Tell me you didn’t kill Quinn’s husband. Did it really matter? Because what was clear was that this had been, in fact, a twofer, as Frank had suggested. Only not two wives setting up one husband to take the blame for the other husband’s murder. It was a pair of lovers, setting up his wife to take the blame for her husband’s murder. When you looked at it that way, Emily had been Frank’s savior. Because how long would it have been before Quinn tired of him? One look at what Frank collected would have been enough to curdle her rosy view of the life that he and she would share.

And he would have insisted on a prenup.

41

SIX MONTHS LATER, Emily sat at her kitchen table with Becca and Lila, the front page of the Boston Globe spread out in front of them. “Looks like he’s gained a little weight,” Lila said. She was taking in a photograph of Frank testifying at the murder trial of Quinn Newell, aka Amanda Quinn Safstrom Newell.

Frank didn’t look fat. He looked pasty-faced and miserable in a tie that seemed to be choking him. He’d been in custody since the night Ryan met them in the parking lot of the police station and walked Frank inside to cut a deal with the DA. Frank had agreed to turn state’s evidence in return for pleading guilty to a lesser charge. Eventually, when the trial was over, he hoped to be released on time served.

Emily would be testifying soon, the prosecution’s other star witness. She was relieved that the tape of her and Quinn, apparently conspiring to kill their husbands, had been ruled inadmissible, and she’d sworn off prosecco.

The media was having a field day, calling Quinn Boston’s black widow. Emily tried not to read about the trial, and if something about it came on the radio, she turned it off. It was bad enough that she’d had to play a supporting role as the clueless wife.

Rafe Bartok would take a turn in the witness box, too, testifying that Quinn and Frank had hired him to impersonate Walter Newell. His role was to drive Walter’s car to the Hyannis auction, register as Walter, turn right around and drive back in plenty of time to run into Emily at the Java Connection, where he’d make a scene, ding her car, and then abandon Walter’s car at the wharf, thereby establishing multiple reliable witnesses who’d swear that Walter Newell was alive long after he’d been killed and put on ice in the Jacuzzi in the Newells’ master bath.