“So, at the risk of prying again too soon, is this breakup for real, or strictly on paper?” She had been the one to suggest a technical divorce, if only to protect us financially.
“He told her he would leave me for her.” The words surprised me once they were out of my mouth.
“He admitted that to you?”
“No, to his lawyer.” Now that I’d opened that door, I owed her a more complete explanation. “I’ve been reading his e-mails. All that nonsense about her company and kickbacks and whatever? He told Olivia he thought Kerry was pissed because he hadn’t left me yet.”
“So she framed him for a sexual assault?”
“Apparently.”
“So you still think he’s innocent?”
“Of that? Yes.” When I first saw the police reports Olivia sent to Jason, I believed he was guilty. It was the photographs of her wrists that convinced me. Her description of the way he suddenly seemed like a different person. With that one e-mail, I became convinced that he had done to her what he had done to me, and she was willing to label that as rape, precisely as Susanna had argued. That was why I had kicked him out of the house that night.
“But how can you be sure?” Susanna asked.
“Because I read the explanation he gave to his lawyer. Just trust me, Susanna. It all makes sense. She set him up. I’m sure of it.”
Normally, she would have pressed me for details, but she let it go, no doubt sensing that she had pushed me far enough for the day.
“Are you okay? Do you want me to come over?”
“No, I’m fine. I’m actually looking forward to being on my own for a while. You know I’ve never lived alone before? Not once. This might be good for me.”
Spencer called me that night. I couldn’t believe how much had changed in the two weeks since I drove him to camp.
“How’s the arm? Still there?”
“Yeah. It’s actually getting better already, but don’t tell Kate. She’s been, like, super nice to me. It was sort of her fault I got it. She was all, ‘That stuff looks like poison ivy, but it’s not.’ That’s worse than not noticing in the first place, right?”
“Are you doing okay up there otherwise?”
“Other than getting poisoned by nature under a counselor’s watch? Yeah, I’m fine. It’s pretty fun up here.”
“It’s only another week, huh?”
“Um, is it? You mentioned before it might be six weeks instead of three.”
I shut my eyes and took another drink of wine. I couldn’t believe I had ever thought that this would all be over by then. “No, unless of course you want to stay.” I’d have to put the rest of the fees on a credit card.
“I’m actually kind of ready to come home, but I like it here too. Mom, what’s going on? Did Dad’s thing get taken care of? Is it over?”
I closed my eyes, searching for an honest response. “It’s going to take longer than we thought, and Dad’s going to stay at Colin’s for a while. After what happened, we thought we’d have a better chance working things out if we lived apart for a while.”
“You kicked him out.”
“No—”
“Mom, he cheated on you, and you need a break. You can tell me that.”
“It’s more complicated, but, yes, we’re on a break.”
“Good.”
“He’s still your father.” They had finally talked Friday night when Spencer called, the first time since Jason told him about the affair.
“I know, and I’ll be fine with him someday. But he’s the one who screwed up, not you. You can stop protecting me.”
“I didn’t want you to spend your whole summer hearing bad things about your family.”
“Well, the stuff I’ve been imagining is probably way worse than what’s really happening.”
I couldn’t believe how smart my kid was.
“Mom?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you want me just to come home? I can handle it. I promise.”
I sucked in my breath. I had given myself so many pep talks about finally living on my own. I didn’t need Jason. I didn’t need anyone. “You don’t mind?”
“Definitely not. Everyone’s starting to stink up here. We take showers, and somehow we get smellier every day.”
My laugh was more of a snort. I missed my kid. I told Kate I’d be picking Spencer up tomorrow.
51
Corrine woke up Monday morning to a call out at Columbia University. What was her early morning was the middle of the night for a college student. For all the headlines about college responses to sexual assaults on campus, universities seemed to be getting worse, not better, in their procedures. By the time Corrine arrived, the victim had already spoken to three friends, a student residence adviser, a faculty mentor, a student services counselor, and a university health clinic nurse. Only the nurse had encouraged the woman to call the police department. From what Corrine could gather, the rest of the crew spent that time convincing the woman that the police would arrest her for using Ecstasy with the suspect the night before, that she could file a complaint through the university system, and that criminal charges could ruin the suspect’s life.
By the time Corrine got to SVU, it was a little after noon. She found a thick mailing envelope on her desk chair. It was from the Pittsburgh Police Department. She opened it to find the reports she had ordered when she first learned that Angela Powell had once been Angela Mullen, the girl recovered after police fatally shot Charles Franklin near the Canadian border.
Corrine flipped through the pages. Photographs of the house that had been Angela Powell’s prison for three years, including two unmade twin beds and a crib with soiled linens. A doctor’s report, describing Angela’s refusal to let anyone else hold the baby until her mother showed up. An FBI agent’s report, detailing Daniel and Virginia Mullen’s threat to sue if their daughter and grandson weren’t released to come home immediately. Background on Charles Franklin: one arrest for indecent exposure outside a public restroom, but no conviction; child pornography found in the house; the typical statements from neighbors saying he seemed so “normal.” A printout of a photograph of him on a gurney, his face already gray and bloated, blood clotted in his dark brown hair.
Even in death, Charles Franklin exhibited physical traits Corrine recognized from photographs of Angela’s son, Spencer: the dark hair, wide nose, low forehead. She hoped that there was some part of Angela’s brain that protected her from seeing the resemblance.
Toward the bottom of the pile, she found the documents describing the discovery of the second victim, the one Angela had been instructed to call Sarah after Franklin brought her back to the home two years earlier. Franklin told Angela he finally got lucky on a trip to Cleveland when a girl “even dumber than you” accepted the offer of a ride home while waiting for a bus across the street from a shopping mall. He threatened to kill them both if they spoke a word of their previous existence under his roof, but Angela remembered Sarah telling her once that the only thing worth seeing where she grew up was the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. She was fourteen years old when Franklin abducted her, making her about sixteen when it was all over.
The girl’s decomposed body had washed up near the Pennsylvania-Ohio state line nearly two weeks after Franklin dumped her in Lake Erie. Two bullet wounds at the base of her skull. Putrefication had taken its toll. She was unrecognizable. A tattoo approximately three inches by two on her right hip was unidentifiable, too, other than the fact of its existence.
The most recent document in the file was written almost a year and a half after Franklin was fatally shot during the rescue. The police and FBI had searched all missing-person reports from Ohio and the surrounding states, but nothing matched the description they were able to provide of “Sarah.” The case, for all practical purposes, was closed. As far as Corrine could tell, no one had ever come forward to claim Sarah as their child. The parents who had allowed a fourteen-year-old to get a tattoo must not have looked especially hard when she disappeared.