Page 35 of The Wife

She considered telling him what she had learned about Angela Powell, but she saw no connection between it and the case against her husband. “Talk to you later?”

“Yeah, but hey—I had a reason for calling other than feeling sorry for myself. I got the warrant signed for the DNA swab.”

“Really?”

“I realized there were no more excuses for dragging my feet. Go big or go home, right? You’ll drop it on him today?”

“Yep. Ready to go now, in fact.”

“Sounds good.”

As Corrine hung up the phone, her thoughts flashed to Angela Powell, who had once been Angela Mullen, at eighteen years old delivering her baby in a bricked-in room in Pittsburgh, an eight-hour drive from her parents.

She couldn’t imagine how that woman was going to feel when this DNA test was a match.

23

Heads turned as we passed tables at the 21 Club. I knew we should have gone somewhere low-key downtown, but Susanna had convinced me to meet her in midtown, promising that her “person” would seat us in the back corner. Getting there had required walking through the dining room, accompanied by a woman whose face filled television screens all over America on a daily basis.

“I’m not so sure about this,” I muttered after the waiter had taken our orders.

“Please. We walked by one person pending trial for mail fraud and another in the middle of a billion-dollar divorce. I hate to break it to you, but this crowd has more than enough of its own problems to dwell on than your do-gooder husband.”

I was thankful that the tables to either side of us were empty. “Except he’s not the do-gooder anymore, is he? Now there’s apparently another woman, and we have no idea what she may have said.”

I had given Susanna the rundown on Kerry Lynch when she called to check on me the previous night, and she’d insisted on taking me out to this lunch.

I didn’t hesitate to share everything I knew. She’d been my friend for ten years now. No one other than my parents and Spencer had been a constant in my life for that long.

When she first began treating me as her friend and not just her caterer, I worried that maybe she already knew about me. I thought she might be working an angle to earn my trust. I began testing her, mentioning details about Spencer as a baby, wondering if she’d ask about his father. I even asked her once out of the blue whether she’d ever been to Pittsburgh, and she seemed completely confused by the question. She had no idea that I was anyone other than a young mom from the South Fork who cooked good food and needed a friend.

When I decided to tell Susanna that I was the girl rescued from Charles Franklin, my parents thought I was insane to trust a journalist, of all people. But Susanna was almost like a surrogate mother. After everything she had done for me, I wanted her to really know me.

She cried when I told her and said she was sorry I was carrying that on my own. A couple of times, she asked me if I was sure I wouldn’t be happier if I told my story to the world. I could make enough money to move out of my parents’ house. I told her the same thing I would later tell Jason: I didn’t want my story to be public, and it didn’t seem right to make money off it, anyway.

And when I told her I didn’t want to write a book, or give an interview, or go to the therapy she offered to pay for, all she asked was to let her know if I ever changed my mind. She never leaked a word. When it came to me, she respected an impenetrable wall between her job and our friendship.

Now, over lunch, she was trying to reassure me that everything was going to be all right. “I know it’s verboten to say, but women do lie about these things.” She had lowered her voice, even though we weren’t within earshot of anyone else.

“You’re going to have to give back your sisterhood card if someone hears you, Susanna. You know what they say: there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t support other women.” I had told her about the police coming to the house, asking Jason if he’d ever had sex with a woman named Kerry Lynch. She agreed with me that it sounded like Kerry had leveled a new accusation, and because of the question about sexual relations, it had to be more serious than Rachel’s initial claim.

“Look, I get it,” Susanna said, tucking her chin-length, perfectly frosted bob behind one ear. “I’m always the one saying that when it’s he-said, she-said, I’ll pick the woman every time. Because ninety-nine percent of the time, women are telling the truth, and a hundred percent of the time, it’s grueling to come forward. Women are blamed, stigmatized, scrutinized, doubted. Even with you...”

Her voice trailed off. I suppose that in a weird way, if I had to be a victim, I was one of the lucky ones. I wasn’t a drunk college student accusing another drunk college student about a fifteen-minute incident at a frat party. I was a sixteen-year-old girl whose one mistake was to accept a ride home in a Lexus SUV from a man who told me he was a twenty-four-year old realtor from Philadelphia, visiting his grandparents for the week. Once I was in the passenger seat, he held a cloth over my face and repeated as necessary until I woke up naked on a twin bed in a pitch-black room with a pain between my legs because, as much as I had been “acting like trouble,” as my father put it, I still hadn’t done that. Not yet. I didn’t come home for three years, and only when police killed my abductor. Charles Franklin was actually thirty-one when he took me, but what did I know? Grown up was grown up.

So I was about as victim-y as a victim could be. But “even with me,” as Susanna said.

My parents, the police, and my therapist all told me to avoid coverage of the case. But they didn’t know how I used that laptop some victims’ rights group had purchased for me to help catch up with my education. I saw the discussion boards filled with comments from strangers rehashing every fact they could find about the case, including the neighbor’s observation that she had seen me outside a few times and once paying for food at the grocery store. She said I looked familiar and asked me where I lived. I told her that I was Charlie’s niece, Sandra.Why didn’t she ask for help?some of the true-crime message boards wanted to know.Why didn’t she tell them who she was?

I was about as perfect as a victim could be, but even I could not escape blame.

Susanna was still delivering her monologue. “The public’s first instinct is to disbelieve the woman, because we don’t want to admit these horrible things actually happen. So to counter that instinct, we good feminists take the position that we believe every single woman, every single time. And then theRolling Stonearticle about the University of Virginia happens, and it hurts us all. So I don’t know what this woman’s angle is, Angela, but I have to think there is one. Because Jason didn’t do whatever she’s accusing him of. For once, I’m glad these cases are harder to prove than people think.”

Susanna had started out covering a crime beat in Miami after graduating from Florida State. “How so?” I asked.

“Whatever this woman’s story is, it’s going to boil down to his word against hers, and the prosecution needs proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Even if they have DNA evidence, the DA has to prove it wasn’t consensual. What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

We stopped speaking as the waiter arrived with our meals—steak tartare for both of us, the best in the city.

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