The Sleeping Beauty Killer

11

Paula Carter stood in the doorway of the guest room, watching her daughter sort through the makeshift office she had created. Casey had left the prison with two boxes. From what Paula could see, most of the contents were files and notebooks, now stacked on the top of the dresser and both nightstands. With the exception of her trip into the city two days ago, Casey had spent all of her time in here, poring over these documents.

“Oh dear, the room is quite small, isn’t it?” she asked.

“It’s a palace compared to what I’m used to,” Casey said with a sad smile. “Seriously, Mom, thank you for everything you’ve done for me. I know it must have been hard to move up here.”

Up here was Old Saybrook, Connecticut, only ten and a half miles from the prison that had been Casey’s home for the last fifteen years.

Paula had never thought she’d leave Washington, D.C. She moved there when she was only twenty-six years old to marry Frank, twelve years her senior. They had met in Kansas City. He was a partner at one of the nation’s largest law firms. She was a paralegal for one of his corporate client’s local counsel. A massive product defect that originated in the client’s Missouri plant meant months of depositions. By the time the case was settled, Frank had proposed and anxiously asked her if she would consider moving to Washington, D.C. She had told him that the only downside was that she would desperately miss her twin sister, Robin, and her little niece, Angela, who had just learned to call her Aunt Paw-Paw. Robin was a single mother; Angela’s father had never been in the picture. Paula had gotten Robin a job as a secretary at her firm and was helping to raise the little girl. Growing up, Paula and Robin had both dreamed of going to law school.

Within three days, Frank had a solution. Robin and her daughter, Angela, would move to D.C., too. His firm would hire Robin as a secretary and would give her a flexible schedule if she wanted to pursue a paralegal license or even law school. All three of them-Paula, Robin, and little Angela-headed to D.C. together.

And what an adventure it had been. Paula and Frank were married within a year, and Casey came along before their second anniversary. Paula never followed through on her dream of becoming a lawyer, but Robin did, while Paula had a wonderful life with Frank. They had a beautiful home in Georgetown with a small yard where the girls could play outside. The White House, the National Mall, and the Supreme Court stood just outside their door. Whoever thought, she and Robin would say, that our daughters would grow up with all of this at their fingertips?

The capital became a member of her family.

Then, just two years after graduating from law school at the age of thirty-six, Robin got her cancer diagnosis. She did all the treatments, lost her hair, felt sick around the clock. But it didn’t work. Angela was still in high school when they buried her mother. She lived with the Carters in the Georgetown house until she graduated and then moved to New York City with dreams of being a model. Four years after that, Casey also left, at first to attend college at Tufts, then to pursue a career in art in New York.

It was just Frank and Paula in D.C. At least the girls had each other in New York-at first, before the trouble with Hunter.

Then three years ago, as Paula and Frank walked up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Frank collapsed. The doctor at Sibley Memorial Hospital told her that he didn’t suffer. “It would have felt like the lights turned off.” In her mind, her husband died of a broken heart. It broke the day Casey was convicted.

Without Frank, the house in Georgetown felt much too large. Paula would go for a walk and see all of the sights she used to visit with people she desperately missed. Robin and Frank were gone. Angela was still in New York. And Casey lived in a six- by eight-foot cell in Connecticut. No, the nation’s capital was not her family. Casey, Frank, Angela, and Robin were. So she sold the house and bought this townhouse in Old Saybrook for no other reason than its proximity to her daughter. Truth be told, she would have paid a million dollars to move into the cell next door to Casey’s if they had let her.

But now her daughter was here, so it felt a little more like home. She wiped a tear forming in the corner of her eye, hoping Casey hadn’t noticed. Frank begged you to take that plea deal, she thought. I’m old, he had said, and I’m only getting older. Casey, you could have been out nine years ago. Frank would have had at least six years-maybe more-to spend with you.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a knock at the door.

“That must be Laurie Moran,” Paula said. “I don’t know why you want to put yourself through this, but Lord knows you never take my advice.” Just like you refused to take your father’s, she thought.