She shook her head.
“Because Anthony would have denied it. More than denied it—he would have claimed the sex was all my idea. He’d have said he fought me off for as long as he could stand it, but I just kept coming on to him. And Sean would have believed him. And I think you can guess what would have come next.”
Karen hesitated, cleared her throat, reached for a fresh paper clip. I hoped for her sake that she really was an intern.
“But isn’t that all the more reason to come forward? Tell the authorities?”
I decided to break out the props. I opened my mouth wide, pointed to two shiny, fake molars on the left side.
“You see that?” I asked. “Last winter, Sean and I were walking downtown, doing our Christmas shopping. We got into a fight over how much to spend on my aunt. My aunt is more like my mother. She raised me. She’s all I’ve got in the way of family. Her eyesight had taken a bad turn, and I wanted to get her a large-screen TV. Sean said she was just an aunt. He said aunts get fancy soaps or gourmet chocolates, not expensive TV sets. It escalated from there. Next thing I knew, he was slapping me around in the parking lot behind Macy’s. There were people all around. When I started screaming, he switched from slapping to punching. He hit me so hard, he knocked these teeth out.
“Back then, I was brave. I called the cops. I filed a report. And then I waited. For weeks. For a full month. I didn’t hear anything back. Meanwhile, Sean was on his best behavior. We got that television set for Aunt Lindsey. He brought me flowers, took me to fancy restaurants. He swore up and down it would never happen again. He said he loved me. He actually made me believe he’d changed.
“So I decided to let him off the hook. I called the precinct to retract my statement, say I wouldn’t press charges. And guess what they told me? There was no report. Either it had vanished or it had never been filed.
“Do you see what I’m saying, Karen? Sean had the power to erase history. I wasn’t just up against him. I was up against a brotherhood. A state-sanctioned gang. That was when I knew he’d lied. He hadn’t changed at all. He’d do it again. And again, and again, and again. And one day he’d go too far. He’d beat me dead, and no one would do a goddamn thing to stop him. So don’t talk to me about reports. Don’t talk to me about what I could have or should have done, because you weren’t there.”
After that, Karen didn’t have much to say for herself. She walked me to pick up my belongings and my street clothes. I changed in a handicapped bathroom, signed a piece of paper, and was on my way.
Outside, I waited for the shuttle bus back to the city. It was raining, which seemed about right. I thought of Sean. I felt more like a patient leaving the hospital than an inmate leaving jail. I’d survived the torturous injection, gagged down the vile medicine, and now the disease was cured. I had the rest of my life to look forward to, and the fact that I had no plans didn’t bother me one bit.
Chapter 35Anna Costello
I OPENED my eyes when they absolutely wouldn’t stay closed any longer, then rolled onto my side and switched the alarm clock to Radio. This morning—if you can call 12:30 p.m. morning—the local DJ was playing Martha and the Vandellas: “Nowhere to hide / Got nowhere to run to, baby…” I laughed out loud at the irony, then got up and danced a little.
I never would have guessed that New Orleans was my kind of town. Jambalaya gives me the trots. Dixieland makes me twitch. But so far, I couldn’t find a single thing wrong with my post-Anthony life. I enjoyed sitting on my wrought iron balcony with a dark roast in the morning and a gin fizz at night. I enjoyed looking down on the cobblestoned street where tourists and locals mingled and sometimes clashed. I even enjoyed the smell of fresh horse manure from the buggy tours that passed under my window every hour like clockwork.
But most of all I enjoyed being alone. It beat the hell out of tiptoeing around that soulless McMansion, doing my best to steer clear of the man who only spoke to me when he wanted someone to scream at, only touched me when he wanted someone to slap around. My marriage had become a nonstop game of hide-and-seek.
Which isn’t to say that my old life didn’t haunt me. Coffee and gin cured a lot, but they couldn’t keep the uglier memories at bay. I’d be sitting on the toilet, swimming in the hotel pool, finishing a crossword puzzle in bed, when out of nowhere I’d flash on an image of Tony, Vincent, Defoe, Broch. They came at me like monsters rearing their heads in a children’s pop-up book. Tony spitting in my face because I’d scraped his Bentley when I was backing out of the garage. Defoe grinning at me through a shattered rear window. Vincent whispering in my ear that sooner or later Anthony would snap and kill me—not because Anthony was evil, but because, as wives go, I was “my own special ring of hell.”
Of course, there was still plenty to fret over in the here and now. I’d been following the investigation from afar. I knew Sarah was out of jail, and I knew Sean was locked up. I’d even managed to get Serena on the phone. Haagen pushed her to the brink, but she stood tall. Serena, more than anyone, put Sean behind bars. When I talked to her, her voice was half nerves and half exhaustion, but there was some
