The Coworker Who Knew My Wife

What we did about it

I am a practical man and I want to tell you the practical part, because I think when people hear a story like this they wonder whether it just ended with a good cry. It did not.

The next morning, Nora called the detective whose number Danny had. Her voice shook the whole time but she did not stop. She told him who she was. She told him what Boyd Rickert had done to her, all of it, the years of it, the two times she ran, the promise he made about her brother, the reason she chose the river. She was on the phone for two hours.

It turned out to matter a great deal.

Boyd was already going to prison for what he did to Sherry. But a pattern is a different animal in a courtroom than a single case, and a first wife who was not dead after all, who could stand up and describe under oath the same escalating cruelty twenty years earlier, turned Sherry’s case from one woman’s word into a history. There was also the small matter of what Boyd had done in the years he believed himself a widower. He had, it came out, collected on a small life insurance policy he took out on Rae Ann not long before she drowned, a policy she never knew existed. A man cannot collect death benefits on a woman who is standing in a courtroom alive. That was its own charge, the kind of clean paper charge with a number attached that juries understand.

Nora drove down to testify that fall. I drove her. I sat in the back of that courtroom and I watched my wife, who had spent twenty years being a woman named Nora precisely so she would never have to be in the same room as Boyd Rickert again, sit ten feet from the man and tell twelve strangers the truth in a voice that did not shake, not once. Danny sat beside me and I held onto the bench with both hands so I would not do something that got me removed.

Boyd did not look charming in that courtroom. He looked like what he was, a small, mean, aging man who had run out of people to frighten. Between the two wives and the insurance fraud, the number the judge read out was longer than the life he has left.

Sherry and Nora hugged in the hallway afterward. Two women who had married the same devil twenty years apart and both climbed out. I just stood there and let it be bigger than me.

The stone in the Beckum cemetery

We went down to Beckum after the trial, the three of us.

Nora wanted to see the stone. Her own gravestone, with her own name, RAE ANN COLTER, and two dates, the second one wrong by more than twenty years. She stood in front of it a long time. It sits next to her mother’s stone, which is real.

She did not cry this time. She had done her crying. She knelt and pulled some weeds away from the base of her mother’s stone with her bare hands, the way you tidy up when you visit family, and she talked to her mother for a while, low, so Danny and I stepped back and let her have it private.

Then she stood up, looked at her own grave, and said, to all of us, “I think I want to leave it. Rae Ann did die here. That girl did drown in that river. She had to, so that I could get born. I do not want to dig her up. Let her rest. I just wanted to come tell her she made it. That the thing she died for worked. That Danny is fine. That she got a whole good life she never thought she would get to have.”

We had the second date sanded off the stone, so it just says her name and the year she was born, because she is not dead. But we left the stone. It is a strange thing to have a grave for your living wife, but it made sense to her, and after everything, whatever makes sense to Nora makes sense to me.