The Courage Tree - Diane Chamberlain [37]
Now, Zoe walked into the shanty to get a bowl for the stew, and when she returned to the clearing, the filthy yellow dog was back, sitting in the open space between the fire pit and the woods. He looked from her to the stew pot and back to her again, and she fought a desire to toss the poor creature a bit of the rabbit. Instead, she carefully lifted the pot from the fire and carried it inside the shanty, shutting the door behind her. No need to invite trouble.
She sat on the couch while she ate, trying to picture the June calendar in her mind. If she was figuring her days correctly, Marti’s escape should have taken place yesterday or the day before. In Zoe’s imagination, the escape was always successful, yet she knew the plan was fraught with difficulty. How the warden would physically get Marti out of Chowchilla was cloudy in her mind, but she trusted that greed would motivate him to operate in a clever and efficient manner. Marti had told her she’d picked the greediest, the least ethical and the most immoral of the wardens to approach with her scheme.
Zoe might no longer have a husband, and she might have lost her daughter to an inept justice system. Her beauty was slipping away from her, and her voice had left long ago. But one thing she still had was money. And she knew from a lifetime of spending, that money could buy anything—or anyone. Marti had always been good at reading people, and she’d read the warden right. He would need enough money to split three ways with two of the other guards, he’d said, and Marti had simply tripled her offer. It was enough money to tempt the pope, Zoe had thought. She was depending on it. Everything had to go according to plan.
It was torture, though, thinking of Marti having to negotiate with prison guards, just as the thought of her being imprisoned for something she had not done was unbearable. Marti in prison! Zoe blamed herself entirely for the fix her daughter was in. She should have hired different lawyers. She’d gone with Snow, Snow and Berenski because they’d always handled everything for her and Max over the years, but criminal law was not their strong suit. They’d let Marti down. Someone said that a car “just like” Marti Garson’s Audi was parked in front of Tara Ashton’s house the day the actress was killed. Marti didn’t even know Tara Ashton, much less have any reason to kill her. Tara had been the hot new actress in Hollywood, with a beautifully exotic face, a stunning body, wavy jet-black hair and an undeniable ability to act, setting her apart from other newcomers who were simply gorgeous. Someone else testified that they had seen a woman who looked “just like” Marti Garson leave Ashton’s house that afternoon. They swore to this, and Zoe could not tell if they truly believed they had seen Marti, or if someone was perhaps paying them to say so. But why on earth would anyone set Marti up?
There had been no fingerprints at the scene; whoever had committed the murder had worn gloves or wiped everything clean. The prosecutor claimed that Marti had a motive: Tara Ashton had recently been given a part in a movie, a part Zoe had been up for. The part had been written for Zoe, for a woman Zoe’s age, and then, suddenly, the script was changed to accommodate Ashton. Oh, that had hurt. No one said flat out that Zoe was too old for the part, but who could deny it, when the front page of the tabloids showed a split image of a time-ravaged Zoe next to the fresh, smiling Ashton?
So, the prosecutor built