Unleashed (2 page)

Although these days, Caroline felt about a hundred years older than her thirty-four years.

The smile vanished as quickly as it appeared, as though her cheek muscles, so unfamiliar with the motion over the past several months, couldn’t hold it for more than a few seconds.

“Mikey, honey,” Caroline called, “why don’t you go use the shovel in the planter right outside. Maybe you’ll find some buried treasure.” Another stiff smile broke free at Mikey’s exclamation of how cool that sounded.

So what if he dug up all her daffodil bulbs? It was worth it to experience that kind of pure, simple joy, even vicariously. And besides, one way or another, Caroline doubted she’d be in this house next year to appreciate them.

Satisfied that Mikey was occupied for the time being, Kate ducked back into the storage space. The single bare bulb cast shadows over the custom-made shelving unit that held boxes of clothing, books, and unused suitcases. An old metal file cabinet that contained decades of Caroline’s late husband’s financial documents was tucked into a corner. Caroline knew the contents of every single box, bag and drawer, because she’d been through every shred of paper and clothing in the past six months, looking for something, anything, that would help her find the truth about what had happened to James.

“Sorry, you asked me something before,” Kate finished with a wave and an eyeroll in Michael’s general direction.

“Oh, I just asked if there was anything interesting in the box,” Caroline said, trying to keep her tone casual, trying to quell the shred of hope that never failed to raise its ignorant head whenever she came across something, anything, that might help her case.

The grim set to Kate’s full mouth said it all. “It’s just books, Caroline, I checked. You can look yourself, but I don’t think you’ll find anything.”

Caroline nodded, but kept the box near the front of Kate’s growing pile so she could look through it, just in case.

“So how is everything going?” Kate asked. “You look a lot better than the last time I saw you.”

Caroline huffed out a laugh as she heaved a box of sweaters onto one of the shelves that lined the space. “I should hope so, considering the last time you saw me I just got out of jail.” As soon as she’d been released two months ago, she’d made a beeline for her favorite salon and gotten a cut, color, eyebrow wax, bikini wax, a manicure, and a pedicure.

It would have been heaven had she not had to endure the suspicious looks of the other women as they whispered about her behind their impeccably manicured hands. Caroline had provided enough speculation and gossip when she’d married James ten years ago and moved to his beautiful house in the wealthy enclave of Piedmont, California.

Perched in the hills east of the San Francisco Bay, Piedmont was an oasis of wealth and privilege. James, his first wife Susan, and their daughter Kate had fit in perfectly. Then James had courted scandal by marrying a trophy wife over twenty years his junior and moving her into his dead wife’s house less than two years after poor Susan was cold in her grave.

Aside from James’s closest friends, Caroline had been tolerated, but never truly accepted by his circle. The wives, especially, treated her with a veneer of courtesy that barely disguised their disdain. And fear. Fear that one day their husbands might find themselves charmed by a young, beautiful bartender who served drinks at their spouse’s favorite after work spot.

But the scandal that erupted when James appeared at the tony Oakland Hills Country Club with his twenty-four-year-old trophy wife at his side was nothing compared to the hell that broke loose when James was murdered a little over six months ago. And Caroline was named the prime suspect.

Kate huffed and heaved another box on the shelf. “I can’t believe they wouldn’t set bail. I mean, rapists and gangbangers get out on bail all the time. It’s a travesty.” Kate’s cloud of red curls shook with indignation.

“They thought I was a flight risk,” Caroline said. “So no bail.” She hoped Kate would pick up on her tone and consider the conversation over. Kate was always trying to get her to talk and share about what it had been like those two months she spent in jail, convinced that if Caroline would just talk about it, she’d get over her insomnia and get a full night’s sleep.

Caroline had no desire to go there. No desire to think about the loss of freedom, the complete loss of dignity and comfort. All she wanted was to cherish every single day of freedom she’d been granted, and do everything in her power to make sure she never ended up back in a cell.

Besides, she knew, and she supposed Kate did too, that talking about her time behind bars wasn’t going to cure her insomnia. The only thing that would accomplish that was finding the real killer before the DA had a chance to rebuild his case and take Caroline back into custody.

“At least the judge didn’t have her head up her ass, unlike everyone else involved,” Kate said as she whipped out a Sharpie marker and scrawled the word “shoes” across the top of a box before pushing it onto a low shelf.

Caroline stopped her. “Shoes go on the second shelf,” she said, indicating the other neatly labeled boxes. Kate rolled her eyes but moved the box to the second shelf. Caroline knew her need for organization bordered on OCD, but she liked having everything in its properly designated space. Besides, her penchant for organizing everything—even a garage storage space no one would ever see—had turned into a surprisingly lucrative side business organizing household spaces for Caroline’s friends and acquaintances. Not that she’d seen much business since she’d first been arrested for James’s murder.

“The judge didn’t have much choice other than to dismiss the charges. The police didn’t have a warrant to seize my computer. Without those e-mails, they didn’t have a strong enough case.” Not that they had a particularly strong case even with the e-mails Caroline had written to her oldest, closest friend, Diana Vasquez, the only person Caroline had really kept in touch with after she married James.

Sure, Caroline had bitched about the state of her marriage, and her desire to somehow get out of it without dealing with divorce and the financial messiness that would ensue. She might have even expressed a moment’s regret that she would have to figure out how to support herself, her parents, and her brother once he got out of jail on the amount stipulated in their prenup. Sure, five million was generous, but it wasn’t infinite.

But somehow the DA had twisted Caroline’s cabernet fueled ramblings into a motive for murder. When combined with an accusation from a former cell mate of her brother’s it had been enough for the DA to bring her up on charges.

The sad truth was, and as Caroline had tried to explain to the police and later the DA, Caroline had known her marriage was in trouble long before James had actually filed for divorce.

It wasn’t just James’s late nights and long absences for business travel. Even if James had continued to be the most attentive husband on the planet, Caroline knew they weren’t going to last. Caroline had loved him, but she wasn’t in love with him. She’d loved his friendship and the security he gave her, but after ten years she was starting to chafe under the confines of being married to James. She was starting to resent the compromises she’d made, the dreams she’d chosen to give up. But as their relationship faltered, Caroline had to face the brutal truth that she had a lot of years left, a lot of time to still have the things she was missing in her life. Things she wasn’t ever going to get if she stayed married to James.

When she’d found James with another woman one Saturday afternoon, Caroline had been almost relieved. She’d come home after her weekend at Disneyland with Kate and Michael was cut short when Kate came down with the flu. It didn’t take a genius to see what was going on between her husband and the beautiful, oh so young woman who was sobbing in James’s study. Caroline had frozen in shock, and heard several seconds of muffled conversation before James noticed her.

“I’m sorry, I can’t give you what you want,” James said, frustration in every line of his body as he stood next to the leather club chair where the woman sat.

“You must,” she sobbed, her voice accented and thick with tears. “You are the only one, the only one.”

James started to pace as he raked his fingers through thick hair only recently gone completely silver. He was still strong and fit as he approached his fifty-sixth birthday, his shoulders firm under his broadcloth shirt, his belly barely bulging over the waistband of pressed khakis. He lifted his gaze, staring at nothing until it caught on Caroline, standing in the doorway.

“I guess I don’t have to ask why you haven’t returned my calls,” Caroline said in response to his horrified gaze.

After the shock wore off, Caroline thought that, along with relief, she was miffed that James would bring another woman into their house. But as she listened to James order the woman to get out she realized she wasn’t very hurt. As she’d confessed to Diana in her long, rambling, e-mails, Caroline had been fooling herself for a long time, hanging on by a thread to a marriage that wasn’t making her happy and never would.

Then again, she hadn’t exactly been in the best frame of mind when she’d accepted James’s proposal. When she’d met and married James, she’d been reeling, coming off the tail end of the worst time in her life. She’d gotten it into her usually resilient and levelheaded brain that James was exactly what she needed. Capable. Responsible. Reliable.

Rich.

Call her a shallow greedy gold digger, but at the time the security of James’s wealth had felt as warm and reassuring as the world’s coziest fleece blanket.

When they first got together and for the first five or so years of their marriage, he’d seemed to be everything she needed. And for the next four years Caroline had shoved aside her doubts, refused to acknowledge that maybe she’d given up too much in the name of security. That maybe she shouldn’t waste too many more years on a childless and increasingly passionless marriage. James was good and generous—not only to her, but to her family. And, as always, there was Kate and Mikey, whose pure little boy love Caroline soaked up like a sponge, hoping it would plug up the gaping hole left in her soul so many years ago.

But the justification wore thin, especially after Kate and Mikey moved out when Mikey was almost two. Mikey’s absence reignited Caroline’s desire for a baby with a vengeance. But no matter how hard she pleaded, James wouldn’t budge. He was finished having children and had the vasectomy to prove it. He wouldn’t consider adoption or artificial insemination as an option. Caroline’s resentment grew and James grew increasingly distant. She soon found herself bouncing off the walls of her perfect home, bored out of her skull in their perfect enclave of suburbia.

So when James had filed for divorce three days after the Disneyland Debacle, Caroline had taken it with a little bit of sadness and a lot of relief.

Until three days later, when James turned up with a bullet in his head, and a former cell mate of Caroline’s brother, Ricky, claimed Caroline Medford had approached him and offered him five thousand dollars to do the hit. Caroline’s protest that she’d met Hector Ramirez once, at a barbecue for her brother during one of his brief stints on the outside, fell on deaf ears.

“Well if you ask me, the DA is a total fucktard,” Kate continued, jarring Caroline out of her unpleasant memories.

“Mommy, what’s a fucktard?”

Kate jumped at Mikey’s high pitched inquiry. “Uhh—”

“It’s a not nice word for somebody who does something silly,” Caroline jumped in to explain. “Don’t use it.”

“Yeah, that’ll work,” Kate said as Mikey marched around Caroline’s car, chanting “fucktard,” in time with the stomping of his rubber booted feet. “They can’t still think you did it,” Kate said, wincing as Mikey repeated the profanity for the dozenth time. “The whole life insurance thing is a crock of shit. I told the DA myself. I mean, you’d think of all people, I would be gunning to get my wicked stepmother behind bars, right? So if I’m in your corner, it should say something, shouldn’t it?”

Caroline grabbed Kate in an impulsive hug. “It means a lot to me that you’re on my side,” Caroline said. Especially when that number could be easily counted on one hand. There was Kate, and James’s friend Patrick Easterbrook, who was in his class at Stanford way back before Caroline was even born, Patrick’s wife Melody, and Caroline’s defense attorney, Rachael Weller. And Rachael probably didn’t count because she took Caroline’s case mostly for the publicity, not to mention a hefty thousand dollar per hour attorney fee.

Even her own mother asked her why she had to get her brother’s name mixed up in it.

Right. Ricky was the one in prison for manufacturing and selling meth, but Caroline was the fuckup.

“Hey, you had my back even when I treated you like crap.” The tiny emerald stud in Kate’s right nostril caught the light as she shot Caroline a wry smile. “The least I can do is return your loyalty.” Kate paused in labeling the boxes and took a deep swallow. “Seriously Caroline, what’s going to happen to us if you go to jail?” She flicked a glance at the door to make sure Mikey was still occupied outside. “And yeah, I know exactly how self-centered that sounds. But Mom’s gone, Dad’s dead, and you’re the only one who really stuck by me through everything.”

Caroline swallowed back her own tears and wiped her nose on the sleeve of her fleece pullover. Now was not the time for yet another sobfest. “Everything will be fine. I’ve got Rachael Weller, for Christ’s sake. She was able to get Bryan Roberts off and I’m pretty sure that guy was guilty.” Her bravado was thin even to her own ears. She’d gotten a reprieve when the judge dismissed her case, but she knew it was only a matter of weeks at best before the DA fortified his case against her and tried to put her back in jail.

“And worst case scenario,” Caroline said as she stacked the boxes along the shelves so their edges perfectly aligned, “you and Michael will be fine. I already signed over your trust, and as soon as everything settles out one way or another, I’ll sign the house over to you, too.” The only reason she hadn’t yet was because she didn’t want it to look like she had something to hide. She also didn’t want Kate to have to deal with the reporters that would no doubt swarm the house as soon as the case went to trial.