Television personalities have come and gone during Susanna’s tenure at New Day, and few women sustain careers into their forties, but Susanna was practically an institution at AMC. She briefly served as lead anchor for the evening news several years ago, but decided she enjoyed the banter of entertainment programming instead. She was approaching sixty years old and was still beloved. On the other hand, no woman was immune from reality. The network had the decency to present Susanna and Eric as equal cohosts, but Susanna happened to know that Eric was twelve years younger, earned twice as much, and was treated as the heir apparent to the network brand.
I’d spent the whole morning pretending that everything was normal for Spencer’s sake, but now that I was alone, listening to my friend’s panicked whisper, my whole body began to shake.
“Did you see Jason this morning?” I asked. “He’s not returning my calls.”
“For a millisecond. I popped into the green room to say hey, but couldn’t stick around. He seemed totally normal. Then I heard some crew members yenta-ing it up outside my dressing room. That’s how I found out about the Post article, but I literally had no time before going on air. The next thing I know, Eric’s throwing him under the bus on live television. Is it possible Jason didn’t see the news before he got to the studio?”
It was more than possible. Jason’s morning routine was a paragon of efficiency. No time for newspaper or web browsing.
“I don’t know. And I have no idea where he is right now. I’m trying not to completely lose it.” I could hear someone speaking urgently in the background.
“Shoot. I gotta go, but I’ll call you when I’m off air.”
I took a cue from my son and kept myself from crying by searching for something funny to say. “By the way . . . You told that chef you always overcook your pasta?”
“Hypothetically, in my imagination. Ciao!”
I happened to know that Susanna never cooked anything. That’s how we first became friends. And it’s how I met Jason.
8
Full-time work on the East End is hard to find. To the extent that farming and fishing have been replaced by the construction of new mega-homes, it’s still work I don’t know how to do. The retail shops and restaurants are packed in the summer, but only hire part-time and often close altogether in the off-season. I was looking for a job at the age of nineteen with nothing to boast but a recently obtained GED—a “high school equivalence” degree in name, but apparently not in perception. And it didn’t help that my reason for not finishing regular school was the three years I had spent away from the East End. When I finally came home, I heard the not-so-quiet whispers about the “hell” I’d put my parents through.
I was finally hired at Blue Heron Farms, a third-generation family business where the men fish and farm, and the women cook and sell the food. What started as a side-of-the-road farm stand had grown into a posh summer market. Before the term “farm to table” became fashionable, Blue Heron had been providing delicious fresh food to Hamptons visitors eager to avoid cooking.
I started at the cash register. After suggesting a few recipes I’d played around with in my parents’ kitchen, I was added to the cooking staff. It was my idea to launch a side business of setting up homes for weekenders. Mom would clean the house. I’d make sure that it was freshly stocked with food and drinks. To find customers, I left flyers on the windshields of the fanciest cars at Main Beach.
Susanna was my first regular. By the middle of the summer, she was so happy with the food that I was preparing that she gave me a shot at catering a small cocktail party. I picked up more clients from there. And somewhere along the way, Susanna and I became something like caretakers for each other. I looked after her home. She looked out for me. She even offered the use of her guest cottage for the off-season.
Mom and Dad made it clear they didn’t want me to move. At first I wondered if they had their own motives. It was only natural they wanted to keep Spencer and me safe under their wing. And Dad was having what we thought were back problems, making it hard for him to work. We’d only find out later, after he died of a stroke, that the problem wasn’t his back at all. It was clogged arteries in his legs. But at the time, my extra income was helping to cover expenses.
In the end, Mom talked me out of it, saying it would make me too “dependent” on Susanna. “You can’t have your son growing up in the backyard of a stranger’s house, like Dobby the house elf.” She had a point.
I was used to guests hitting on me during catering gigs. I was in my early twenties, wore my dark-blond hair in long, beachy waves, and had the perfect tan for those little black cocktail dresses that the Hampton set prefers for their party staff. When they asked me what I was doing when I got off work, my go-to response was “Going home to my son.” Nothing like a kid to get rid of a man looking to hook up.
But Jason was different.
It was Susanna’s Memorial Day party, her biggest bash of the year. Two of my staff—a bar-back and a kitchen helper—had no-showed, one of the risks of hiring summer Hamptonites as supplemental workers. Their first priority was to party, and it was the kickoff weekend of the season.
The icing on the cake was the delivery guy from the party rental company, a local who didn’t like me for “acting uppity” since I came home. When he saw that I was the one running the fancy party, he decided to dump all the chairs and tables in the driveway, forgoing the usual custom of moving and assembling them for a tip. I did the work myself instead of telling Susanna that not everyone in town liked me as much as she did.
I was scrambling to make sure I didn’t let her down, but keeping up proved less impossible than I had feared. I’d turn around, and the platter of shrimp cocktail that was running low would suddenly be replenished. The stack of tasting plates accumulating next to the bar would be cleared. I assumed that one of the two girls I had hired to pass trays for the party had been pitching in, until I walked into the kitchen to find a man reaching into the refrigerator for a plate of deviled eggs topped with caviar.
He looked surprised to see me when he turned around. “Busted.” His grin suggested a combination of pride and guilt.
“I was about to get those. Sorry.” When you work summers in the Hamptons, you get used to apologizing for things you have no reason to be sorry for.
“For what? So far, you’re the best thing about this party.” I thought it was the beginning of yet another pass until he pulled the plastic wrap from the plate and popped an egg in his mouth, one full bite. “This food is heaven,” he said once his mouth was clear, “and these people are assholes.”
“And yet you’re here.”
“True.” The grin again. “So everyone here who’s not in the kitchen is an asshole. Except Susanna. Her . . . I love. I’ll be a good boy and won’t tell her I hate these people—well, except for the nice woman who’s working her butt off to feed all of us.”
He pulled the special deviled-egg tray from a stack of platters on the kitchen island. “I assume these go here?”
“Absolutely nothing else could possibly go there.”
We began moving the eggs over, two at a time, in silence. When we were finished, he grabbed the tray and left, giving me a little wink as he backed through the swinging kitchen door. “No one has spotted me yet. I feel like a ninja.”
When the party died down, he reappeared in the kitchen as I was packing up the leftovers for Susanna’s freezer. He even helped me carry my equipment out to the pickup truck I had parked behind Susanna’s guesthouse.
“Cool ride,” he said. I didn’t tell him that I had borrowed it from a man named Matt Miller. Or that Matt and I were kind of a thing.
When the work was done, he closed the truck door for me, and that was almost it. I had backed out of Susanna’s driveway and was halfway down the block when I saw him in my rearview mirror, walking toward one of the last cars parked on the street, lighting a cigarette. I reversed back and rolled down the passenger window. “I assumed you were one o
f Susanna’s weekend guests.”
“Nope. Just stayed late.”
He was in the driver’s seat and about to shut the door when I said, “I’m Angela, by the way.”
“I’m Jason. Thanks for the nice party.”
I broke down and asked Susanna for his last name two days later. She told me he was an economics professor at NYU. “He’s single, you know. I called him last year for background on a story we did about global trade, but then I happened to mention my house out here. He was looking for a rental. Anyway, he’s terrific. Want me to matchmake?”
I didn’t want to put Susanna in the position of suggesting that her college professor friend date a mom with a GED, so I made her promise not to say anything. “I was curious, is all.”
By the time Jason called me a week later, he was all I could think about. To this day, both he and Susanna swear that she never meddled.
9
When I got back from walking Spencer to school, I called out Jason’s name, but the house was silent. I sat on the living room sofa and flipped open my laptop.
If you search online for “Jason Powell wife,” you find out that her name is Angela Powell. You’ll find exactly one photograph of us together—at a fund-raiser for a mayoral candidate. Jason posts no pictures of me or Spencer on social media, and my Facebook page is under the name Angela Spencer and used only to be in touch with the other moms at the school. If you search for Angela Mullen, you’ll learn she was credited as a sought-after caterer in a few articles about summer life on the East End, but no mentions of her for the last six years.
If you dig hard, you might find some archived news articles—nothing national, only from the East Hampton Star and Newsday on Long Island, right around the time google became a verb—referring to a missing girl by that name. The police said there were no signs of foul play, and unnamed “sources” speculated the girl had left on her own, but her mother, Virginia Mullen, doggedly blanketed Suffolk County with flyers and swore she would never stop searching for her daughter.
But, at least with my online skills, you wouldn’t know for certain that the girl and the caterer were one and the same, or that Angela Powell used to be both of those girls, or where Angela Mullen was while she was missing, let alone why she might actually be of interest.
How long could Jason’s “scandal” make the rounds before someone started to wonder why his wife kept such a low profile?
I tried Jason’s cell once again. It was still off. Is he on the subway? Has he been arrested? Is he with someone—another woman, maybe? My imagination ran through every scenario. I wasn’t going to be able to do anything else until I heard from him.
When my phone finally rang, I swiped right to accept the call without reading the screen. “Jason?”
“It’s Colin. I’ve been trying to reach him, too. Do you know about these reports I’m seeing? Does he need a defense lawyer? I’ve got some names for him.”
In addition to being Jason’s closest friend, Colin Harris is also an attorney and the kind of person who likes to fix problems. Five years ago, when I had my medical issues, he bombarded me with recommendations for specialists who could help. He was not going to rest until my troubles were solved. That’s what Colin is like.
“He’s not answering his phone,” I said. “I mean it, Colin, if Jason’s not in jail, I might be, for killing him.”
“Did he know this complaint was coming?”
“I have no idea. I mean, he told me that a female intern complained he said something sexist. He sounded annoyed by the whole situation, but he didn’t mention the police. He left this morning for a segment he was supposed to do on New Day. They canceled it as if Jason were Ted Bundy or something. He didn’t call you?”
“No,” Colin confirmed.
I tried to find comfort in that fact. Colin was a well-connected insurance defense lawyer at a big law firm that represented big corporations. If Jason thought he was in legal trouble, surely he would have called Colin.
Now that I was on the phone with another person, I felt tawdry for scanning Rachel Sutton’s Facebook page. She probably had no idea that one of her classmates had outed her name in an online comment, and that others were now repeating it on various less-than-reputable websites.
Graduated with honors from Rice University in Houston, head of the Environmental Society. Volunteer for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals while pursuing her graduate degree in economics at NYU.
There was a photograph posted a week ago of two hands entwined on a tabletop. The female hand bore a solitaire diamond ring. The caption read, “I said yes.” Seventy-two comments of congratulations followed for Rachel and the groom-to-be, who was apparently named Michael Logan.
Colin was asking if I had tried calling both of Jason’s offices, at the university and at FSS.
“He didn’t answer,” I said, scrolling down to scan more photographs of Rachel. She had dark brown hair, pale skin, and pretty almond-shaped eyes. She looked like she could be mixed-race. She looked nothing like me.
“Did you call Zack?” Colin asked.
I realized that Colin knew Jason’s professional friends better than I did, the consequence of my avoiding his work-related shindigs, where I inevitably felt out of my element. I have no interest in socializing with grown adults who always seem to launch a first conversation with “And where did you go to school, Angela?”
When I told him that I hadn’t reached out to Jason’s protégé, Colin said he would call Zack and let me know if he heard anything. Before he hung up, he told me to let Jason know that he had the name of a “hard-core crim shark” ready to go. He also promised that everything would be all right.
I found myself staring at a photograph of Rachel with two other gorgeous twentysomethings, one male, one female. According to the “check-in,” the photograph was taken at some place called Le Bain, apparently a rooftop bar at the Standard Hotel. Swanky.
I clicked on the name of the male friend tagged in the picture—Wilson Stewart. He had perfect white teeth and floppy, sandy brown hair. He was a frequent poster: politics, food reviews, lots of photographs. At this point, I was hitting my laptop’s touchpad at random to keep my mind occupied.
I was reading about the online persona created by this stranger—Rachel’s young, good-looking friend, Wilson Stewart—when my cell phone rang again. The screen told me it was Jason.
“Where are you?”
“At school. Shit, you heard already, didn’t you?”
“It’s all over the news,” I said, “online, at least. And Susanna called. So did Colin—he has a lawyer he wants you to contact. What the hell is going on, Jason? Rachel’s claiming you assaulted her? You told me it was an offhand comment.”
“It’s complicated, okay? I didn’t think it would come to this—”
When he mentioned it at dinner right after it happened, he’d sounded amused by it. Now it was complicated.
I heard him sigh on the other end of the line. “A cop called—a woman—while I was in Philly. I told her I wasn’t talking without a lawyer. I was ready to call Colin if she pressed it, but she didn’t. I assumed she was dotting her i’s because Rachel blew it out of proportion. Now this.”
I told him again I’d been trying to call him all morning. “Where have you been?”
“The dean’s office. His secretary was dialing my cell before I’d left the television studio. I felt like a child being hauled into the damn principal’s office. He said the university’s initiating its own investigation. If they try to use this to fuck with me, it could derail everything.”
I knew he didn’t literally mean everything. He would still have me and Spencer, and he’d told me how hard it was to revoke a professor’s tenure. Jason was referring to everything else that was important to him right now—his newfound role as a public intellectual, his plans for the future.
His voice trailed off. I had seen my husband go from the dean’s beloved academic wunderkind to an outsider in a handful o
f years. After the Wall Street Journal reported that Jason got a seven-figure deal for his book, his colleagues accused him of being a sellout. They liked him better when he published heavily footnoted articles that no one read.
“Jason, are you sure there isn’t something else I should know?” I shut my eyes, afraid of the answer. Maybe there was a flirtation. A moment between an admiring young student and her attractive professor. I pictured all the girls daydreaming about Professor Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark, “love you” etched on a set of eyelids.
I fell for Jason at about the same age. Why wouldn’t they?
He answered immediately. “I swear on my mother’s grave, Angela, nothing happened. It was—damn it, when she walked into my office, I was changing clothes. She must have thought—”
I held my free hand to my face. “Jesus, Jason.”
“What? I ran at lunch and had taken a shower. It’s not like I was naked. I was tucking in my shirt, I think. I was almost done when she walked in or I would have told her to come back later. This girl’s crazy. And damn it, I want a fucking cigarette.”
“Don’t even.” When Jason asked Spencer what he wanted for his thirteenth birthday, Spencer had asked his father to quit smoking. I want you to live forever, Dad. Jason resisted at first, joking that he liked the look on strangers’ faces when they saw him light up after a long run. But he finally quit on New Year’s, successfully substituting gum for the cigarettes he’d taken up while finishing his PhD dissertation.
I didn’t realize I was still scrolling through Wilson Stewart’s Facebook page until I stopped suddenly on a photograph. He was drinking from a highball glass—something dark, maybe scotch. His eyes were glazed, trying to focus on the screen for the selfie he was taking. A thin arm was draped around his waist from behind. A head of dark shiny hair was visible over his shoulder, pale skin pressed against his neck as two lips found the lobe of his ear. No ring, not yet. It was Rachel Sutton.
The Wife: A Novel of Psychological Suspense Page 5