The Secret Life of Ceecee Wilkes (28 page)

A
s she walked through the entrance of the independent-living residence, Eve spotted Marian feeding the fish in the lobby’s huge aquarium. Even with her back to Eve, Marian was instantly recognizable. That straight spine. The white hair that she still wore in a pageboy. It was hard to believe she was nearly ninety.

Eve came up behind her. “How’s my favorite octogenarian?” she asked, slipping an arm around Marian’s shoulders.

“Well, hello, Eve!” Marian said as she bussed her cheek.

“I thought I’d stop by to invite you to a play,” Eve said. “Jack and Dru are both in it and it runs for a couple more weekends.”

“I’d love that,” Marian said. She used a key to open a cupboard near the aquarium and put the box of food inside. “Let’s have a seat and catch up.” She motioned toward the large area off the lobby where residents played cards or read or people-watched. There were a lot of those—the people watchers—and Eve felt exposed as she walked across the room. Several residents looked up from their card games. A couple of women, recognizing her from previous visits, waved.

Marian guided her toward the alcove near the window, and Eve wondered if she’d intentionally selected the spot for privacy. Did she know what was going on and want to talk to her about it?

“How are you doing?” Eve asked Marian, as she took a seat in the corner. “You look terrific, as always.”

“Fantastic,” Marian said. “And how about you?”

“I’m fine.”

“Jack and the girls? Is Cory talking to you these days?”

“Not much,” she said.

“She’s still engaged to that fool?”

Eve laughed. “I’m trying to be more kindhearted about him.”

“Well, you’re welcome to think of him however you like,” Marian said. “But I don’t like a man who comes between a woman and her family.”

“Cory loves him, though.”

“I’m hoping she’ll outgrow it.”

A moment of silence stretched between them as Eve readied herself to dance around the issue she’d come to discuss. Did Marian remember her long-ago reaction to the news about Genevieve’s kidnapping?
Are you aware of the situation with the wife of UVA’s president?
she could ask. She’d planned to question her carefully. Instead, she blurted out in a whisper, “Have the police come here to see you?”

“The police?”

“Shh,” Eve said. “Have they?”

“No. Why would they?”

Eve hesitated. Maybe Marian didn’t remember any of it. Maybe she didn’t remember that she’d taken her in under an assumed name or that she’d supplied her with a high-school transcript. She’d only known her as Eve Bailey, and she’d known her that way for a very long time.

“I just—”

“Are you in trouble, Eve?”

Eve hesitated. “I hope not,” she said.

“The past catching up to you?”

“I hope not,” she repeated. “I—”

“Hush,” Marian said quickly. “Don’t tell me anything. Don’t remind me of anything. All I remember is that you came to my house to help me with my day care. In return, I gave you room and board. Then I took care of Cory while you went to school. I introduced you to Jack. You married him, and we’re the best of friends. I don’t remember more than that.” She looked hard at Eve.

“You really don’t?” Eve asked, not sure if she believed her.

“That’s right. But I
would
remember if the cops had come to see me. That you can be sure of.”

“And they haven’t.”

“No, dear. They haven’t.” She cocked her head, narrowed her eyes. “You’re really scared, aren’t you?”

Eve nodded.

“How realistic is it that they could be looking for you?”

“Very realistic. Frighteningly so.”

“Then you’ll be in my prayers,” Marian said. “I never knew what brought you to me. I didn’t know what had happened to you or what you’d done. But whatever it was, you are not that person—that little girl—anymore. If the police come, that’s what I’ll tell them. That you’re a marvelous woman. A marvelous mother.”

“I haven’t been that marvelous when it comes to Cory,” Eve said. “I smothered her. I made her fearful.”

“A mother never loved her daughter more,” Marian said. “Every mother I know screwed up somehow with her kids and only with the best of intentions. If I’d had kids, I’m sure I would have screwed up, too.” She leaned forward to pat Eve’s hand. “Now, tell me what night we’re going to this play.”

T
im’s trial was scheduled for late August, but his attorney, Len Edison, asked for and received a two-week delay.

They can’t find me,
Eve thought.
They need more time to track me down.

She waited for someone to arrive with a subpoena. From her office, she watched the entrance to the building, waiting for a stranger who would change her life and the lives of her family. It was like waiting to die and take everyone she loved—and had lied to—with her.

Both
Dateline
and
20/20
featured the case,
Dateline
even using some of Ken’s coverage of the story. Eve would have been impressed by his confident presentation if she could have been at all objective about the subject matter.

Tim’s attorney asked for yet another delay when the first expired, but this one was not granted. They hadn’t found her, but certainly they would continue their search. Her hypervigilance was taking a serious toll on her health. Her heart rate never slowed from a gallop, and her eyes were always wide-open, searching for the person who would slap the handcuffs on her wrists. By the day of the trial, she’d lost fifteen pounds and her clothes hung from her frame. She needed to use the scooter more and more, riding it around the grounds, dealing with the concern of her friends and co-workers, who’d thought she was getting better. The joints in her feet and ankles, her hands and wrists, were so swollen that her doctor increased the dosage of one of her medications and told her if that didn’t make a difference, he would take her off her current regimen and try something else. He took vast quantities of blood from her for testing, worried about her weight loss, her pallor, her poor concentration. She knew that no blood test could tell him what was ailing her.

Court TV
televised gavel-to-gavel coverage of the trial. She longed to stay home and watch, but that would be both impossible and irresponsible. She had to work, whether she could concentrate on her clients or not. In the evenings, though, she sat in front of the TV to watch the recap of the day’s events in the courtroom. Jack was no longer surprised by her interest in the case; he thought it made her feel closer to Cory because of Ken’s involvement with the coverage in North Carolina. He watched the recap with her, as if determined to share in what interested her. She’d shut him out of her interior life the past couple of months, unable to tell him what she was thinking and feeling, and she guessed this was his attempt to breach the wall she’d erected between them.

The prosecutor’s name was Sal Schreiner, a surprisingly small, ineffectual-looking man—until he opened his mouth and began moving around the courtroom. He had a strong voice, a jumpy, darting way of walking and gesticulating, and a slick style of questioning that instantly grated on Eve’s nerves.

He started with Irving Russell himself. On the stand, Russell was not the imposing figure he was on the grounds. For the most part, he was stoic, but his voice quavered as he described the night of the kidnapping. He’d been working in his downstairs office in the mansion as he waited for his wife to come home, he said. The first indication he’d had that something was wrong was when the day-care supervisor called to tell him that his five-year-old daughter, Vivian, had not been picked up at the usual time. Worried, he’d been about to leave the mansion to try to find Genevieve, when he received the first phone call from Timothy Gleason.

“He said he had her,” Russell recalled. “He said she was safe and would be returned to me unharmed if I commuted Andrea Gleason’s sentence.”

The camera lingered occasionally on Vivian, where she sat in the courtroom, a tissue pressed to her eyes. It was hard for Eve to watch either of the Russells. She tried to separate herself from the case, to pretend she had nothing to do with it, but that was impossible. Tears filled her eyes as Russell’s testimony came to a close. She wondered if the jury members were similarly affected, or if it was her closeness to the case that made his testimony hit her so hard.

During the recap on the following evening, Tim’s cousin, David Gleason, took the stand. Long-haired and brown-eyed, he looked more like Marty than Tim, and he spoke with a slow drawl so thick he was hard to understand at times. He testified that Tim had asked if he and Marty could use the cabin “for a few days of R and R” and that he’d given them a key.

“Did it seem odd to you for them to want some ‘R and R?’” Schreiner asked.

“No,” David Gleason said. “Marty had some problems and Tim was kind of his caretaker, so I figured it had to do with that. Tim jes’ wanted to get Marty out of town for a while, someplace peaceful.” He ran a hand over his beard. “’Course, I figured out what was goin’ on when the news came out about them kidnappin’ the governor’s wife and all, but I was confused.”

Schreiner raised his eyebrows. “Confused about what?” he asked.

“’Cause the news said they were talkin’ to the governor on the phone, and the cabin didn’t have no phone.”

“Did it occur to you to call the police when you realized what your cousins were doing?”

Gleason looked down at his hands, then shook his head. “No,” he said. “I mean…I was young.”

“Great excuse,” Jack said sarcastically. He and Eve were watching the TV from beneath the covers of their bed. “‘I was young,’” Jack mimicked him. “This guy should go down with his cousin.”

“I was different than I am now,” Gleason continued, “and I cared about Andie…Andrea…too. I was actually sort of rooting Tim and Marty on when I figured out what they were up to. ’Course, I had no idea the…uh…Mrs. Russell was dead.”

Eve was tense as she waited to hear him say the name “CeeCee Wilkes.” She didn’t like watching the trial secondhand this way. She found it increasingly hard to sit in her office during the day, wondering if CeeCee’s role in the kidnapping was being exposed while she counseled her student clients. Who would bring her up first? Maybe no one would mention her until Tim took the stand. It certainly seemed as though David Gleason knew nothing about her.

“When did you next go to your family cabin?” Schreiner asked him.

“The next spring, most likely. I’m not sure.”

“Was there any evidence of the brothers having been there?”

Gleason shifted his weight in the chair. “The one thing I do remember was that the bathroom door was busted,” he said. “The jamb was splintered near the knob.”

At that point, Schreiner started his energetic dance around the courtroom as he presented two large photographs of the cabin bathroom and one of the hallway. He paraded them before the jury, then set them on easels at the front of the courtroom. With a pointer, he showed where a bullet had been found in the wall of the bathroom. He then produced the bullet itself, bagged in plastic, and laid it on the table near the easels.

“What was your next contact with the Gleason brothers?” Schreiner asked the cousin once he’d finished his display.

“Tim called…I don’t know when, exactly,” David Gleason said. “Maybe a week after they used the cabin. He told me that the cops were after them and they were going on the run.” David Gleason looked apologetically at Tim, who sat calmly next to his attorney. “He told me he’d get in touch when he could.”

“And did he?”

“Yes. ’Bout a year later I got a call from him. He said he didn’t want to lose touch with me—we’d been great friends all our lives, you know—but I should never…” He looked down at his lap again, his jaw muscles working. When he lifted his head, there were tears in his eyes. “He said I should never let anyone know what his new name was.”

“Why didn’t you call the police when you realized Mrs. Russell was still missing?”

Gleason shrugged. “I didn’t want to get Tim and Marty in trouble.”

“Nice guy,” Jack said.

“Marty was…schizo, you know?” Gleason said. He shrugged. “I figured he’d killed her, most likely without meaning to or somethin’, and Tim was trying to protect him.”

Jack stretched his arms over his head and yawned. “Have you had enough of this yet?” he asked.

“I’d like to watch a little longer,” she said. “I’ll go into the living room.”

“Well—” Jack leaned over to kiss her “—don’t stay up too late, all right?” He looked worried.

She smiled as she got out of bed. “I won’t,” she promised.

In the living room, she turned on the TV to see the next witness for the prosecution take the stand. Terry Newhouse, Tim’s friend in Jacksonville who had owned the house from which the calls were made to the governor, was clean-cut and clean shaven. He gave his profession as “semi-professional accountant.”

“Did you know what the brothers were up to?” Schreiner asked, once Newhouse had been sworn in.

Newhouse nodded. “Pretty much. Yeah.”

“Where did they tell you they’d left the governor’s wife?”

“In a cabin with a friend watching her.”

Eve knotted her hands together in her lap.

“Did they identify the friend?” Schreiner asked.

“No, sir.”

“Do you know the gender of the friend?”

“In my mind, I think it was a female. I thought maybe it was Tim’s girlfriend, but I can’t remember why I thought that. I mean, I don’t know if they said that or not.”

“Do you remember the girlfriend’s name?”

Eve held her breath, but Newhouse shook his head. “I just told you, I’m not even sure it was a girl.” He was getting a little testy.

Eve suddenly remembered Bets. Maybe they would think it was Bets who’d kept watch over Genevieve, then later killed herself out of guilt for having participated in the kidnapping! She felt relief, but it was short-lived as she realized that once Tim had his turn to tell the story, Bets would no longer be a suspect in anyone’s mind.

The following evening, she watched the trial alone, since Jack was holding auditions at the university. She sat on the sofa as the woman who had been Bets’s roommate took the witness stand. Jeannie Rose was a pretty fifty-one-year-old registered nurse with short blond hair and wide, believable blue eyes. Did she know about CeeCee? Eve was glad Jack wasn’t home, because she didn’t think she’d be able to mask her anxiety as she watched Jeannie Rose swear to tell the truth.

“Bets and Tim were together for two years,” Jeannie said when Schreiner started questioning her. “I thought she knew something about the situation when Tim kidnapped Governor Russell’s wife, because she didn’t really act surprised, but I don’t think she was actively involved. She and I worked together at that time, so I saw her all day and night while Tim was…doing whatever he was doing.” She kept her eyes glued to Schreiner, and Eve wondered if it was to avoid looking at Tim.

“Where was she at the time Genevieve Russell was kidnapped?” he asked.

“She was working with me. I know she couldn’t have been the person that witness…Mr. Newhouse…was talking about guarding Mrs. Russell, because that whole week she was barely out of my sight. She was upset, though. She just told me it was because Tim was out of town and she missed him. When I thought about it later, I realized she must have known what was going on.”

Schreiner questioned her a while longer, then Tim’s lawyer cross-examined her, but Jeannie Rose offered little ammunition to either side of the case. After her testimony, court was recessed for the day.
A good day,
Eve thought with relief. Any day that the name CeeCee Wilkes was not mentioned was a good day in her eyes.