He stood in the door, his jaw hanging open. “Mom?”
She raised her chin. Her green eyes were glassy, but the stunned look in them said she hadn’t expected him home.
“Please don’t tell anyone,” she said and started crying. She stood up and clasped her arms around him. “Please, this is my last time. I’m trying to stop. I swear I’m going to stop. I promise.”
At that age, you believed your parents. You believed your mom even if she had powder up her nose. What else was he supposed to think? He was barely thirteen then, and all he knew was that his parents had been fighting, they barely had any money, and they lived in a shitty neighborhood.
She’d clutched him as if her life depended on it and begged him to never breathe a word.
In the months that had followed, she’d seemed determined to prove herself to him. She’d told him she was getting help, that she was going to Narcotics Anonymous, and that she had a sponsor for counseling and guidance. “Please, Ry. I’m trying so hard, baby. I’m trying so hard to fight these demons,” she’d say to him at night as he got under the gray cover in his twin bed. “Don’t tell your daddy please. He’d just worry. And don’t tell your brothers and sister. I’m so ashamed, and I want to get well again. I’ve got a sponsor and I’m going to meetings, and I swear I’m going to kick this habit. I owe some money to the guy I used to buy from, and I’m working extra for the local gymnastics team to earn enough to pay him back. Once I do, I swear I’ll be free of this.”
“I won’t tell anyone,” Ryan had said, battening down the hatches, locking up his brain, some sort of self-preservation kicking in. It was all he’d been able to do. Zip it up, keep it quiet, and never speak of what he saw.
He never said a word.
Even when she met Luke at those meetings. Even when she fell for another recovered addict. Even when she was first questioned by police, and it all came to light that she’d not only been having an affair with that former addict at the time of the murder, but that she’d made a string of phone calls for two months to a man named Jerry Stefano. Why was she talking to him so much, the cops wanted to know?
She’d begged Ryan again to stay quiet. She’d shut the door to his room, planted her hands on his shoulders, and given him instructions. “They haven’t found the person who shot your daddy. And they’re asking me all kinds of questions, and I’m petrified they’re going to try to frame me for his murder. You know what we talked about?”
Ryan had nodded as fear rippled through him.
“If the police know I used drugs, if they know I bought them from Jerry Stefano, it will look so much worse for me. They know I’ve been on the phone with Jerry for months. I’m going to have to tell a lie about all those phone calls. He’s been calling to collect money, and if they know I was buying from him, they’ll paint me as a druggie, murderer wife.”
“But wouldn’t they see you’re innocent if you tell them about the drugs? Won’t it be better to have them know you bought drugs than to have them think you planned a murder?” he’d asked, trying desperately to understand why she didn’t confess her secret.
She shook her head. Vehemently. “No. Never. Trust me. It will look worse, and I have to beat this rap. So I have no choice but to lie about Jerry. Luke is the only other one who knows the truth about those phone calls.”
Luke and Ryan.
That was all.
Now, years later as an adult, Ryan was asking the only other person who knew if he’d broken their silence. “Did you tell the detective that Stefano was her dealer?”
Luke shook his head, rose, and turned up the air conditioning in his piano room. The sound of the whirring grew louder, as if Luke was using it as a buffer to cover up this conversation. Ryan bristled inside, because he so often did the same thing. He’d cranked up tunes in his car when he’d told Shannon details of the case.
Luke held up his palm, as if he were swearing in court. “I did not say a word. Her last wish before she went away was for me to keep that secret,” he said, his voice trembling. “She was terrified of Stefano. You never met him, Ryan, and I pray you never do. You bump into a guy like Stefano on the street and you run the other way.” There was rabid fear in his eyes as he offered this strange piece of advice.
Ryan crossed his arms. He didn’t want advice from his mom’s lover. Besides, he wasn’t afraid. Not of Stefano and not of men like the scumbag who’d killed his father. “I’m not scared of men who deal drugs to fucking mothers and children,” he said, practically spitting out the words.
Luke’s gray eyes widened, and he grabbed Ryan’s arm. “She was petrified of what would happen if people knew she was connected to him,” he pleaded.
“But their plan didn’t work. Their cover-up failed,” Ryan said, reminding him that the lies his mom had told didn’t save her from jail. The truth would have tethered her more closely to the Royal Sinners, so she’d fashioned a fable. She’d said all those phone calls to Stefano were for tree trimming, and he’d said the same. That was Stefano’s day job—a laborer at a tree-trimming company, so when she was asked about the string of calls, she’d claimed she’d hired him “under the table” to clean up some overgrown branches. It was the kind of work she couldn’t have her teenage sons do since it required specialty saws and tools. That was all true and completely plausible.
And the tale seemed to work at first for both Stefano and Ryan’s mom. For a brief while, their story did the trick. Botched robbery—that was how the murder looked to authorities, and Stefano seemed clean.
Until the detectives found Stefano’s fingerprints on the gun he’d disposed of, and the man started singing about how he’d been hired for much more than tree-trimming.
Stefano served it all up, and the lie unraveled.
He told the cops he’d been contracted to kill. He said the calls to Dora weren’t to cut overgrown branches—they were to plan the murder and to make it look like a robbery gone wrong. He alleged he’d been promised ten percent of Thomas Paige’s life insurance policy if he pulled it off.
The life insurance company went next, supplying more evidence. They confirmed that Dora had called a few months before the death to make a “routine check” on the beneficiary information on behalf of her husband, then six days after the murder to try to liquidate the funds.
In her defense, Dora maintained her husband had asked her to check on the policy and that was why she’d phoned the company months before his death. For him, she’d said. He was busy working, and asked her to check up on various pieces of paperwork. As for accessing the payout, she pointed out that if she’d killed him for money wouldn’t she have called hours later for the cash? No, she’d waited a week.
A week. She hung her hope on time.
The jury didn’t buy it.
She could have admitted to the drugs then, but it was too late for her. The case was so far beyond drugs. The state had Stefano and his testimony, they had the life insurance proof, and they had circumstantial evidence—she was having an affair at the time of the murder.
They had her, beyond a reasonable doubt, the jury said.
Admitting to drug using and buying, to money owed to dealers, wouldn’t have done a damn thing to change the fate of either Stefano or Ryan’s mom.
“Don’t mention the drugs,” she’d begged Ryan before she left for Stella McLaren. “It won’t make a difference now. I will keep fighting to be free, and it will look worse for me if this gets out. I’ll try to find a way to get the guys who really did it. I have to take the fall now, but please know I will be appealing. I will do everything I can to be with my children again.”