“Mom, are you all right?” said my son Aaron on the telephone, in a low strained voice, and I nearly dropped the phone on the floor of my car. “Where are you? Please tell me you are somewhere safe.” I told him I was in the parking lot of the theater on Scottsville Road with a flyer for a nail salon in my lap. There was a silence on the line, and a murmur of other voices behind him, and a door closing. Then he said, “Mom, stay right there. I am with a detective, and we are coming.”
I sat in my car with the doors locked and the radio off. I did not understand. I thought of my son in Nashville, as he had told me, at a convention of building supply dealers. I thought of the desk clerk saying that nobody by his name was registered. And now here he was, on my telephone, in the company of a detective, saying that he was coming. Fifteen minutes later, an unmarked sedan pulled into the empty parking lot, and Aaron got out of the passenger side, in a wrinkled shirt, looking ten years older.
He came straight to my window and I rolled it down. He put both hands on the door frame and looked at me with eyes that were red from lack of sleep. “Mom, I am so sorry. I should have told you. I should have told you three weeks ago.” The detective, a woman named Reyes in a charcoal blazer, stood a respectful distance behind him, listening. I told them both what I had heard. I held up the flyer with its pink loopy handwriting. Detective Reyes took it with a gloved hand and nodded slowly.
A mother who sits in the shadows and keeps her face still has more power than she knows, and so does a son who finally begins to ask questions.
Aaron told me the story in the back seat of the sedan, with the heater running. In May, after Kendra had increased the life insurance policy, he had noticed the premium on the bank statement. He had called the company, who told him that the rider had been signed with a copy of his signature. He did not tell Kendra. He went instead to the police, quietly, and for six weeks he had been helping them build a case. The trip to Nashville had been a cover so that Kendra would feel safe to move forward.
There was more. The man in the shadows beside her, Jace Mullins, was not merely a lover. He had a record in two states for insurance fraud, and he had been working with a ring that targeted wealthy men with weak family ties. Detective Reyes had been watching Jace for four months.
She said that my account of the whisper in the theater was the missing piece. She had been waiting for a witness who could place the two of them together and describe the plan. “Mrs. Marsh,” she said, “you may have just saved your son life.”
I did not feel brave. I felt as if I had been hit by a truck. But I gave a full statement that night in a bright, hushed room at the police station, with a cup of bad coffee in front of me. I told them about the hand dryer, the beach scene, the cardigan, and the way Kendra had faltered in the middle of a sentence. Detective Reyes took it all down. When I was finished, she squeezed my hand and told me that I had a better memory than many of her colleagues.
They arrested Kendra and Jace on Saturday morning, at a motel outside Glasgow, with two phones, a notebook of dates, and a printed map of Barren River Lake. Both were charged with conspiracy to commit murder and insurance fraud. Kendra said nothing at first. Then, at a bond hearing, she looked across the courtroom at her husband with a small bright smile, as if they were two people at a dinner party, and I understood, finally, how thoroughly she had been performing for years.
Aaron moved into the spare room of my house for the winter. We spent long evenings in the kitchen, he and I, working through the strange new landscape of his life. He had loved her. That was the hardest part. He said it again and again, with his head in his hands, and I said what I could, which was that love is not a mistake because it was misplaced. In the spring, he began teaching a class on safe boating at the community center. He said it helped.
On Tuesdays I still go to the late show at the theater on Scottsville Road. Aaron comes with me now. We buy the five dollar tickets and a large popcorn, and we sit in the middle, about halfway back. Sometimes, when the lights go down, I glance over my shoulder at the empty seats behind us. Then my son reaches over and takes my hand, and the music swells, and we watch the love story together in the quiet of the theater.
