“Oh Sweetie, I don’t know. I guess nothing so horrible.”
One of the ways that Ariel has been extra-cautious in her life has been talking to her son about men. She never wanted to sound too negative, too hostile. She doesn’t want George to grow up thinking that his mother hates all men; she doesn’t want him to hate himself just because he’s male. She also doesn’t want the boy to grow up dubious of all women because his mother seems to be a noncredible man-hating lunatic. This has been one of the hardest needles to thread while sewing the fabric of this future man’s psyche: What will this particular patch look like, the patch where he believes women, or doesn’t?
“Bucky is just a man who turned out to be selfish, and something of a coward, and I realized that I didn’t want to share my life with him.” Ariel feels tears coming on again. Sleep deprivation has always heightened her emotional swings. As has this subject.
“Marrying the wrong person is a mistake that a lot of people make. I’m really grateful that I caught the mistake while I could still do something about it. But I’m also really grateful that I was with Bucky for those years, because that’s how I got you.”
The boy never responds to anything like this.
“And although Bucky is not horrible, some men are. Charlie Wolfe is one of them.”
“Who’s definitely not my father?”
“No.” Ariel braces herself to admit another very hard thing: “But he believes he is.”
George is rightfully confused. “Why does he believe that?”
“He sexually assaulted me, George. You understand how evil that is, right? Well, I didn’t think I’d be able to prove it, in court. And I thought that trying might ruin my life.”
Ariel was at the time thirty-three years old, unemployed and broke and soon to be divorced, and pregnant, feeling acutely alone in the world. She found herself walking the streets of New York in a daze, plotting the possible narratives, how each would play out, short-term and long-, the investigations, the trial, the TV reports, the witnesses for the defense, the counteraccusations, the character assassinations. There was no way it wouldn’t be a horror that would drag on for years, and in the end Charlie would most likely be acquitted.
Pressing charges would probably accomplish nothing other than tossing some pebbles into his smooth path. Afterward, Charlie would be able to move on with his life. But not Ariel. This would be who she’d have become, and who she’d be forever: the woman who accused a powerful man of sexual assault.
Her life didn’t yet have a story. She didn’t want this to be it.
“Instead I did the only thing I could think of to get justice: I told him that I was pregnant as a result of that assault, and that I could prove it, and that he’d have to pay to keep me quiet.”
“So you lied to him too.”
Ariel thinks about trying to stifle her tears, or hide them, but this too is something that the boy ought to see; this should be part of his fabric. The lies, the tears, the whole mess.
“Yes, I lied to him too.”
Her multimillion-dollar lie. Her first multimillion-dollar lie.
CHAPTER 49
DAY 5. 9:19 A.M.
Ariel drives George to camp. She goes to the supermarket, where she dumps items into her cart without thinking. She thanks her mom profusely, dodges more questions from Elaine, says goodbye. She takes the dogs to the beach, doesn’t stop throwing the ball until they both give up from exhaustion, then fill the truck with salty sand and the reassuring smell of wet dog. She’s trying her best to pretend that life will be normal again. She knows it won’t.
*
Griffiths should let it go, but she can’t bring herself to quit, and won’t let Jefferson or Antonucci quit either, all of them following the backward trails of John Wright and Lucy Reitwovski, Ariel Pryce and Charlie Wolfe, back fourteen years ago, twenty, twenty-five—
“Yeah, I remember her.”
Griffiths catches a strained tone in this woman’s voice.
“That was horrible, what happened to that poor girl.”
Griffiths sits up straighter. This, finally, is it.
“Can you tell me what you remember?”
“Oh I’ll never forget it. There were three of us who closed that night. I was the bartender, so I stayed upstairs to clean the bar, lock up the liquor, count the cash, bring it to the night depository. A bar-back was in the kitchen, washing dishes. Lucy’s responsibility was the basement, where there was a small secondary bar to clean, and the pool table and darts to rearrange, lock the fire door, kill the lights.”
Griffiths keeps her pen poised over her notepad, but she hasn’t written a thing. She’s going to remember all this word for word.
“Lucy opened the door to the restroom, and a man yanked her inside, locked the door, and raped her. Afterward, he slunk out the basement door. When I got back from dropping the cash around the corner, I could see that Lucy was shaken, but she wouldn’t say anything. Then apparently a week later, she went to the police.”
“Why did she wait so long?”
“I don’t know. She was underage, working illegally, with a fake ID. Maybe she was worried that she’d lose her job. Or maybe she was worried about all the other things that women—girls—worry about when they report rape.”
“Did the police investigate?”
“Yeah, they questioned a guy, I never found out his name. But there was no forensic evidence, no witnesses. She says he raped her; he says it was consensual. The classic. Eventually, she dropped the charges.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think?” She laughs, mirthlessly. “His parents paid her off. Ten thousand dollars in exchange for her signature on an NDA.”
“His parents. So does that mean that he was a student?”
“Yeah. Our bar was a law-school hangout.”
Law school. Bingo.
“Ten thousand dollars. Can you believe it? She was sixteen years old.”
*
The first story that breaks, as is almost always the case these days, does not meet the highest standards of journalistic integrity. This early slapdash feature takes over the landing page of a major aggregator, which happens to be the chief competitor of a news site that’s owned by Charlie Wolfe’s company; this is probably not a coincidence. This site doesn’t have a sterling reputation for credibility, nor does it boast a roster of reputable journalists. That said, Ariel still has the sense that most of their reporting is mostly truthful. They’ve broken a few stories, all of a similar flavor: celebrities behaving badly, a category of reporting for which Americans have an insatiable appetite. If someone at all famous does something at all bad, ever, Americans will read about it.