Chapter 25: In the Background

On the night before David Martinez's trial, Emma Pillsbury sat herself in front of one of the many computer monitors in her small apartment. Adjusting the angle of the screen, she looked into the camera and sat silently for a moment, staring the image before her. She didn't look like anyone anymore. Not Emma Pillsbury. Not Sylvia Henderson. Both of those women no longer existed, and trying to find herself in the face which stared back was heartbreaking.

She spoke aloud, counting and repeating the word hello to test the sound to see if it would hold up to deliver the truth to those who would wish to know it in a matter of hours. A bullet to the head would not simply stop David Martinez's life, it would also stop his reign. No trial was going to stop that. He would have had bigger army in prison than he had in the outside world. More people with more connections to enact revenge upon Eva Hernandez and anybody she loved. Emma wanted to put a bullet in fifteen years of pain.

When she was satisfied her message would carry despite a voice riddled with nerves and self-loathing she wouldn't be able to afford to indulge in twelve hours' time, she pressed record.

"My name is Emma Pillsbury. Nine years ago I married William Schuester, a man of integrity who was honest to a fault. Or so I thought."

Emma took a deep breath and a sip of water from the glass beside her on the desk, placing it back in the center of the coaster which was positioned two inches away from the computer keyboard in front of her. Then she continued.

"Seven years ago, Will's son showed up on our doorstep. At eighteen years of age, Jesse St. James was already a man and two years older than Will had been when Jesse was born. Will told me that evening that he had known of his ex-girlfriend's pregnancy, but he assured me he never knew whether she had kept the baby. Frances St. James was the daughter of a minister, he said. He told me the minister had Frances sent away when he learned of her pregnancy, and Will claimed he never saw the woman again. The young man on our doorstep that evening changed our lives forever.

For months after Jesse's appearance, I was certain Will was having an affair. I convinced myself he'd found his high school girlfriend again and they had rekindled their old romance. Will began arriving home later and later…"

Emma paused, pressing her lips together and shaking her head.

"I'm sure you're wondering why this is relevant. It will become very clear shortly. Will worked late, despite being moved to day shifts at the SRS, and on more than one occasion I'd driven past the warehouse only to see him hop into his car at the end of his shift and drive off in the opposite direction to our home.

I didn't want to follow him. I didn't want my suspicions confirmed, but when he stopped calling to tell me he'd be late I decided to borrow a car from a friend and wait until Will pulled out of the warehouse car park."

This was the tipping point, she would decide years later. The night she decided to follow her husband in a borrowed car, was the night she lost control over her ability to only do what was honest and right. Will, it seemed, had stopped doing that a long time ago.

"When he pulled up outside a house I didn't recognize, I imagined the woman to come to the door. The one I was certain would be Frances St. James. But a man came to the door instead, and the two greeted each other with a handshake rather than the kiss I'd been afraid of witnessing. The man who shook my husband's hand that evening was David Martinez."

Emma needed a break. She had desperately hoped she'd be able to get through the story in one sitting. Seven years of reasons, seven years of explanation for the act she was about to commit, but her memory of seeing Martinez for the first time nearly brought her to tears. Cold blooded killers don't cry on confession videos, she reasoned.

Emma paused the recording. She looked around at her apartment. Everything she owned was packed neatly in boxes. Many of them were never unpacked when she moved into the small space one month before. The boxes were small so they could be lifted by hand, and were stacked no more than four boxes high along the wall to her right.

When they cleared out her apartment, they would find everything easy to redistribute. All of the boxes containing her clothes were marked for charity. It seemed quite fitting that other women would be walking the city dressed in her clothes. More women with fractions of her identity. Parts of her with different names.

She picked up the phone to her right. Selecting Eva's number, she focused on the dial tone and turned around in her chair so she wasn't forced to keep watching the woman she didn't recognize on the screen.

"Eva, it's me. How are you?"

"We should probably get used to referring to each other with our new names, now." Emma's heart hurt at the bite behind the words of the broken woman on the other end of the line.

"We should. This will all be over tomorrow, honey. We won't have to worry anymore. You won't have to be afraid." Emma had repeated these words to the younger woman many times over the past few weeks. If repeating things made them real, their lives could well begin tomorrow.

Eva was the only person who knew who Emma was now, and while the younger woman was not convinced Emma's plan ensured a life without fear, Emma was also the only person she trusted. Besides Brittany. Emma knew this. She knew that by leaving tomorrow Eva would never be able to contact Brittany again, and while continuing where they had left of was never an option, Eva felt some happiness at having the other woman back in her life again. Emma knew Eva was also aware that their plan would protect Brittany. It would take her out of the spotlight. It would erase the to-do list upon which she was number one.

"Is everything in place?"

Emma shuddered at the cool tone Eva used when referring to that part of their plan.

"Everything is in place. I just need to finish my recording and set the timer for its release. Make sure you get some sleep tonight, okay honey?"

"You too." Emma envisaged the smallest smile on the other woman's face. She needed to believe it was there. She needed to believe she was doing the right thing by someone.

Emma turned her chair back around to face the monitor, placing her phone in the very spot she had retrieved it from. She still liked order. She still liked to be in control of as much of the space around her as possible, but that had changed dramatically for her over the years. She pressed record again.

"Two years prior to my marriage to Will Schuester, I began working at a summer camp for teens with special needs. Parents insisted upon having nurses on hand. Many of the other volunteers were also teenagers. Two of the teens I spent several summers with were Eva Hernandez and Rory Flanagan. The two met as high school freshmen the year I began volunteering and, from what I later learned, the two kept returning as it was their only opportunity to spend large portions of time together. I had assumed initially that the two were a couple, but when only Rory returned for the third year in a row, I not only found this to be untrue, but I found the reason behind her lack of attendance alarming.

Eva had been incarcerated for a crime she did not commit. I had been aware that a relative of hers was very controlling, but when Rory explained that this relative had set her up because he disapproved of her lifestyle, I was furious. I wanted to contact the authorities and mentioned that my husband was a member of an elite police squad."

Emma's face flushed with humiliation at the naivety of her words years before.

"Rory told me I was not to pursue the matter under any circumstances and was very clear about the fact that involving my husband would be catastrophic. I suppose I lied by way of omission around the same time Will began lying to my face. Eva was at the Jane Addams Academy under the name of Sofia Ramos and Rory mentioned that she had met another girl who attended a regular school and they were very close. Eva, as Sofia, was in and out of the Jane Addams academy three times over the next eighteen months. Through it all, the young girl, Brittany Pierce, stuck by her.

These two very different sides of my life came together one awful night shortly after the fourth summer camp had ended."

Emma paused the recording again. Her memories of the three weeks after that final camp were so vivid she could still feel the way her skin crawled at the knowledge of who Will had become.

"So now we're back at the start. After Jesse's arrival in our lives I'd been following my husband on and off, and discovered his bizarre partnership with David Martinez. While I still hadn't worked out exactly why they met so frequently, this would soon become alarmingly clear.

Having spent the night alone one Friday evening, Will having called to say he was on the verge of a breakthrough in a huge investigation and would sleep at the warehouse, I received a call the following morning. Expecting it to be Will, ready with another lie, I was surprised to hear it was Eva. We'd spoken only once since the camp, when I called JA to check on her, but I told her that if she ever needed anything, she could call. She told me to turn on the television and when I did so the news coverage showed a house which had been the subject of a raid the night before and the reporter revealed Will's superintendent, Paul Karofsky, was dead, along with two unnamed officers. The news reporter attributed the deaths of the police officers to members of several Hispanic gangs who had been present at the house that evening. We do that all the time, don't we? We pick an easy target, one who is not in uniform, one without a badge, and wave their difference like a red flag at the camera. We give the real criminals time by doing that. We give them time to button up their shirt again and sit back behind their desk.

When I asked after Will, Eva could confirm he was still alive, but she was insistent upon meeting with me as soon as possible. We met later that evening, and that is when my life changed."

Emma stood from her seat and ran her fingers through her hair. Walking over to a small overnight bag by the front door she opened a pill box and placed a tablet on her tongue, the bitter taste spreading in the moment before she walked back to her desk and reached for her glass of water. Running the footage back a few seconds, her own image in fast motion replacing the pill and walking backwards towards the chair before removing a hand from her hair and sitting down. She cut the unwanted portion and resumed her recording.

"Eva and I sat in a corner booth of a café. She wore dark glasses which weren't doing a very good job of hiding anything, and she flinched as I leaned across the table to remove them. The bruising covered her cheek bone, and her eye was bloodshot and swollen. She said the marks on her ribs were the worst and that's when I first noticed the way she winced with every breath.

Eva revealed Will had been working with Martinez. She explained in detail the events of the evening before in which she had been at a party with her girlfriend only to have the man catch the two in bed together. She told me she saw Will wielding a gun and that she and Brittany had escaped through a window. She knew Will and Martinez were responsible for the death of Karofsky as they had apparently been planning it for weeks. When Eva arrived home early that morning, her family was out, by David Martinez was there. He beat her and threatened to kill her if she breathed a word of the events to anyone. He wanted Brittany's name and Eva told him she was moving away and they would never see each other again. When he insisted on a name, with his fingers around her throat, she choked out the name Cheryl DeMart. Cheryl and Brittany were physically similar and had attended the same high school.

Eva went on to detail Martinez's double act undercover, deceiving both the SRS and the Hernandez family. Drugs were the motivation behind Will and Martinez's deception. The two were making a great deal of money from skimming off the side of Eva's father's business and selectively sharing information with the SRS.

Eva also informed me that Will was an addict. This, more than anything else she had told me, explained the change I'd seen in him. Eva informed me that the men had become aware I knew of their involvement and after Martinez beat Eva she heard him tell Will that I needed to be taken care of now they'd solved the Karofsky problem.

But Eva and Rory had cooked up a plan with the help of Martin Flanagan. Within hours I had received a list of drugs I would need to acquire from the hospital.

The Flanagan's were holding a doctor named Richard Forde. The man had been working with them for some years, on call to provide medical attention to members of the family who met with unexpected hostility during jobs. They paid him handsomely for his time off the books, but when Forde wanted to bring a colleague in on their deal, the Flanagan's weren't happy. Forde was given the opportunity to redeem himself by helping me trick Martinez and Will into believing I was dead."

There is nothing easy about faking your own death. Emma Pillsbury had learned this the hard way. Although she did so to save her life, very little of the life she had known, remained. She had questioned the value of a life frequently over the past few years. More so over the most recent months. Dying at Martinez's hand may well have been the easier option, in hindsight. But that option would not have gone any way towards helping Eva and the Pierce girl.

The newspaper headlines declared the death of the local nurse, an unfortunate tragedy. Forde was given his life back, as well as the accolade of being the first on scene and who had used heroic measures to save William Schuester, but had declared Emma Pillsbury dead upon impact. She owed the Flanagan's her life.

"Remarkably, Will passed his post accident drug test with a little help from Martinez, probably, and was cleared of wrong doing in the accident which appeared to have killed me. He was hailed as one of the city's heroes, and an innocent victim of the tragedy.

The Flanagan's worked on the idea that I should be kept hidden in plain sight. They knew nobody would be looking for a dead woman and so began establishing a life for me without too many ties. They wanted the new me to be hard to find and impossible to trace back to them.

With the help of Richard Forde, Flanagan set up a company which was headed by his son, Rory. While the lease agreement was in Forde's name, and his signature appeared on all the papers associated with the business, the security company was completely under Flanagan's control. When Forde misstepped again, this time bringing his colleague to meet with Martin Flanagan unannounced, they decided he'd served his purpose and gave him a round of pills he'd supplied them with at one time or another and made his death look like a suicide.

I was brought in as a silent partner in Rory's security operation and he taught me the basics of programming and hacking.

I felt as though I had actually died. As soon as I became involved with Eva and the Flanagan's, Emma Pillsbury ceased to exist. I was given a new name and began living a quiet life as Sylvia Henderson. The woman that nobody knew.

While the Flanagan's had no concerns with their son's friendship with Eva, Eva's family knew nothing of it. Nor did David Martinez. Eva needed it to stay this way. Martinez traced Cheryl DeMart to a small town in Colorado and vowed once more that if she ever came back or contacted Eva again he'd kill her.

For a few years everything seemed to be at a standstill and I became used to the idea that I might be able to have a relatively normal life working for the Flanagan's. Eva went off to college in Pennsylvania and studied nursing. After she graduated she worked there for a couple of years before she was sure it was safe to return."

Emma found herself feeling tired and knew that the rest of the story was one the SRS were perfectly aware of. She glanced at the clock above her desk. In less than eleven hours she will have changed the lives of many forever. She needed sleep, and focused her attention back on the screen.

"When Eva's return coincided with that of Cheryl DeMart, Martinez went into a rage. Still believing her to be the girl from the party years ago, he was convinced she and Eva were going to reconnect and he set up her death to appear to be a suicide. This is when Eva insisted we put Onyx on Brittany. The trouble was, Martinez put his surveillance onto Eva and quickly found out about her friendship with Rory Flanagan. Martinez killed Rory the day after he saw him at Pierce's studio and when the Flanagan's began asking questions he killed Felipe to pit the two families against each other. At some point Rory had made the connection that Brittany was his half-sister. When Flanagan found out, I was then tasked with keeping Brittany safe at all costs."

At all costs. Protecting Brittany and protecting the memory of everything the young woman had meant to Eva was the driving force behind everything she'd been doing for months. Emma Pillsbury was concerned about what would occur when that momentum came to a stop.

"Of all the crimes I have committed over the years, none have been major and none have hurt anybody, intentionally or otherwise. Tomorrow that will change. Tomorrow I will end this."

Emma saved the recording and set it to send to Artie Abrams the following afternoon. She picked up the glass of water and cardboard coaster. Walking to the kitchen she disposed of the coaster and rinsed the glass. Leaning against the counter, she surveyed her apartment. Besides her computer equipment everything else was boxed up ready to be removed. She and Eva would be out of the country by the time the SRS received her video. They would only have each other now, but at least they would finally be free.