Page 45 of The Better Sister

The first witness, as Olivia had predicted, was Detective Guidry. She was the witness who established the basic facts about Adam’s murder: who he was, where he lived, how he died. I felt an entire courtroom of eyes follow me, including Ethan’s, as I walked out during Nunzio’s extensive PowerPoint display of Adam’s injuries. I had been the one to find him. I remembered pressing sofa cushions against the wounds, hoping I could somehow save him, even as I knew he was already gone. Before I let the door close behind me, I made a point of holding Ethan’s gaze, hoping he’d understand. It would not help his case to have the jury see me if I got sick again, like I had at the house that night.

I drove to the nearby Hyatt where Nicky and I had rented a room to have a place to hide as necessary during the trial, since the courthouse was nearly an hour away from East Hampton. For the next two hours, Nicky texted me updates from the remainder of Guidry’s direct examination. The alarm evidence, the items found in Ethan’s closet, the window that appeared to have been brokenafterthe house was ransacked. No surprises, at least.

I returned to the courthouse for a quick recess before Olivia would have a chance to cross-examine Guidry.

“Nunzio still hasn’t objected to us watching the trial?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“Is that unusual?”

“He’s probably worried about the optics. You’re a public figure. You’re also a widow and the defendant’s mother—mothers, really. I wouldn’t read into it, for now.”

It was hard to ignore thefor nowat the end of the sentence.

Olivia used her cross-examination to establish all of the evidence that the police lacked in their case against Ethan. No murder weapon, no DNA evidence, no blood found on Ethan or his clothing, and no bloody clothing found discarded near our home.

Olivia introduced a photograph of the block of knives on our kitchen counter. “Every slot here was occupied by a knife when you entered the house, correct?”

Guidry agreed.

“And the only other knives you found in the home were standard, silverware-style dinner knives?”

“That’s correct.”

“And certainly it wasn’t a standard dinner knife that inflicted the decedent’s injuries.”

“Definitely not.”

She repeated the same line of questioning with a photograph of the knife block in the city apartment.

The implication was clear. There was no evidence that the knife that was used to kill Adam came from either of our homes.

“In fact, Detective, you have no physical evidence whatsoever to tie Ethan to this crime, do you?”

“No, but—”

Olivia had nothing more for the witness. I thought I saw one of the jurors—the twenty-six-year-old woman who worked at the outlet mall—nod in my direction. Or maybe I imagined it because I needed something to hope for.

The first non-law-enforcement witness was Margaret Carter, the headmaster of Casden, Ethan’s high school. Margaret has an intentionally formal demeanor, but she doesn’t fit the stereotype of a prep school principal. She’s more Upper East Side wife material than English boarding school matron. Nunzio began by having Margaret summarize her own elite credentials (Phillips Exeter, Yale, then a master’s degree in education from Columbia), followed by what sounded like an advertisement for Casden itself. For ten years straight, the small school had representation in every single Ivy League university’s entering freshman class.

I remembered the two-pronged campaign I had spearheaded to get Ethan into Casden. One prong was getting him in. I pulled every string I could, including setting up a high school internship program for aspiring young writers atEve. The other was convincing Adam. Public schools had been good enough for the both of us, in his view. We would have killed for the opportunities that a school like Casden could provide, and Ethan would simply take it for granted. I tried to convince him that Ethan was only indifferent to school because he wasn’t sufficiently challenged. Once he was in an institution like Casden, he’d rise to the occasion. I eventually prevailed, but Adam made it clear that it was only because he wanted to pacify me, not because he agreed.

I never thought it would lead to having Margaret testify against Ethan at his murder trial.

Once Nunzio was done with background information about the school, he established that Ethan was completing his sophomore year at Casden when Adam was killed.

“Was there an incident in the fall semester of his sophomore year involving a weapon observed in the defendant’s backpack during school hours?” Nunzio asked.

“That’s correct.”

Olivia had sought to suppress the evidence relating both to our ownership of a gun and the fact that Ethan had carried the weapon to school. Once Judge Rivera determined that the gun evidence was relevant, Olivia had stipulated that Margaret could testify to the hearsay reports of the fellow student who had caught sight of the gun in Ethan’s bag. As Olivia explained it, there was nothing to gain from the jury hearing directly from one of Ethan’s peers, who might be tempted to offer an exaggerated portrait of him, whether favorable or not.

“Please tell the jury what happened.”

“One of our students was lingering outside my office after classes broke out. I got the sense that he wanted to speak to me, but wasn’t quite certain about how to approach me, or perhaps whether to do so at all. After nearly thirty years at this, you get a sense of how teenagers operate. So I called him in and put the question to him directly: ‘What is it you’d like to say?’He asked me what a student should do if he were aware of another student bringing a gun to school. I advised him of what I suspected he already knew—that it was a dangerous situation that we absolutely must know about. I asked him how he would feel if something tragic happened and he hadn’t shared whatever it is he knew. At that point, he told me that Ethan Macintosh had a handgun in his school bag.”

For the record, Nunzio had Margaret identify Ethan as the student in question. I felt all eyes on me again as Margaret explained how she had followed school protocol by calling me to report the problem.

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