She said then, “I hope the same thing happens to you.”
“Being written about...”
“No, having your husband murdered.”
If this was how Suzanne Church fought, no wonder they were separated. I bit the tongue of my wicked mind on that thought. She was misplacing her anger, that was all, and it was to be expected. “I don’t think you mean that. You would never want someone else to have to live with this.”
“I would though. I hope your husband dies horribly. Then you’ll think of what you put us through.”
“Respectfully, the murderer put you through this. And Cary put you through this. Not me.” I added, “You can’t blame other people for wanting to know how such a strange, awful thing happened.”
In the pause that intervened, I could all but hear her gathering her thoughts for the next assault. “Is that what you think, that you’re so wise and brave that you’ll be able to work out the truth and share it? Or are you just licking your chops to be able to dine out on our grief?”
“Do you want to keep any of this off the record? Like the part where you said you hope someone kills my husband?” I asked her then. That was nasty; I didn’t intend to quote her.
“I never said anything like that,” she told me. “If you write that down, who do you think people will believe, me or the murderer’s buddy pal?”
She hung up. I hung up.
Then, to my horror, she called back. I considered not answering, but I did.
“Why couldn’t you even have the decency to come here and look me in the face as you tried to destroy my life?” she said.
“I would be happy to come and see you,” I said, and thought,About as happy as I would be to do bowel surgery on myself in the woods with a stick.
“You should. I would kick your fat face in.”
“Then I should stay right where I am,” I said. “Honestly, I feel terrible for you and your children. I am writing this becauseI should, but it’s not fun. When I think of the ways it involves me too, it makes me sick to my stomach.”
Until now, I’d never really grappled with how fragile I would feel if someone else was writing about my biggest heartbreak. I didn’t even want to write about that myself. I had the righteous dread of hipster-style first-person “participatory” journalism. Yet, what other choice did I have but to look in the mirror? Would it not have been disingenuous otherwise?
Suzanne Church was quiet for so long I believed that she’d hung up again. Finally, she said softly, “I’m sorry. You’re right. This isn’t your fault. I’m so angry at Cary but there’s no one else except Cary I would tell. I want him to comfort me. I wish we stayed together. Maybe it was partly my fault that he went to that woman.”
“No. Don’t think that.”
“I could have been a better wife.”
“I’m sure that you were a fine wife. Who knows why people do the things they do? It certainly wasn’t any failure on your part.” Then I asked the big question. “You really didn’t know anything about this, huh? Not the fact of the woman or the money or any of that.”
“I found out when he died. He wasn’t around as much as he should have been. I told him I felt like a single mom. But he would ask me, what did I want him to do? I wanted to be with the kids until they were a little older, so he was doing consulting along with teaching and, I guess, this other stuff too.” Eventually, Cary came home from some supposed late-night consulting gig and Suzanne confronted him with her suspicions. He admitted everything. She threw him out.
“Maybe it’s better in the end that you didn’t know.”
“It’s more than the grief. I feel like a complete fool,” she said. She had nightmares of walking into Cary’s funeral with her little boys, and everyone started to laugh at her and make kissy noises.
When we ended the conversation, I was exhausted. It wasanother one of those situations you think happen only in novels, but here I was in real life, panting and sweating as if I’d run a 10K with a hangover. My T-shirt was soaked through. My cheeks felt as though the skin was scalded. I wanted to tell Nell that it really wasn’t worth it. I wanted to run back into the sweet embrace of comparing the merits of scarves cut from silk satin, charmeuse, twill and georgette, or the occasional polyester blend—strictly utilitarian for travel.
If this was what big-league pitchers of writing routinely experienced, I was meant for right field.
Still, I kept trying all the keys I could think of to open the door of Felicity’s life after college. Unusual for people of our generation, she didn’t have much of a social media presence, except for her own beautiful photos of birds that she sometimes posted on Instagram. I didn’t do much in that realm either. Ivy insisted on videos about how to tie a scarf like Mary Berry. I gave Marcus the props, but an intern did the actual tapings. Looping an elaborate scarf knot was for me akin to whipping up a Salzburger soufflé—forget about it. Yet one more way I was ill-suited to my job.
Maybe Nell was right about everything. Maybe this story was just an exercise in voyeurism for well-heeled women readers with secret fantasies about the power to parlay a honeypot into a pot of gold.
If I were Felicity, would I talk to me?
In the true crime podcasts my dorm buddies and I listened to at midnight—Columbia, Missouri, being no more a glitter kingdom of urban nightlife than Sheboygan had been—there were always stories beneath the stories. Women make up most of the audience for true crime podcasts and books, maybe because they have more to fear. My interest wasn’t so much in what people did as who they were. In my internship days, I went for what I thought of as the “beforemath,” as opposed to the “aftermath.”
I thought I knew all about Felicity’s beforemath, but clearlyI did not. Her secrets, and the real story, would be in that beforemath. Even if Felicity was incontrovertibly guilty, there would be a story for me to write—the story of her broken life and my broken heart.
