Back home, she powered on her iPad—yet another gift from Angela, purchased with Jason’s money, connected to the WiFi that Angela insisted that she needed but which Ginny rarely used. She typed in “Jason Powell,” then added the phrase “latest news,” Amanda’s words ringing in her ears.
“NYPD Investigating Jason Powell for Rape,” screamed the headline. According to the article that followed, law enforcement sources had confirmed that, separate from last week’s complaint against Powell by an intern, the police department’s special victims unit was pursuing a different woman’s complaint that Powell had forcibly assaulted her.
Ginny checked her phone. No calls from Angela. No surprise.
When Angela first started dating Jason, Ginny worried in a way she hadn’t since Angela was found and returned home. It was natural for her to distrust a summer visitor from the city, consorting with “a local” to prove he wasn’t a complete outsider.
Ginny of course had never blamed Angela for what happened to her, but the truth is that her daughter would have been safe if she hadn’t been so obsessed with escaping her own community. Ginny would never forget the first time Danny found out where Angela really was when she broke curfew. In the past, Ginny had covered for her, telling Danny that she’d given Angela permission to stay out late, or had forgotten that Angela had told her about a slumber party. But when a twenty-six-year-old banker crashed his BMW into a stop sign on Cedar Street with two drunk teenage girls in his car, Danny finally saw a different side of his little girl.
The banker tested positive for cocaine. Fortunately, no one drug tested the girls, returning them home to their families. The first thing in the morning, Danny was down at the police station, insisting that the banker be arrested for kidnapping or reckless endangerment or some other crime for running off with his fourteen-year-old daughter. Some poor police officer had to break the news to Danny. The banker had no idea he was partying with minors. The police found Angela’s fake ID in her purse. To top it all off, the other girl in the car was fifteen-year-old Trisha Faulkner, whose entire family was rotten to the core. Most of the men had been in and out of prison, and the women were always offering explanations for bruises and worse. Trisha was known for being deeply troubled, acting out with drugs and sex at a shockingly young age. Sensible people kept their distance.
But apparently Angela wasn’t being sensible.
Ginny remembered listening from the bedroom door when Danny went into Angela’s room to ask her what she was doing in a car with a grown man.
Angela had broken down in tears, apologizing for her mistake, but then tried to explain what drew her to people like that—summer people. She said that for nine months a year, she looked around and saw nothing to be hopeful about. Everyone she knew worked all day, every day, and nothing ever changed. But once the season started, people showed up who had more than jobs. They had careers and plans and traveled the world—a world she wanted to be part of. She said that people like the BMW driver “made her feel special.”
Ginny was prepared to comfort Danny when he joined her alone in the kitchen afterward. She wanted to assure him that he was a good man and a good provider, and that Angela was going through a phase after suddenly blossoming into a beautiful girl who looked older than her fourteen years. She had expected her husband to blame himself for not giving Angela a better life.
Instead, he had slumped into his chair and glared at Angela’s door. “I never thought I’d say this, but I’m ashamed of our daughter.” He forbade Angela from talking to Trisha Faulkner, which seemed only to draw them closer in the weeks and months that followed.
Ginny knew Angela didn’t tell her everything, but she still confided in her enough for Ginny to know that there was something honorable in Angela’s devotion to her friend. Angela said Trisha didn’t have anyone who cared about her, including her own family, and was counting down the days until she was eighteen so she could leave home. She hinted that something bad was happening to Trisha, but that her mother didn’t believe her, and she was afraid to talk to the police. Angela didn’t fill in the details, but she seemed to be confirming what many people already wondered about the men in that family.
What Danny and Ginny saw as reckless, Angela seemed to view as a search for better options. These two girls were determined to get out of the East End, and were trying to absorb every bit of knowledge they could from people they thought were better and wiser, simply by virtue of their resources.
The car crash incident wasn’t the last of the curfew violations that summer, or for the next two years. They tried grounding her, but short of installing locks on her door, they couldn’t keep her from walking out. Ginny would tell herself that at least Angela came home every night. Trisha, meanwhile, would disappear for days or weeks at a time, suddenly turn back up in town, and the trouble with Angela would start again.
And then on July 17 two summers later, when Angela was sixteen years old, she disappeared. Three years after, the police killed the man who’d taken her, and Angela came home with Spencer. She was finally safe. She got her GED. She started working. She had a good business started. And then Jason came along.
Jason wasn’t a coked-up banker. He wasn’t that monster who offered Angela a ride home from a beach party she was too young to be at. But something about him was grandiose, his “goodness” a bit too on display. Like every part of his life was about cultivating an identity. He couldn’t just be normal.
And most importantly to Ginny, he was an outsider, and so when he first appeared in Angela’s life, Ginny couldn’t help but think about fourteen-year-old Angela, sitting on her bed and telling her father that the lives of the Mullen family weren’t good enough for her and that she, in some small way even at that young age, saw her looks as a way to achieve something better.
Despite Ginny’s worries, though, Jason had turned out to be a far better man than she ever expected. He wasn’t simply toying with a beautiful local beneath his station. He actually followed through. He married Angela. He was raising Spencer. And though Ginny knew that Angela would have preferred that Jason never leave the walls of the ivory tower, Ginny also suspected that he would have already declared a run for office if it hadn’t been for Angela’s misgivings.
But this new allegation was far worse than the initial one. The last time Ginny spoke to Angela, Jason had been thrilled with the “good news” that the intern was getting trashed in the media. Ginny could hear the mixed feelings in Angela’s voice over the phone. If it were any other case, Ginny would be the one writing a letter to the East Hampton Star to deplore the blaming of the victim. Angela’s whole life revolved around Jason, so of course she was choosing his side. But Ginny believed that some part of Angela actually felt for that intern. She of all people knew what it was like for people to believe you can’t really be a victim if you’re “that kind of girl.”
Her thoughts were interrupted by a knock at the door. She peered through the pebbled arch of glass in the wood to see a blurry figure. The logic behind the design of this door had escaped her for the past thirty-three years, but she didn’t care enough about it to change it.
Once she opened the door, she recognized her visitor as Detective Steven Hendricks. His gray beard was a little bushier than the last time she’d seen him, and his hairline had receded a tad farther, but he still had those damn glasses hanging from a cord around his neck. Danny always said the man was trying to look “cerebral.”
She didn’t invite him in.
“Please hear me out.”