Finding Mrs. Ford

by Deborah Goodrich Royce

  “Take a seat, please.” DelVecchio gestures to the side of the table opposite Provenzano, as though they would consider splitting up to share sides with the FBI agents—like two couples out for dinner.

  “Mrs. Ford, I am going to make this very plain.” DelVecchio does not sit but stands behind his chair. “You might be in a great deal of trouble. Exactly how much trouble you are in will depend entirely on facts as they unfold and your compliance from this day forward. You are not yet charged with a crime. But, you do understand that you have the right to remain silent, the right to an attorney? If you cannot afford an attorney,” he adds with a small smile, “one will be provided for you. Do you understand these rights, and do you wish to speak to me?”

  “Yes, I—” she begins.

  “Good.” DelVecchio cuts her off. “I repeat. You are not yet charged with a crime. However, pursuant to investigation of the accusations that are now being leveled by Mrs. Hopkins, there are numerous state and federal laws that may have been broken.” DelVecchio uses the fingers of both hands to tick off his points. “If you are not, in fact, Susan Bentley Ford—if you are, in fact, another woman who has been posing as Susan Bentley Ford—if the real Mrs. Ford is dead or was killed—if you have had any involvement in, or knowledge of, her death or disappearance and have withheld that information from legal authorities—if you, at some point in time, assumed her identity and her property—if you moved that property from one state to another—well, to name a few criminal charges that would be considered—and I stop myself here to assure you that this list is nowhere near comprehensive—we have identity theft, larceny, forgery, illegal transport of stolen goods over state lines, accessory to murder and, make no mistake about this, murder. Is that clear, Mrs. Ford?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Now, I have some questions for you. To begin with, do you recognize this object?”

  DelVecchio slides his chair to the side, making a slight whine along the floor as he does so. He steps forward to the edge of the table, leaning his legs on the rim. He reaches down to pick up a manila envelope, which she had not noticed earlier. He lifts up the envelope, pinches the little brass clasp, and runs his hand under the flap to loosen it. He tips the envelope to allow its contents to slide out onto his cupped left palm. All eyes are focused on DelVecchio’s sleight of hand.

  DelVecchio then grasps the object with the thumb and index finger of his right hand, holds it up in the air and lets the length of it fall down and dangle.

  Like a man just dropped from the gallows, a pendant shaped like a question mark swings back and forth on a long gold chain in front of all of their faces.

  “Do you know what this is, Mrs. Ford?”

  “It, uh, it’s a necklace,” she says.

  “Sus…” Jack catches himself. “You don’t have to answer this,

  you know.”

  She sees DelVecchio register Jack’s slip, tally it in his mental file folder.

  “Mr. Ford, as I am sure you are well aware,” Provenzano says, “under certain conditions, Mrs. Ford’s cooperation with an ongoing investigation—an investigation that may involve other parties and other crimes—might ameliorate the effects of any charges brought against her.”

  “Are you making some sort of offer?” Jack asks.

  “I don’t mind answering the question,” she says. “I have nothing to hide.” At that comment, she notices, everyone in the room maintains a studied poker face—Jack Jr. included.

  “Have you seen this necklace before?” Provenzano asks.

  “Yes, I have.”

  “Look, I mean it,” Jack blurts. “You do not have to answer these questions. Gentlemen, I suggest that we stop these proceedings now. As a family member, I cannot properly act as counsel for this interview.”

  “Mr. Ford, as I said earlier,” DelVecchio explains, “Mrs. Ford has not been charged with any crimes. We are asking for her help in another matter. A case that’s been cold for thirty-five years. It would be beneficial to Mrs. Ford to be of assistance to us.”

  “It’s all right, Jack.” She reaches out to touch Jack’s arm and feels him flinch. She turns back to Provenzano and DelVecchio. “Where did you get that necklace?”

  “Why don’t you tell us what you know about it,” says DelVecchio.

  “Look,” Jack interjects, leaning toward her across the table to better claim her attention. “I really do not like where this is going. I advise you to stop talking immediately.”

  “Mrs. Ford, do you remember meeting a young woman by the name of Diane Englund? She may have been a patron at Frankie’s Disco. She may have worked there as a waitress. She may not have used her real name.”

  And with that, Agent Provenzano opens a second manila envelope, larger than the first, and slips out a photo. It looks like a yearbook photo, glossy black and white. In it, Diane, the sweet, young waitress from Frankie’s, is smiling. Her hair is curled in a flip, her bangs are combed straight down over her forehead. Her freckles shine out, her eyes are bright, and her smile is wide.

  Diane is wearing a dark crewneck sweater—maybe black, maybe blue, maybe even red. Staring at the photo, she remembers the odd fact that red looks like black in a black-and-white image.

  Around her neck hangs the gold question mark necklace. It is distinctive. There is no mistaking it; she has never seen another one like it. Not before and not since.

  She breathes in sharply.

  “I—that’s all I have to say right now. I need to go.” She rises abruptly, which tips over her chair behind her. It lands with a loud thud.

  Jack rises, as well.

  “Mrs. Ford, we’ll be in touch. We suggest you think seriously about what we said.”

  Without a word to the agents or each other, Mrs. Jack Ford and Mr. Jack Ford Jr. depart.

  41

  Friday, August 15, 2014

  Two days later, Mrs. Ford strides back into the reception room of the FBI office in Boston. This time, she is alone. She knows now what she must do to right mistakes of the past and contain any further damage. She wears neither heels nor a dress but is less formal in dark pants, a sweater, and loafers.

  “Good morning, Melinda,” she says.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Ford. Please have a seat. I’ll let them know you’re here.”

  She sits and waits. Distractedly, she reaches into her bag and pulls out the old white envelope, dingy and yellowed with age.

  DelVecchio opens the door. “Mrs. Ford,” he says.

  “Agent DelVecchio,” she answers, stuffing the envelope back in.

  She follows him through the reception area, past Melinda at her post, through the door, down the hall and into the interrogation room that is now familiar to her.

  “Mrs. Ford,” Provenzano greets her. “Please take a seat.”

  She sits on her usual side of the table and DelVecchio joins Provenzano on theirs.

  The room has more objects in it than it had on her visit two days before. A white board is mounted on an easel next to the table. The high school graduation photo of Diane Englund, smiling, freckled, and wearing the gold question mark necklace, is tacked to it. Several other iterations of that picture, each blown up and featuring the necklace in grainy black-and-white closeups, are alongside of it. Hanging below them are some large-scale images of the necklace in full color. New pictures taken from the necklace they now have in their possession.

  “Just to establish the facts, you have chosen to return here today unaccompanied by an attorney?” Provenzano asks.

  “Yes, I have,” she responds.

  “And you are willing to cooperate with this investigation?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Have you brought the photographs you mentioned on the phone?” DelVecchio cuts to the chase.

  “Yes.” Again, she extracts the shabby envelope from her purse. “Here they are.”

  She sets the envelope on the table and slides it across to the agents.

  Provenzano takes it and opens it. It
is not sealed. He shakes out a stack of Polaroid pictures, ten in all, and, one by one, examines them. He grabs a jeweler’s loupe from the table to get a closer look. Once he has gone through the stack three full times, while she and DelVecchio remain silent, he passes the stack and the loupe to his partner.

  DelVecchio repeats the process.

  “Why didn’t you turn in the photos to the police earlier?” asks Provenzano.

  “I was frightened.”

  “Do you understand the ramifications of these pictures? Do you also understand the consequences for you for withholding this information all these years?”

  “These pictures scared me.” She sinks back onto her chair. “It was a dark time. My life was…well, you don’t care about that.”

  “Why don’t you let us decide what we care about and what we don’t?” Provenzano says gently.

  “What happened to her?” She looks at the smiling Diane on the white board.

  “We’ll ask the questions, Mrs. Ford,” says DelVecchio, not gently at all.

  Provenzano steps in. “We don’t know what happened to her. Here’s what we do know. Diane Englund was a runaway. From a prominent family in Bloomfield Hills. Her father was an executive in the auto industry. With Chrysler.

  “Her parents brought that yearbook photo to the police in the summer of nineteen seventy-nine, shortly after she disappeared. The FBI became involved. But nothing of her was ever found. No information about her whereabouts. No body. No calls. No tips. Nothing. Those were different times. This was before computers. There was no internet.

  “Eventually, the case went cold. The information was placed in her file, along with the school photo. It was all kept in the property room in Detroit, down in the basement. Another face on a milk box.

  “When Samuel Fakhouri turned up in our hands ten days ago, that necklace was in his possession. We had not been looking for it, but it caught our attention. We reviewed everything we had with our office in Detroit and someone there remembered it. They dug around and came up with this case. We ran some dimensions and the necklace is an exact match. We suspect Fakhouri might be our guy.”

  42

  Wednesday, September 5, 1979

  Suburban Detroit

  Annie hadn’t intended to go to Susan’s that night. They were not even on speaking terms. She hadn’t meant to go looking for Frankie, either. He had told her he was busy with his mother and had asked her to leave him alone. She hadn’t planned out one single aspect of the debacle that unfolded.

  The evening had begun at her grandmother’s house. She’d promised Grandma Annie a girls’ night in, complete with Jiffy Pop, and she had attempted to make it work. She sat on the sofa next to her grandmother, struggled to follow the TV show, tried to choke down popcorn, and endeavored to limit her runs to the bathroom for little maintenance sniffs. Grandma Annie had noticed her agitation.

  In the bathroom, Annie calculated her remaining cocaine supply. And that is how she ended up at Johnny’s, doing something else she hadn’t intended to do that night. She knew she was courting disaster by showing up at his place once again, but she was desperate. Desperate to get those pictures that Johnny had taken of her. And desperate for more cocaine.

  It was not so much that Annie enjoyed the feeling of being on cocaine, but that she couldn’t bear to come off of it. What happened when the coke wore off was a ripping open of the chasm inside of her, exposing the hole she pretended was not there. To face it was unendurable.

  Annie had experienced her first taste of cocaine not quite two months before. How could the drug have become the centerpiece of her waking life in such a short time? It had not happened with a bang but with a sweet slide. Cocaine had inserted itself ever so gently into the empty space that was already primed, ready, and waiting inside Annie. It slipped in neatly, a perfect fit, like a hand in a custom-made glove. The problem now was that, when that glove was removed, the hand it exposed was a slab of raw meat with every nerve exposed.

  Annie had backed herself into a tight and airless corner.

  The fact that Johnny behaved with impunity filled her with awe and envy. She recognized the boys’ club to which he belonged and knew that she stood outside of any benefits it might confer. If Frankie ever figured out that she’d been trading sex for drugs, she would be judged harshly and tossed aside.

  On whatever pecking order those men existed, Johnny was above Frankie. Frankie would throw Annie to the curb, but he would forgive Johnny. Maybe not at first—maybe Vito would have to step in and talk sense to him—but, eventually, Johnny’s sins would be absolved. He and Frankie would move on together, in their little fraternity, and, over the years, Annie would become a shared anecdote, a reminiscence of the summer of ’79.

  Perhaps she would not even achieve that status. Maybe she’d simply be forgotten, joining the anonymous masses of girls they had screwed. In any case, they would close ranks and shut her out.

  She perceived this, but she could not help herself. She had heard it said that a mugger doesn’t mug everyone he sees—he picks his mark. Johnny had chosen her because she had been available to be chosen. Annie could have walked away, could have taken Susan’s offer of an exit strategy, but she did not. She had made her bed, as her grandmother would say, and she was lying in it.

  So the night that had begun at Grandma Annie’s quickly devolved into a whispered call to Johnny from the wall phone in the kitchen. Could he meet her? No. Could he help her out? Please, she found herself begging. Fine, he acquiesced. He sounded annoyed, not at all happy to hear from her. He said he was going somewhere important and did not have much time. She could come by his place, but she’d better make it quick.

  Annie slammed down the phone and dashed out the door, calling a hasty goodbye to Grandma Annie. Had she known that she would never see her grandmother again, she would have said a more respectful farewell to the woman who had loved her beyond all others.

  But she didn’t.

  43

  Thursday, September 6, 1979

  In the early morning hours, Annie spun her Corvette in the direction of Susan’s. Susan would know what to do. She always did. Annie recognized her own peevishness toward Susan and couldn’t explain it. She liked Susan. She wasn’t even joking when she’d said she wanted to be more like Susan. She also knew Susan was leaving imminently to go back to college and she risked never seeing her again. So, why hadn’t she spoken to her in weeks?

  That thought skittered toward another, darker truth and Annie bumped up against the question of her own college career. Classes had started already, and she had neither bothered to show up nor to officially resign. Best not to think too deeply on that subject and circle back to Susan. She hoped she hadn’t already missed her.

  This endless game of mental ping-pong was exhausting and only ratcheted up the bleakness that was creeping like a fog over Annie’s cocaine-induced good spirits. She freshened her dosage, which helped, and drove a little faster to Susan’s.

  Her loveless encounter with Johnny that night had gutted her and left her longing for a friend. Though it had been a victory of sorts. She had gone to Johnny’s and done what she needed to do to get what she needed to have. When he left the room to dress, she had rummaged in his drawer and succeeded in retrieving the photos.

  It did not take long. The white envelope was sitting right on top of a mess of papers. It practically had a spotlight shining on it. She had grabbed it, stuffed it down the front of her jeans and slammed the drawer shut.

  She was gone before he came out of the bathroom.

  At two a.m. on that September night, standing on the front lawn at Susan’s, Annie’s thoughts turned to Frankie. He knew she’d had the night off. She had expected him to take her out for the evening. Maybe not for dinner, she couldn’t stomach dinner, but at least for drinks. The bar at the Renaissance Center downtown would have struck the right note of celebration.

  Celebration of what? Well, getting ahold of that envelope would certainly qualify as g
rounds for celebration, but it was not as though she could talk to Frankie about that. She couldn’t really talk to Frankie about much, she would have to admit, if she were honest with herself.

  And what was that business about dinner with his mother? Had Frankie really thought she’d believe such a transparent lie?

  Annie tossed a pebble with a little too much backspin and cringed for a moment as it arced high in the air toward the window. To her relief, it did no damage and was probably the hit that succeeded in waking Susan.

  It wasn’t really until Susan came out to the porch that Annie hatched her plan to find Frankie. Once born, like a weed in her mental garden, the idea flourished and shadowed all others. In that way, it served to calm her. One obsession was easier to manage than dozens of thoughts ricocheting around in Annie’s brain, fighting each other for dominance. She would search for Frankie, Susan would accompany her, and any concept of what might transpire once Frankie was uncovered remained unexplored.

  Annie had expected to discover Frankie, in full flagrante, on the boat. She knew that he’d been with Sherry more than once this summer and she had a hard time believing that Susan hadn’t noticed anything. It was so damned obvious to her that she suspected Susan must have known. But Susan maintained her ignorance, which reminded Annie that Susan was secretive and perhaps untrustworthy.

  The boat had turned out to be a bust. Annie had had the hardest time climbing aboard, with the ladder pulled, but her own sense of moral righteousness catapulted her onto the deck. She’d made so much noise in the process that she paused a moment to catch her breath and listen for Frankie.

  As Annie prowled the pitch-dark boat, she cursed Susan sitting comfortably in the car, probably sleeping by now. She had really wanted Susan to serve as her backup on this mission.

  Just then, a flashlight clicked on and blinded her. She screamed and stumbled backward toward the stairs.

  “Who’s there?” she asked shrilly.