Free Good Mourning by Elizabeth Meyer

“Bill, give me that sheet for a sec?”
    Sure enough, there was her name: Annie Nast. The woman was the stuff of New York City legend. She grew up in Manhattan around the same time as Elaine—but with the kind of money that set her in a whole other class. Annie was the daughter of a businessman, and when he died when she was just a girl, she inherited tens of millions of dollars. It’s an outrageous amount of money now, but it was downright absurd at the time. To top it off, she was beautiful—she looked like she could have been sisters with Grace Kelly. And they had similar taste in men, because, like Grace, Annie married a prince. They divorced after two kids and almost a decade of marriage, but still, the woman married a prince . And when the whole thing ended, she actually wound up paying him asettlement of a million dollars, plus a couple of estates. Baller move, especially back in the day, when most women still relied on husbands to pay their bills.
    Annie’s biggest downfall might have been her crappy taste in men. She was still pretty, and Lord knows she was still rich, when she found herself back on the market, and it didn’t take her long to find husband number two. On the social scale, this guy was a significant downgrade—I mean, where do you go after a prince, really? Despite what people might have said, Annie went ahead and married Frederick Nast. The next thing you knew, they had a kid. You would have thought things were pretty good. This guy would have been straight-up mental to stray on his gorgeous sugar mama. But like many men with an inferiority complex, ol’ Frederick had a mistress before they’d been married very long. Nobody knew if things were ever that great between him and Annie anyway, but pretty much everyone knew it by the time they were on the brink of divorce. (It didn’t help that they would talk openly about it at parties. Total faux pas.)
    Before you could say “divorce papers,” Annie was suddenly and inexplicably in a coma. And not one of those Sandra Bullock–­movie, my-lipstick-is-still-perfect-even-though-­I’ve-been-unconscious-­
for-two-days comas, but one that lasted for decades . All fingers pointed toward Frederick. Blabbing about how much you hate your wife is never a smart precursor to killing her, especially when there’s serious cash on the line. Neither is having your mistress take the stand at your murder trial to reveal that she had given you an ultimatum to leave your wife. But you couldn’t just leave her —good God, no—because a ­divorce would cut you off from her fortune. Frederick was convicted but quickly teamed up with a big-shot lawyer for his appeal. In a second trial, Frederick’s guilty verdict was overturned after the defense called up one medical expert after another who claimed Annie wasn’t killed by her greedy shit of a husband but rather her own form of self-medication.
    The upper crust of New York watched the trials like it was Days of Our Lives . It was the 1980s. The city was hot with cocaine, crime, and more money than it knew what to do with. (So I’ve read. I was, like, two. My New York was filled with carousel rides in Central Park and My Little Ponies.) Finally, at the request of Annie’s two children from her previous marriage, Frederick agreed to grant Annie—still in her coma—a divorce and leave the country. She eventually ended up in a nursing home, kept alive by machines, and allegedly never with a blip of brain activity, until she died as an old lady. Heartbreaking.
    And now here she was at Crawford. “Bill,” I said, “you know who this is, right?” There had been books written, even movies made about Annie’s murder trial. People couldn’t resist the juicy plotline. It was like reality TV before there was even a name for it.
    Bill looked at the sheet again. He might not have lived in Manhattan—none