The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes

  “I kept waiting for you to suggest a therapist on your own.” Jack rubbed her back. “You usually go when you have a problem. Then I remembered that the woman you used to go to—Janet? Was that her name?”

  “Yes,” Eve whispered.

  “I remembered she moved away and that you might not know who to go to. It’s hard when you’re a therapist yourself and have to find someone who…you know…who you won’t cross paths with professionally. But you really need to, Eve. I’ve never seen you like this. You’ve lost so much weight. You’re depressed, watching TV all the time. I don’t know what to do. How to help you. And Cory’s made it harder for you, cutting you out the way she has. She’ll come around. When she has a baby, she’s going to want her mommy.”

  “I’m sorry I’ve worried you so much,” she said into his shoulder.

  “It’s going to be okay,” he said. “I’m here for you.”

  She loved how he was rubbing her back, but she didn’t deserve his comfort and she sat up straight again.

  “Can we talk about this tomorrow?” she asked.

  He ran his hands down her arms, his love-filled eyes worried as they searched her face. Lying to him, keeping secrets from the man who had loved her for so many years, suddenly seemed like the greatest crime of all.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  She went back to bed with him, but didn’t even try to sleep. Instead, she stared at the dark ceiling, thinking. Jack was right that she needed help. She felt crazy, driven part by impulse, part by emotion. By five in the morning, when the birds started chirping in the yard outside their bedroom window, she’d made up her mind. The cost of doing something would be terrific; the cost of doing nothing even greater.

  She got out of bed at six. Her body ached, but the pain in her heart was worse—prickly and sharp. In the kitchen, she made coffee and heard the sound of Jack’s alarm clock. She poured the coffee into two mugs and carried them into the bedroom.

  He’d turned on the shower and was starting to take off his T-shirt when she walked into the bathroom.

  “I need to talk to you,” she said.

  He looked at her, his gaze falling to the mugs in her hands. “Can it wait until after my shower?”

  She shook her head slowly, and he hesitated only a moment before turning off the water.

  “Okay,” he said, taking one of the mugs from her. He followed her to the armchairs by the bay window.

  She sat down, resting her mug on the small table near her chair, afraid the tremor in her hands might cause her to spill it.

  “Is this about our conversation last night?” he asked.

  Oh, how she wished it were that simple! She shook her head. She didn’t want to hurt him, but there was no way to do this without pain all around.

  “There’s something I’ve never told you,” she said. “Something terrible. And I’m so, so sorry.”

  He tilted his head to the side as if trying to guess her secret. She imagined the naïveté in his thoughts: She’d been molested as a child. She’d been married before she ever met him. Nothing he could imagine would prepare him for what she was about to say.

  “I thought I knew all there was to know about you.” He was steeling himself; she could tell by the way he held his coffee cup with both hands.

  “Eve Bailey is not my real name,” she said. “Not the name I was born with.”

  He frowned, waiting for more.

  “My name was CeeCee Wilkes.”

  “What? Are you…are you kidding me?”

  She shook her head. “The things you know about me growing up are basically true,” she said. “My father disappeared when I was little. My mother died when I was twelve. I lived in foster homes after that. But I never did live in Oregon.”

  “You lived in Portland,” he said, as if reminding her.

  “I didn’t. I’ve never even been to Oregon.”

  “Why did you tell me you grew up there?”

  “I’ll get to that,” she said. She was taking the long way around the barn, but could think of no other way to tell him. “When I was sixteen, I worked in a little coffee shop in Chapel Hill and…” She looked out the window, where the early-morning sun filled the yard with a lemony light.

  “Eve,” Jack said. “Please don’t drift off. What are you trying to tell me?”

  She shifted her focus to her husband’s eyes. “I know Timothy Gleason,” she said. “I mean, I knew him. He was my boyfriend when I was sixteen.”

  Jack sat back in the chair. “Are you…tell me you’re making this up. Please.”

  “I wish I were,” she said. “He was a customer at the coffee shop. I fell in love with him. I…” She pressed her hands together in her lap. “It’s so hard to explain how I could have done something like this.” Her mind raced ahead to all she knew, all Jack didn’t know and was going to have to hear. It was overwhelming, but she’d started and now she needed to finish.

  “Tim was a member of an underground organization called SCAPE,” she said. “He mentioned it during his testimony. Do you remember?”

  “I wasn’t hanging on every word of the testimony,” Jack nearly snapped. “Now I understand why you were.” He narrowed his eyes at her. “Do you still have feelings for him? Is that what this is about?”

  “Oh, no, honey.” She was stunned he’d jumped to that conclusion. “It’s nothing like that.”

  “What is SCAPE?” he asked.

  “An organization against the death penalty. I don’t even remember what the letters stand for. He was against it because of his sister being on death row.”

  “The sister he was trying to get out of prison.”

  “Right. See, he lied to me. He told me she’d killed a photographer after he raped her, and—”

  “I thought the photographer she killed was a woman,” Jack said.

  “Exactly,” Eve said. “That’s what I mean about him lying. He tried to win my sympathy for his sister by saying she’d been raped.”

  Jack looked frustrated. “What the hell does this have to do with you having a different name?”

  “I’m getting there,” she said. “He wanted me to be sympathetic to his sister because he needed to…to use me. I had no idea, though. I thought he was in love with me. He was much older than I was and I was so…God, I was so seduced by his attention. After a while, he told me about his plan to kidnap Genevieve Russell.”

  “I’m afraid of where this is going.” Jack wore the expression he usually saved for their daughters when one of them did something seriously wrong. It didn’t fit the lines of his face. When he looked like that, she sometimes didn’t recognize him.

  “It’s unimaginable now,” she said, “but I got swept up in the whole thing. I thought his sister had been treated unjustly, and I was—” she shook her head “—I was actually touched that he loved her so much he was willing to turn his life upside down to help her. He persuaded me to watch…to guard…Genevieve Russell in that cabin. The one on the Neuse River.”

  “Where her body was found?”

  She nodded.

  “Did you kill her?” he whispered.

  She started to cry, her hand over her mouth. Unable to speak, she shook her head so he didn’t have to wait any longer for her answer. She wanted him to touch her, to put his arms around her in comfort the way he usually did, but he sat like a rock in the armchair, his untouched coffee still clenched between his hands.

  She wiped a tear from her cheek with her fingers, then cleared her throat. “She went into labor while I was alone with her,” she said. “I was so scared. I was sixteen and knew next to nothing about pregnancy and labor. At first I thought she was faking, but when I realized she wasn’t, I…I just panicked.” She was speaking quickly now. She felt manic, anxious to get it all out. “I didn’t know where there was a hospital and it was night and we were out in the middle of nowhere,” she said. “I wanted to get her in the car but it was too late. The baby was on its way. She delivered it on a bed in the cabin and I used a
knife to cut the cord. That was the bloody knife they found in the grave with her. It wasn’t used to kill her. No one killed her. When the baby was born, Genevieve started hemorrhaging. She had red hair and she told me redheads had a tendency to hemorrhage after childbirth, and—”

  “That’s why you told Cory about—”

  She watched the light dawn in Jack’s eyes. They flew open wide, and he stood up abruptly, his full mug falling to the carpet. “No,” he said. “Please tell me Cory isn’t…” His voice trailed off.

  She nodded, looking up at him. “I wrapped her in a blanket and drove to the house of some other SCAPE members,” she said. “I was hysterical. A mess. I stayed there a few days and—”

  Jack turned away from her and walked out of the room. In a moment, she heard the back door slam shut. She sat still, but it was as though her muscles were shaking inside her skin. She felt a little as she had that night in the cabin: she knew she had to do something quickly, but she wasn’t sure what it was. Should she go to Jack? He wouldn’t welcome her now, but she had so much to do and time was critical. It was nearly seven-thirty. What time would the jury meet to deliberate Tim’s sentence?

  She stood up, then went into the backyard to find Jack sitting on the bench in the garden, head lowered to his hands.

  He looked up when she neared him. “I don’t know you,” he said. “I’ve never known you.”

  “Yes, you do.” She sat down next to him on the bench. “You know me better than anyone. You know the person I’ve been for nearly thirty years. Eve Bailey. The person I grew up to be.”

  “How could you…” His voice trailed off as he shook his head. “How could you keep her? Why didn’t you make sure Russell got his daughter?”

  “I tried. The people who were helping me gave me new identification as well as identification for Cory. They gave me Marian’s name and told me to—”

  “Marian?” He looked stunned.

  “She was involved…peripherally involved with SCAPE because of her husband’s execution.”

  “I can’t picture Marian allowing you to—”

  “Marian didn’t know anything except that I needed a safe place to live,” Eve said. “She didn’t want to know anything else. When I was driving to her house—to Charlottesville—I tried to drop the baby off at the governor’s mansion in Raleigh, but there were guards everywhere. I tried to put her in a police car, but the alarm went off when I opened the door and I ran. I didn’t know what to do. Jack, please understand! I was a kid. I barely knew how to drive the car I was in, much less how to get the baby to Irving Russell. When I got to Marian’s, she assumed Cory was mine. By that time, I was in love with her. With Cory. I felt it was my duty to keep her safe. To be worthy of having her. To take care of her the way Genevieve would.”

  Jack shook his head slowly. “This is so sick,” he said.

  “I know it sounds that way and I know this is too much to lay on you at once,” she said. “It must sound horrible to you. Beyond horrible. I did those things, though, and I can’t undo them.” She looked at her watch and saw that her hand, her entire arm was shaking.

  “I don’t know you,” Jack repeated. “The woman I know would never have kept someone else’s baby.”

  “I wasn’t a woman.” She began crying again, or maybe she hadn’t stopped. “I was a girl. But I’m not telling you all this to make excuses for myself.”

  “So, why are you telling me all of this?”

  “Because…because Tim hasn’t given me away. Do you see that?” She grabbed Jack’s hand. It felt like a cool, hard stone beneath her palm. “Tim wasn’t even there when Genevieve died.” She wanted him to understand. “I was the only one there. I’m the only person who knows he didn’t kill her. He knows I was there, but he’s protecting me. Protecting CeeCee.”

  “Stop saying that name!” Jack pulled his hand away from hers. “I don’t know who that person is.”

  “It’s me. It’s who I was then. And Tim knows that if he says his old girlfriend, CeeCee Wilkes, was there, they’ll start a manhunt for CeeCee and it would lead them right here.” She shuddered. “Right here. I’ve been waiting for that,” she said. “Waiting for the subpoena. The cops at the door.” She looked through the grape arbor toward the front of the house as though she might see a police car on the street. “That’s why I’ve been so crazy lately. I’m not…depressed, Jack. I’m terrified and guilty and ashamed of myself. That’s why I’ve been glued to the TV. I was waiting for Tim to say I was there, but he didn’t say a word. He’s taking the bullet for me. For CeeCee. And today they’ll probably give him the death sentence for a murder I know he didn’t commit.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I have to go public. I have to—”

  “Oh, no, you certainly do not.” Jack shook his head again.

  “I’ve thought it through,” she said. “I can’t let him pay for something he didn’t do.”

  “Why the fuck not?”

  She had never—never—heard Jack use that word.

  “He’s the criminal.” Jack waved his arms through the air. “If he’d been there instead of you, he probably would have ended up murdering her.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “And he wasn’t there. I was. I know what happened. He’s guilty of a lot of things, but he’s not guilty of murder.”

  “So let me get this straight,” Jack said. “You’re willing to destroy your life—because that’s what this will do, Eve. Have no doubt about it. Your career will be over. Maybe mine, too. You’re willing to do that and to drag me through the mud with you. Drag Dru through the mud with you. And worst of all, turn Cory’s world upside down and…oh, God.” He pressed his fingers to his temples. “I can’t even imagine what this will do to Cory,” he said.

  “I know,” she whispered. “That scares me.”

  “This will be the end of your relationship with her,” he warned. “Maybe with all the people you’ve betrayed.”

  “With you?” she asked tentatively.

  He ignored the question. “All to save this scummy son of a bitch from a fate he deserves?”

  She fell silent, letting his words sink in. He wanted there to be a pat solution to this problem. If he could give her one, she would grab it, but she knew better.

  “There’s no way you can prove you didn’t…cut the baby out of Genevieve Russell and murder her yourself,” he said.

  She hadn’t thought of that. “I’ll have to take that chance.”

  “You’ll go to prison, Eve!”

  “I know.” She remembered sitting on this bench the night before, looking at the night sky. She was going to lose the stars and the moon. She was going to lose Cory. She had to call her before she did anything else. She looked at her watch again. Nearly nine. Cory would be in the classroom by now.

  Jack seemed to read her mind. “This Russell thing is in the tabloids,” he said. “Do you want Cory in the tabloids, too? Do you want everyone in the grocery store to know her life story?”

  “Maybe I can protect her some—”

  “Dream on! You’ve got to think this through, Eve.”

  “That’s all I’ve been doing for weeks,” she said quietly.

  “You’re already flaring. Can you imagine how much sicker you could get in prison?” He suddenly got to his feet, raising his arms in the air as he spun around to look at her. “I can’t believe I’m talking about my wife going to prison!” he said. “This is insane.”

  “If I don’t come forward, I’m going to get sicker anyway,” she said. “This is why I’ve been flaring, Jack. I can’t carry the guilt around with me any longer. I’m sorry to put you and the girls in such a terrible position, but please, try to imagine yourself in my place.”

  “Very, very difficult,” Jack said.

  “You don’t know what you might have done if you’d been in my shoes when you were sixteen,” she said.

  “I never would have gotten myself mixed up with a scheme like that, and that I
do know.”

  “I made stupid choices,” she said. “I admit it. But imagine you did do what I did and now you’re watching someone take the fall for you. Does it matter what sort of person he is? Does that matter, Jack?”

  He said nothing, and she knew she’d hit a nerve in him. Jack was a good man, and she’d struck him in the heart of that goodness with her question.

  He looked away from her, running his hand over his chin. “I need time to digest this,” he said.

  “That’s the thing,” she said. “I don’t have time. I’ve taken too much time being afraid to say anything. And today he’s going to be sentenced. I need to do it today.”

  “No,” he said firmly. “This is not just your life you’re talking about, Eve. Or whoever the hell you are. This is my life, too. And your daughters’. You may think you need to come to the aid of that scumbag in prison, but I think you’ve forgotten who really matters. You’re putting him ahead of your family.”

  Was she? Oh, God. Should she swallow her integrity for the sake of her family? It would be so much easier, but she was certain it wouldn’t be right.

  “None of us is going to die if I tell what I know,” she said. “But Tim is almost certainly going to die if I don’t.”

  “Ask me if I care,” Jack said.

  “I just…I have to do it, Jack. I’m sorry.”

  “This is unreal.” He looked at her and she was afraid she saw hatred in his eyes. “You’re unreal.” He looked toward the house. “I’ve got to get out of here,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I said. I’m going to get dressed and go to my office, and I hope by the time I get home tonight, this whole…this mess will turn out to be a bad dream.”

  She stood up, grabbing his arm. “Don’t go,” she said. “Please. I have to figure out what to do now, and I need you to help me think through how to do it.”

  “That’s asking a lot, Eve.” He shrugged his arm out of her grasp. “You seem bent on doing something that’s going to hurt everybody you supposedly care about. Where do you get off asking for my blessing?” He turned away from her and walked toward the house.