My Husband Framed Me for His Mistress's Crash novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Driver's Seat
Laurel wakes in handcuffs behind the wheel with a dead man in the road, the seat pushed to the front notch, and the husband who put her there; she asks for a lawyer, records his lie on a jail line, and ends the day facing his mistress wearing her mother's pearls.
A police officer locked handcuffs on my wrists while I sat in the driver's seat of my husband's car.
Red and blue lights filled the windshield.
My knees were jammed against the steering wheel.
In the headlights, a dented aluminum lunch pail lay on its side in the road.
Past it, a white sheet covered a man.
I'm five foot ten. The seat was pushed all the way forward, to the last notch, and my legs didn't fit.
"Ma'am, stay with me," the officer said. "Keep your hands where I can see them."
My tongue was thick and my thoughts came slowly.
The last clear thing I remembered was 11:20 p.m., on the road home from Marshall's campaign gala.
I had tipped the passenger seat back and closed my eyes.
Marshall had leaned forward from the back seat and set a pill in my palm.
"Take your pill, sweetheart. Melanie's driving."
I had taken a pill every night for two years, since we lost our daughter, Wren.
Marshall handed it to me himself, with a glass of water, every night.
He hadn't driven at night in all that time either.
Melanie Mullins ran his campaign. She was also sleeping with him.
I had known for months, from the red lipstick on the rims of his coffee cups.
She was five foot two, in gold four-inch heels.
In the hotel garage she had yanked the driver's seat all the way forward so she could reach the pedals.
Marshall had finished four bourbons and wanted to lie down in back.
I swallowed the pill. When my eyes closed, the two of them were arguing about a missed turn.
Now Melanie was gone.
The passenger door hung open. On the windshield, the dashcam mount hung by one torn wire.
The passenger seat was still tipped back, with Marshall's wool coat spread across it, right where I had been sleeping.
The officer walked over to the hood to talk to Marshall. I could hear every word.
"She insisted on driving," Marshall said. "I'd had a few. I should have stopped her."
He rubbed his eyes.
"She never even got out of the car. She just sat there."
Then he came to my window, bent down, and tucked my hair behind my ear.
He used to do that only when nobody was looking. Now he did it only when somebody was.
Across the street, a neighbor in a bathrobe stood on her porch with her phone raised.
"You took your pill, Laurel," Marshall whispered. "You don't remember anything. Let me handle this."
He had forgotten who he was talking to.
Eight years ago, the prosecutors in this county prayed they wouldn't draw me at trial.
I was a defense lawyer, and I never lost.
Then I married one of those prosecutors, and he told me one lawyer in the family was enough.
The officer came back to my window. "Ma'am, were you driving this vehicle?"
I could have said Melanie's name.
My words were slurring, though, and I would sound like every drunk who ever blamed a ghost.
So I asked for a lawyer and said nothing else.
While he wrote, I cataloged the details: the seat at the front notch, the torn wire on the mount, the tipped seat under Marshall's coat.
My left earring was gone too.
At the scene, the officer had me blow into a small machine. It read 0.00. He frowned and tapped it twice.
At the station, he held up my evening bag and pulled out an orange pill bottle.
ZOLPIDEM 10 MG, with my own name on the label.
"Sleeping pills and driving, ma'am."
I didn't argue. The bottle was mine, and arguing at one in the morning in a ballgown would only help Marshall.
At 7:05 a.m., a guard in the county jail let me make one call.
A sign above the phone said ALL CALLS ARE RECORDED.
Good. I wanted it recorded.
I called Marshall and kept my question small. "Where were you sitting, Marshall?"
"Don't talk on this line, honey."
He slowed down, the way he did for juries.
"I was in the passenger seat. You insisted on driving. I begged you."
I shut my eyes.
His story now had a time stamp, in his own voice. If it ever changed, I would have the first version.
At 3:30 that afternoon, in an orange jumpsuit, I was walked to the visiting window.
Melanie sat on the other side of the glass.
Around her neck were my mother's pearls.
I knew them by the chipped pearl at the clasp, the one I had rubbed with my thumb since I was nine.
They had been in the box on my dresser yesterday.
This morning, while I sat in a cell, she had been in my bedroom.
Melanie picked up the phone and touched the pearls with two fingers.
"Marshall said you won't need these where you're going."
Then she hung up on me.
"Kershaw," the guard called. "Your lawyer's here."
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