The Other Mrs.(74)

I ask, “What makes you think she was scared?”

“My company has gone global recently. I’ve spent a great deal of time overseas. It’s been difficult, to say the least. The time away from home, yes, but more so the difficulties of learning a new language, culture, of trying to integrate into a foreign country, succeed at my job. I’d been under a lot of pressure. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this,” he says, apologetically almost. There’s a hint of vulnerability there.

I don’t know what to say to him, and so I say nothing.

I don’t know why he’s telling me this either.

Jeffrey goes on. “I guess I’m just trying to say that I was overworked, burned out. Completely overwhelmed with work. I haven’t been home much lately. Any time spent at home was often beset with jet lag. But something had Morgan upset. I asked what it was. But she was selfless to a fault. She wouldn’t tell me. She said it was nothing. She wouldn’t burden me with whatever it was. I asked,” he admits, saddened. “But I didn’t ask enough.”

It strikes me that this isn’t the face of a madman I see.

This is the face of a grieving widower.

“I heard on the news that there were threatening notes,” I say.

“There were,” he says. “Yes. The police found notes in our home.”

“Forgive me for saying this. It’s not my business. But your ex-wife. Is it possible she had hard feelings about a new woman in your life?”

“You think Courtney did this? Sent the threats, murdered Morgan.” He shakes his head, says decisively, “No. No way. Courtney is the type to fly off the handle, yes. She’s rash. She has a temper. She does stupid things.”

And then he goes on to tell me about some night Courtney came to the island with the sole intent of stealing her own child. She almost got away with it, because she had keys to the home Jeffrey and Morgan shared since it was once her own home. After everyone was asleep, she let herself in, went to their daughter’s bedroom, roused the little girl from sleep. It was Morgan who caught them as they were making their way back outside. Courtney had plane tickets in her possession; she’d somehow already gotten a passport for their girl. She planned to leave the country with their daughter. “Morgan wanted to fight for full custody. She didn’t think Courtney was fit to parent.”

The day at the memorial service comes back to me.

My temper got the best of me.

I was angry.

You can’t blame me for trying to take back what’s mine.

I’m not sorry she’s dead.

Were these words double-edged? Maybe not a confession to murder, but rather a reference to the night she tried to steal her own child.

“Taking a child away from her mother...” I say, letting my voice trail off. What that is—taking a child from her mother—is motive to kill. Except I don’t say it like that. Instead I say, “If anyone ever got between me and my children, I’d be beside myself.”

Jeffrey is resolute. “Courtney isn’t a murderer,” he says. “And the threats Morgan received were...” But he stops there, unable to put into words what exactly the threats were.

“What did the notes say?” I ask hesitantly. I’m not sure I want to know.

There were three notes, Jeffrey tells me. He doesn’t know for certain when they arrived, but he has his assumptions on one. He had watched Morgan make her way to the mailbox one afternoon. It was a Saturday a month or so ago. He was home. He watched out the window as Morgan went down the drive.

“I had a habit of staring at her when she didn’t know I was watching,” he confesses. “It’s because of how beautiful she was. It was easy to do. Morgan,” he tells me, smiling nostalgically at the memory of his wife, “was easy on the eyes. Everyone thought so,” and I remember what Officer Berg said about the men in town having eyes for her. About Will having eyes for her.

“Yes,” I reply. “She was lovely,” changing the way I think of him because I can see in his eyes just how much he loved Morgan.

That day Jeffrey says that he watched as she bent at the waist, as she stretched a hand into the box to retrieve the mail, as she made the long walk back up the driveway, thumbing through the mail as she went.

Halfway up the drive, Morgan came to a standstill. Her hand went to her mouth. By the time she made it inside, she was as white as a ghost. She brushed past Jeffrey in the doorway, shaking as she did so. He asked what was wrong, what she found in the mail that made her so upset. Morgan said only bills—that the insurance company hadn’t covered a recent doctor appointment. The balance left for them to pay was highway robbery.

It should have been covered, she snapped, marching up the stairs with the mail in her hand.

Where are you going? he called up the stairs after her.

To call the insurance company, she said, but she went into the bedroom and closed the door.

Everything about Morgan changed that day. The changes were subtle. Another person might not have noticed. There was a sudden propensity toward closing the curtains as soon as the sky turned dark. A restlessness about his wife that hadn’t been there before.

The notes that the police found were all different, slipped in between the box spring and the mattress that Jeffrey and Morgan slept on. She’d intentionally hidden them from him.