,” I told Lauren, “is speculation.”
Mimi’s son needs to use the bathroom. There wasn’t a basement bathroom in the house. It had been an
issue for decades. Peter was planning to install one around the time he was murdered. Adrienne had arranged to have two new bathrooms—one in the basement, one near the family room—included when she built the missing turret on the southwest corner of the house.
Mimi and Mattin were undoubtedly planning to make similar additions during their upcoming renovation.
But Mimi’s son didn’t know any of the plumbing remodeling plans. All he knew was that he needed a toilet and he couldn’t find one downstairs. He listened for footsteps or voices upstairs, waited until he heard nothing, and climbed the stairs to the main floor to find a bathroom.
Jonas had moved a little by the time he took the next photograph in the series. Maybe only a couple of feet—the angle is different from the earlier shots by a few degrees.
The foreground shows a continuation of the same horrific violation as the photograph before. But it’s worse. Mattin is now standing on the arms of the chair, hovering above the woman’s head and mouth, his erection in front of his oddly displayed testicles. This picture makes it even clearer that Mattin’s pubic hair is shaved.
The background is different in this photograph. In the background is the kitchen, again. But it’s no longer vacant.
Mimi is standing at the kitchen island. Her husband’s rape of their friend is ongoing in the family room, in her clear view. She is not watching.
In the photograph she is looking, and pointing, across her body, in the direction of the basement staircase.
On the very edge of the photo, cut in half vertically, is the focus of her attention: a young man in a stocking cap and a Rossignol T-shirt. No hoodie. No day pack.
Her son, Emerson, is standing at the top of the basement stairs.
The shock in Mimi’s face has the clarity of untracked snow. It’s unmistakable. With her arm in motion, she is banishing her son back down to the basement.
But her eyes reveal that she is aware it is already too late. If Jonas’s camera can find the young man in that frame, then the young man has already witnessed his stepfather’s quasi-acrobatic sexual assault on the woman by the fire.
The Last Lie Page 37
