The Wife: A Novel of Psychological Suspense

by Alafair Burke

  “Jason’s lawyer wants to use my background as part of his defense.”

  Her eyes widened in disbelief.

  “I know Jason’s innocent,” I said, trying not to cry, “and I want to help him, but it’s not fair that I should have to pay the price for what he did.”

  “So then don’t,” she said, releasing me from her embrace. “Tell that lawyer it’s off-limits.”

  “I’m not sure I trust her. She’ll find a way to use it. She’ll leak it to the press. Or just blurt it out in court before we can stop her.”

  “Tell Jason that if she utters one word about you, you’ll leave him. Trust me: if she’s trying to make him sympathetic, the image of you standing up in court and walking out will backfire.”

  “Except it is relevant, Susanna.”

  I could tell from her expression that she didn’t see the connection.

  “Jason and I don’t—we haven’t, you know, for years. And it’s because of me. Olivia says it will make his affair more understandable if people knew that I wasn’t . . . available to him in that sense.”

  “No,” Susanna said, shaking her head adamantly. “No way. If he had an affair with this woman, then that’s his defense. He’ll get acquitted. And that’s all he gets. He doesn’t get to blame his infidelity on you, Angela. Please, I know you’re determined to stand by him, but you don’t owe him this.”

  “Except maybe I do. It’s my fault. I’ve said all these years that the past is the past. That I started over again. That I’m fine. That I’m ‘good and boring.’ Except obviously I wasn’t.”

  She placed an arm around me. When she spoke, she sounded less determined. “Why didn’t you tell me all this, sweetie? I thought you guys were so perfect.”

  “We are. Or we were. I thought we were. We just didn’t—” I rotated my hand as a substitute for the actual words.

  “I’m sorry to pry, but why not? I mean, I remember when you first got married and stayed at my place while the guesthouse was being remodeled. I could hear you through the walls.”

  I placed my hands over my face. “So embarrassing.”

  “It wasn’t that bad. But I’m serious, did something change? Or were you never really able to enjoy that with him? Was that . . . not real?”

  I could tell that the latter explanation made her feel sad for me, as if I had missed something important in my life. The answer to all of her questions, I suspected, was yes. It was . . . complicated. I have no way of knowing what I would have been like if I had never gotten into Charles Franklin’s car. But I did know that when I read magazines like Cosmo or Elle, or overheard women gossiping about sex at the parties I catered, I didn’t feel like I was as comfortable with sex—or as happy about it, or as eager for it—as I was supposed to be. It’s not as if I hated it, or even disliked it. I enjoyed the closeness of it, and had learned to appreciate the physical pleasure that came with it. I just didn’t need it or necessarily want it, other than as an indication that my marriage was normal—that I was normal.

  I saw no reason to explain all of that to Susanna right now, because her first question was the one that really mattered. Yes, something had changed in my relationship with Jason.

  I decided to tell her. If I was going to tell anyone, it should be Susanna. “The last time we were together was three years ago, and I freaked out.”

  “What do you mean? Like a flashback?”

  I was surprised that she used that precise word. I had only spoken to her once about my flashbacks, and only for the purpose of explaining why I had no interest in writing a book, doing an interview, or going to therapy. Other than the rare flashback . . .

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Sort of. But it was bad. I cried, and we fought, and—” I was surprised at how upset I was getting, remembering what had happened that night.

  “Sex with your husband shouldn’t make you cry. If you were having a hard time, because of what you went through, he should have understood. And sometimes people simply aren’t in the mood. It doesn’t have to be a whole thing.”

  “He—I don’t think he knew.”

  “He didn’t know what?”

  “That I didn’t want to—” I was shaking my head, beginning to cry.

  “Angela, please, it’s me. Just tell me. If Jason did something to you that you didn’t want him to do—”

  I heard the front door open, followed by the sound of voices. Jason was back from his meeting with Olivia, and Colin was with him. I wiped my face with the back of my sleeve and put on a smile.

  Jason paused to give me a quick kiss on the head and to say hello to Susanna, and then headed upstairs. He closed the door of his den.

  I asked Colin how the meeting with Olivia went.

  “She actually said the civil lawsuit was good news.”

  “Someone might try explaining that to Jason,” Susanna said. “I’ve got to be honest: he looks worse than I even expected.”

  Colin glanced up the stairs to make sure that Jason was out of earshot. “Honestly, I think part of him was still in denial. He really thought this was going to go away. Today was a wake-up call. The university’s going after him, plus three major clients called FSS today and pulled out.”

  I found myself wondering whether Jason had planned to tell me about the clients.

  “None of that sounds like good news,” Susanna said.

  “Olivia thinks it might be,” Colin explained. “The civil case makes Kerry look greedy, which plays into what Jason’s been saying all along. Olivia says she can use it to call into question Kerry’s motive.” I hated hearing that woman’s name used in my house. “Plus, a civil suit means we can use civil discovery.”

  He must have realized that I hadn’t followed his last point.

  “Civil cases have different rules for getting access to evidence. In a criminal trial, prosecutors sit tight on most information. But now that Kerry has sued, Olivia can demand access to the evidence because it’s relevant to the civil suit. Most importantly, Olivia can depose Kerry, meaning she can question her without a jury sitting there.”

  I noticed that he was only talking about Kerry, as if Rachel didn’t even matter.

  “So does that mean Martinez can depose Angela?” Susanna asked. I hadn’t thought of the possibility.

  “I suppose, but I can’t imagine why she would.” Susanna gave my hand a brief squeeze as Colin tried to strike a lighter tone. “Trust me: She was going to sue him eventually, so it’s better that she did it in time to screw up the criminal case. Now, I’m going to drag Jason out of his office so I can make the two of you eat something.”

  As Colin walked up the stairs, Susanna placed her hand on my forearm and jumped right back into our previous conversation. “You need to tell me what happened between you.”

  I shook my head. For three years, I had blamed myself for breaking what I hoped was only a small part of our marriage. Now I didn’t know what to think. What I did know was that I still wasn’t ready to talk about it.

  We ate lunch at Lupa in silence. While the waiter was running Susanna’s credit card—she insisted—Jason got a text message from Olivia Randall. She was filing a motion for access to all evidence held by the NYPD and the district attorney’s office. She also wanted to suspend the criminal case against him while the civil suit was pending.

  “So what does that mean?” Jason asked, looking to Colin.

  “Do it,” Colin said. “You hit pause on the criminal charges to deal with the civil case first. If you reach a financial agreement, the criminal charges might go away.”

  Susanna shot me a concerned look. Colin was already talking about a settlement. I heard Jason’s phone bloop as he hit the send key.

  “I told you that lawsuit might be a blessing in disguise,” Colin said as we walked out of the restaurant.

  Nothing about this felt blessed.

  Spencer called that night from camp. Jason was home, but Spencer refused to talk to him. I wanted to tell him how much his father needed to hear
his voice, but the whole point of sending him away had been to protect him from what was happening at home.

  “How long do you plan to freeze him out?” I asked.

  “However long he was cheating on you. How does that sound?”

  He had only been gone four days, and it felt like I hadn’t seen him for months. I tried to tell myself it was worth it. At least in his mind, his father’s only crime was an affair. But camp wouldn’t last forever.

  37

  “What do you know about Mozambique?”

  Thanks to all their calls on the Jason Powell case, Corrine immediately recognized the number as ADA Brian King’s. “You’re kidding me, right? I’m African American, not East African.”

  “That’s not what I meant. And you at least knew it was in East Africa, so you know more than I do.”

  “Why the geography quiz?” she asked.

  “I was reading up on Kerry Lynch’s employer.”

  Corrine knew that Powell’s attorney was threatening to turn the trial into an indictment of Kerry’s employer for some kind of kickback scheme.

  “Is it bad?” Corrine asked.

  “I have no idea. I just wasted an hour educating myself on private water companies that serve developing countries. Getting clean water into those areas of the world can literally save lives, but it also involves doing business with some sketchy regimes.”

  “Sketchy regimes? Is that an official State Department designation?”

  “What am I, the Council on Foreign Relations? This stuff’s way over my head. Apparently a bunch of companies have stopped doing business in parts of the world that are most in need of water. Oasis, on the other hand, continues to land privatization contracts, making them darlings among Jason Powell’s crowd.”

  “But maybe raising questions about how they’re able to venture where others won’t?”

  “Well, that’s what Olivia Randall says, and it doesn’t help that Kerry had an affair with the CEO. And meanwhile, Kerry won’t talk to me about it. I called Oasis’s in-house counsel with some general questions, and they basically told me to piss up a rope. This trial’s going to be a shit show—if it even goes.”

  King had already been nervous about the complicated arguments Olivia Randall was promising to raise at trial, and that was before Kerry surprised them yesterday by filing a civil suit in the highest-profile manner imaginable. Corrine respected Janice Martinez’s work on behalf of crime victims, but she also knew that the woman’s priority was not obtaining a criminal conviction and sentence. She believed in punishment through the pocketbook. Now she was insisting that all communications with Kerry go through her, and was refusing to let Kerry answer any questions about her employer or her affair with Tom Fisher, insisting that those topics were irrelevant.

  “I also read up on Powell himself.”

  “Sounds like you did a lot of reading today.”

  “I found an article he wrote for Huffington Post a year ago about the kinds of good works private companies are doing around the world—water purification systems like Oasis, low-cost solar lighting for third-world regions, a nutritional supplement that could cut infant mortality rates by a third in mothers without proper nutrition. The jury’s going to want to give him a medal.”

  “Except they know by now that a man can be solid on his politics and a predator behind closed doors.”

  Corrine considered once again whether she should tell King what she had learned about Angela Powell’s past. If he was worried about the jury seeing Jason Powell as a saint, it certainly wouldn’t help matters if they learned that he had married the woman who survived Charles Franklin’s horrific abuse and raised the son she had borne as a result. Corrine was actually surprised that Powell’s own lawyer hadn’t lobbed the information into the public yet. But if she had to guess, Angela was the one blocking that move. That detective in East Hampton had made it clear how hard the family had worked to keep the past in the past.

  Having now spoken to the woman face-to-face, Corrine had no doubt that Powell’s wife had spent years developing a carefully crafted persona. She hadn’t flinched when Corrine told her about the prostitute. Standing quietly by her husband was one thing, but Corrine couldn’t imagine Angela jumping into a spotlight for him.

  Corrine decided to keep the information to herself for now.

  “Unless he’s not a predator,” King was saying. “If he was having an affair with Kerry and had suspicions about Oasis, it would make sense that he’d go to her to see what she knew. But maybe he made a mistake trusting her.”

  She quickly ran through the logic of Powell’s defense. If Kerry believed that Powell was going to bring down Oasis, her own livelihood was on the line, too. She could have told her bosses—including the one she once had an affair with—that Jason was a problem, and then used their relationship to fabricate a sexual assault claim on the heels of Rachel’s initial complaint against him.

  “You should have gone to law school, Duncan. That was a magna cum laude summary right there.”

  “I hate to break it to you, but I make more money than you with OT, and can retire in five years with a pension. You can keep your JD.”

  “You sure you won’t go out with me?”

  “Stop asking. It’s getting sad. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’re starting to believe Powell.”

  “Don’t quote me on this, but I don’t know what to think at this point. It bothers me that Powell knew so much about Kerry’s relationship with her boss. It makes me think he’s telling the truth about the affair.”

  “You do know a woman can be raped by someone she’s had consensual sex with before, don’t you?”

  “You don’t need to fem-splain sex offenses to me.”

  “Please don’t try to make that a word.”

  “Look, I get it: I’ve prosecuted plenty of date rapes. Marital cases, too. But Kerry’s denying any kind of relationship with Powell. It comes down to her credibility.”

  “If she had come in saying she’d had an on-and-off affair with some consultant at work, and one night he forced himself on her, what would you have done when she reported it weeks later?”

  He didn’t respond.

  “I mean, hypothetically, if she did have something going with Powell, does that really matter?”

  “I take it back. You shouldn’t have just gone to law school. You should have taught it, Socratic method and all.”

  “The point is, Kerry might have lied about some things, but not the ones that matter. Maybe she thought we wouldn’t believe her unless it looked less like date rape and more like ‘rape-rape.’” She used her free hand to make air quotes.

  “That’s not going to fly with a jury,” King said. “And if I even hint to Janice Martinez that I’m questioning Kerry’s account, she’ll make me look like a misogynist Neanderthal with the press.”

  “So you put on your case, and let Powell do the same. Let the chips fall as they may. Isn’t that what juries are for?”

  “That’s not how it works, and you know it.”

  It seemed to Corrine as if that’s exactly how it worked—or at least, should work. King seemed to think that it was his job—and his alone—to decide who should be punished and by how much.

  “Anyway, I don’t know why I brought all this up. I was calling to tell you I got a subpoena from Olivia Randall, demanding access to our evidence because it relates to the civil case. Plus, she wants to suspend our prosecution until the lawsuit is resolved.”

  The implication was clear. If they settled the civil suit, a joint request to dismiss the criminal case would be part of the package. “So what are you going to do?”

  “What can I do? I’ll turn over what we have. As far as the timing goes, maybe you’re right. Let the chips fall. If the case goes away, it’s on Janice Martinez.”

  As Corrine hung up, she could feel the case slipping away. Whatever was going to happen now would happen. Her work was done.

  38

  Three Days Later />
  What do you wear to court for your husband’s rape case?

  I stood in my walk-in closet, remembering how absurdly fantastical it had felt when Jason and I first viewed the carriage house with our realtor—Julia, Juliette, Julianna, whatever her name was. The closet was nearly as big as my bedroom at Mom’s house, and it was in Manhattan, where everything was supposed to be smaller.

  Now, two years after we’d moved in, the closet was still less than half full. I never was a clothes person. What did I really need? Jeans and T-shirts, some sweaters, a few dresses for special occasions. I opted for my go-to navy Trina Turk jersey dress, with three-quarter sleeves, A-line cut, and above-knee hem—originally purchased for Dad’s funeral.

  I made a point to blow-dry my hair perfectly—the attachment aiming down on a big, round brush. I was careful with my makeup, using the expensive brushes pushed on me by the Sephora salesgirl instead of my fingers. I checked the mirror before I left the bedroom. Not bad.

  Jason was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs. If you didn’t know the context, you might have guessed it was our anniversary or some other special occasion. Sometimes I forgot how merely looking at him used to make me feel.

  “Olivia still doesn’t know whether she’ll be there?”

  Jason shook his head and popped a Nicorette from his pocket into his mouth.

  There was the courthouse. She was Kerry Lynch.

  We held hands as we walked out the door, a driver waiting for us outside. Please don’t let her be there.

  When we entered the courtroom, I spotted Janice Martinez at the front of the spectators’ rows, conferring with a male lawyer on the other side of the bar. I assumed he was the prosecutor. A quick scan revealed neither Kerry Lynch nor Rachel Sutton. When Martinez sat alone in the first row as the judge finally took the bench, I allowed myself a sigh of relief. Coming there with Jason had been hard enough. I did not think I was strong enough to be in the same room with that woman.

  Twenty minutes and two cases later, I flinched when I heard the courtroom door open. I snuck a quick glance over my shoulder, steeling myself for Kerry’s entrance. The late arrival was Susanna. She had promised to do her best to make it after New Day aired, but her schedule was notoriously unpredictable.