“I assume you tried to trace the check?”
“I tried. I found out it had been cashed at a branch of our bank in Tacoma the day it was written. But the endorsement was too scribbled to make it out. The only thing I could tell for sure was that it wasn’t endorsed by Richard.”
“If you truly believed that your husband was trying to kill you, Mrs. Durant,” the prosecutor asked, “why didn’t you go to the police?”
“And tell them what?” Clare asked him in return. “I had no real evidence. What could I say? ‘I know my husband, and I know what he’s trying to do to me, and why he’s trying to do it, but I have no proof, so just take my word for it and arrest him before he succeeds’?” She shook her head. “The detectives working on this case were good people, but they were so focused on their stalker, they wanted to believe that he was the one who ran me off the road.”
“But you knew he wasn’t.”
Clare shrugged. “As I’m sure you’re well aware, what you know and what you can prove are sometimes two very different things,” she said. “I lived with Richard Durant for fourteen years, and I probably knew him better than he knew himself. But the police didn’t know him. They didn’t know him at all.”
Sundstrom decided to go for it.
“So, let me see if I have this straight,” he declared. “What you’re now telling this jury is that you did intend to kill your husband, because your husband was trying to kill you -- in a very interesting array of ways, I might add -- and you knew the police wouldn’t do anything about it without something as inconsequential as proof. So instead, you decided to take matters into your own hands, and make it look like you mistook him for a stalker?”
“No, that’s not how it happened,” Clare protested.
“All right then, what was it?” the prosecutor pressed. “You couldn’t identify the shape of the man entering your room? You couldn’t see he was carrying a suitcase? You didn’t know it was your husband and not the stalker?”
“Don’t you get it?” she exclaimed. “It didn’t matter who it was. They both wanted to kill me!”
“So you say,” Sundstrom declared. “But then, we have only your word for it, now don’t we?”
“I loved my husband very much. And now he’s dead, and I have to live with that. What reason would I have to lie to you?”
“Anger . . . humiliation . . . retribution . . . actually, I can think of quite a number of reasons. Trying to stay out of jail also comes to mind.”
Clare squared her shoulders. “Think what you like, Mr. Sundstrom,” she said. “You have a job to do. I understand that. And if ridiculing me will help you do it, go right ahead. I’ve already been betrayed, in the worst possible way, by a man I was supposed to have been able to trust. Do you really think there’s anything you can do to me that could even come close to that?”
The prosecutor blinked. That was not the response he had been expecting.
At the defense table, David sat calmly, his chin in his hand, and watched and listened.
“All right, then let’s talk about the night you shot your husband,” Sundstrom said, hoping to shift the jury’s focus. “You say you couldn’t tell who was entering the bedroom, is that correct?”
“Yes, that’s correct,” Clare confirmed.
“And you were shocked when you turned on the lights and found it was your husband you had shot?”
“Yes.”
“And you also maintain that it didn’t matter who you’d shot, because whoever it was had come to kill you?”
“More or less.”
“Which is it, Mrs. Durant -- more or less?”
“My husband wanted me dead, and according to the police, so did the stalker.”
“And what weapon was your husband carrying?”
Clare looked perplexed at that. “I don’t know,” she replied “I didn’t see one.”
“Well, you claim you shot him in self-defense,” the prosecutor pressed. “To support that claim means you had to have reason to believe you were in imminent danger. If your husband wasn’t carrying a weapon, what were you in danger of?”
“I didn’t know it was my husband until I turned on the lights,” Clare reminded him. “As far as I knew, he was in Vermont.”
“You didn’t see the man holding the suitcase silhouetted in the doorway?”
“To be honest, I didn’t see much of anything,” Clare replied. “I heard the stairs creak. I heard someone coming toward the door. I saw the door open. I saw it was a man. I was terrified. I thought I was going to die. I don’t really remember anything else.”
“So, what is it you want this jury to believe -- that you didn’t know it was your husband, and that you made a perfectly reasonable mistake? Or that you did know it was your husband, and since he wanted to kill you, anyway, it really wasn’t such a mistake?”
“There were two men who wanted to see me dead, yes,” Clare clarified. “But when I pulled the trigger, I assumed I was shooting the stalker. That’s what the police had led me to expect.”
“So, in other words, you simply made a mistake?”
“Yes.”
“Then why did you hide the suitcase before the police got there?”
Clare sighed deeply. “I’ve asked myself that question a hundred times,” she said. “I don’t know why. I don’t even remember doing it, and yet I know I must have done it because I was the only one there. But I honestly don’t know why.”
Sundstrom paused. “And this elaborate ruse was all because your husband was going to divorce you?”
“You still don’t understand, do you?” Clare said. “My husband wasn’t going to divorce me -- he was going to kill me.”
“So you say.”
***
David rose slowly from his seat. “You say you loved your husband?” he asked.
“Yes,” Clare said. “I loved him very much.”
“And you loved him all the years of your marriage?”
“Yes.”
“Despite his numerous
