The Perfect Wife

“I made something for y’all,” she announced. The trace of the South in y’all told us how excited she was. “I call it Electra Dancing.”

We noticed she had a fire extinguisher standing by. “You should probably give her some room,” she added.

She pulled a sheet off the thing that stood next to her. It was a kind of sculpture, we saw instantly, not dissimilar to the shopbots we were all familiar with. Some of the shopbot parts, though, had been replaced with junk—the head was an old motorcycle headlight, the fingers were bicycle chains, and there were bits of old telephones and typewriters incorporated into the design. It was wearing a pretty vintage dress in bright-yellow cotton.

As we watched, the bot abruptly raised both arms. Flames shot from its wrists—one forward, one back, like a Catherine wheel. It started to spin; or at least, its body did. The head remained motionless. And suddenly flames started shooting from its head and that started spinning, too, the opposite way to the rest of it. It was a dancing dervish, a pirouetting top, a whirligig of flame.

“I’m pretty!” the robot announced in a mechanical recorded voice, like a truck reversing, even as it was consumed by fire. “I’m pretty!” Its torso erupted in flames, the yellow dress turning to lace and dropping to the ground. We thought—or said later we’d thought—of witch burnings, autos-da-fé. But mostly we just stood and gaped. “I’m pretty!”

It was all over in less than a minute. First the bot fell silent, then it stopped spinning, its smoking carcass completely incinerated. An acrid, cordite stench wafted over the parking lot.

“What went wrong?” someone asked—some idiot: Most of us decided later it was Kenneth. But Abbie didn’t seem to mind.

“Oh, it was supposed to do that,” she said cheerfully, surveying the charred wreckage. And turning toward us, she added, “I like to play with fire.”

She did indeed, as some wit pointed out later. Because, although we were not very good at art or its interpretation—felt rather uniquely unqualified to judge it, in the normal way of things—it was absolutely clear to us that Electra Dancing, or the firebot as we christened it, was Abbie’s way of telling us that she thought the shopbots sucked.

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While you wait for Danny and Sian to get to the beach house, you plug Tim’s USB stick into a computer and look through the next document. It’s another slideshow; of articles about the trial this time.

Once again he watches intently as you read, gauging your reaction.

The first cuttings relate how Detective Tanner listed to the court the steps taken to find you, the subsequent widening of the search to include the possibility you’d been harmed, and the switch of focus from accident to murder. The jury was told that police cadaver dogs had found two “areas of interest”: one in your car, and one in the kitchen at Dolores Street.

Under cross-examination, Detective Tanner admitted the sniffer dogs might have been reacting to the smell of raw meat previously stored in your kitchen. You’d been given some venison by a friend not long before your disappearance, which you transported in the car and subsequently hung in your larder.

He also admitted that the switch to a possible murder investigation came after air and sea searches around San Gregorio had drawn a blank.

“In other words, you were keen for it to look as if you’d finally made some headway?” Tim’s defense lawyer, Jane Yau, suggested.

Not surprisingly, Detective Tanner rejected this, maintaining that it was reasonable, when no evidence emerged to support the most likely explanation, to switch his team’s attention to the next most likely.

“So you can confirm that the transition to a homicide investigation—a widespread, costly, well-publicized homicide investigation—was prompted not by any actual evidence that a murder had taken place, but by the absence of evidence of accident or suicide?” Jane Yau pressed.

Reluctantly, Detective Tanner conceded that this was indeed the case.

The jury then heard from an old college friend of yours, Sukie Marenga, also an artist, who claimed you’d told her you were having problems in your marriage. You’d also complained that Tim was reading your emails. Sukie told the court that, around that time, Tim and you wrote down your feelings about each other on two pieces of paper, which you burned together in a Buddhist-style ceremony.

“They were trying to parcel up their bad energies and release them to the universe,” she explained. “It’s a Reiki ritual to cleanse yourself of negativity.”

“Do you happen to know whether the ceremony was effective on this occasion, or whether some of those negative energies in fact persisted?” Mark Rausbaum, the prosecuting attorney, asked—a question that was immediately challenged by the defense but no doubt planted a suspicion in the jurors’ minds that the ritual had not been 100 percent effective after all.

Rausbaum then introduced phone records showing you’d used your phone far less frequently in the weeks preceding your disappearance than you usually did. The state’s contention, he explained, was that you had become aware your husband was spying on you, and this had brought the existing problems in the relationship to a head. Tim subsequently killed you, drove your body to the beach in your own car, and disposed of it in the ocean.

Supporting this theory was the fact that your wet suit was still hanging in the wet room at the beach house. The prosecution suggested this meant you couldn’t have been surfing that night.

Tim’s lawyer highlighted a number of weaknesses in this scenario. Not only was there no body, there was no evidence that the problems in your relationship were anything other than the usual ups and downs of a high-pressure marriage. Tim had explained to the police that, a month before your disappearance, you’d left your phone on a bus, and it was a while before it was found by the transit authority—something the transit authority confirmed. In the meantime you’d been using a temporary phone, which had vanished with you. There were no signs of violence in either of your houses, or in the car, or at the beach.

Jane Yau also pointed out that San Gregorio was a well-known clothing-optional bathing area and that you’d been known to surf there naked on more than one occasion. Perhaps you’d simply forgotten your wetsuit that night? What was more, data from the GPS locator in Tim’s phone showed no evidence he’d been anywhere near the beach house on the night in question. Admittedly, the phone had been powered off at the time—but that was simply due to a flat battery, Tim had explained. The defense requested that the case be dismissed.

And, perhaps remarkably given the intense level of media interest, the judge agreed. Quoting the ancient principle of corpus delicti, he said in a written statement that, while it wasn’t absolutely necessary for the prosecution to produce a body in order to prove a murder had taken place, it was certainly necessary to prove that a murder had taken place before somebody could be accused of it. The standard of proof in corpora delicti cases must therefore be higher than a mere “balance of probabilities.” He was dismissing the charges with immediate effect.

In the period following the trial’s collapse, a twenty-six-year-old woman from San Jose was charged with posting an offensive message about Tim on Twitter. In a separate case a thirty-one-year-old woman from Los Angeles who posted something on Facebook was given a six-week suspended prison sentence. A petition to the government to change the law so that corpora delicti cases required a lower standard of proof in the future received over twenty-five thousand signatures and was then quietly ignored.

Detective Tanner gave a TV interview on the courtroom steps in which he said the police would not be looking for anyone else in connection with Abbie’s disappearance.

After some of the judge’s comments in previous trials were publicized on social media, a separate campaign to force judges to retire at sixty-five received over fifty thousand signatures.

The police subsequently clarified that, while there were no outstanding lines of inquiry, “a team of officers is available to respond at any time to any new information that is received regarding Abigail Cullen-Scott.”

Tim Scott declined to give any interviews whatsoever.

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