Sweat ran down her face, down every part of her body. It gathered under her breasts and atop her enormous belly as she waddled her way west on 95th Street. At least there was a breeze from the Hudson River. She’d been allowed to leave work early today, so that was one good thing—although she had nowhere to go, no one to see, and nothing to do. She was eight months pregnant with a child who would never be hers. She’d signed the adoption contract last month, so this life that was growing inside of her would not stick around for company. Well, at least her medical bills would be paid.
She opened the heavy front door of her building, pressed for the elevator, and waited as it cranked down to the lobby. She really had to pee. The baby was pressing on her bladder and she could not make it a full hour without running to a bathroom, wherever she was. Most restaurants took pity on her, considering her bulk, and let her use their restrooms, even if she couldn’t afford to eat there.
Once in the apartment, she made a beeline for the bathroom. Her roommate was away in Ohio visiting family. They’d found each other on a grocery-store notices board—two Midwestern loners adrift in New York. She was a singularly uncurious girl and did not question the pregnancy. Annie had made a cursory explanation of her intentions and the subject was promptly dropped. The two of them never became friendly. At least she was someone to help with the rent.
The evening stretched in front of her, like every evening before it and those, she imagined, that would follow. It wasn’t even six and it wouldn’t be dark for hours. Was this the longest day of the year? It hardly mattered. She would not be able to see the lingering daylight from this apartment as it existed in perpetual gloom. She crossed to the kitchen, flipped on a light, and was shocked by the cockroaches that scurried across the floor.
“Shit!” She backed out of the room as fast as she could.
She sat in the one faded chair, opposite the faded sofa, and tried to fold her knees up under her in case any cockroaches migrated out there. It was no easy task at her size.
She thought about what she had resolved to do. Knowing her roommate would be away, she had made her decision to open the white envelope. She would finally look at its contents, take responsibility for her actions, and acknowledge all that she had done that led up to the situation she found herself in now. Then, she would say a prayer and burn the pictures in the kitchen sink.
A ritual to mark her transition to a new life.
It was time. Her due date was in a few weeks and she wanted to do this before the baby was born. She wanted to come home from the hospital and have nothing of the old life in her possession—to render herself an empty vessel both physically and psychically.
She peeked into the kitchen again to scan for the cockroaches. They were nowhere to be seen.
She crossed over to the hall closet and reached to the top shelf for the box in which she stored her papers. Taking it down, she dug through it to retrieve the old purse that had traveled with her across lifetimes and found it at the bottom of a pile. Inside of it, she found the white envelope.
She walked back to the kitchen and located the big box of matches. Their stove did not work without matches, which was another unsettling thing about New York. In Warren, you could just turn a stove on and it would work. You didn’t have to stick your head inside, like you were gassing yourself, to find some pilot light while you held a lit match.
She paused in front of the sink to compose herself, to find that centered place that she had known so well, as a little girl at St. Mary Magdalen Church. She closed her eyes and breathed in and out. She had not touched cocaine or alcohol since the night of September 5th of last year. She was learning to calm herself without help now.
Ready.
She pried open the envelope, then hesitated. Maybe it was enough to simply remember what happened that night with Johnny, what happened that whole gruesome summer. Maybe she didn’t need to look at the actual, physical proof of her own fall from grace.
But no.
That was not what she had decided to do. She would face it. She would reckon with herself. And she would begin the process of atonement.
She took the pictures out. She held them in front of her face. She squinted to see better.
Something was not right.
They were not photos of her at all.
The photographs were of young Diane—the sweet, freckled waitress from Frankie’s, the one who stopped coming to work in the middle of the summer.
But here she was, in these pictures!
She was naked, just as Annie had been in the photos that Johnny had taken of her. Diane was wearing nothing but the gold question mark necklace.
How had she gotten that necklace? When had these photos been taken?
Annie’s head swam, and her hands began to shake. Her stomach, already pressed so high in her chest by the baby, felt like it would exit through her mouth.
She stumbled back to the chair and leaned in toward the lamp. In a few of the pictures, Diane could have been smiling, but it wasn’t clear. Her lips were stretched back a little, but the expression was more of a wince. Her brows were furrowed. Her eyes were half closed and rolled back.
In most of the pictures, however, her eyes were open wide and staring. Her head hung at an unnatural angle and her neck looked dark and smudged. Bruised.
OhGodohGodohGodohGodohGodohGodohGodohGodohGodohGod—
Diane appeared to be dead.
63
Friday, August 15, 2014
Boston
DelVecchio drummed his fingers on the glass—the porthole of the door to their little cubicle—as he looked out into the hallway of the FBI offices. As though the blank white walls out there might hold the answer to all of his questions.
Annie knew that the answer he was seeking did not lie in the hallway.
She sat at the table, face-to-face with Provenzano, knowing full well that the answer rested in her. It lay on the table in the pile of pictures she had brought to show them. Pictures of the dead Diane.
It lay in what they were going to ask her to do about it.
“Thank you, Mrs. Ford, for returning to talk to us. Are you comfortable?” asked Provenzano, working to soften her.
“As comfortable as I expect to be,” she said, unable at that moment to imagine actual comfort.
“Good. Like I said, we’re glad you called us. Glad you came back. We always encourage cooperation as best for everyone involved; we believe you’ll find that to be true. So, let’s get started. First of all, how much do you know about Congressman Buscemi?”
“Just what I’ve told you,” Annie answered. “He wasn’t a congressman when I knew him.”
“Well, he’s been a congressman for a long time. And we’ve been after him for longer,” DelVecchio said.
“For drug dealing?”
“That’s the tip of the iceberg. Buscemi stopped directly dealing drugs when he ran for congress. Obviously. But his ties to his former associates run deep. Did you know a cop by the name of Daniel Ravello?”
“Yes. He was always with a group that hung out at Frankie’s—with Johnny Buscemi, in particular. And he was with Johnny again when I saw him in New York last week.”
“Ravello’s no longer a police officer. He’s Buscemi’s chief aide and has been since Buscemi took office. These affiliates of Buscemi’s are involved in all sorts of unsavory matters: racketeering, extortion, prostitution, book making, drugs, arms trafficking. The list goes on. Ravello has kept Buscemi’s name out of it all. He’s kind of the clean-up guy,” DelVecchio said. “But we believe, strongly, that Buscemi has a finger in all of those pies.”
“These pictures”—Provenzano jumped in, gesturing at the grisly show-and-tell on the table—“combined with your testimony regarding your first-hand personal experience with Buscemi, could be the key that locks Buscemi away. Remember Al Capone: after everything he did, our guys got him on tax evasion.”
“Wait.” She thinks she might vomit. “I would have to testify?”
>
“We’re asking you to do two things. First, we want you to meet with Johnny Buscemi. Immediately,” Provenzano said. “We’ll provide a contact number for him—his cell phone so that he picks it up himself. You’ll organize a meeting at your house in Watch Hill.”
“Why would he come to my house?” Annie was reeling.
DelVecchio answered. “You’ll tell him you have the photos. You’ll tell him you have the necklace that Diane Englund was wearing in the pictures on the night she was killed. You’ll offer to give him those items in exchange for his silence about you. As you’ve said, he saw you in New York last week. So he knows you’re alive—and he can guess at how much you have to hide. It’s pretty tidy. Everyone has something to gain here.”
“There’s something I don’t understand,” she said. “I got that necklace from Frankie Castiglione. Not from Johnny Buscemi. How did Frankie get it? Who killed Diane?”
“Does it matter? If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas,” DelVecchio crudely responded. “Only she’s not getting up. Ever again. Somebody killed her and it sure as hell looks like Buscemi, from what you’ve told us.”
Provenzano took it from there. “Look, Mrs. Ford, we need to nail this guy. Castiglione is dead. He’s out of our reach. We don’t know which of them killed her. Maybe all of them. But this guy has gotten away with way too much for way too long. People have died, and you’ve given us the first tangible proof of it. And we need you to take him down. We’ll be very close by. We’ll fit you with a wire, so we’ll be able to hear everything that goes on. We can be next to you very quickly should something go wrong.”
“Do you even know how much can go wrong?” she asked. “Johnny Buscemi is a violent man. You can see that from those pictures. What if he decides to kill me?”
“He’s also a United States Representative. We doubt that he’ll hurt you.”
“That seems pretty easy for you to say, from wherever you’re hiding—in the bushes or in the closet or somewhere! He may be a congressman, but I’ll be backing him into a pretty uncomfortable corner.”
“We understand that, Mrs. Ford. That’s why we’ll be nearby.”
“Then what?”
“You’ll show him the photographs and the necklace. Get him to talk. Is that understood? You have to get him to talk.”
64
Monday, August 18, 2014
Watch Hill
Time: 6:28 a.m.
It was early Monday morning, but Annie had been awake for hours. She sat in one of the Adirondack chairs near the seawall, holding a piece of paper. Her coffee cup was next to her, as usual, resting on the arm of her chair. Her dogs slept at her feet.
Mrs. Ford’s favorite way to begin her day.
It was too early for the shot signaling the raising of the flag at the Watch Hill Yacht Club. The sun had barely risen, and a mist hovered over the ocean. The beauty of it pierced her, cut a hole right through her. Or maybe it just shone a spotlight on the hole that she had never been able to fill.
She looked down at the paper, at the phone number written there by Agent Provenzano, and laid her hand on her cellphone, sitting on the opposite arm of her chair. There was no use procrastinating. It was not as though she had many options. Susan, had she been alive, would have made the call by now. Susan would have called him on Friday, after leaving the FBI office. Susan would not have let this fester all weekend.
But she was not now and never had been Susan.
She picked up the phone and stabbed in the digits.
“Hello,” said a melodious male voice on the other end of the line—a bit gravelly from sleep, but still a very nice voice.
“It’s Annie Nelson.” She sat up straighter to fortify herself against him. “I have that envelope I took from you—I think that’s what you were talking about in New York. I also have the necklace. The unusual one that Diane was wearing in the photos you took of her.”
“Well, well,” he said in his most sarcastic tone. “Good morning, little girl.”
“Come to my house in Watch Hill. Tonight, at midnight. The town will be dead by then, so no one will see you come or go. You have time to catch a flight into Providence and it’s a forty-five-minute drive from there.”
“I don’t think so, little girl. I think I’d rather have you come see me in Detroit.”
Annie dropped the register of her voice as low as she possibly could. “First of all, don’t you ever—and I mean ever—call me that again. I am not your little girl. Is that clear?” She did not wait for an answer. “Secondly, I kind of have you by the balls here, Johnny. I’m not coming to Detroit. If you want the pictures and the necklace—if you want to keep those balls—you’ll meet me where I want to meet.”
“All grown up now, aren’t you?”
“Cut the crap. Are you coming or not?”
“What’s your address?”
65
Monday, August 18, 2014
Time: 8:58 p.m.
“What else do you need to tell me?” Sammy is ashen. “Is it about the baby?”
“No.” Annie sets her bags on the floor and walks over to the window. She looks at the lighthouse making its revolutions as though this were a normal day, an average day, a day of no special consequence.
“It’s about Diane,” she continues. “That waitress I mentioned before. Johnny killed her. Or, someone killed her—I don’t know who—but Johnny was involved. That necklace I gave you, the one that Frankie gave me, it belonged to her. I didn’t know that then.
“And now, the FBI are threatening me with jail for all sorts of crimes. They read me a list that could put me away for a very long time, everything from identity theft to murder and a dozen things in between. They’ve made me an offer: They’ll let it all go if I do something for them. Two things, in fact.” She looks at her watch. “The first is that, in three hours, I’m supposed to meet with Johnny Buscemi. I called him early this morning and he’s on his way here now. They want me to wear a wire. Set him up.
“And maybe I would have been able to do that. Maybe it would have felt good. But there’s a second part. I would have to publicly testify against him. Sammy, I did some things back then that I’m not proud of. Ugly things, and most of them, with him. And it turns out now that it’s all wrapped up in Diane’s death.
“But, to bring him down, I’d end up bringing the whole house down with me. The house my husband built. I don’t want to do that! I don’t want to destroy the names and reputations of my husband and stepson. It’s not fair to them.
“I’m not Susan Ford, as much as I wanted to be. She’s not even real. I made her up. And I’m certainly not Susan Bentley. She died a long time ago. I’m Annie Nelson. I lost her so many years ago that I think it’s time to find her.”
“Jesus Christ, Annie. You’re really playing with fire here.”
“Look, it’s pretty simple: if I go now, I can leave Susan Ford intact—crystallize her here. She can disappear—off into the fog of the Atlantic.”
Bang! Bang! Bang! The knocking at the door resumes.
Sammy looks at her. “You’ve made up your mind?”
“I have.”
“You have always amazed me, Annie.”
“You sure as hell never showed me that.”
“I’m not as expressive as you are.”
“That’s putting it mildly. Are you coming?”
“I can’t. Not now.”
66
Time: 9:06 p.m.
Annie goes down the back stairs and exits a small door at the side of the house. She does not pass through the living room. She cannot face her dogs, sleeping there, trusting that their world has not changed.
For an instant, the thought of leaving her dogs doubles her over in pain. She has made too many departures for one person; she’s spent too many years alone. Precipitously, she sits on the steps with her head between her knees, willing the pain away.
It would be so easy. She could turn around right now, wake her dogs and walk wi
th them back up those stairs. Back up to her life. But she reminds herself that that life has vanished. Susan Ford is already gone.
She collects herself and continues.
She moves down a narrow alley, past an old stone fountain, and around the back of the gatehouse toward the road. She lifts the latch on a picture-book white wooden gate and closes it softly behind her.
She looks both ways.
No cars are parked on the road.
She walks down Bay Street, the heart of Watch Hill. She passes the carousel, its horses still, the newspaper kiosk closed; passes the entrance to the public beach; passes St. Clair Annex, its ice cream window selling cones to the after-dinner crowd. She passes the Olympia Tea Room, alive with summer revelers. She nears the boats bobbing in the bay.
Here, she stops. She sets down her bags and takes one last look at all that she is giving up. Here is Venus, Jack’s magnificent yacht, a seventy-four-foot-long wooden beauty nearly a hundred years old, its varnished surfaces gleaming in the lamplight.
She takes her laptop out of her bag and lets it slide, with the slightest plop, into the water of the bay. Then she takes out her iPhone and iPad and does the same. The noise they make is even softer. She looks down to see that the ripples they made are already dying.
And then she says the words she was never able to say to her husband when he left her on an April afternoon: “Goodbye, Jack.”
“Hello, little girl.”
Annie’s knees buckle. The voice is right next to her, a whisper in her ear. She turns, expecting to see Johnny Buscemi, and looks straight into the face of Danny Ravello.
“The boss told me to say that to you. He said you’d know what it meant.”
“I-uh—” Annie scrambles to collect her thoughts. “What are you doing here?”
“You didn’t really think the congressman would come here himself, did you?”
Finding Mrs. Ford Page 25
