“You should have gone ahead and fought, anyway — if you had anything to fight for.”
“I was framed.”
“I know,” I said, “but we’re not trying the divorce case on the merits. I’m just sketching a picture of what happened. The lawyers sent the papers to a New Orleans process sender. The process server came lumbering up the steps, pounded on the door, looked Roberta over, said, ‘You’re Edna Cutler,’ and handed her papers. He made a return of service that he’d duly and regularly served Edna Cutler on a certain day and date in New Orleans. You, of course, were far, far away.”
Edna said, “You’re making it sound like a conspiracy. As a matter of fact, I didn’t know anything whatever about the divorce until very recently.”
I turned my eyes to Roberta. “That was because you didn’t know where to notify her?”
She nodded.
“It was very, very clever,” I said. “It’s a very neat way of turning defeat into triumph. Marco Cutler thought he had a good divorce. He went to Mexico before he had a final decree, and remarried. You waited long enough so it would look as though you were acting in good faith. Then you wrote Roberta Fenn a letter, asking her to be nice to some man who was a friend of yours. That was the first time Roberta had had your address. She answered that letter by writing to tell you that after you had left, papers had been served on her, that because she had promised you that no matter what happened, she’d swear she was Edna Cutler, she had told the man who served the papers that that was her name. You immediately wrote back and asked Roberta to send the papers on to you. She sent them on, and that gave you all you needed to swear that that was the first time you had any knowledge you had been divorced. Prior to that time you thought you were still the wife of Marco Cutler, separated, of course, but still his wife.”
“So you wrote to your husband and asked him how he got that way, pointing out to him that his divorce wasn’t any good because the papers hadn’t been served OR you. In other words, you now had him hooked, and you were going to make him pay through the nose. He didn’t dare let his present wife get the least inkling of the true facts of the case. In short, you’ve got him where you want him.”
I quit talking and looked at her, waiting for her to say something.
At length, she said, “ You make it sound as though I had worked it out as a clever idea. As a matter of fact, I had absolutely no thought of anything except to get away from it all. My husband had framed me. He had subjected me to all sorts of humiliations. I don’t know whether it was because he had determined to smear me so badly I couldn’t hold my head up among my friends, or whether he himself had been victimized. He’d hired private detectives and had paid them a fancy sum. Those detectives had to produce evidence to get money, so they kept sending in all sorts of lies to Marco, and Marco gleefully thought he was getting something on me. He paid them fabulous sums.”