Letters in the Attic(61)
“I just—” Susan took three or four quick breaths and then steadied herself. “I wasn’t trying to hurt you, Archer. I didn’t want to make you mad. You wanted—you wanted me to be somebody I couldn’t be. I could never live up to everything you demanded in a girlfriend. I knew it would only get worse if I was your wife.”
“Worse?” He shook his head, undisguised disbelief on his face. “I gave you everything. You never stepped outside without being covered in jewels, dressed in the latest fashions from New York and Paris. I gave you a European sports car. Once we were married, you would have had half a dozen mansions to live in, people to wait on you hand and foot, and whatever else you wanted day or night. That would have been worse?”
“I didn’t want those things, Archer. I never wanted those things. You wanted those things for you, not for me. I had to wear certain clothes, drive a certain car, know certain people, look a certain way because that’s what Archer Prescott’s girlfriend was supposed to do. But you never listened to what Susan Morris wanted.” A tear trickled out of the corner of Susan’s eye. “What she needed.”
Prescott snorted. “Don’t give me that. You loved all that stuff. Every woman does. But I picked you. I picked you to be my wife, and you threw it all in my face.”
“You didn’t want a wife. You wanted a Barbie doll. You wanted something you could dress up and carry around with you to impress your friends.”
“Why did you agree to marry me in the first place? If I was such a jerk, why did you say yes?”
Susan wiped her face with both hands. “I thought you loved me. I really thought you did. Everybody told me you must, the way you showered me with presents all the time. Every time you screamed at me and told me I was stupid, and it was a good thing I had you to take care of me, I thought somewhere inside, you must love me. I thought we’d work things out in time. I thought maybe you just didn’t realize how I felt, and I was afraid if I told you I’d lose you too.” She glanced at Annie, her eyes pleading for understanding. “But then I realized I couldn’t dress perfect and act perfect and feel perfect all the time. I wasn’t a fashion model, and I didn’t want to always dress like one. I wasn’t a high society girl. I couldn’t play that forever. I wasn’t what you wanted, and no matter how much you pushed me, I couldn’t be what you wanted. And after that night on the boat, that night we were docked at Brockton—” Again she glanced at Annie. “Archer, I knew you’d never let me go. I had to do something.”
“So how’d you pull it off?” He looked her up and down. “How in the world did you ever have the courage to pull it off?”
Susan swallowed hard and then straightened her shoulders, daring to look him in the eye. “I didn’t sleep at all that night. I just kept thinking about what you said. ‘Once we’re married, nobody can ever make you testify against me.’ I knew after that, you’d never let me go. I knew that, if I tried to leave, you’d just come after me. There was nothing else I could do.”
Annie bit her lip. “But why—?”
“Why didn’t I tell someone? Why didn’t I get help? I had no family anymore. No real friends. Nobody to look after me anymore. You’ve obviously never been around someone with his kind of money, with his connections. Make the wrong man mad, and you end up in a ‘rest home’ for people with mental issues or a ‘treatment center’ for those with a tragic addiction to pain medication. Or maybe you accidentally overdose on some designer drug that happens to be popular at the time, something he’d been begging you to get treatment for for months and months. Or maybe you just disappear.” She glanced at Archer. “Wasn’t that how you explained it to me in Brockton?”
He looked her up and down, blatant contempt on his face. “You never were very smart, you know. You probably would have made me do something like that, in time.”
“I guess I decided I’d rather disappear on my terms than yours.”
“I still want to know how you did it. You had no money. No friends.”
“Yes, you made sure of that. But you forgot the jewelry. Those diamond solitaire earrings and the matching bracelet, the ones I was wearing when I left the boat, were fakes. While you were having lunch with that stock trader in Brentwood, I pawned the real ones, bought some cheap replacements, and hid the money. You had told me not to leave the boat, and usually I was scared enough that I didn’t. That day, I was too scared not to. I had just gotten back aboard when you showed up. I remember thinking you could hear my heart pounding and being sure you knew where I had been.”