Chapter 18
Tessa wanted to run out the front door, and would have if not for the large number of media people gathered at the gates outside her house. She forced herself to stop at the bottom of the staircase before she acted on the impulse and continued to run outside, only to find herself surrounded by unfriendly reporters of various kinds. Trapped inside her house was turning out to be almost as bad as being in prison, although, to be sure, she didn’t have a guard like Hicks teasing and taunting her. The media had taken her place.
“Hey, are you okay?” Jill asked as she came up behind Tessa. “You ran out so fast.”
Tessa took a deep breath, hoping to calm herself, but it didn’t help. “How can that little . . . punk live with himself? I am so . . . angry! His testimony could have helped my case. I am, I don’t know—” She twisted her long hair in her hand. “I feel as if I need to act, to do something other than just sit here and wait on Rosa and Rachelle, and that”—she pointed upstairs—“total jerk. It’s hard, Jill. Very hard.” Tears surged again, something she was becoming quite used to, and, as was becoming more common now that she was out of prison and did not have to hide her emotions, she let the tears stream down her face.
“I know, sweetie, I know. We are going to make this right no matter what we have to do. I promise. I think Lee Whitlow is top-notch, and I swear I haven’t Googled the man. He’s smart and seems to know what he has to do for you; and Sam does as well. You’re the toughest gal I know, Tessa. I couldn’t have endured all this and kept my sanity.”
Tessa gave up a halfhearted smile. “Bull. I don’t believe that for a minute.”
Voices coming from the top of the staircase were heard before Jill could respond.
Lee, Sam, and George came down the stairs.
George held out his hand to her. “Mrs. Jamison, I can’t even begin to know what you have been through, but I . . .” He stammered, and this almost made her feel sorry for him. Almost. “I will do anything I can to help with your new trial. It was totally wrong of me and my uncle not to go to the police and the DA to let them know what we had found.”
Hesitantly, Tessa took his offered hand. “Yes, it was wrong, George. Very wrong, but I do not suppose there is any point in my rehashing your reasoning. As long as you’re willing to tell what you saw now, I’m okay.” To be sure, Tessa was fudging a bit on this, but anger, recrimination, and holding on to the past could not change her future.
George nodded, looking relieved, and Sam led him out the back entrance. Once the people of the press saw him, they were likely to put two and two together, if they hadn’t already. And neither Tessa nor any of the others wanted them to get too much of a head start on learning about the new witnesses and what they might testify to.
Lee looked at his watch. “It’s almost eight o’clock, so Rosa should be here pretty soon. Are you sure you want to sit in on this one?” he asked Tessa, as they all returned to the living room. “You can tell me what you want to ask her, and I will.”
“No, I want to confront her myself,” she said adamantly. “I know her, and I need to know why she . . . No, that’s not it. I do know why. What I want to hear from her own mouth is exactly what she saw that day.”
“Fair enough,” Lee said. “Though I’ll want to question her, inform her what to expect when we go to trial. I don’t want her running off.”
“Isn’t there something you can do legally to make sure she stays here to testify?” Jill asked. “I would hate to see her take off because she was afraid.”
“There are a few tactics I can use,” Lee said. “I doubt I’ll have to. When I spoke to her, she was extremely remorseful, and without having the threat of being deported as an excuse this time around, I don’t think I’ll have to resort to any legal razzmatazz.”
Sam came back into the living room. “I have taken the liberty of ordering take-out from Papa Luigi’s. I know the owner, and asked them to call me when they were close, so I can meet them around back,” he announced. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I am famished.”
Tessa realized that she was hungry and was thankful that Sam had taken the initiative to feed them. Half an hour later, Sam’s cell phone rang, telling him their dinner was right around the corner.
There was still no sign of Rosa, and it was way past eight o’clock.
Sam met the delivery driver before he had a chance to enter the screened-in pool area. Sam returned carrying three large bags with heavenly smells emanating from them.
“Hope Italian works for everyone,” he said as he took plates from the cabinets and placed them around the bar in the kitchen.
Tessa took knives and forks out of the drawer and put them next to the plates. “It works for me. I can’t remember the last time I had real Italian food.” She was reminded of the cans of SpaghettiOs she used to order from the prison commissary. Was that considered Italian?
“Lee, Jill, help yourselves,” Sam said as he removed paper lids from large foil pans. The delicious scents of garlic and tomato sauce emanating from lasagna, cheese ravioli, and baked ziti filled the kitchen. The tantalizing odor of garlic knots made Tessa’s mouth water. A large container of antipasto, with salami, cheese, hot peppers, pepperoni, anchovies, and green and black olives supplemented the carbohydrate-laden dishes. It was a feast right out of The Godfather.
As they filled their plates with the food, Tessa half listened for a knock on the glass doors. She forked a bite of lasagna into her mouth, closing her eyes and reveling in the heavenly taste. If she were forced to return to that hellhole of a prison, she knew she would spend many nights reliving this meal. For the next few minutes, the four ate heartily. When they finished, Lee excused himself to make a phone call.
“She’s not coming,” Tessa said.
Lee came back into the kitchen. “No, she’s on her way here. Apparently, she had to call a cab. Said they were running late. Not sure why she didn’t call to tell us, but she assured me she would be here within fifteen minutes.”
Breathing a sigh of relief, Tessa nodded. “I don’t think she ever learned to drive. At least not when she worked for us. She had a relative bring her most days, or Joel would send a car for her. I can’t imagine living in San Maribel and not driving.”
Actually, she could. It had been years since she had had a driver’s license or driven a car. The last time she had driven, she had been racing to get home to the girls. She didn’t know if she would even remember how to drive if for some reason she had to.
“If you don’t have to learn, you won’t,” Sam said. “At least she knows how to use a cell phone.” His last words were laced with sarcasm.
Tessa discovered that she did not really appreciate the disparaging comment from Sam, as she knew Rosa, or at least she thought she did. Then again, maybe Rosa wasn’t the kind, sweet woman she had led her and Joel to believe. Rosa had not come forward when she could have, and that alone spoke volumes.
What were her priorities at the time of the murders? What did the woman care about? How little she must have thought of Tessa, Joel, and the girls.
This line of thinking made Tessa’s blood boil, so she could understand where Sam’s sarcasm was coming from. He’d met Rosa on occasion, too, but had never, at least to her knowledge, known her very well.
“She was good with the girls,” Tessa said. “They always enjoyed spending time with her, and I thought the feelings were reciprocated, but apparently, I was wrong.” She wanted to add more but didn’t. Lee was probably aware that Joel had taken care of hiring Rosa and, quite possibly, had overlooked her lack of legal status.
“We don’t care how good a housekeeper or babysitter she was. Don’t allow yourself to feel pity, Tessa. She might have information that could have turned the entire investigation another way,” Lee explained. “If she sees you as sympathizing with what her situation was then, she might think you’re letting her off the hook and be more willing to help out in your defense.”
“I don’t care what her opinion of me is. I want her to tell us what she knows. That’s it,” Tessa said as she went to the sink and began rinsing the dinner plates and placing them in the dishwasher. Jill handed her the knives and forks. She ran them under the hot water and dropped the knives and forks in the basket in the dishwasher. “I assume you told her to use the back entrance?”
“Of course,” Lee said. “The members of the media are still at their posts out front, and I doubt they’re going to leave us alone anytime soon. They came to get a story. And, what with Chen thinking about running for governor, this is the biggest story around.”
Sam had remained silent during the cleanup, but he spoke now. “Why don’t we give them something? Tell them about the bones we found. Get them off our backs.”
Lee raised his brows, obviously considering Sam’s suggestion. “That might not be a bad idea. But let’s wait until Rosa shows up. I want to hear her story first, then we’ll decide. Are you all right with this, Tessa?”
Do I really have a choice?
“I’ll do whatever it takes, Lee. I have let you know my position time and time again. I do not want to speak to the media, now or ever, not in a million years, but you or Sam do what you feel is best.” She despised the media. They were to blame, at least in her mind, for her racing off to San Maribel in the first place. She had known that her girls’ nightmare would become public, and she had had to prevent that. In doing so, she had killed them. By not telling Joel about his brother’s abuse, she might as well have put a gun to their heads and pulled the trigger. It was her fault, no matter what Jill or Sam or Lee said. She had put the cart before the horse, and doing so had cost her everything that was dear to her. Everything.
“I want to see what Rosa says, then we can decide,” Lee said again.
Tessa didn’t have anything to say to that, so she continued to clean the kitchen. Her thoughts were all over the place. It still seemed surreal, being here in her own home, surrounded by familiar yet unfamiliar things. New furnishings, floors, and walls did practically nothing to eliminate the images of what she had found at the pool that horrible day. She doubted that they would ever fade away. Like an old photo that had aged to a blurry finish, the edges of her memory of that day were faded, dried with time, but the actual picture of what she had seen was clear, as sharp as if she had just taken a snapshot of the scene.
It had taken a very long time for this image to return, but now, she could remember every single detail of what she had seen. And there was one detail that had always nagged her about Joel, and she had never repeated it to anyone, for fear they’d think she had totally gone off the deep end, but still, it nagged at her. He appeared so . . . different. Yes, she knew he’d been killed, murdered, and she understood the decomposition process, the bloating, all the scientific terms for describing a dead body in water, but she still felt that something wasn’t right. Later, after Rosa left, maybe she would tell Jill about it. Jill was a doctor, and she might have an explanation for Tessa’s feeling.
They all turned when they heard a light knock on the glass doors. “I’ll get it,” Sam said, moving to the back of the house.
“Stay calm,” Jill coaxed Tessa. “You have nothing to be afraid of.”
That was easy for Jill to say. Tessa had everything to fear. Her temporary freedom would most likely be taken away from her, and she would have to return to prison for the rest of her life if things did not go well. She was simply not going to allow herself to get her hopes up even though Lee and Sam were very encouraging. Going back to prison is what she should focus on. It was so hard to be optimistic when you’d spent a decade of your life behind bars. And it was much worse because she was innocent.
“Tessa?” Jill said. “Are you okay? You seem like you’re a million miles away.”
Tessa agreed. “Sorry. I was. I do that a lot. I’ll be fine.”
“Let’s get this over with,” Jill told her. “Rosa is waiting.”
Taking a deep breath, Tessa could not help but feel a bit anxious. It was time to hear from the horse’s mouth exactly what her former housekeeper had witnessed.