Chapter 8 - What the Judge Saw
Chapter 8 - What the Judge Saw
Judge Halloran set the hearing for Thursday morning at nine, and Rachel told me to wear the beige sweater I had on at the party, and I did, because for once I wanted the video to match who I was instead of who Nick said I was being.
The courtroom was small, the kind they use for family matters in the old building downtown, with fluorescent lights and a heater that hummed.
Nick sat on the other side of the aisle with an attorney I didn't recognize, a tall man in a charcoal suit who kept looking at his phone.
Ellen was not on the witness list.
She came anyway.
She walked in through the back doors at eight fifty-five with her hair pulled back and her gold earrings on and she sat on my side of the aisle, one row behind me, and she didn't say anything to me or anybody until the bailiff called her name.
Rachel played the twenty-two-second clip first.
The screen on the wooden cart at the side of the room showed my husband's face shifting from concern to fury, and my daughter's face squinched up with her mouth already open, and I watched the judge watch the screen and then watch Nick.
She asked the clip be played again.
It ran again.
Nick's attorney stood up and said the clip was taken out of context, that a two-year-old grabbing a phone off a table is 'a routine parenting moment' and that the video had been 'manipulated and selectively framed by a third party with her own motivations.'
Judge Halloran wrote something down and asked the clerk to play the driveway footage next.
That footage was eleven minutes long, and Rachel only ran the first sixteen minutes of it before the judge held up a hand and told her to stop.
The clip showed Ellen's car rolling up the driveway, Nick walking out with the white envelope, Ellen tucking it into the paper bag, Nick leaning in close to say something to her, and then both of them walking back to the house like they were in the same family.
Judge Halloran looked at Nick's attorney and said, "I'm going to give your client a chance to explain the transfer."
Nick testified about being a widower's son before he testified about anything else, and how his mother 'would have wanted the house to stay in the family,' and how the payments to Ellen were 'loans' for a cousin he'd 'helped out for years.'
Then Rachel called me up.
I testified for thirty-one minutes.
I testified about the second phone I found in the gym bag and read the message aloud from the exhibit folder, and I saw Judge Halloran's pen stop on the page.
I testified about the trust condition I was never told about, that the lake house passes to Nick outright only if his child reaches school age, and that if it doesn't, it goes to 'the issue of Ellen Marsh,' which I learned for the first time from a sticky note and not from my husband of nine years.
I testified about the money missing from the joint account, and I gave the totals, and I gave dates.
Nick's attorney tried to ask me whether I had ever met Ellen before that day, and whether I had any personal reason to 'manufacture a conflict,' and I said no, I had never met her, and the only reason I remembered her at all was the smile, which I had seen one time before, at Nick's mother's will reading, on his aunt's face.
Then Ellen was called.
She stood up and walked to the front and raised her hand like she had done it before, which it turned out she had, once, in a different county, over a different thing, years ago.
She told the judge exactly what she had been paid, and how long, and why.
She told the judge she had been mailing certified letters to the trust attorney for eighteen months and never got an answer.
She told the judge about the arm.
She was on the stand for twenty minutes, and not once did she look at Nick.
When she stepped down, Judge Halloran read the order into the record, and I remember it exactly because Rachel wrote it on the back of her legal pad and gave it to me afterward.
Protective order granted for me and for Ellie.
Trust disbursement frozen pending a full accounting.
Guardian ad litem appointed for my daughter.
And Nick was ordered to surrender his firearms within twenty-four hours and stay sixty yards from the house.
His attorney said something about an appeal, and the judge said he could file it, and the courtroom emptied out the way courtrooms do, all business, no drama.
I walked out into the hallway and Ellen was standing by the water fountain with her purse over her shoulder, and she pulled out a small envelope, folded in half, and she handed it to me.
"Read this one alone," she said.
"It's the part I couldn't say in there."
May you like
I took it.
I put it in my coat pocket and drove straight to my sister's house and sat on the back porch with it in my hands for forty minutes before I opened it.
