Page 16 of Deadline

“I tried to reach Jeremy. I wanted to know what was going on. But my repeated calls to his cell phone went straight to voice mail. I also tried his workplace. I was told he had called in sick that morning. No one at the construction firm had seen or heard from him since the day before.”

“You went home?”

“That’s right.”

* * *

In terms of mileage, the museum wasn’t that far from her townhouse, but it seemed to take forever to cover the distance. The streets were familiar, so she could drive them without having to concentrate. But that only allowed her mind to spin wildly with chilling thoughts. Jeremy’s relationship with Willard and Darlene Strong was obviously volatile, and the possibility of it endangering her sons to any extent and on any level was untenable.

Would she have to get a restraining order after all? Should she appeal to the family-court judge to deny Jeremy all visitation rights until he got himself sorted out? Perhaps a drastic move like that would wake him up to how self-destructive his behavior had become. Maybe withholding his sons would compel him to seek treatment, to get

counseling, before he completely ruined his life.

Such were her thoughts as she pulled onto Jones Street, which looked absurdly placid. Enormous live-oak trees cast welcome shade onto the sidewalks buckled by their roots.

After moving out of the house where she and the boys had experienced so many unhappy times, she’d leased the townhouse. The walled courtyard provided a safe place for the boys to play. The neighbors watched out for one another. Until she decided where she wanted to settle, it was a comfortable and convenient stopgap.

To her disappointment, Mrs. Abernathy hadn’t yet arrived. She turned in to the narrow, oyster-shell driveway and followed it along the side of the building to her parking space in back. She alighted quickly, climbed the steps, and unlocked the back door, which opened directly into the kitchen. Her alarm started beeping. It sounded unusually loud, and it took her a frustrating three tries before she punched in the correct sequence of numbers to turn it off.

When it stopped, her ears continued to ring—the only sound she heard above the portentous silence that pressed itself against her eardrums. All her sensory receptors seemed heightened to a thousand times greater than their normal capacity. Because there was no motion or sound, the absence of stimuli was deeply disturbing. It bespoke the void her life would be without her sons in it.

The rambunctiousness of two active preschoolers, which sometimes frazzled her, was now what she craved. She wanted to hear their laughter, inhale their little-boy smells, feel the pressure of their warm bodies against her chest and the damp smear of their kisses on her cheeks.

She went to the sink, turned on the faucet, and took a drinking glass from the open shelf. She filled the glass with water and drained it thirstily. Thinking that surely the headmistress had had time to get there by now, she glanced at the clock on the stove, then, thinking she heard a car on the street, turned.

When the glass slipped from her hand, it shattered on the floor, spraying her feet and legs with shards of glass.

Willard Strong was standing not three feet from her. He held a double-barrel shotgun crosswise against his chest, from shoulder to hip, one hand on the stock, the other on the barrels. “You scream and I’ll kill you.” Her back door was standing ajar. Calmly, he reached behind him and pushed it closed.

* * *

Amelia rolled her lips inward and took a deep breath through her nose, held it for several seconds, then released it slowly.

Jackson regarded her with concern. “Do you need a moment, Ms. Nolan?”

She shook her head, then murmured, “No, I’m fine.” She wasn’t, but hopefully no one in the courtroom would call her on the fib. She wanted no more delays in the proceedings. She wanted to get through this, past this, so she could get on with the rest of her life.

She barely remembered a time when she’d had complete control of her life and could make decisions without factoring Jeremy into them in one way or another. He’d been out of her life for more than a year, and still he was dominating her thoughts and dictating how her days were spent. But once she got through this—

“Mr. Strong used those exact words?” Jackson asked. “‘You scream and I’ll kill you?’”

Refocusing her thoughts, she answered yes.

“Did you feel that you were in imminent danger?”

“I did, yes. The threat seemed real. He was glaring at me, breathing hard. He was flexing and contracting his fingers around the barrels of the shotgun. He looked distraught. Furious. I was afraid for my life.”

Jackson let that sink in as he walked over to the table where evidence, which had already been introduced, was exhibited. “Is this the shotgun he brought with him into your house?” He carried the weapon back to the witness box for her inspection.

“It looks like it. I remember the design carved into the stock.”

He asked that the record note that she had identified Exhibit A, the shotgun with which Darlene Strong had been shot in the chest.

As he replaced the shotgun on the table, he asked, “Did the defendant say anything else to you?”

“He asked if my husband was there. I told him no and reminded him that Jeremy was no longer my husband. He said, ‘But she’s still my wife, and he’s’”—she darted a glace toward the jury box, then finished—“‘he’s fucking her.’ I told him that I knew nothing about it, that it wasn’t my business to know, and that whatever was happening between them, Jeremy wouldn’t come to my home.”

“What did he say to that?”