Dead to Her(84)
“First,” Anderson continued, “there’s the beautiful, very young, and slightly unbalanced new foreign wife, who saw the opportunity to stick her claws into a wealthy widower far away from home. A hasty, unhappy marriage that William Radford was already regretting and planning to be free of with no financial loss.” She sighed, enjoying the theater of her statement. Marcie had thought the detective was dour, but there was definite humor glinting in her eyes now. It made her look younger and happier. None of it stopped Marcie from wanting to smash her in the face. “Isn’t that so often the way?” Anderson continued. “Pick something up on your vacation that looks great in its natural location and then when you get it to your house you realize it doesn’t really fit with the rest of your stuff and you end up throwing it away?”
Marcie said nothing, but she got the feeling that Detective Anderson didn’t much like what she knew of William any more than the people she was investigating for trying to kill him.
“Then, of course, we have your husband, Jason Maddox, Mr. Radford’s colleague and close friend. We’ve found enough . . . discrepancies, for want of a better word, in the Radford and Partners accounts to be preparing to charge him with embezzlement. The way I see it is that William came back from Europe six months before he planned to and Jason didn’t have time to cover all his tracks. So, both Keisha Radford and Jason Maddox had motive and opportunity to try to kill William Radford, and to be honest, I was veering very much toward Jason being the more likely candidate—he’s too smooth for my taste—until he asked to speak to me at five A.M. this morning.” She leaned across the table. “When he told me to go look in the air vent in your dressing room, where he’d hidden this.” She pushed the old yearbook across the table, the pages open to where Marcie’s young sullen face stared back. “And so here we are, Savannah Cassidy.”
Her air vent. Of course that’s where Jason had put it. Right back where she’d hidden everything. She stared at the old photograph. Savannah Cassidy. A name that had become her destination. With everywhere on the map to choose from, she’d moved someplace where she’d at least never forget the name she was given at birth. She looked up at Anderson.
“My name isn’t Savannah Cassidy. It’s Marcie Maddox. I changed it legally to Marcie Brown before I left Boise. I have the paperwork.” She wasn’t waiting for the poor excuse of a publicly appointed attorney beside her to interject. “Or I guess I presume you do if you have my box of private things.” Any tears she may have been holding back burned dry as a flash of anger heated her.
Anderson turned the pages of the yearbook before sliding it over again. “Jonny Newham. Your high school sweetheart. So, as the mysterious note that was sent to your husband along with this asks, what happened to Jonny?”
“You know what happened to Jonny,” Marcie sniped back. She wasn’t going to go through all this again. Not over Jonny. That was dead and buried. The past. Screw Anderson and her shovel.
“Do we?” Anderson raised an eyebrow. “Why don’t you tell us to make sure.”
“Jonny died. He killed himself.” Her back straightened even though she knew where this was leading. She was walking on quicksand that could drag her down at any moment. “We got married straight out of high school. He got us a trailer in the mobile home park. I worked shifts in the diner and he worked in a car shop a mile or so away. We were poor but happy and thinking of starting a family. Then there was an accident and Jonny’s leg got crushed under a truck. He should have gotten compensation, but it turned out he’d been drinking on his lunch break and it was likely his fault. He didn’t fight it.” She sighed. “Things got bad after that. I worked more shifts and Jonny drank all our extra money. He started on drugs. He was a different person.”
“But he’d straightened out before he died.”
“Yes, or so he said. Who knows really?” Her voice was soft. She hadn’t spoken of this in so many years and now here she was, telling her sorry tale for the second time in a week. “But probably. He definitely seemed straighter for a month or so. He’d been doing some cash work on people’s cars when he could. We were getting back on track. Talking about a baby some more. A compensation company had even come along and said they could get him some money for his accident.”
“And they did, didn’t they? You got that.”
“I did. After he died.”
“So, I repeat the question. What happened to Jonny, Marcie?”
“I don’t know. I went to work. I had an eight-hour shift that evening, finishing at eleven. When I went he was watching daytime TV and there were leftovers in the fridge. He was having a bad day with his leg and he was in a real mean mood. It didn’t make me want to come home. I needed a beer, so I went to the late-night place out by the freeway to meet up with Janey Spence, one of the other waitresses. I wanted to be young. Have a good time. Drink. Dance. All that stuff.”
“You danced with some men that night.”
“Yes, I did. Everyone knows that. It’s in the files you’ve probably read and it was all over the local TV and radio. I danced. I got drunk. And then I went home with some guy and passed out drunk, so don’t ask if I screwed him because I don’t know. He said I didn’t. I’ll take his word for it. In the morning, I woke up hungover and feeling guilty and went back to my trailer. Jonny was cold and dead on the floor. There was a half-empty bottle of whiskey beside him.” She blinked and behind her eyes in that instant she could see it all again.