The Wife: A Novel of Psychological Suspense Page 4

  I first learned Rachel the Intern’s last name from my iPad. From Facebook, to be precise. Jason hadn’t brought up the incident since initially mentioning it at dinner. He’d spent two days in Philadelphia. By the time he came home, I had actually forgotten about it. I assumed that if an intern’s complaint had moved beyond Zack, Jason would have mentioned it.

  On the right side of the screen—beneath the name of an Oscar winner who was in the middle of a contested divorce and that of an athlete I barely recognized—were the words Jason Powell. My husband was “trending.” For a split second, I felt excitement, but then I clicked on the link.

  After a quick skim of the article, I reached for the remote control on the nightstand and turned to New Day, where Jason was scheduled for a segment this morning. They were on a commercial break.

  I clicked over to MSNBC, where Jason was also a frequent contributor. The Morning Joe panel was interviewing some congressman I’d never heard of. No mention of Jason on the crawl beneath the program.

  I flipped up three stations to the channel that focused on finance issues. Nothing.

  One more click up to the leading “conservative” station. A photograph of Jason appeared in the upper-right-hand corner, not far from the face of the attractive blonde who was speaking his name. And then I saw the letters in a banner across the bottom of the screen. Progressive Celebrity Economist Accused of Intern Sex Abuse.

  The article was from the Post, and 3,000 Facebook users had already shared it. The paper had pulled a photo from Jason’s listing on the university’s website. Jason looked so young. His long face was fuller then, and he wasn’t yet sporting the short-stubble look he’d adopted a few years ago. His green eyes seemed to stare straight through the camera, and he was smiling as if he had thought of a joke.

  The article itself was only two paragraphs long. It said that an unnamed college intern had accused “economist turned pundit and political lightning rod” Jason Powell of “involuntary sexual contact.”

  “An inside source tells the Post that the dirty professor keeps a secret room with a shower and a bed adjacent to the ritzy off-campus office where he has been earning a mint telling investors how to spend their money according to his liberal politics. The same source reports that the NYPD is close to making an arrest and that we will soon be learning more about the various uses to which the renowned economist has been putting the bed in question.”

  I had to stop myself from throwing the iPad on the floor. When we first moved downtown, Jason missed being able to run in Central Park every day. Splurging for that shower when he opened FSS had been a way to get back to his old running routes. And the bed wasn’t an actual bed. It was the daybed we used to have in the hallway alcove of our old apartment. I had been the one to suggest moving it into the room we jokingly called his “suite” at the office. With no windows, the room was perfect for a quick catnap when Jason’s early-bird grind caught up to him in the afternoon.

  I tried calling Jason’s cell phone, but it went straight to voice mail. “Jason, call me as soon as you get this.” I sent a text with the same message.

  I scrolled down the page on my iPad to see the Facebook comments accompanying the Post article. It was going viral.

  I knew his good-guy shtick was an act.

  The police are about to arrest? Is he still teaching undergrads? WTF?

  I know a girl at school who interns with him. She’s the only female in the program. It has to be her. Name is Rachel Sutton. She’s hot.

  Several comments followed that one, scolding the author for “doxxing” the woman who was single-handedly ruining my husband’s reputation. Apparently it was okay for Jason to be named, but her privacy was to be protected. I made a mental note of her name and continued skimming the comments.

  What kind of professor meets with a student alone . . . in a bedroom?

  OMG. His son goes to my daughter’s school! He always seemed so nice. I’m crushed.

  The author of that last comment was a woman named Jane Reese. I clicked on her profile picture and recognized the teenage girl next to her from Spencer’s choir performances. According to Facebook, Jane and I were “friends.” And she was the one who was “crushed.” I clicked the unfriend button.

  Spencer.

  Jesus, Spencer. I had protected him from so much, but I was powerless to shelter him from this.

  I googled my name and Spencer’s—using both Powell and Mullen—searching for any mentions within the last twenty-four hours. No one had dragged us into the story. Not yet, anyway.

  But if some random Internet user had already posted the name of Rachel Sutton, how long would it be before people who thought they knew something about me jumped into the fray?

  Spencer had a pillow pulled over his head to block the light seeping around the window shade. He let out a moan when I sat at the foot of his bed. My son had a way of treating each morning as a theater audition.

  “Do I need to remind you that little girls in other parts of the world have literally died trying to get an education? Time for school, mister.”

  He squinted up at me from beneath his shaggy hair. “Normal moms say, Get the fuck up before I kill you.”

  This is my precocious son’s idea of “normal.” “I prefer guilt trips to death threats. Get up. But we need to talk for a second. Some kids at the school might be talking about Dad.” Spencer had started calling Jason Dad after our first anniversary. We never asked why. We were just grateful.

  “Loretta’s mom has an Academy Award, and Henry’s dad is literally like a musical genius. Trust me, no one talks about Dad.”

  Ah, the joys of a private school in Manhattan.

  “There’s a story going around the Internet. Someone accused him of something. It’ll get cleared up, but I need you to try to block it all out today at school.”

  “What do you mean, he was accused?”

  There was no way I could keep the details from my son, not with the 24/7 media cycle. “It’s a student from the university. College students can overreact, Spencer.”

  I started babbling from there. I told him that sometimes extremely troubled students found their way into the university. That his father had done nothing but try to help her by supervising an internship. That teachers have conflicts with students all the time, but Dad had the additional complication of being a public person. It was possible the student was looking for attention at his expense.

  “So what are people going to say?”

  I searched his pale brown eyes, which peered out beneath wisps of hair that should have been cut two weeks ago. My son was too old to be treated like a child, but he was young compared to his peers. His friend Henry, for example—son of the “musical genius”—had two nannies, a driver, and a bodyguard at his disposal, and saw his parents twice a month. These kids would pull no punches.

  “That a student accused your father of inappropriate behavior.”

  “What? Like . . . sex?”

  I said I didn’t know exactly. That it was a misunderstanding. That I only told him in case someone mentioned it at school.

  “And this is, like, online?” He started to get up, probably heading for the phone I made him dock downstairs in the kitchen, one of the phone-related Mom Rules, along with divulging his passcode, asking permission before sharing photographs of others, and, most controversially, all phones in airplane mode while the car is moving.

  I tried not to think about the other parents whispering in their kitchens right now about my husband. Or the NYU students texting links to one another during class. Or the people I used to know on the East End, gloating that my perfect life in the city hadn’t worked out quite so well after all.

  “This young woman is obviously troubled, Spencer. Deeply. And your father’s been trying to help her, okay?” I was hinting at facts I knew nothing about, but needed to offer some kind of explanation for what was happening. Troubled girl gets fixated on successful mentor seemed, sadly, to work.

  “Mom,
I can’t go to school. You have to let me stay home.”

  I walked to the bathroom in the hallway and turned on the water in the shower. It took forever to heat. “You can’t stay home, or people might assume he’s guilty. He’s your father, Spencer, and you’re not a child anymore. We have to protect our family.”

  7

  While Spencer was in the shower, I tried Jason again. I hung up when I heard the familiar “You’ve reached Jason Powell . . .” I’d already left two voice mails and three text messages.

  I flipped on the small television hanging beneath our kitchen counter, keeping the volume low to make sure I’d hear Spencer on the stairs in time to turn it off. I flipped to New Day. Jason initially became a semiregular on the show due to our friendship with one of the hosts, Susanna Coleman. Now that Jason’s commentary was widely sought after, he still appeared about once a month, primarily out of loyalty.

  Susanna and her cohost Eric were in the studio’s kitchen, flanking a chef I recognized from one of those cable cooking shows. The chef was saying, “See? Perfect al dente,” while Susanna and Eric attempted to sample the supposedly perfect spaghetti strands with grace.

  Susanna was nodding in agreement until her mouth was free to speak. “You’re my hero. I always overcook my pasta.”

  Had Jason already been on the air this morning? What was he supposed to talk about today? He had brought it up the night before, while I was trying to read Spencer’s paper about James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. My son was only in the seventh grade, but some of his homework was already more sophisticated than anything I had ever done in school. I had stopped reading to look up the word circumlocution on my phone when Jason mentioned his plans for the TV segment.

  Now I remembered: seven retailers who were changing the world in small ways. It didn’t take an economist, let alone one with Jason’s credentials, to hype footwear and blankets, but these were the compromises he made for the sake of expanding his “platform.”

  Had he really gone on air and talked about guilt-free splurges without acknowledging the claim against him? No way. The Twittersphere would have been merciless. These days, the public thinks they’re owed an immediate explanation.

  I reached for my phone and googled “Jason Powell New Day,” then narrowed the search for posts within the last hour. I found the answer to my question on a website that covered celebrities from a feminist perspective.

  Seven minutes into New Day’s opening, cohost Eric Jordan abruptly interrupted one of Susanna Coleman’s stories about her beloved dog. “I’m sorry, Susanna. But no one wants to hear about Frannie. Let’s talk about the elephant in the room.” He identified the elephant as the New York Post’s report that morning that a college intern had accused Dr. Jason Powell—“our own Dr. Jason”—of “inappropriate conduct.”

  The irony of a man interrupting a woman to insist that she discuss allegations of sexual misconduct did not seem to be missed by Coleman. “You’re telling me what I can and can’t talk about right now?”

  Jordan proceeded to read what appeared to be a prepared statement. “As journalists, we know that every individual is presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. But as a television program, New Day is also aware that the offscreen actions of on-air personalities can be distracting from quality content. As such, the segment we announced yesterday featuring Dr. Jason Powell for today has been canceled.”

  The program went to commercial and proceeded as business as usual from there.

  In other words, everyone’s presumed innocent unless we think it will hurt our ratings.

  Hearing Spencer’s heavy steps on the staircase, I clicked off the television and placed my phone on the counter, screen down.

  “Chocolate-chip pancakes?” he said drily as I placed three perfect round discs onto a plate. “I thought you said I shouldn’t ‘eat like a little kid anymore.’”

  I hated the voice my son used when he impersonated me—so pinched and harpy. I let it slide for that day, and didn’t mention the context for that particular lecture: his picking at his dinner the night before, only to order pizza two hours later.

  I shrugged and handed him the plate and a bottle of syrup. Pancakes were not part of the usual rotation of weekday breakfasts.

  “If some skank accuses Dad of murder, will I get a car?”

  “Don’t use words like that,” I said, pointing a stern finger, though I was smiling as I said it. Finding humor was my son’s way of dealing with the most unhumorous situations, and he knew how that kind of talk got under my skin. “Besides, I’m in denial that you’ll ever be old enough to drive.”

  He didn’t complain when I followed him out the front door after breakfast. At his request, I had stopped walking him to school this year, but I still found days when I was “going that direction anyway.”

  Jason had been adamant about paying for Spencer to go to a “good school.” I thought the Springs School had been perfectly good. It was the same grade school I attended. It was the grade school that most kids in East Hampton attended—not the uber-rich sections of East Hampton, but the way-north-of-the-highway area where the normal people lived. People like my family. People like Spencer and me before I met Jason.

  Manhattan was different, Jason explained. We couldn’t drop Spencer into any random school. Parents who had to rely on public education chose their zip codes based on the quality of grade schools, and kids had to compete from there for spots in the best high schools. Families who could afford to opted for private schools, hiring consultants to assemble application packages and cozying up to potential references. The whole process sounded nauseating, but Jason knew more about education than I ever would, so I toured the “go-to” private schools. Friends Seminary had been the only one where I could picture Spencer being comfortable. Yes, there were children of rock stars and Oscar winners, but there were regular kids too. And it was Quaker. That had to mean the people were good, right?

  I expected Jason to balk at the price tag, but the bigger issue was the school’s Sixteenth Street address. The trip from his apartment on the Upper West Side to the Village was only three miles, but it was a long haul given Manhattan traffic at peak hours. Jason decided we would move downtown.

  “But what about the park?” He had opted for the apartment on Seventy-Fourth Street for its access to Central Park, where he could enjoy open space and maintain his twenty-five-mile-a-week running regimen.

  “I’ll be the weirdo who does twenty laps around Washington Square. Besides, it’s walking distance to the university. I should’ve moved a long time ago.”

  We could barely afford the rent on a two-bedroom on Waverly when we first made the move to the Village. Now, thanks to Jason’s extra income, we owned our own home on Twelfth Street—an actual carriage house, complete with a street-level parking garage—less than a ten-minute walk from Friends.

  I could feel Spencer’s pace slow as we neared the school. As usual, his eyes were glued to his phone.

  “Catching Pokemons?”

  “So two years ago, Mom. And you know what I’m looking at.”

  “It’s going to be okay, Spencer. You know your dad wouldn’t do something like that, right?”

  “Well, yeah. But that doesn’t matter. Police set people up all the time. People go to prison for, like, their whole lives, and then it comes out they were innocent the whole time. There’s a place called the Innocence Project. Haven’t you heard of it?”

  My son is starting to figure out that I’m not as educated as the other adults in his life. I hate the feeling of disappointing him.

  “Yes, I’ve heard of it, but that’s irrelevant. Your father’s not going to prison. It’s all a misunderstanding. Absolutely nothing happened.” Once again, I tried to sound like I knew more than I actually did. “Your dad’s going to be fine.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said. “We’re rich.” I hate that my son knows so much already about the world. “Besides, this isn’t near
ly as bad as what some other kids went through. Seth’s dad’s been in rehab for basically all of middle school. And Karen’s older sister made a sex tape with Little Pony.”

  “My Little Pony?”

  “No, Mom. Little Pony. Geez, he’s a rapper.”

  “Not my fault his name’s stupid.” We were at the corner before the school entrance, the farthest he let me walk him these days. He did allow me to give him a big hug. When I opened my eyes, I saw Jane Reese standing next to a black Escalade in the middle of the block, watching us. She quickly turned away. I wondered if she had noticed yet that I had unfriended her.

  “Thank you, Spencer. You’re a good kid. Remember: When they go low . . .”

  “We go high.” I gave him a quick fist-tap for good measure. “Are you going to be okay? I mean—what if people find out about . . . you know, us? I don’t really care, but—”

  I felt a catch in my throat. My son, facing school to pretend he wasn’t scared that his entire world was falling apart, was worried about me.

  “The police will have this cleared up in no time. It’s all going to be fine.” I looked away so he couldn’t see the uncertainty in my eyes. Even he had no idea how much I distrusted the police, or my reasons.

  I was almost home when my cell phone rang. My screen read “AMC.” The American Media Center, the network that runs New Day. Maybe Jason was calling from the green room.

  “Jason?” It was about time.

  “No, it’s me.” Susanna was whispering. “I’m calling from the set during a commercial break. Are you okay?”

  “No, I’m not okay. I didn’t know anything about this. I found out online. The show felt the need to read a statement? Based on the word of some—” The word skank came to mind, planted in my frontal lobe by Spencer minutes ago. “Student?”

  “Don’t get me started. That was obviously the studio going to Eric behind my back. They probably knew I would’ve thrown down to defend him.”