The Wife: A Novel of Psychological Suspense

by Alafair Burke

“Which goes to his school and to our mortgage and to taxes and to my agent and to running a business. Two clients have already dumped me. And I still have to pay the rent on our offices and paychecks for the staff. Do you know how much I had to give that defense attorney as a retainer?”

  Of course I didn’t, because he hadn’t told me. But now he told me he’d taken $50,000 from our savings account—almost all of it—as a retainer. If the case went to trial, we’d need to open a line of credit against the house. Olivia estimated that it would be $300,000, plus any expert testimony they might need.

  “How much is left?” I asked.

  “I mean, it depends what you count. I’ve got almost a million in my retirement account, but I can’t touch it without paying massive penalties. And we have the equity in the house.”

  I knew it had been a mistake to extend ourselves to buy this place. Who owns an actual house in Manhattan, let alone in Greenwich Village, let alone a carriage house with the ultimate luxury of a parking garage? We could have bought a nice apartment, with money left over to buy a decent house in East Hampton, instead of renting in the summer. But this place was on the National Register of Historic Whatevers. It was significant. It needed us, in Jason’s view. We had to lock it down, although it meant using his entire book advance as a down payment, with an enormous mortgage to fund the rest.

  “How much do we have left in savings now?” I asked.

  “About twenty.”

  I would have guessed three times that. “The camp is only eighty-five hundred; five thousand for three weeks. I never ask for anything, Jason. If you can spend half a million dollars to prove your mistress is a liar, you can throw in a few more bucks to protect our son from the details. He’s going.”

  I expected him to argue, but he simply nodded. “I’m probably not supposed to touch that cake, am I?”

  I smiled involuntarily and handed him a plate from the cabinet, knowing that something in our relationship had changed. He needed me to stand by his side through this. He needed me, period.

  The following morning, the news broke. A woman—unnamed, of course—had accused Jason Powell of rape. The NYPD had taken a DNA sample for comparison. A criminal law professor from Hofstra was quoted as saying, “The DNA will be make-or-break. But, let’s face it, with a high-profile suspect like this, why would they ask for a sample if they didn’t expect it to match?”

  I was in the kitchen an hour later when I heard a knock at the door. I looked through the peephole. The woman was about my age, wearing a white cotton blouse and navy capri pants. Something about her looked familiar. Maybe she was a mom from school, or a neighbor collecting signatures to block that high-rise proposed three blocks down.

  When I opened the door, she asked if Jason was home, then asked if I was his wife. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but a story posted on the Daily News’s website two hours later reported that “a woman who answered the door at Powell’s home, which he purchased for $7 million two years ago, said, ‘This is all lies,’ before retreating inside.”

  Once it was dark, I went to the front porch with a screwdriver, removed the gargoyle doorknocker by myself, and threw it in the garbage at the corner. As I walked back home, I realized it was the start of Memorial Day weekend, exactly seven years since I first met Jason. This wasn’t a future I ever predicted for myself.

  25

  Ginny Mullen locked the front door of the house she had cleaned on Ocean Drive. She usually worked with her friend Lucy, but Lucy’s grandson was running a fever and couldn’t go to day care, and Lucy’s daughter had appointments at the hair salon, and her son-in-law, who was one of the best tree trimmers on the East End, still had his hands full thanks to the storm three weeks ago. So Lucy was the babysitter for the day, and Ginny had cleaned this five-thousand-square-foot home—the biggest house on her list of clients—on her own.

  She had returned the key to the hidden outdoor lockbox when the owner, Amanda Hunter, pulled into the round gravel driveway in her black Range Rover. Amanda stepped out wearing a fitted tank top and yoga pants, her arms sinewy and still tanned from last month’s trip to St. Barths. She was probably forty years old, but worked hard at the gym and with Botox to look younger.

  “Hey there, Ginny. I thought you’d be finished by now.”

  She would have left three hours before if Lucy had been there to help. “Sorry—I’m working alone today, so it took a little longer.”

  “No problem. Sorry, I’m a little bit sweaty. Pilates teacher kicked my butt.” She didn’t look the least bit mussed to Ginny. “Oh shoot, I forgot to leave you money, didn’t I?”

  It was an ongoing problem with Amanda.

  “That’s okay,” Ginny said. “I always know you’ll leave it next time.” She didn’t complete the rest of the sentence—you’ll leave it next time after I text you a reminder.

  Amanda was rifling through her purse now, pulling out random bills. “I think I have it. Or most of it.”

  “Really, it’s okay.”

  Back into the purse went the bills. “I’ll write it down so I don’t forget. So, are you doing okay? With your son-in-law and this latest news? Oh, stupid me. I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s just, here he is, like the perfect catch, and now this.”

  Ginny assured her that Angela was fine and that “things would be sorted out soon,” whatever that meant, then made her way to the Honda Pilot she had parked at the far end of the driveway.

  “I like your new car, by the way,” Amanda called out as Ginny climbed into the front seat. Ginny threw a final wave as she drove away in the car that Jason’s money had helped her buy.

  Back home, she powered on her iPad—yet another gift from Angela, purchased with Jason’s money, connected to the WiFi that Angela insisted that she needed but which Ginny rarely used. She typed in “Jason Powell,” then added the phrase “latest news,” Amanda’s words ringing in her ears.

  “NYPD Investigating Jason Powell for Rape,” screamed the headline. According to the article that followed, law enforcement sources had confirmed that, separate from last week’s complaint against Powell by an intern, the police department’s special victims unit was pursuing a different woman’s complaint that Powell had forcibly assaulted her.

  Ginny checked her phone. No calls from Angela. No surprise.

  When Angela first started dating Jason, Ginny worried in a way she hadn’t since Angela was found and returned home. It was natural for her to distrust a summer visitor from the city, consorting with “a local” to prove he wasn’t a complete outsider.

  Ginny of course had never blamed Angela for what happened to her, but the truth is that her daughter would have been safe if she hadn’t been so obsessed with escaping her own community. Ginny would never forget the first time Danny found out where Angela really was when she broke curfew. In the past, Ginny had covered for her, telling Danny that she’d given Angela permission to stay out late, or had forgotten that Angela had told her about a slumber party. But when a twenty-six-year-old banker crashed his BMW into a stop sign on Cedar Street with two drunk teenage girls in his car, Danny finally saw a different side of his little girl.

  The banker tested positive for cocaine. Fortunately, no one drug tested the girls, returning them home to their families. The first thing in the morning, Danny was down at the police station, insisting that the banker be arrested for kidnapping or reckless endangerment or some other crime for running off with his fourteen-year-old daughter. Some poor police officer had to break the news to Danny. The banker had no idea he was partying with minors. The police found Angela’s fake ID in her purse. To top it all off, the other girl in the car was fifteen-year-old Trisha Faulkner, whose entire family was rotten to the core. Most of the men had been in and out of prison, and the women were always offering explanations for bruises and worse. Trisha was known for being deeply troubled, acting out with drugs and sex at a shockingly young age. Sensible people kept their distance.

  But apparently Angela wasn�
�t being sensible.

  Ginny remembered listening from the bedroom door when Danny went into Angela’s room to ask her what she was doing in a car with a grown man.

  Angela had broken down in tears, apologizing for her mistake, but then tried to explain what drew her to people like that—summer people. She said that for nine months a year, she looked around and saw nothing to be hopeful about. Everyone she knew worked all day, every day, and nothing ever changed. But once the season started, people showed up who had more than jobs. They had careers and plans and traveled the world—a world she wanted to be part of. She said that people like the BMW driver “made her feel special.”

  Ginny was prepared to comfort Danny when he joined her alone in the kitchen afterward. She wanted to assure him that he was a good man and a good provider, and that Angela was going through a phase after suddenly blossoming into a beautiful girl who looked older than her fourteen years. She had expected her husband to blame himself for not giving Angela a better life.

  Instead, he had slumped into his chair and glared at Angela’s door. “I never thought I’d say this, but I’m ashamed of our daughter.” He forbade Angela from talking to Trisha Faulkner, which seemed only to draw them closer in the weeks and months that followed.

  Ginny knew Angela didn’t tell her everything, but she still confided in her enough for Ginny to know that there was something honorable in Angela’s devotion to her friend. Angela said Trisha didn’t have anyone who cared about her, including her own family, and was counting down the days until she was eighteen so she could leave home. She hinted that something bad was happening to Trisha, but that her mother didn’t believe her, and she was afraid to talk to the police. Angela didn’t fill in the details, but she seemed to be confirming what many people already wondered about the men in that family.

  What Danny and Ginny saw as reckless, Angela seemed to view as a search for better options. These two girls were determined to get out of the East End, and were trying to absorb every bit of knowledge they could from people they thought were better and wiser, simply by virtue of their resources.

  The car crash incident wasn’t the last of the curfew violations that summer, or for the next two years. They tried grounding her, but short of installing locks on her door, they couldn’t keep her from walking out. Ginny would tell herself that at least Angela came home every night. Trisha, meanwhile, would disappear for days or weeks at a time, suddenly turn back up in town, and the trouble with Angela would start again.

  And then on July 17 two summers later, when Angela was sixteen years old, she disappeared. Three years after, the police killed the man who’d taken her, and Angela came home with Spencer. She was finally safe. She got her GED. She started working. She had a good business started. And then Jason came along.

  Jason wasn’t a coked-up banker. He wasn’t that monster who offered Angela a ride home from a beach party she was too young to be at. But something about him was grandiose, his “goodness” a bit too on display. Like every part of his life was about cultivating an identity. He couldn’t just be normal.

  And most importantly to Ginny, he was an outsider, and so when he first appeared in Angela’s life, Ginny couldn’t help but think about fourteen-year-old Angela, sitting on her bed and telling her father that the lives of the Mullen family weren’t good enough for her and that she, in some small way even at that young age, saw her looks as a way to achieve something better.

  Despite Ginny’s worries, though, Jason had turned out to be a far better man than she ever expected. He wasn’t simply toying with a beautiful local beneath his station. He actually followed through. He married Angela. He was raising Spencer. And though Ginny knew that Angela would have preferred that Jason never leave the walls of the ivory tower, Ginny also suspected that he would have already declared a run for office if it hadn’t been for Angela’s misgivings.

  But this new allegation was far worse than the initial one. The last time Ginny spoke to Angela, Jason had been thrilled with the “good news” that the intern was getting trashed in the media. Ginny could hear the mixed feelings in Angela’s voice over the phone. If it were any other case, Ginny would be the one writing a letter to the East Hampton Star to deplore the blaming of the victim. Angela’s whole life revolved around Jason, so of course she was choosing his side. But Ginny believed that some part of Angela actually felt for that intern. She of all people knew what it was like for people to believe you can’t really be a victim if you’re “that kind of girl.”

  Her thoughts were interrupted by a knock at the door. She peered through the pebbled arch of glass in the wood to see a blurry figure. The logic behind the design of this door had escaped her for the past thirty-three years, but she didn’t care enough about it to change it.

  Once she opened the door, she recognized her visitor as Detective Steven Hendricks. His gray beard was a little bushier than the last time she’d seen him, and his hairline had receded a tad farther, but he still had those damn glasses hanging from a cord around his neck. Danny always said the man was trying to look “cerebral.”

  She didn’t invite him in.

  “Please hear me out.”

  He had called her twice in the last week. She had deleted both messages.

  She stepped aside so he could enter. The house suddenly felt smaller and in even more need of the TLC that Angela kept offering to pay for. Ginny immediately remembered the way Hendricks had scanned their home fifteen years earlier, when Angela first went missing. She could feel him judging them, like he already knew the full story from the look of their house and a two-year-old police report from a single-car accident with Trisha Faulkner and their daughter in the car.

  “What do you know about the accusations against your son-in-law?” Hendricks asked.

  “Not sure why that’s your business.” Other than passing him a couple times at the grocery store, Ginny’s last contact with Hendricks had been a note he’d written almost a decade ago, stuck in their screen door. He said that the biggest mistake he had ever made as a police officer was not trying harder to find their daughter. The note had ended with, “All I can say is that I’m sorry.” Ginny had never shown the note to Danny. Danny was dealing with enough guilt of his own. She always wondered if it contributed to the stroke that killed him five years ago.

  “Even an old guy like me can reach out when necessary.”

  “Reach out to who? Jason? Doubt he’s in a mood to talk to police right now.”

  “No, I meant to the NYPD. Let them know there’s another side to the story—assuming there is, of course. Police get a gut feel on a case and fill in the blanks from there. If they think Jason looks wrong for this, I can present his version. Be his advocate, so to speak.”

  Ginny resisted the urge to remind him that he had formed a gut instinct about Angela when she first disappeared and then filled in the blanks as he saw fit. The car crash. A stop on the beach for a minor in possession of alcohol. The friendship with Trisha, who ran away the way other girls changed lipsticks. Ginny had made so many visits to the police station that the staff started heading for the bathroom when they saw her walking toward the entrance.

  When Trisha left town for good shortly after her eighteenth birthday, it seemed to validate Hendricks’s version of the facts: Angela had run away for a life somewhere away from Springs, and then her fucked-up BFF Trisha followed suit as soon as she was legal.

  “Why are you offering?” Ginny asked.

  “You know why. When I got that phone call from Pittsburgh PD, saying that one of the girls in that house was Angela—well, I felt my heart stop. I still can’t sleep some nights, knowing what she was going through, and the way I ignored all your worries. I know Danny died without ever forgiving me—”

  “He blamed that animal who took her. And he blamed the Faulkner family for getting her involved in trouble. He didn’t blame you,” she said. Everything she said was true. She didn’t add that Danny also blamed himself. “Anyone ever hear from Trisha again?
”

  Ginny had spent three years playing a bizarre game of whack-a-mole, chasing down every oddball rumor that popped up as to Angela’s whereabouts. She joined a cult of aspiring yoga fiends. Ginny found the cult, but no sign of her daughter. She met a rich, older man and moved to a state where it was legal to get married without parental consent. Turned out, there was no such state. When Trisha disappeared, the word in town was that she had gone down to Rincón to join her friend Angela. Ginny had spent half their savings account on flying a private investigator all the way down to Puerto Rico. Nothing.

  “Not that I know of.”

  “I like to think that maybe as much as she was a bad influence on Angela, Angela was a good influence on her. She always told Angela all she wanted to do was get away from her family as soon as she was eighteen, so maybe she’s got a nice life.”

  “And I thought Angela had a nice life too, once I heard she got married and moved to the city. It gave me some peace about my role in all of what happened. But now this. I mean, let’s say hypothetically that the NYPD reaches out to me about Angela. What do you want me to say? I know you’re touchy about her privacy, but I could vouch for her husband, say he’s a good man.”

  “I don’t know, Steve. I’m not sure how Angela’s going to react to that.”

  “Ask her, okay? It helps to have a cop in your corner, even if it’s a dumb guy like me.”

  Ginny was surprised when Angela picked up on the second ring.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  Normally, her daughter tried to hide her annoyance at being disrupted. Ginny didn’t take it personally. She knew that Angela hated the slightest bit of surprise. Her routine made her feel safe.

  But on this day her daughter actually sounded happy to hear from her.

  “Are you okay, Gellie?”

  “Trying to be.”

  Her thirty-one-year-old daughter, already mother to a thirteen-year-old, sounded so tired.

  Ginny told Angela about the visit from Steve Hendricks and his offer to act as a kind of advocate for Jason to the NYPD.