I text Ben the next morning as I get in my car. I turn the key in the ignition, the warm air blasting in my face as the car starts.
I’m going to Matt’s. If I turn up dead, do a podcast about my murder.
He hasn’t responded by the time I pull up in front of my old house.
I bound up the front walkway before I can change my mind. This is probably a deeply stupid idea, but Matt won’t answer my calls, and if I don’t confront him soon, I’m going to explode.
“Let’s kill your husband.”
Shush, Savvy. We’re not murdering anyone today.
The door swings open before I reach it, and I stop short.
A woman steps out, dragging two large suitcases behind her. She’s tiny
—five feet, maybe—and she struggles with the bags, which probably weigh more than she does. One of them topples over on its side and she curses.
“You want some help?” I ask.
Her head snaps up. Her eyes are blue, and bloodshot. The red curls she has tied up in a bun are coming loose, hanging over one shoulder. She’s a mess, but still stunning.
She stares at me.
“Wife number two?” I guess. “Julia,” she says.
“Lucy.”
“I know.”
She hasn’t answered my question about help, but I grab the toppled bag anyway. We drag them to the Lexus in the driveway and I help her load
them both in the trunk. She slams it shut and turns to me. “What are you doing here?” she asks.
“I need to talk to Matt.” “About what?”
That seems intrusive, considering we just met, but I guess she’s still technically married to the man.
“Murder.”
She bursts into tears.
My phone buzzes, and I don’t know what to do about this crying replacement wife, so I open my purse and glance at the screen. There are two texts from Ben.
THAT’S NOT FUNNY.
Are you really at Matt’s right now?
Julia sniffles, drawing my attention back to her. She grabs my hands.
Hers are very cold, which is weird in this weather. “Don’t go in there,” she says. “He’s in a bad mood.” I’ll bet he is. My phone buzzes again.
“Let me help you,” she continues.
I cock my head, confused. “Help me?”
“You know that podcaster, right? I want to talk to him.”
 |
Ben and Paige meet us in his hotel room. I want to leave, but Julia keeps tearfully looking at me like we’re in this together.
I avoid Ben’s gaze as we step into the room and Paige introduces them. Maybe I’m worried that both Paige and Julia will immediately know we’re having sex if I look at him.
Maybe I’m just really, really annoyed that the man I’m sleeping with has so much information about my life, and now he’s going to have so much information about my marriage. I miss Nathan, and that glazed, far- off look he got when I was speaking.
Ben gets Julia a cup of coffee, and I sit beside her on the couch while she holds it in her freezing hands. Ben’s microphone is on the table in front
of us, but he hasn’t turned it on yet.
“I want to do an interview,” she says. “About Matt.”
“Okay.” Ben smiles in this soft, gentle way that I think is meant to be nonthreatening. He’s never smiled at me like that, thank god. “What about Matt?”
“About … our marriage. And some things he said about Lucy.” She glances at me apologetically.
“Did you know Savannah?” Ben asks, even though I’m fairly certain he knows the answer to that question.
Julia shakes her head. She’s fixed her hair and is far more put together now. She’s one of those women who can do an effortless messy bun, and I dislike that about her. “No. I never met her. I don’t know anything about her or…” She looks at me again.
“Should I leave?” I ask hopefully. “This will probably be easier to talk about when I’m gone.”
“No.” She grabs my hand, wrapping her icy fingers around mine.
“Lucy can step out when you begin the interview,” Paige says. I try not to look too relieved. I carefully extract my hand from Julia’s grip.
“I want to talk about what Matt is actually like. What our marriage is like. Because all the things that the women in our neighborhood said about him…” She reaches for her coffee and takes a slow sip. “I can’t let them do that. I thought I could let it go, but if I don’t say something, I’m never going to be able to live with myself.”
Paige’s eyes dart to mine, and I can tell from that quick look that Ben didn’t share the end of Maya’s interview with her. She’s caught off guard.
“Telling the truth isn’t going to do shit for you, honey,” Savvy whispers.
I stand, because I really can’t take much more of this. Julia looks up at me, startled.
“I should go.” I move around the coffee table and head to the door. “If people knew I was here when she tells you…” I grab the door handle. “You don’t want me here for it.”
Julia looks like she’s going to protest, but Paige nods. “She’s right.
We’ll see you later, Lucy.”
I throw open the door and practically run out.
Listen for the Lie Podcast with Ben Owens
BONUS EPISODE 2
Julia Gardner showed up on my doorstep unexpectedly one day. I received word she wanted to talk to me, and I said sure, even though I was confused about what she would have to say about this case. Matt Gardner’s wife never met Savannah, and from what I’d heard from neighbors, they were a perfectly happy couple. Matt hit the jackpot with his second wife, as one person told me.
As it turns out, Matt and Julia have been separated for a couple months now.
Ben: You moved out today?
Julia: Yes. Well, I partially moved out two months ago. I went back for more of my stuff today because he said he’d be out of town. He wasn’t, but I should have expected that.
Ben: Let’s back up a bit. You and Matt have been married for…?
Julia: Three years.
Ben: How’d you meet?
Julia: I was attending a conference in Houston, and he was there visiting some friends. We met at the hotel bar and just hit it off. We dated long-distance for a while, and then I moved out to Plumpton to be with him. We got married not long after.
Ben: Tell me about Matt.
Julia: He was really— No, I was going to say he was charming, but that’s not the right word. He’s not charming, exactly. He’s comfortable. He’s one of those people that, when you meet him, it feels like you’ve been friends for a long time. He has this way of putting people at ease. I’m not very good at talking to strangers, so I noticed that about him right away. It didn’t feel like he was hitting on me in that hotel bar, it genuinely felt like he was just being friendly. Not very common with men.
It all felt very nice, at first. He was very open with me about his past, about Lucy, and it made me feel like he was an honest man. I was looking for that in a relationship. But things moved really quickly, and he pushed hard for me to come to Plumpton. I just thought he wasn’t scared of commitment.
Once I got out here, and moved into the house, things changed a little. I brushed it off, mostly. He was moodier, more likely to snap at me, but that’s what happens, isn’t it? You get comfortable in a relationship and you stop being so polite.
Then he was yelling more, and I realized that he was drinking quite a lot. He’d hide the bottles at the bottom of the trash can outside so I wouldn’t see them. He’d been avoiding me in the evenings, holing up in his study by himself, and I realized that it was because he was drinking down there.
I tried to bring it up with him—gently—and he got really mad and told me to stop being such a prude. He said he liked to relax with a drink at night, and that I shouldn’t
be complaining about him taking out the trash. Did I want him to just leave it all for me to do?
I sort of saw through those excuses, but I also didn’t want to badger him about his drinking if he wasn’t ready to talk about it. You can’t make people accept that they have a problem, you know? They have to come to it themselves.
But, unfortunately, I guess he took that as the all-clear to just drink in front of me. And he was not nice when he drank. We’d just gotten married when he really started to let loose—that’s probably why he let loose, come to think of it—and I was a little baffled about how to handle it all. And I felt like I’d been a bit of an idiot. I knew he had a problem when we got married. I’d gone in clear-eyed about it.
But then the violence started.
At first, it was throwing glasses at walls and taking out his anger on stuff around the house. Then it was me. Slapping and pulling my hair and shoving me into walls. He was always yelling at me about how I’d hit him too, how it was my fault too, and I was just like … what are you talking about? I haven’t touched you.
Ben: To be clear, he was hitting you—abusing you—but telling you that you were hitting
him?
Julia: Yes. Constantly. The next morning, I’d say, if you ever slap me like that again I’m leaving you, and he’d go, you slapped me back, you have no room to talk. Which never happened.
Ben: What was his response when you told him that?
Julia: Sometimes he’d look genuinely confused. Like he really had thought that we’d been going nine rounds instead of him just … it was only him. I wondered if maybe he was so drunk that he didn’t remember what happened, so he was just saying that.
Ben: Did you ever feel safe telling anyone about this?
Julia: My mom. I’d edit it a little, try to make it sound not so bad because I didn’t want her to worry. But I definitely didn’t want to tell anyone in Plumpton. They were all so crazy about Matt. And I worried he’d tell them all that I’d hit him too, even though it wasn’t true.
The thing is … this is probably really weird, but the person I most wanted to talk to was Lucy Chase.
Ben: Even though you’d never met her?
Julia: Yeah. And that’s weird, right? No second wife wants to talk to the first wife. Especially a first wife who has been accused of murder. But I wanted to know if their marriage had been the same, because Matt talked about her so … kindly.
Ben: I’m sorry, kindly?
Julia: Yeah. It was one of the things I liked about him at first, actually. I’ve never liked men who speak badly of their exes. It usually feels a bit misogynistic to me.
Matt actually seemed sort of sad when he talked about Lucy. He said she was sweet and kind and he felt bad that she had to leave the town she loved. He openly told me he
still loved her, but that they just couldn’t be together anymore. He said that he hoped she was happy.
Ben: Did you ask why they got divorced, then? If he still loved her?
Julia: I did, and he said that she left him, which is true, I think. He said that it was all just too much for her, being in Plumpton after Savvy’s murder. But, of course, later I wondered if it was because he’d been hitting her too.
And I wondered if it was just me. Maybe he’d been so devastated by that divorce that he started drinking, and he changed. That’s why I wanted to talk to her. But I didn’t reach out, of course. That would have been too weird.
Ben: You’ve met her just today, though, haven’t you?
Julia: Yes. I met her today, by chance. I didn’t ask, though. I wanted to, but it’s not my place. I could tell that she didn’t … Well, she has enough problems. She doesn’t need mine too.
Ben: How long did the abuse go on with Matt before you left?
Julia: Only about six months. It ramped up really slowly, and so there was only about half a year of me going, am I really doing this? Is this my life? How have I wandered into this abused-wife narrative? It almost felt unreal. I think I might have left earlier, had I not been so confused about how I ended up in that situation.
Ben: Was it okay? Leaving?
Julia: My mom came up and stood in the house while I packed, so he was forced to be on his best behavior. He yelled a lot when I was there today—I was alone—but it was fine. I told him that my mom and my friends knew I’d come up to Plumpton, just in case.
Ben: Just in case something happened to you? Right? I just want to make sure I have this straight—you felt the need to let someone know you were going to see Matt, because you were worried that something might happen to you while you were there?
Julia: Well, it sounds quite dramatic when you put it like that.
But … yes.
I start to end the interview here, and Julia almost lets me, but she jumps back in, looking flustered.
Julia: No, I just … Can I say one more thing? I need to tell you something.
Ben: Of course.
Julia: It’s something Matt said about Lucy once. When he was drunk. Very drunk, actually. He was going off on this tangent that he did sometimes. I think it was to make me feel bad. Talking about how wonderful Lucy was. It never really made me feel bad, though. Or, not in the way he probably thought it would? I’d get pissed at him, but just even more intrigued about Lucy.
Anyway. He was talking and talking, and he said, “I should have protected her better.” And I was like, “You mean after the murder?” Because I knew that he’d sent her to her parents after and felt guilty about it.
And he was like, “No, that night. I should have protected her better.”
I was like, “What do you mean? You weren’t there, right? Do you mean you should have left the wedding with her?” I was fishing for information, because Matt never talked about that night.
And I could see him have this, like, moment of clarity where he realized what he
said, and his face just turned bright red. And he muttered something about how, yeah, that was what he meant, but … I don’t think that was true.
I think he was there, with Lucy, when Savvy died.
