The Innocent Wife

by Amy Lloyd

  What might have been, Sam wondered: their first dance and feeding each other cake, a wedding night tangled in white sheets. Instead they talked, and he asked her to promise she wouldn’t leave. ‘I thought I could handle it,’ he said, ‘but I can’t, I need you to stay.’

  ‘I haven’t got enough money. I’ll need to go back to England, work for a while, save up.’

  ‘Please,’ he said, ‘I spoke to Jackson about this and he said he could get you some work here. Just stay a couple of months. I live for these visits …’

  ‘What about my visa? I don’t think I can work …’

  ‘We’re married now; you can become a citizen. Stop looking for reasons you can’t stay. You’re my wife now, I need you.’

  Ten

  A few weeks later and Sam was living in a cheap apartment on the outskirts of Gainesville paid for by Jackson Anderson. He occasionally threw her menial tasks to make her feel as though she wasn’t freeloading, things like reading and replying to emails from fans of Framing the Truth or looking through the social media comments and sharing anything related to the upcoming series with their followers. But this only took up a small part of her day, the rest of which she spent watching TV or wandering the aisles of Walmart unable to decide what to eat later, forgetting what she’d come there for in the first place and buying the junk that made her teeth feel furry and her stomach ache.

  Carrie moved back to LA after they’d finished filming. She called regularly and stayed on the phone for an hour at a time. The silence was like a vice after they hung up. Sam became obsessed with watching people from back home on Facebook, who seemed to be posting exclusively to her, showing off, new babies and new jobs, mud-runs and restaurants. She hadn’t looked at Mark’s page since he left her, and now she looked at it just to hurt herself, scrawling through it for any suggestion of her, but it was as if she’d never existed.

  The message boards weren’t kind about her marriage to Dennis. They called her a groupie, and were more concerned with the progress, or lack of progress, in the case. They wanted a different judge, one who wasn’t biased, and organised a petition for someone new to work on the appeal. Sam wondered how she’d ever admired these people. Didn’t they think that Dennis’s lawyers would already have done this?

  Once a week she visited Dennis, brushing her hair and smiling, with less and less to talk about.

  Then the cycle broke, her phone ringing in the middle of the afternoon. ‘I’ve got news,’ Carrie said. ‘Are you sitting down?’

  Carrie explained: the tips line had received a call from a man who wanted to remain anonymous. He told them he’d been in prison for child sex offences for ten years and saw the billboards months after being released. When he was first arrested, he said, he shared a cell with a man called Wayne who had told him how there were girls he’d killed that the cops never knew about. He’d said they’d even found one of them and he thought for sure he was going down for it but the police never came. The shock made him stop killing for years after that. At first, the caller said, he thought Wayne was lying about it because who’s dumb enough to admit being a fucking serial killer to some guy he just met? But it stuck with him because of the eerie level of detail and the pride Wayne took in the story.

  What colour hair does Wayne have? the agent on the tips line asked. The caller told them it was salt and pepper but in patches it was a thick, wiry black. Wayne had also boasted about how he hacked off a lock of the girl’s hair as a keepsake but burned it on the side of a road weeks later for fear of the cops finding it. The girl had scratched him up pretty good, he’d had to cut the fingers off, and it made Wayne sick to his stomach at the time, the caller said, though he had laughed when he recounted it, and made the sound of splintering bones with his teeth. Wayne told the caller he never felt satisfied and every time he got a girl it always escalated. It’s how he got caught, eventually; he’d hung around at the crime scene too long, and it all got messy. The caller didn’t like the guy, was glad to be moved away from him. He wasn’t a snitch, he said, but it was hard for a sex offender like him to get employment and the reward money looked good.

  The detail about Holly Michaels’s hair had never been released to the public, how a knife had left a nick in the back of her skull where he caught her while cutting off a lock. It sent Dennis’s team into overdrive, and they started putting together new applications for the testing of evidence and calling authorities. Eventually they tracked down a Wayne Nestor who had been transferred from the prison the caller mentioned to another in Kansas. He’d been arrested for the violent murder and rape of several young girls. So his MO was in line with Holly’s murder, as was the fact that at the time he’d been residing in Ocala driving a truck that took a route right by Ocklawaha, the cheerleader camp where the sighting of the flasher had originally been reported.

  Carrie waited long enough to make sure it was worth getting excited about and made everyone promise she could be the first to call Sam.

  ‘So? What do you think?’ she said now.

  ‘What happens next?’ Sam was chewing her thumb. In the mirror she saw herself: pale and dark-eyed, a cluster of spots on her chin.

  ‘We get Holly’s shirt retested. If Wayne’s DNA is on there it’ll flag up on the CODIS, the criminal database, and, well, Dennis could be released within days of that happening. I mean, it’s fucking him, right?’

  Sam stopped pacing, held the back of a chair and tried to focus. The room around her was littered with discarded clothes, dirty glasses and plates, empty food cartons.

  ‘Days?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, bitch, days. Exonerated. There was never a shred of Den’s DNA on Holly, so if we can put a name to the blood on her shirt they’ll have no choice but to release him. And this caller has given us strong grounds to get that shirt retested.’

  ‘How likely is it they’ll let us test the shirt?’ Sam no longer knew what she wanted. Was it this?

  ‘I’d say it’s pretty likely. They’ve turned us down before but with an actual, probable suspect to test it against? The lawyers are fairly confident right now. Patrick and I are coming back with the crew to Florida on Wednesday so we don’t miss anything. I’m so psyched right now. How are you feeling?’

  If the appeal fell through and the authorities refused to retest the shirt, there’d be nothing left to hope for. ‘Has anyone told Dennis yet?’

  ‘No. There’s been so much fact-verification to do in case this guy was just some loser or fantasist. No one wanted to get his hopes up.’

  ‘I don’t really know what to do.’ Sam sat, her legs weak beneath her.

  Whatever was next, she had to be ready for it.

  Eleven

  Sam got the news just three days later. Wayne Nestor had admitted to the prison pastor that he’d killed Holly Michaels. Seeking redemption, he confessed to everything, repeating it all to a video camera with his lawyer at his side, and asking for nothing but God’s forgiveness. The courts retested the T-shirt and got a positive match. Finally, Dennis was to be released. After so many disappointments and false starts, life was suddenly on fast forward.

  The night before Dennis’s release, Sam had a drink to calm her nerves, then several more, until her phone was waking her up and Carrie was saying she’d be with her in twenty minutes. Sam asked if it could be more like an hour and Carrie laughed, as if the idea Sam could wait even another second was unbelievable.

  She washed in the sink, sprayed herself all over with deodorant until the small, windowless bathroom was cloudy with it. She applied fresh make-up over yesterday’s make-up, pulled a dress from the laundry basket, wrinkled and musty, and shouted when Carrie arrived in just fifteen minutes. She threw things at random into an overnight bag, not knowing where she would be staying, not believing Dennis would be with her.

  Carrie beeped the horn again and she screamed, ‘Fuck! Fuck! Calm the fuck down! I’m coming!’

  There was a coffee waiting for her in the cup holder in the car, giant, just cool
enough to sip. Carrie was talking about her girlfriend, Dylan, who complained about the demands the case was putting on her. ‘I don’t think she really believes he’s getting out, you know? It’s tough. I’ve been doing this for twenty-one years now but we’ve only been together for three. Dylan doesn’t get it sometimes. It’s so good to have you, you get it.’

  Sam kept agreeing as she watched the car dealerships and discount stores zip by. They seemed to be hurtling towards the court. Carrie’s voice was manic and hard to follow, the radio noise was getting louder, her chest was tight, and her ribs clutched at her lungs like fists.

  ‘Stop, we need to stop, I can’t breathe,’ she said.

  ‘Now?’ Carrie looked around, and Sam realised she couldn’t change lanes to get to the layby.

  She rolled down the window but the air was more suffocating than the inside. She undid her seatbelt, letting it snap back, the sensor pinging and screeching, urging her to buckle back up. But she was pulling her dress away from her chest, nails dragging over skin cold and clammy. ‘Stop, stop the car.’

  Someone leaned on their horn as Carrie pulled over sharply. Sam opened the door before they’d stopped, tumbling out on to the rough ground beside the highway.

  ‘What’s wrong? What’s happening?’ Carrie ran around the front of the car and squatted. She held Sam’s hair off the back of her neck and told her to slow down and breathe deeply.

  ‘I don’t know if I can do this,’ Sam admitted after she’d calmed slightly.

  ‘With Dennis?’ Carrie stared at her, eyes wide with anxiety. Sam felt awful knowing what pressure she was putting on Carrie but she couldn’t help it.

  ‘It’s happened so fast.’

  ‘It has, I know. Look, you don’t have to do this. I can take you home, or you can come and wait somewhere else, take it one step at a time. You can come to the party later? Or … just say what you need and we’ll do it.’ Carrie’s voice was sincere and she rested a palm on Sam’s back as her breathing slowed.

  ‘I have to be there. I’m his wife.’

  ‘Bullshit, he’ll understand. It’s a lot for him, too, you know? I’ll explain it to him.’

  ‘No … it’s not that I don’t want to … It’s just – I’m scared.’ The truth was that Sam had grown used to their relationship as it was, separated by a thick Plexiglas wall. Without that wall, Sam worried, there was nothing to stop them from hurting each other, as she and Mark had done. Or all the other things people did to each other: walking away, lying, switching off their phones, little cruelties she and Dennis had so far been shielded from.

  ‘Of course you are. So am I! This is fucking crazy.’

  ‘You’re scared?’

  ‘Yeah!’ Carrie laughed nervously. ‘I’ve known him over twenty years and I’ve worked all that time for this moment. It was my whole life and now suddenly … holy shit! I should already be there, you know that? I was supposed to be filming this but I just couldn’t handle it. I decided I wanted to go with you because, I figure, you feel about as crazy as I do right now. I know it’s difficult to process; I’m feeling it too. It’s normal to feel like this.’ She looked anxiously at her watch. ‘It’s up to you. We can do whatever you want to do.’

  ‘I’ll come,’ Sam said. Her breathing was even. The fear was still a knot inside her but she imagined other things, the good things, how Dennis would lean towards her and kiss her, the heat of his mouth, pressing against him so tightly she’d feel the beat of his heart on her own. Just to touch him, finally, and be touched – wasn’t this what she’d always wanted?

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Carrie held out her hands to help Sam stand. Together they got back into the car and carried on towards the court.

  ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ Carrie asked.

  ‘Yes, I’ll be fine.’

  ‘I know.’ Carrie smiled at her. ‘You’ve got to be strong, hook that eighteen-wheeler up to your balls and pull.’

  There were crowds around the courthouse, separated by striped barriers. On one side a hundred or so people with Dennis Danson T-shirts, signs that read ‘Justice at last!’ and ‘EXONERATED’ and ‘End the death penalty!’ On the other a small group of vocal protestors: ‘Still guilty!’ and ‘WHERE ARE THEY DENNIS?’ and ‘LET US GRIEVE!’

  Closer to the doors stood reporters, some speaking live to cameras, some waiting around looking bored and restless, paparazzi poised and boisterous. Sam shielded her face as they walked through the press, strangers calling her name. When they entered the courtroom, it was fairly full, and the rest of the crew were at the front right, filming, with Jackson Anderson seated behind Dennis’s lawyer. Carrie suggested asking people to move so they could sit closer but Sam wanted to stay further back. ‘You go,’ she said, but Carrie took a seat next to her and held her hand in both of hers.

  ‘Who are all these people?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Who the fuck knows. Fans, I guess.’

  To Sam it felt like an invasion. The atmosphere was rowdy, and conflicted with her long-held fantasy of this event in which there’d only be the crew and herself, a sombre atmosphere and a softly spoken judge. Dennis would be freed from his cuffs and he would turn to her and approach her tentatively. He would hesitate before kissing her – he would be shy, of course – and the kiss would be gentle, his hand on her cheek, fingers in her hair. Dennis would be reluctant to take his attention away from Sam but he would, eventually, to thank everyone, to shake hands and hug and answer questions. Then he would excuse them, take her by the hand to their car, and they would be alone, unable to keep their hands off each other, driven to whatever hotel the team had booked for them. They’d spend days locked away together, entwined and slick with sweat. They’d start making love when they were still half-asleep, grinding lazily against one another, the covers tangled around their ankles.

  A cheer snapped her out of her daydream. The crowd shifted and she saw Dennis, his back to her, in an oversized beige short-sleeved shirt, a brown tie slipping out of the collar. He spoke to his lawyer next to him, who was grinning and kept shaking him by the shoulder. Sam almost called out to him, wanting him to turn around and see her, but he stayed facing straight ahead. Near the front she saw the back of a woman’s head, hair long and straight. Is that Lindsay? she asked herself, a rush of cold up her neck. She almost asked Carrie but stopped herself, thinking of the fight and the feeling of sickness it left her with for days.

  The court was called to order, the judge entered and everyone stood, the murmuring fading to a few whispers and the squeak of shoes on the polished floor. There were formalities, the words brushing past Sam, her eyes on her husband’s back, watching his shoulder blades move under his shirt. Carrie squeezed her hand and she started to listen, trying to focus over the sound of blood in her temples.

  ‘As someone who has worked in the justice system for over forty years, I’ve seen the best of our system and, unfortunately, the worst. It is not infallible, and this does not excuse the huge miscarriages of justice the likes of which we see here today. For a man to lose twenty-one years of his life, a young man, is a loss for which there is no compensation.

  ‘That more children lost their lives due to the failings in this case is another tragedy. As a country we should mourn the incalculable loss that has stemmed from this evil.

  ‘It is not my place to tell you how to live your life now, Dennis, but I hope that you can find peace through everything and live well, be happy, do good, and spread kindness where you have been denied it yourself.

  ‘So it is with both sadness for your loss and joy for your redemption that I hereby exonerate you of all charges …’

  There was a roar of applause, and people swarmed forward. The woman in front was swallowed by the crowd, and Sam saw her duck as someone pushed past her. Dennis and his lawyer stood and Sam saw Dennis bow his head a little towards the judge. With everyone standing Sam lost sight of Dennis for a moment, but Carrie pulled her along by the arm, wading thr
ough people to get her to him. When they saw him again he was having his cuffs unlocked by an officer who shook his hand vigorously before he turned around and was embraced by his attorney. Everyone wanted to shake his hand. Dennis grinned as he was pushed forward by the men around him but when he approached the swing door he looked back over his shoulder as if someone were about to stop him.

  It was hard for Sam to tell if he had seen her, the way his glasses reflected the light and shielded his eyes, but when he turned towards Sam his smile seemed to waver. She and Carrie continued towards him. Heads turned and she heard someone murmur, ‘Wife.’

  He held his hands out to her, palms up, and she touched them. Their fingers laced together and he pulled her a little closer.

  She tilted her head to kiss him and he flinched. ‘Sorry,’ he said and quickly pushed his lips against hers. She realised she had her eyes open and squeezed them shut; their teeth clacked together and his breath was stale. When she pushed her tongue into his mouth he jumped, startled. Sam disconnected, and they both looked away, wiping their lips.

  As they left he held her hand, his knuckles digging into hers. They were hit by a wall of noise beyond the heavy doors, reporters shouting questions all at once. Dennis’s lawyer read a prepared statement. ‘Justice … innocence …’ she heard. ‘Freedom … support … fight …’

  Police escorted them to a silver car with blacked-out windows that Jackson had arranged to take them to the hotel. They opened the door and Sam climbed in, eager to get away from the journalists who cascaded forward, shouting to be heard. But Dennis stood quietly, tilting his head back and letting the sun rest on his skin.

  ‘What does it feel like?’ journalists shouted. ‘How do you feel? What does freedom feel like?’

  Dennis looked around him, every camera and microphone vying for his attention, and took a deep breath. ‘I don’t know yet.’