Susanna’s story last summer about the underground market for government documents had come in handy. My name, according to my UK passport, was Susan Martin. Mom was known as Rosemary Parker. And Spencer now went by Spence, last name Martin, same as mine.
My hair was now cropped short and bleached nearly white. Sometimes I barely recognized myself in the mirror. Spence says I look “punk rock.”
Susanna understood my decision to leave, but thought my refusal to tell her where we were going was overkill. She eventually relented when I broke down in tears, telling her how paranoid I was that the New York magazine writer was going to find out about my past.
“Think about Spencer,” I had pleaded. “I don’t want the whole world to look at him and see Charles Franklin. I can’t risk that. I’d rather be safe than sorry.”
That magazine writer didn’t exist. Well, she did exist, but she had never called me, and to my knowledge, no other journalist was looking to write a profile about the former Mrs. Jason Powell, not yet anyway.
I had promised Susanna that once we were set up somewhere new, I would let her know so she could visit. I still hadn’t contacted her, and doubted that I ever would. I had learned my lesson. She had been a good friend to me, but friendship had its limits. From now on, I would only trust my family: me, Mom, Spence. Spence had been remarkably cooperative so far, because he was still convinced that Jason was guilty and that we were better off distancing ourselves. But eventually I was going to face a decision on how much to tell my son about the real reason we had come here.
Letting him have his way on his first name seemed only fair, given what I was putting him through. With a different last name, I didn’t see the harm.
“You may not like my food,” I said, “but someone else does.”
“It went well?” she asked.
I had asked the broker who found us our house to let me know if she heard about anyone who might need catering. As it turned out, she knew the owner of a modest little oceanfront restaurant with twelve four-tops whose chef had left for Anguilla to open his own place. Customer ratings on TripAdvisor were already starting to decline, even off-season.
“You’re looking at the new head chef at Margo’s.”
My mother hugged me and told me how proud she was of me.
When I went to bed that night, I reached for the notebook on the nightstand. Dr. Boyle was the one who suggested that I start keeping a journal when I told him that Spencer and I were leaving New York for a while. It was no substitute for regular sessions, he warned, but might prove therapeutic.
I hadn’t decided yet whether it was helping me, or even if I needed the help. But I tried to write once or twice a week anyway, burning the pages afterward when I used the grill, just to be safe.
What if . . . ?
What if I hadn’t gone to the bonfire that night? What if I hadn’t accepted Charles Franklin’s offer of a ride? What if I had run out the front door instead of checking his garage to see if it was safe to leave? And what if I had never gone to Kerry Lynch’s house that night?
When I feel my thoughts move in that direction, I shut them down, because asking what if can lead to regrets, and regrets are dangerous. You make the best decisions you can make in the time you have to make them, and you move on. It’s instinct. It’s survival.
I got in that car with Charles Franklin because it seemed safer than walking alone on a dark road at night.
After a year of learning how to survive in that house—earning tiny privileges like time away from my room, use of a toilet, fresh-squeezed juice when I was really good—he told me he was bored. He needed another girl. He had tried offering rides, the way he had gotten me, but it wasn’t working. He made my choice clear: either I had to help him get another girl, or he would kill me. What else was I supposed to do?
We tried a few times—once at a mall in Cleveland, once in Philly, one time we drove all the way to Buffalo. As it turned out, not everyone was as trusting as I had been as I walked away from a bonfire party, even when there was a sweet girl in the passenger seat.
Sometimes I thought about those girls, wondering how their lives turned out. They had no way of knowing that their entire futures had rested on a decision to turn down the offer of a ride from a nice-looking young couple in a white SUV. The girl from Cleveland had been the basis for “Sarah” when the police asked what I knew about her. I remembered passing signs on the highway for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, so I added that detail, too.
Charlie didn’t like the idea of taking two girls from one location, but his desire to have someone new had bloomed into an obsession, and he was blaming our failures on me. I begged him to give me one more shot, but on my terms.
We went back home—to my home, in East Hampton. I told him I knew a girl who would trust me.
I didn’t actually expect to find her, not really. I crossed my fingers beneath my legs, hoping she was off on one of her excursions. It felt so surreal to be back again. The new chain drugstore whose construction my parents complained about was open on Main Street. We passed the bus stop where I’d been headed the night he took me. At the windmill, I looked longingly at the turn that led to my house. I felt my hopes drop as we reached the post office. We had gone all the way through East Hampton—the town where I was born and raised—and no one had recognized me. My plan had failed.
It felt as if we were picking up speed with every block until his SUV was barreling east on 27. Pretty soon we’d reach Montauk, right around sunset. We had been cruising the area for three hours, not to mention the drive from Pittsburgh. He said if we reached the lighthouse without another girl, he’d drown me in Napeague Bay. I thought about honking the horn or grabbing the wheel and running us into a tree.
And then I saw Trisha. She had her thumb out, walking backward along 27. My best guess was that she’d been drinking on Fort Pond. I had to make a split-second decision. I justified it by telling myself that together, we would be stronger. With Trisha’s help, I would find a way out.
What shakes me to the core to this very day is how happy she was to see me.
I told Charlie to pull over, and then I hopped out of the passenger seat. Trisha ran at me so hard, she literally knocked me over. We were like two puppies wrestling in the sand at the side of the road.
“What are you doing here, girl? Where have you been?”
“Get in,” I said, pointing to the white SUV. “Let’s go party.”
Charlie put the cloth over her face, the same way he had when he had taken me a year earlier. It was the second worst thing I have ever done.
You might think that killing Kerry is the worst thing I’ve done, but it’s not. Even so, I force myself to tamp down the what-ifs about that night, too.
What if I had never read my husband’s e-mail? I wouldn’t have seen those photographs just minutes before he came home to report the “good news” that Kerry’s lawyer was open to settling.
Or what if I had recognized Tom Fisher as he left Kerry’s house? If I had realized who he was, I might have known that something was off with Kerry’s story. I would have come to my senses and gone home.
Instead, I watched him drive away, and then I knocked on her door. I wanted to hear the truth about my husband, once and for all, straight from the source. She almost didn’t let me in, but I told her that I had seen the pictures of her wrists. During the entire ordeal—the police visits, the arrest, the arraignment, the lawsuit—no one had ever told me the details of the alleged assault. It wasn’t until I read that e-mail from Olivia that I knew, or thought I knew, the truth.
“He did the same thing to me,” I said. “I believe you.”
When she let me inside, I asked her to tell me exactly what had happened.
She was holding a glass of red wine. It was so bizarre standing there in her living room—two women on either side of her coffee table, with nothing in common except what Jason had done to us.
And then she laughed at me.
“You’re even crazier than Jason said you were.”