The Abortionist's Daughter (14 page)

And she had a marriage of twenty years to resurrect. One of them had to take the step to put a little spark back into things, and she didn’t think it was going to be Frank. He was still working as hard as ever. Maybe men didn’t feel it as strongly when their children went off to college; she hadn’t talked to enough people to get a consensus. What she did know was that Frank was like a horse with its blinders on, plodding down the same path as he was twenty years ago. If anyone was going to spark things up, it would be her.

That was the idea, anyway. The trouble was, whenever she looked for matches, she got distracted. There was always housework, bills, car repairs, laundry—and don’t forget she was supposed to carve out a little time for herself, according to the self-help magazines. So then she’d forget about Frank, and sparking things up; and then she and Frank would bicker over something, and she would think, Why me? Why does it always have to be me who tries to get the ball rolling? I could use a backrub, I could stand to have him take my head in his hands and kiss me long and slow the way we used to kiss, before children; why does it always have to be me? And at that point, even if somebody stuck a love torch in her hand, she wouldn’t have known what to do with it.

CHAPTER EIGHT

——————

THE WINTER HOLIDAYS
came and went with little by way of celebration. Carolyn returned the day before Christmas, only to learn the day after that her mother had slipped on the ice and sprained her ankle. Again Huck found himself driving her to the airport in a snowstorm. I don’t know why my sister can’t handle this, she said in the car, but I suppose with two kids and a nanny and a domestic support staff, it’s hard to find time to go take care of your own mother. Huck told her she was doing the right thing, though he too wondered why her sister couldn’t step up to the plate in a situation like this. That made him feel selfish and small, though, so he reminded her he was going to be working pretty much around the clock anyway.

Megan and Frank stayed on with the Goldfarbs, who canceled their trip to the Caymans to prevent a disastrous scenario from unfolding on Christmas morning with Megan and Frank waking up alone to a joyless, empty house. This warm and welcoming Jewish couple, who had for years denied their three children anything that might possibly have resembled a Christmas tree, went out and bought a sixteen-foot Noble fir for Frank and Megan, along with glass baubles, colored lights, and Mylar tinsel (no small irony since Diana had abhorred tinsel and banned the messy stuff from her own house).

Shock had quickly thickened into grief, and both Megan and Frank found themselves slogging through the dark December days. For Christmas, Megan bought her father an espresso maker. Frank bought her a pink cashmere sweater, which shamed her in light of the fight she’d had with her mother that last morning, complaining as she had that all her parents ever gave her were practical gifts. The sweater instantly rose to most-cherished-gift-ever status, because Megan suspected that not once in her nineteen years had her father gone out and purchased a Christmas present for her. Buying presents was Diana’s domain, with Frank’s role limited to that of Recipient of Thanks on Christmas morning (often receiving Diana’s hastily whispered words about a box’s contents minutes before it was opened). So touched was she by the knowledge that her father had driven to a mall, found a parking space, picked something out, gotten it gift-wrapped, and hand-written the tag that she put the sweater on right over her sleepshirt.

“You can return it if you want,” her father offered.

Like she would!

The day after Christmas, Frank suggested they drive up to Vail for a few days. This he claimed was simply to be a vacation for them. In fact, however, he had an underlying motive, which was to enable them to wake up in the morning without getting assaulted by yet another daily headline chronicling the latest development in the Duprey investigation.

To avoid a conflict of interest, Frank’s office had transferred the case to the DA’s office of a neighboring county. One of their first moves was to try to keep the press from reporting the specifics about Megan’s photos. They hardly expected to win their motion, given the First Amendment, but they landed a maverick judge and the story never went to press. Frank’s relief that his daughter was not going to read of her fame on Page One was outweighed only by his wish that Internet technology would, for once, vanish overnight. He knew it was only a matter of time before Megan found out about the pictures, but for now, hopefully, she would remain oblivious.

As for the preliminary autopsy report, it had been released just before Christmas, and although the same DA had successfully petitioned to keep it sealed, certain details had been leaked to the press. Thus by Christmas the entire city knew that Diana had been mildly drunk; that she had died of a blunt trauma to the head consisting of a skull fracture and a subdural hematoma; that sometime in the last month she’d taken some kind of amphetamines; that there were traces of semen in the vaginal cavity; and that there were several scratch marks on her arm.

The entire city also knew that both Frank and Megan’s fingerprints, given voluntarily, turned out to match those taken from around the house. As Megan would have said,
Well, duh; we live here.
However, it was then learned that Frank’s prints matched those specifically lifted from the broken highball glass and the curved chrome handles on the edge of the pool, and with this revelation the public seemed to perk up, to raise a collective eyebrow—even though, as Frank’s attorney emphasized, this proved nothing except that Frank had at one point since the last dishwasher cycle held the glass,
big deal;
and that he had at one point since the last housecleaning session touched the chrome handles,
big deal.
Besides, his attorney noted, there were other unidentified fingerprints on the pool handles too. This sort of mob mentality, he intoned, this “gotcha” attitude, was deplorable.

The community tried not to prejudge but couldn’t resist. It was as though they’d suddenly been granted the chance to infuse their collective history with Genuine Tragic Irony: for here was one of their most respected citizens, a family man who did good things for the community, who was handsome and intelligent and kept himself in tip-top physical condition—
and who killed his wife.

As if the autopsy and the fingerprints weren’t enough, people talked among themselves, and it became common knowledge that at some point that afternoon Frank had come across something online that infuriated him. What exactly he saw, the general public did not know. Yet his secretary admitted he had stormed out—she even used the word
ballistic,
much to the dismay of Frank’s attorney—and the next person to see him was neighbor Susan Beekman, who witnessed him racing into his house.

“You could hear it clear down the street,” Susan declared to a young reporter from the local paper, referring to the ensuing argument. “They were throwing glasses and yelling so hard they woke up my son.” Susan Beekman didn’t feel much obligation to censor herself. Although she’d borrowed many a cup of sugar from Diana over the years, she’d always looked askance at Frank and Diana’s parenting style, especially after she witnessed Megan and Diana smoking a joint on their back deck one April afternoon, which, if anyone was wondering, was why she’d never asked Megan to babysit for young Dylan.

In any event, Susan’s garrulous inclinations didn’t strengthen any presumptions of innocence for Frank. By Christmas, although no charges had been filed, the lay assumption was that Frank Thompson had killed his own wife. Something he saw on the Internet had sent him flying into a rage, the theory went; he drove home, burst into the house, argued with Diana, and ultimately smashed her head against the side of the pool. Had people known about the threats on the answering machine, or the bundle of letters that turned up at the clinic, they might have focused on Reverend O’Connell and his group; but based on what they knew, people were speculating not who did it but rather whether the charges against Frank Thompson would be second-degree murder or involuntary manslaughter.

Frank found that with some discipline he was able to skim the newspaper articles with enough detachment to keep from coming unglued. Sure, they angered him, but he knew how newspapers worked, knew they were just doing their job. What bothered him far more than his seeing the headlines was Megan seeing them—Megan, who thought if she read something in the newspaper, then it must be true. For the second time in the last year he found himself wishing that she’d gotten into Princeton, just so he could put her on a plane and send her back to school two thousand miles from this nightmare.

This was not an option, however. Nor was his well-intentioned but misguided idea that he could rise at six and stuff the Goldfarbs’ paper deep into the trash before anyone had a chance to read it. Or his plan to disconnect the television cable. There simply wasn’t any way for him to prevent Megan from hearing or reading what was being said. And so to Vail they went, where they paid astronomical last-minute prices for a one-bedroom condo and skied the velvety Back Bowls for five days straight, retiring to bed each night before the ten o’clock news came on.

On New Year’s Eve day they returned to town. It was not an occasion Megan wanted to celebrate—not just because she was mourning her mother, but also because of last year’s breakup with Bill, a scene she’d rather forget. She and her father stayed in with the Goldfarbs and watched a movie on their new flat-screen TV. At eleven o’clock Megan stood up and covered a yawn.

“You’re not staying up?” her father said.

You and Mom never stayed up, Megan felt like saying; why should it matter tonight? But she was aware of the meanness behind the impulse, and squelched it.

Her father stood up and hugged her. “Okay then,” he said. “Good night, honey.”

“Good night, Megan,” the Goldfarbs echoed.

Nobody wished anybody a Happy New Year.

—————

It was a convenient arrangement, staying at the Goldfarbs’, and would have remained so, except that on New Year’s Day one of the Goldfarb children called to tell his parents that he’d re-enrolled at the university, and could he and his wife and their two children come and stay with them until they found a place of their own? After hanging up, the Goldfarbs insisted to Frank and Megan that they stay on, but Frank, who’d been raised with a keen sense of houseguest etiquette, concocted a story about how he needed to be able to stay up late without disturbing people. The next day he and Megan packed up their meager belongings and drove to a hotel.

Megan was secretly relieved to give up the Goldfarbs’ house for the impersonal confines of a hotel room. Being loyal friends, the Goldfarbs had never shown any sign that they suspected Frank of killing Diana; but with all the talk, all the newspaper stories, how could they help but wonder whether it was true?

Megan herself steadfastly refused to think that her father might be culpable. Her parents fought a lot, sure; but the notion that he might have killed her was not just preposterous but rose from sheer laziness, a complete lack of imagination. People wanted answers, and they wanted them quickly, and she was mature enough to see it as a lynch-mob mentality that sought to pin the blame on the first person who came to mind.

There was, granted, the matter of her father’s denial—or rather, his lack of a denial to her. Sometimes, in the dark hours of the night, a tiny malevolent voice nagged at her that he’d never taken her aside and reassured her that of course he hadn’t done it. Sometimes doubts began to hum. She turned them off. So what if he hadn’t come right out and denied it to her personally? Like the earth isn’t flat, right? And do people go around shouting the news through a bullhorn?

Megan was convinced it was one of the anti-abortionists. There was that woman named Eve Kelly who lived outside Denver. It was Eve’s voice on the tape they’d found on the old answering machine, the voice saying
You’re next,
and when Megan saw a picture of Eve, she recognized her as the woman who’d stood outside their house in subzero temperatures last winter, sandwiched between two black and white posters of fetal remains. She’d worn a long down coat, Megan remembered, and a blue scarf and a silly pompom hat. Sometimes she sang hymns. Sometimes she gave long speeches, to no one. Diana had to get a court order to keep her away.

Megan was sure it was someone like Eve Kelly, and she wondered why the police weren’t so keen on pursuing this avenue. Eve was crazy; Eve was a fanatic; Eve knew their house. In moments of impatience she vowed to herself that if the police didn’t talk to Eve Kelly pretty soon, she would.

—————

Hoping to avoid the press, Frank had chosen a travelers’ hotel on the outskirts of town. But as they walked into the lobby, a gaggle of reporters materialized from nowhere and flocked around them.

“Can you tell us why you’re moving into a hotel?” one reporter asked.

“Is it true you’ve agreed to talk to the police next week?”

“Will your daughter talk too?”

“Does she have her own attorney?”

“Why did your wife meet privately with Reverend O’Connell at your home? What did they discuss?”

“Do you have any reason to think that your wife’s relationship with Reverend O’Connell was anything other than platonic?”

Hearing this, Megan gestured at the reporter with her middle finger.

“Ms. Thompson,” the reporter called, “is it true you were involved with a teacher at the high school?”

Frank whipped around. “Stay away from her.”

But Megan had already stopped.

“Is it true your mother got him fired?”

“No.”

“Who did, then?”

“I did.”

“Why?”

“He gave me herpes,” Megan replied.

Her father grabbed her by the arm and yanked her back. “What are you
doing
?” he said between clenched teeth.

“Giving them stuff to write about.” She glanced back at the reporter and shrugged.

“For god’s—We’re here to register,” he told the desk clerk.