A Mother’s Alibi

Chapter One

The woman had a master’s from a top university, and a few days ago she killed the husband she had married a week earlier, Greg Wood.

The first thing she said to me was to ask where her stepdaughter was.

I had never seen anyone care that much about a child she barely knew.

I had seen Zoe Carter’s photo, but when she stepped out of a room in the detention center, she still caught me off guard.

She looked younger than thirty-eight, maybe early thirties. About five foot seven, fine features, a clean, steady kind of beauty.

She was pale, yet there was a calm elegance about her. Even as a woman, I felt a split-second of vertigo when I first saw her.

Her eyes held something else, a hard resolve that made you ache and kept you guessing.

The woman with the master’s from a top school had killed her husband a week into the marriage, Greg Wood.

He was forty-three, from Fayette County, Alabama, and had only finished grade school. He ran restaurants in the city for more than ten years, then the business folded two years ago, partly because of the pandemic. Before he died he worked security at a small factory outside downtown. His ex-wife, from Hillsborough, North Carolina, died six months ago after an illness.

When she heard I had been hired by her ex-husband, Liam Archer, Zoe only nodded. She didn’t look surprised.

She went quiet, then asked, urgent, “Do you know how Kayla is?”

I knew that look. I see it in my own mirror. I am a mother too. Still, I had never met someone who worried so much about a stepdaughter she barely knew.

She had a pair of small, sharp canine teeth, and when she smiled they lit up her sad face.

If not for the stubborn, weathered light in her eyes, people might still see the trace of girlish innocence she once had.

“I heard they haven’t found another guardian yet, so the county placed her in a children’s home. Don’t worry, she should be safe there and looked after,” I said.

“She won’t be fine in a children’s home, Attorney Parker, can I plead not guilty?”

“In most criminal cases a not-guilty plea is hard to win. Sometimes it even backfires, so we have to be careful. It isn’t impossible. I need to know the entire picture, every step of what happened, what led up to it, and how it ended. I need to know what facts and circumstances point to your innocence. Only after I understand the case can I study it against the law and decide whether a not-guilty plea makes sense for you.”

I liked her the moment we met. It was that feeling when you recognize your own. There was a fierce mother’s instinct in her eyes, and it drew me in.

“Then I’ll start with when I moved in next door to him,” she said after a pause, reaching back for the days just before everything blew up.

Paid Content

游客，Hello! To view the hidden content of this post, please purchase access from the author.50Coin

立即购买