“I’m not talking about sex!”
“Then what are you talking about? You think it’s my fault we’re having trouble? How do you know it’s not you? Maybe you don’t like that I have to work so much, but I don’t like that you’re so needy. It makes my skin crawl.”
He actually shuddered. The minute that registered on her face, he wished he could take it back. It was the stress—the pressure he was under. Maybe Mercedes had gained some weight, and maybe she’d let herself go in other ways. He couldn’t help finding her drab and worn compared to the women who caught his eye. Compared to Peyton, who particularly appealed to him. But he still loved her. Didn’t he?
“I wasn’t needy until I married you,” she said. “You made me like this.” He heard their youngest daughter come into the living room then, yelling “Daddy!” and Mercedes dropped her voice. “And sometimes I hate you for it.”
“You hate me?”
He expected her to deny it. He’d taken her words out of context. She hadn’t really said she hated him. But she didn’t attempt to correct him; she stood there, glaring at him through those hazel eyes that seemed years older than when he’d looked into them last.
“Mercedes?” he prompted.
“I hate what you’ve turned me into,” she finally declared.
The tears that streamed down her cheeks made it possible for him to breathe again. She didn’t mean it. It wasn’t as if she’d ever leave him. “We’ll talk about it when I get back, okay? I promise. And…and maybe we’ll get counseling.” She’d been begging him to go to a therapist for more than a year. Maybe if he gave her that hope, she’d calm down and he’d be free to do what he had to do before dealing with his marriage.
“If we don’t get help, we won’t make it,” she told him dully, and turned, like a tired old hag in her sloppy sweats, to do the laundry.
Rick knew he should put his arms around her, comfort her, tell her he still loved her and offer a sincere apology. He could see how she’d feel used. When they made love, he pretended she was someone else, someone more attractive. And lately that someone had been Peyton. Fantasizing about another woman wasn’t the best thing for their relationship. He owed Mercedes more. But he couldn’t bring himself to touch her right now. He kept seeing Peyton’s bright eyes, beautiful face and perfect figure, and the contrast between them was just too great; he was losing all desire for his own wife.
Or maybe it was Mercedes’s fault for not taking better care of herself. If she was more attractive, he’d want her—as long as she could stop acting like a bitch when he needed a little understanding.
Regardless, they’d have to solve their problems later. If he didn’t make this flight, Laurel might not survive the night. Then he wouldn’t have the option to quit; he’d be fired.
“Listen, I—I’ll call you later, okay? I wouldn’t go tonight if I had any choice, but…something big is going on at work. Something that came down from the governor himself. This isn’t optional. It’s flattering that they’ve chosen me to implement it. And I would’ve told you I had to leave except…I knew it would upset you and I didn’t want to deal with the backlash. You can understand that, can’t you? I’m so tired of fighting.”
“You can’t be any more tired of it than I am,” she said.
“Daddy?” Ruby came to their bedroom. “You’re leaving again?” she asked, and the disappointment in her voice and on her face so mirrored her mother’s he could barely bring himself to swipe a kiss across her cheek.
“I’ll be back soon, princess,” he said, and went to tell his other daughter goodbye.
7
Peyton wanted to know more about the crime for which Virgil Skinner had lost fourteen years of his life. She also wanted to know more about his mother and his uncle and what they’d done to help or hurt him.
Figuring there had to be some details about him in the media, a piece on his exoneration if not the crime, she went online and began to search. Because he’d been incarcerated in Colorado, she first visited the website of the Denver Post and was pleasantly surprised to find an article dated two weeks ago.
Convicted Murderer Exonerated
After Fourteen Years
Virgil Skinner, thirty-two, was only eighteen when he was convicted for the murder of his stepfather, Martin Crawley, who was forty-six at the time. Given a life sentence for shooting Crawley with Crawley’s own gun, which was kept in the house, Skinner wasn’t expected to see a parole board for thirty years.
Enter Innocent America, an organization based in Los Angeles dedicated to freeing Americans wrongly convicted of crimes. “There are other organizations dedicated to exonerating, almost exclusively through DNA testing, wrongly convicted individuals,” said Lisa Higgleby, staff attorney for IA. “We’re here for all the rest. Barring DNA proof, it’s very difficult to get a conviction overturned, but a far greater percentage of people are faced with this type of case than one that can be cleared through the use of science.” According to Higgleby, the primary causes of wrongful conviction include witness misidentification, an incompetent or inadequate defense, the use of jailhouse informants and prosecutorial/police misconduct or mistakes.
For Skinner, however, it was the testimony of the one person he should have been able to trust—his mother—that sealed his fate. “If not for the way my mother protected my uncle, and herself, my brother would not have gone to prison and lost such a big chunk of his life,” said Laurel Hodges, Skinner’s sister, a divorced mother of two who has fought diligently for her brother’s freedom. It was Hodges who contacted Innocent America and convinced them to take a look at his case.
“Laurel’s faith in her brother was unyielding. I absolutely couldn’t tell her no,” said Higgleby. “But this case would never have reached a happy resolution without Geraldine Lawson.” Ex-wife to Skinner’s uncle, Lawson came forward with information about the night Crawley was killed that caused police to reopen the investigation.
Gary Lawson has since been charged with Martin Crawley’s murder and is being held without bail in Los Angeles while awaiting trial. Skinner’s own mother is suspected of asking her brother to carry out the murder, but no charges have yet been filed against her.
Comfortably dressed in sweats again now that she was back from taking Virgil to the motel, Peyton read the article twice, then searched the internet with Ellen Crawley and Ellen Lawson, in case she’d gone back to her maiden name, Geraldine Lawson, Martin Crawley, Virgil Skinner, even Laurel Hodges as keywords. But other than a short piece in the L.A. Times mentioning Ellen and Gary’s implication in the fourteen-year-old shooting, she came up empty-handed. During regular business hours, she could probably get hold of someone in the federal system who might agree to run his prisoner ID number. But since he’d been released, that might not give her much. She already knew where he’d been incarcerated, at least at the end of his sentence, and for how long. What she wanted was the rest of Virgil’s story….