So I had to tell Jason. A year after Charlie kidnapped me, Sarah showed up. Spencer was born the following year. When we had to leave the house after the police came, Charlie decided that two girls and a baby was too specific a description. He killed Sarah, and kept me and Spencer.
Most of what I told the police was true, I explained, except Sarah was the one who got pregnant, not me. But she was younger, and always a little bit off, and I had taken care of the baby at least as much as she had. That was Charlie’s logic, at least.
When the rescue team descended on Niagara Falls, my only goal was to protect Spencer and keep him with me. I said he was mine. That’s why Mom said she’d sue everyone on-site if they tried to examine us physically. Spencer didn’t have my blood, but I was the only family he had left.
“I swear on my life,” Jason promised now, “I will take the truth about our son to the grave. But to have spoken even a word about your past to her was a terrible betrayal. It wasn’t my story to tell.”
I nodded, imagining their conversation—Kerry running me down, trying to convince Jason to marry her. Jason explaining that there were things about me she didn’t understand.
But he had stopped short of telling her everything.
“Well, there’s nothing we can do about it now, I guess.” The cavalier words were overcompensation for the emotions I was fighting to control. “Maybe she has one ounce of decency and will keep it to herself.”
“I’d do anything to turn back the clock and change all this,” he said.
He had no idea how much I wanted that, too.
The room became quiet, and I stood up to get dressed. “I meant what I said before,” he said softly. “I would have never left you.”
Maybe not, I thought, but that’s not what you told Kerry.
When I left his building, I crossed Eighth Street. Inside the mobile store I bought a prepaid phone, the kind a European tourist might buy on a visit to New York City. In some circles, it would be called a burner. I was going to need it. I had made my decision weeks ago. I would never be Jason’s wife again, which meant I needed a longer-term plan.
55
Three Days Later
I remember when I used to think of the reserved cars at the front of the Cannonball as the equivalent of a private jet, the way the rich folks arrived to the Hamptons in the summer. A couple times a week, an express train ran between Manhattan and the Hamptons, shaving the ride down to about two hours. The big splurge was a booked seat during peak season, at double the price, with bar service and no anxiety about having to find room on a train carrying twice the number of people intended.
Now, our $51 tickets felt like slumming. The Audi had been sold, along with the carriage house, so driving was no longer an option. Last summer we had gotten into the habit of using the helicopter service to save time, because in Jason’s world, time was money. Now we were the kind of people who rode the train, springing for the reserved seats.
“You sure your mom’s okay with me staying there? Susanna offered me a guest room.”
I was too busy waving down a taxi in the crowd to have this discussion with him again.
“We’ve talked about this a hundred times. If I could get away with staying with Susanna instead of Mom’s, I would totally do that, but Mom would kill me. And Spencer wants you at home with us.”
The plan was for Jason and me to take the twin beds in my childhood room, because Spencer asked to sleep in the living room, where I knew he’d stay up all night watching YouTube. This was going to be our first weekend as a family under one roof in more than a month.
“Angela?”
The cabdriver was looking at me in the rearview mirror.
“Hey, yeah. Sorry, I can’t see you from back here.”
I leaned over the bench seat to get a better view of the driver. The man was probably about my age, but didn’t look great. Something about him seemed familiar.
“It’s Steve.”
Steve. Right, Steve.
“Yes, of course, it’s so great to see you.” I searched the recesses of my memory for the local Steves. Clerk at IGA. Bartender at Wolfie’s. Trisha’s cousin. Yep, Trisha’s cousin, that was the one. “How are your parents?”
Steve’s father was the least horrible brother among the Faulkner men. He was a mechanic at the shop on Springs Fireplace. His mother used to sew tablecloths and napkins to sell at the farmer’s market.
“Dad passed last year—a stroke. Same with yours, right?”
“Five years ago. I’m so sorry.”
“Mom, she’s okay. Needs a walker already because of swelling in her legs, but otherwise, she’s doing good.”
Jason was looking at me, obviously wishing we had taken Mom up on her offer to meet us at the train station.
“Well, it’s real nice seeing you. We’re only out for the weekend.” For some reason, I needed him to know we didn’t own a house here. “My son’s been out, staying with his grandmom. We’re here to pick him up.”
“Don’t suppose you heard from Trisha this summer?”
I shook my head. “I haven’t talked to her since—wow, high school, I guess.”
“I figured. I thought maybe with you being in the news and everything, she might have reached out—”
He was looking at Jason, not me, in the rearview mirror.
“Nope,” I said. “She may not even know I got married. How’s she doing?”
“No one knows. She always said she was going to get away from here and never speak to another member of the family. I guess she meant it.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“The two of you were always the same—wanting to get as far away as possible. Hell, if she had stuck around, you probably wouldn’t give her a second thought, the way you’ve moved on.”
Next to me, Jason nudged my leg with his knee. Instead of ending the conversation, though, I leaned forward to make sure Steve could hear me. “That’s not true.”
“Yeah, well, I guess there’s no way to know.”
Jason rolled his eyes and began reciting a turn-by-turn guide to Mom’s place to fill the silence.
The house was empty, a note left on the laminate-topped breakfast table: “Went to IGA. Back soon. I’ll cook!”
“I thought you told her we wanted to take her to the Grill tonight.”
I had. She responded by saying she’d rather eat corn flakes than put up with the “crowds of summer sewage.”
“I figured she was less likely to give me the riot act in public,” Jason said.
This would be the first time my mother had seen Jason since I found out about his affair. “She promised to be on good behavior.” In reality, her only assurance was that she wouldn’t run Jason down in front of Spencer. “Do you still think about her?” I asked.
“Your mom?”
“No. About her.” Kerry, I thought. “I asked you once, in our room, if you loved her. You never answered me.”
The kitchen was so quiet, I didn’t want to breathe. The only sound was a lawn mower in the distance.
“Yes, but not the way I love you. And she obviously didn’t love me back, or she never could have done what she did.”
The next morning, I woke up thinking I had heard a phone ring.
I opened my eyes to see Jason in the twin bed three feet from mine, ear already to phone. I heard muffled voices and dishes clanking in the kitchen and fumbled to find my own phone in the blankets wrapped around my legs. It was nearly nine. Jason never slept in this late. I suspected he had been waiting for me to get up before venturing anywhere near my mother.
I listened to a series of “uh-huhs,” a “Where?,” and a “Do they know anything else?” before he hung up.
He was staring up at the ceiling, absolutely still.
“Is everything okay?”
“That was Olivia. A cop she knows called her. They found Kerry.”
“Where was—” I didn’t finish the question. He was covering his face with his hands.
“She’s dead. Kerry’s dead.”
I joined my mother and son in the kitchen, leaving Jason alone to cry for a woman he had once loved.
After breakfast I asked if anyone wanted to take a walk up to Gerard Point with me, knowing that Jason would want to go for a run, and that Spencer shared my mother’s view that walking was for people who didn’t have cars.
I waited until I had made the turn from Springs Fireplace Road onto Gerard Drive to remove my burner phone and a single Post-it note from my skirt pocket. Sitting on my favorite boulder, a few feet from the water, I called an international number and then used the keypad to follow the automated instructions. As a final step, I entered my eight-digit PIN, already committed to memory.
The computerized system on the other end of the line confirmed that I had a balance of $100. It was official: I had an offshore account. We’d be closing on the carriage house on Tuesday. Our lawyer was planning to take care of the checks for alimony and my half of Jason’s retirement account at the same time.
I looked out over Gardiners Bay, realizing this might be the last time I saw it. I was actually going to miss this place.
56
Corrine leaned close to her bathroom mirror to apply a second coat of mascara and then stepped back to make sure it wasn’t too much. As a final check, she used her compact to inspect the back of her hair, which she sometimes forgot to tend to. Not too shabby. She had a seventh date tonight with a sports producer named Andrew who made specials for ESPN. He was the first man she’d been willing to see that many times since the divorce. Even more surprisingly, he had asked her to go with him next weekend to a wedding in South Carolina, and she hadn’t hesitated. It dawned on her that she—who prided herself on being at least one step ahead of everyone—may have gone and gotten a boyfriend without realizing it.
She was strapping on high-heeled sandals she knew she’d regret later when her cell phone rang. It was a 516 area code—Nassau County. Something in the back of her brain told her what was about to happen.
It was Netter. The body had been found late the night before by two teenagers who had wandered away from a beach party for privacy. “I’m sorry it took me so long to tell you. Been working nonstop. No autopsy yet, obviously, but it was clearly a head injury. You were right about the missing crystal egg.”
She had known she was right the second she inspected Kerry’s living room.
“What beach?”
“Ocean Beach. The task force is on it now, but I’m still lead.” Ocean Beach was at least an hour east of Kerry’s house, in Suffolk County, a two-hour drive from Manhattan with zero traffic.
“Anything new on Tom Fisher?”
“His wife and kids were visiting the grandparents on the Cape the night Kerry was last seen, so if he has an alibi, we don’t know about it. The drive from Kerry’s to the drop site and back to his place is about ninety miles. We’re hoping he had to stop for gas and are checking all the stations off the Meadowbrook. And we’re getting warrants now for his house, car, and office.”
Married ex-boyfriend she was shaking down for money, spotted at the house the last night she was seen. Corrine could imagine a judge signing off on that.
“If you need anything from the NYPD, let me know?”
“Will do.”
“And, hey, thanks for calling. Seriously.”
Corrine made it all the way to dessert before she mentioned the case to Andrew. She could tell from the way he kept looking at his napkin that he would have preferred to discuss anything else, and she knew that he would find a reason that maybe she shouldn’t join him in South Carolina after all.
57
Six days later, the nightmare began again. I was on my way home from Dr. Boyle’s office when my cell phone rang. It was Susanna.
“Are you okay?” She sounded rushed.
“Yeah, I’m fine. What’s up?”
“You don’t know?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I need you to sit down.”
“I’m on the street, covered in sweat.” Last weekend at Mom’s had been a break from the city heat. I was counting down the days before I could sit on a beach again. “Just tell me.”
“I got a call from our crime beat guy. Jason’s in custody. They arrested him at his apartment.”
I turned to face Jason’s building on Eighth and Mercer, and remembered the three police cars I had seen pulled to the curb on Eighth Street on my way to therapy. I’d thought nothing of it at the time. “Is it another woman?”
“No. It’s Kerry. They’re charging him with murder, Angela.”
I reached out for something to help me stand. I was leaning against a trash can. “That doesn’t make sense. She was found all the way on Ocean Beach. That’s at least two hours away, and we gave them a timeline for the whole night.”
“Are you listening to yourself, Angela? Have you forgotten that Jason wasn’t actually with you? If they arrested him, they must have evidence. And they know you lied to the police about his alibi. I told you to come clean by now.”
Her words were still ringing in my ears when I walked into my lobby. It took a moment to register that the doorman was speaking to me. A police officer wanted to see me. He gestured to a man in a uniform, sitting on a bench by the elevator.
Technically, he was a sheriff’s deputy, not a cop, and he was there to serve me with documents. It was happening: I was subpoenaed to appear in front of a grand jury in Nassau County.
58
Netter finally answered his phone the third time Corrine tried to reach him. He obviously knew why she was calling.
“Sorry, I wanted to give you a heads-up, but the ADA’s on the warpath about leaks.”
“I could’ve at least helped you pick him.” She had learned about Jason Powell’s arrest from a news report on her car radio only twenty minutes earlier. Netter had apparently gone through the Manhattan South homicide squad instead of contacting Corrine for assistance.
“I think our DA is pissed that your DA made a statement clearing Powell before all the facts were in.”
“And what are the facts? Last I heard, you liked Fisher for it.”
“You’re won’t be happy about this, either, but we matched a piece of physical evidence near the body to the DNA swab you took from Powell. Sorry.”
Her swab; his case.
“What kind of physical evidence?” she asked.
There was a long pause, followed by another apology.
“Wow, it’s like that. Okay. I guess the wife lied to me about his alibi after all.”
“So it would appear. The ADA subpoenaed her. We’ll see if that puts the fear of god into her.”
“Assuming she lied, how’d he get to Long Island that night?”
“We’re thinking he trained it out to her place, and then used Kerry’s car to move her body to Suffolk County and back. Hey, I gotta run.”
She heard voices in the background. “Wait. Did you find blood in her trunk? Or video from the train station?”
“Don’t worry about it. We’ve got DNA. It’s locked and loaded.”
That was the problem with DNA. It made law enforcement lazy. If they convicted the wrong person years ago, they expected DNA to fix it. And if they had DNA to match? Forget about it; they were done.
As she continued to crawl through traffic, she realized that transportation was the one equalizer in New York City. Unless you were in a helicopter or a hovercraft, you had to deal with this bullshit in one form or another.
So how the hell had Jason Powell gotten to Long Island that night?
Netter didn’t seem bothered by this hole in the case, but Corrine could picture a lawyer like Olivia Randall driving a long-haul truck through it.
Sitting behind the wheel of her own car, she started thinking of all the ways a person could get to Port Washington and back. The train, cab, the usual car rental companies, Zipcar, Uber, Lyft, Juno. The more she thought through the options, the more fut
ile the search felt.
Forget the train; he would definitely use a car. And he would use his own car if at all possible to avoid a paper trail. His plates hadn’t turned up on the readers from the bridges and tunnels, but a lot of city drivers bought blocking devices to protect themselves against red-light cameras.
Kerry Lynch was no longer her case, but Corrine wasn’t the type to accept loose ends. Maybe she’d poke around in her spare time.
59
Five Days Later
Jason looked ten years older and ten pounds lighter. It was the first time Olivia had been able to get me access to him since he was denied bail after his arrest. I spotted what I thought was a bruise on his left cheekbone, but he swore I was seeing things because I was worried.
“How are you and Spencer holding up?”
I shrugged. “I mean, fine, under the circumstances. I’m doing my best to tell Spencer this will all get worked out, but I see him on his computer all the time—trying to figure out why exactly his father is here.”
“He thinks I’m guilty.”
“No, of course not.” I was unable to meet his eyes. If it weren’t for me talking Spencer off the ledge, he’d be on the news telling anyone who would listen that Jason killed Kerry Lynch, was a horrible father, and had been on the grassy knoll with Lee Harvey Oswald. Dr. Boyle said I should expect his loyalties to swing wildly for the foreseeable future.
“There is one thing,” I said, as if it had just come to me. “A New York magazine reporter called me last night. I looked at her stuff. She’s not just some blogger. She writes these long, intense pieces. She left a message for Mom, too. And right when I was coming in, Mom texted me. Three different people out East got calls, including my old boss at Blue Heron.”
“What did you say?”
“No comment, of course, but I don’t know how long I can keep that up. She’s obviously digging around. When she called Mom, she even mentioned that time Trisha and I got in that car accident with the BMW guy.”
The Wife: A Novel of Psychological Suspense Page 26