My Husband Framed Me. I Took It All. Chapter 10

My Husband Framed Me. I Took It All. Chapter 10: The Woman Who Didn’t Exist

Margaret Vale hired a lawyer in March.

Her name was Naomi Pryce. Boston. Former federal prosecutor. She specialized in wrongful convictions and charged eight hundred dollars an hour, and she had never once, in eleven years of practice, been retained by a client she could not meet.

Dee’s nephew sent the retainer from a bank in Augusta. Fifty thousand dollars. The same number Grant had paid for Daniel. I’d chosen it on purpose..

The instructions were simple. Locate Calvin Reeves, released from federal custody in Pennsylvania eleven

months prior. Locate Renee Duclos, former girlfriend. Obtain financial records for Ridgeline Consulting LLC, Boston. Obtain phone records for Grant Ashford, September of the year Daniel died. Do not contact Elena Ashford at Blackridge. Report only to the Augusta box.

Napmi Pryce wrote back in April.

Ms. Vale. I don’t take anonymous clients. But I read Elena Ashford’s trial transcript last night and I couldn’t

sleep. Reeves is in a hospice in Scranton. Stage four. I’m driving there Thursday.

I read that letter forty times.

Then I burned it in my sink and flushed the ash, and went to the warden’s office and laundered eleven

thousand dollars in kickbacks from a call center in Lewiston, and I smiled at Curtis Hollis and asked about

his grandchildren.

Reeves talked.

Dying men do. Naomi sat with him for three hours and he told her everything. The phone call, The gun

-handed to him in a parking garage by a man in a charcoal suit who wore driving gloves. The instruction to leave it in the silver Lexus in the third bay. The fifty thousand, half before, half after, wired to his sister’s account from a company called Ridgeline Consulting.

Ridgeline. The same shell Grant used to pay Hollis. He’d used one company to buy Daniel’s murder and my imprisonment.

He’d never even bothered to change the name,

Naomi got it on video. She got it notarized. She got a sworn affidavit from Renee Duclos, who cried through most of it. And then she did the thing I’d hoped and feared she’d do.

She came to Blackridge..

“You have a legal visitor,” the guard said, and my stomach dropped through the floor.

Naomi Pryce was fifty, sharp-eyed, with a briefcase she held like a weapon. She sat across from me in the attorney room and studied my face for a long time before she spoke.

“I’ve never met Margaret Vale,” she said. “But I’ve spent four months with her paperwork. Her handwriting

slants left. Yours does too.”

I said nothing.

“I’m not asking. I don’t want to know. What I want is to tell you that I have enough to file a motion to vacate by Friday, and enough to make the Suffolk County DA very interested in your husband’s bank records.” She leaned forward. “And I want to tell you that a man in a warden’s uniform watched me sign in and then made

a phone call in the hallway, and I didn’t like his face.”

“Curtis Hollis.”

The

“He knows you have counsel now.”

“Yes.”

“Is that a problem?”

I thought of Britt Kowalski laughing at dinner.

“File Friday,” I said. “And Ms. Pryce-if anything happens to me before then, there’s a Bible in my cell. Take it. Don’t let anyone else touch it.”

She looked at me for a long time. Then she nodded and stood.

Hollis was waiting for me outside the attorney room.

He walked me back to B-block himself. Slow. Friendly. His hand on my shoulder like a father.

“A lawyer, Elena. After all this time. How did you afford her?”

“Pro bono.”

“Of course.” He stopped at my cell door. Bergen was down the corridor, watching. Hollis didn’t seem to

notice. He leaned close, and his breath smelled of peppermint.

“Britt Kowalski had a lawyer too. Public defender. Nice young man. He filed something the week before she died.” He patted my shoulder. “Paperwork can be so dangerous, in here.”

Then he smiled, and let go, and walked away whistling.

I went into my cell. I sat on my bunk. I took down the Bible.

Friday was five days away.

I had to make it to Friday.