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“Then just tell me about him. You seem close to him.”
Hesitantly she nodded, worried that anything she said might be twisted and used to prove her father’s guilt.
“You were close with your mom too,” he noted, of course he knew that because they had talked about it. “Were your parents close with each other? Did they get along?”
“They loved each other.”
“Did they fight much?”
She glanced at her half-sisters. “They only fought about them.” To her sisters, she added, “I'm sorry. Intellectually I know that what your mothers did isn’t your fault, but the facts are that you two were the cause of friction in my home. My mom forgave my dad his affairs, but things were still tense between them sometimes, because of you.”
Nick’s voice turned gentle as he asked, “Was your father ever abusive? Was he ever violent with you or your mother?”
Shocked, she shook her head so hard she winced. “What? No! Definitely not. He never laid a hand on me or on my mom. Or my stepmothers,” she added. “He hardly ever even raised his voice.”
“What about the rest of you?” Nick surveyed her siblings. “Was your father ever violent with any of you?” Andrew, Clara, and Naomi all shook their heads in the negative. “What about with your mothers? What was his relationship like with them?”
“Tense.” Clara’s green eyes grew sad. “My mother blamed both him and me for the affair and the effects it had on her marriage.”
“Non-existent,” Naomi replied. “My mother acted like he didn’t exist. In her mind, her husband was my father. I may as well have been visiting a ghost on my fortnightly weekend stays with him as far as she was concerned.”
“Do you know if there were other women your father had affairs with?”
“I don’t know, I was eight when my mom died, I was too young to pay attention to things like that. And after, with the others, I didn’t care. I didn’t care if he broke up with them, I didn’t care about his relationship with them, I didn’t care about his happiness.” It sounded so selfish when she said it out loud, but it had been how she had felt back then.
“Washe happy with them?” Nick’s eyes were full of sympathy, but Aggie didn’t want his sympathy.
“I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t think he cared, he just didn’t want to be alone.”
“What about you? How did you get along with them? Were they good stepmothers?”
“Looking back Selene was. I was nine when she married my father, my mother had only been dead a year, I didn’t want a replacement mommy. I wasn't very nice to her, but she was always patient with me. She was young but mature. She was kind, thoughtful, she gave me space, but at the same time she set boundaries and insisted that I treat her with respect. At the time I hated her, but it wasn't personal, I would have hated whoever my father married. I was sixteen when he married Claudia. I thought I was too old for a mother figure, so I pretty much dismissed Claudia, ignored her most of the time. She was happy enough with that. She never really relished the role of mother, she usually just tried to be my friend, but I didn’t want another friend.”
“Neither of them hurt you in any way?”
“If you mean would my father kill them because of something they did to me then definitely not.”
“What about the break-ups? Were they amicable?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think there was any animosity on my father’s side at least, he just started looking for someone to move on with.”
“After the divorces, do you know if he saw his exes again? If they spent time together? Or if he had cause to see them for any reason?”
“I don’t know,” she replied softly. She was so tired. Last night she’d had dreams about Nick, some happy some sad, and this morning she had woken up fatigued as though she hadn’t slept at all. She just wanted this to be over. For Nick to be gone. So she could focus on moving on.
“Did you know he still saw Emily? We have a witness who saw them together the day she went missing, said they were arguing. Do you have any idea what they might have been arguing about? Was there any unfinished business between them? The witness said he’d seen them together arguing a couple of times.”
“I don’t know. I knew Emily the least of all of my stepmothers, I was already an adult by the time they married, and she was younger than me, I never approved of her. I have no idea what she and my father would have cause to argue over. I didn’t know that he still saw her.”
“Aggie, we know about the wallpaper in your father’s house,” Nick broke the news softly.
“You stole my keys and broke in there,” she said dully. She should be horrified, but she didn’t seem to have enough left in her for it. “He started the wallpaper thing after my mom died. He always loved photos. They were all over the house. When my mom was gone, he had the wallpaper made up and covered his room and my room with photos of her. Over the years it spread throughout the house. When I was little I liked it, it made me feel like my mom was watching over me.”
“There were photos in the wallpaper of all three of his ex-wives after they'd broken up.”
“Which doesn’t make him a killer,” she reminded Nick.
“Although it does make him a little creepy,” Naomi muttered.
