“You’d go on the podcast,” Wilde said, “and say it happened to you.”
My God, Wilde thought. It was just awful enough to make sense.
“I wanted to help this girl—and I wanted my sister to know what kind of man she’d married.”
“So who is she? This ‘girl’ Peter attacked?”
“I can’t say. I promised.”
“Marnie—”
“No, you can make all the threats you want to, but I’m not doxxing a victim.”
Wilde decided not to press on that for now. “But why go on the podcast at all?”
“I just told you. To help the girl. To help Jenn.”
“But you could have just told Jenn, couldn’t you? You didn’t have to go public like that.”
“What, you think I wanted to do it this way?”
And here the answer was obvious, Wilde thought: Yes. Yes, she wanted to do it just that way. Had to. She wanted the attention and notoriety, and damn if it hadn’t worked. Hester had been right. Marnie wanted fame, no matter who paid the price, and she got it.
“I didn’t have a choice anyway,” Marnie said. “I was under contract.”
“To?”
“To the show. That’s how reality TV works. You sign a contract. The producers give you an instruction and you follow it to enhance the story line.”
“But you weren’t a contestant on the show.”
“Not yet. But I’d applied and made it far enough to sign. If I wanted to make the cut next season, it was important I showed them my best.”
Wilde couldn’t believe what he was hearing, and yet it all added up. “A producer told you to lie in exchange for a slot on the show?”
“Hey, I got that slot on my own,” Marnie said, her tone thick with indignation. “With my talent. And it wasn’t a lie. It happened, just as I said it did.”
“But not to you.”
“What difference does that make? It happened. I talked to this girl myself. She had proof.”
“What kind of proof?”
“Photographs. Lots of them.”
“Those could have been photoshopped.”
“No.” Marnie sighed, shook her head. “Look, Jenn and I used to be close. We’d get drunk and talk, you know, about Peter. This is embarrassing, but I knew what it looked like. This wasn’t Peter’s head photoshopped on another body.”
“Used to be close,” Wilde said.
“What?”
“You said ‘Jenn and I used to be close.’”
“We still are. I mean, we are again now. Peter…he wasn’t good for our relationship.”
“Why not?”
Marnie shrugged. “I don’t know. He just wasn’t.”
“Did you like him?”
“What? No.” Her phone buzzed. She read it. “Damn, you made me late for makeup and hair. I have to go.”
“One last thing.”
Marnie sighed. “Okay, but remember your promise?”
“Did you ever tell Jenn the truth?”
“I told you. This is the truth—”
Wilde tried not to raise his voice. “Did you ever tell Jenn that what you said about Peter happened to another woman, not you?”
Marnie said nothing but her face lost color.
Wilde couldn’t believe it. “So your sister still thinks—”
“You can’t tell her,” Marnie said in a harsh hush. “I did it for Jenn. To protect her from that monster. And Peter confessed. Don’t you get that? It was all true. Now leave me the hell alone.”
Marnie wiped her eyes, spun, and hurried away.
Chapter
Twenty-Four
Let me tell you what kind of person Martin Spirow is.
When a twenty-six-year-old “fitness model” named Sandra Dubonay died in a car accident last year, her family posted an obituary on her social media page with a heartbreaking smiling-in-the-sun portrait of their daughter and the epitaph: You Will Always Be In Our Hearts. Under that obituary post, in the comment section, Martin Spirow, using a fake account, posted the following:
It’s sad when hot pussy goes to waste.
I ask you: Do you need to know more?
Boomerang investigated the case and ended up giving Martin a slap on the wrist. On social media, Martin Spirow follows a lot of robustly built “fitness models”—an intriguing euphemism—but claims that he has no recollection of writing those awful and cruel words and must have posted while blackout drunk.
Yeah, right.