The Perfect Wife(29)
And, perhaps remarkably given the intense level of media interest, the judge agreed. Quoting the ancient principle of corpus delicti, he said in a written statement that, while it wasn’t absolutely necessary for the prosecution to produce a body in order to prove a murder had taken place, it was certainly necessary to prove that a murder had taken place before somebody could be accused of it. The standard of proof in corpora delicti cases must therefore be higher than a mere “balance of probabilities.” He was dismissing the charges with immediate effect.
In the period following the trial’s collapse, a twenty-six-year-old woman from San Jose was charged with posting an offensive message about Tim on Twitter. In a separate case a thirty-one-year-old woman from Los Angeles who posted something on Facebook was given a six-week suspended prison sentence. A petition to the government to change the law so that corpora delicti cases required a lower standard of proof in the future received over twenty-five thousand signatures and was then quietly ignored.
Detective Tanner gave a TV interview on the courtroom steps in which he said the police would not be looking for anyone else in connection with Abbie’s disappearance.
After some of the judge’s comments in previous trials were publicized on social media, a separate campaign to force judges to retire at sixty-five received over fifty thousand signatures.
The police subsequently clarified that, while there were no outstanding lines of inquiry, “a team of officers is available to respond at any time to any new information that is received regarding Abigail Cullen-Scott.”
Tim Scott declined to give any interviews whatsoever.
22
You sit back, relieved. Of course, you’re biased, but the case against Tim was clearly paper-thin. The prosecution had no body, no CCTV, and no forensic evidence. An attractive, high-profile young mother had vanished, and in the subsequent media frenzy someone had to be found to blame for it, that’s all.
You’d known all along there was no way Tim could have been involved, but you’d been half dreading that the trial might have turned something else up; that your husband—never the humblest or most patient of men—could have been goaded by some wily prosecutor into saying something that showed him in a bad light. But as it turned out, he’d never even had to take the stand. He’d been completely exonerated. And if a few crazies on social media had a hard time accepting that—well, that was their problem, not his.
All the same, it strikes you that you, Abbie, were a strangely absent figure from the proceedings. The allegations of affairs weren’t even touched on, nor the evidence of your depression. You’d hoped reading about the trial might give you an insight into what was really going through your mind in those last few weeks, but—just as with the contents of your phone—there’s nothing.
“Do you believe me?”
Startled, you look up. Tim’s eyes are boring into yours. “Do you believe I had nothing to do with what happened to you?” he repeats.
The question must be burning him up for him to even ask. His certainty is usually as fixed a part of his personality as his gray T-shirts.
“Of course.”
He grimaces. “Don’t say Of course. Of course means ‘I have no choice but to believe my husband.’ Your mind’s better than that, Abbie.”
Is this why you built me? you wonder. So I could pronounce you innocent from beyond the grave? To hear me say out loud the words the jury foreman never got to say?
“But it is Of course. And I didn’t need to read those articles to think that, either. I know you, Tim. I know you’d never deliberately harm anyone. But especially not me.”
Tension leaves his shoulders. “Of course I wouldn’t.” You both smile at his choice of words.
You hear the sound of a car pulling up. It’s Sian, arriving with Danny. “Hi, Danny,” you say eagerly as he runs into the house. He ignores you, instead making a beeline for the long wall of windows overlooking the ocean, which he greets by rubbing his face happily over the glass. You know you should really follow through, make him go back and say hi in response, but he looks so delighted to be here that you don’t have the heart.
“He loves this place,” Tim says, watching. “He used to spend hours down on the beach, jumping in the waves with you.”
“Maybe that’s something I can do with him tomorrow, then. I’d like that.”
Tim hesitates. “I’m afraid not. You going in the ocean would be like me taking my smartphone into the pool. Water—particularly salt water—would wreck you in a second.”
“Oh.” You think of your earlier self, the thousands of hours you spent on a board. That was why Tim built this house, after all—so you could be near your beloved ocean. And now even that’s off-limits.
“We might be able to address that, though, in time,” he adds. “And the hiking here is terrific. We should think about getting a dog—”
You shake your head. You don’t want a dog.
You make pasta. The four of you sit around the massive party-sized table on the sundeck to eat it, but conversation is fitful. You try to draw Sian out, but she seems to regard your questions as just some random computer-generated chitchat. Sometimes she ignores you altogether. Only when you ask her about Danny’s school does she become more animated. Meadowbank is, she says, exceptional, the only place in the whole state where kids like Danny get the consistency and intensity of support they need. The results there have been incredible.