The Girl From Home: A Thriller (4 page)

“He lived on Clayton Road,” Jonathan prods. “We played Little League together?”

“Who?”

“Doesn't matter. Just someone I knew once.”

They fall into a silence. The Michigan–Ohio State game's first half ends and they watch the halftime analysis without a word passing between them. When the players take the field for the second half, Jonathan figures it's a good enough time as any to take his leave.

“Hey, I should be going now, Dad. I need to get ready for the reunion. But like I said, I'm going to be staying at the house, so I'll come by tomorrow again and tell you all about it. Okay?”

“You're staying at my house?”

“Yeah. I told you just before.”

His father's deep brow furrows, as if he's trying to make sense of this state of affairs. Jonathan braces to once again have to explain to his father that his wife, Jonathan's mother, is still dead.

Instead, his father says, “Johnny, can you do me a favor?”

“Sure. What?”

“If you're going to come back tomorrow, can you bring Marty with you to visit?”

“Marty? Who's that?”

“Marty McMarty. My pet monkey.”

*  *  *

Jackie Williams isn't sure whether the bruise over her left eye is still noticeable. It reminds her of a ghost that only she could see. And it terrifies her in the same way.

Jackie and Rick have been together for twenty-six years, if you went by the first time he asked her out, which was the summer before their senior year at East Carlisle High School. It was twenty-one years if the count began when they started dating the second go-round, which was the summer after they each graduated from college. Twenty years from their engagement, and nineteen from the day they were married.

“You've been in there for like an hour, Jackie,” Rick says from the other side of the bathroom door. “Trust me, you're going to look better than the rest of your skank friends.”

Jackie shakes her head in disgust. It was just like Rick to think she was being vain.

“Hang on. I won't be much longer,” she calls back.

Staring at her reflection, Jackie knows that she looks damned good. At forty-three, with two kids, she could easily pass for ten years younger. Same weight as back in high school, with most of it in the same places as it was back then, too.

But the mirror undeniably betrays that something is off. Back in the day, she had a killer smile. When she flashed it, everyone fell under her spell—boys, girls, teachers, parents—it didn't matter. But now, it looks as phony as a bad toupee.

It last happened a week ago. Rick was drunk, which was bad enough because he'd driven home, but that infraction was nothing compared to the fact that Jackie knew her husband hadn't been alone. Rick's new assistant, nineteen-year-old Brittney, was his drinking buddy.

Jackie had held her tongue all the other times her husband had come home reeking of beer and drugstore perfume. She'd nod like an idiot when he explained he was held up in a business dinner that required a little extra lubrication to get the deal done.

This time, however, when he stumbled into the living room with that self-satisfied grin on his face—as if cheating on the mother of his children was only one thing he got out of his philandering, the other being that he thoroughly enjoyed her inability to do anything about it—for some reason she'd had enough. She wasn't going to let it go as she had a hundred times before. If she couldn't stop his infidelity, at least she could end her complicity in it.

“I hope you at least wore a condom,” she'd said.

“What'd you say?” he responded, slurring his words.

“You heard me. Bad enough that you're with such trash, but I don't want whatever's on her going anywhere near me.”

He moved closer. By the look in his eye, Jackie knew he was going to strike her. And it was almost like she wanted him to do it. Sometimes, when the bruises faded, she wondered if she'd imagined the assault, but if he hit her again, she'd have incontrovertible proof that her husband was a monster.

“You high or something?” he said.

“She must be fucking other people, too. I bet she has to after you. Got some twenty-year-old she calls up the moment you leave, so she can get herself off.”

By now, he was so close she could smell the stink on his breath. At six-two, Rick towered above her. Although she had provoked this confrontation, Jackie was now afraid of what she'd wrought. She reached for the only shield she had: her children.

“The kids are home,” she said.

She hated invoking Robert and Emma for protection. But through the years she'd tried every other tack: fighting back, hiding, threatening to call the police, and nothing else had ever worked.

The possibility that his children would bear witness to their father beating the crap out of their mother was not always a sufficient deterrent for Rick, however. It often depended on how drunk he was. Tonight he was very drunk, so nothing could save her.

He smacked her. Hard.

It was one shot, open-handed at that. But Rick had a big hand, thick too, and callused where the fingers met his palm, from the days when he worked construction. His imprint covered more than half her face, from right below her cheekbone all the way up to her scalp. The contact made a crack loud enough that it sounded like a weapon had been used.

She crumpled to the floor, her hand instinctively rising to her cheek, to detect whether Rick had broken the skin. A trickle of blood at the corner of her eye latched onto her finger.

Jackie wanted to cry out, but feared that would only cause the children to leave their bedrooms to investigate the source of her anguish, so she stifled her scream by stuffing her hand into her mouth. For his part, Rick saw nothing but humor in the situation. He flashed a particularly sadistic smile at the sight of his wife curled up in the fetal position on the cold foyer floor. As if he couldn't be more proud of what he'd just done.

She braced for more. At his worst, Rick would shower her with punches and kicks. This time, however, he merely stepped hard on her back as he walked away.

She wasn't the only one Rick terrorized. When Robert was fifteen, Rick decided his hand no longer was sufficient and started to use his belt to mete out discipline, without regard to the severity of the infraction. After Robert fumbled on his way to the end zone in some meaningless JV game, Rick unleashed a particularly furious beating on his son. Later that night, after Rick had fallen asleep drunk, Jackie went to Robert's room to comfort him. He had stopped crying and looked more like a man than she had ever recalled.

It was in that moment that Jackie realized her silent suffering hadn't been protecting her children after all. To the contrary, she had only served to bring them into her nightmare.

“When I'm old enough, Mom,” Robert had said with steely-eyed determination, “I'm going to kill him. I swear I will.”

After that she went to see a divorce lawyer. He told her that at the end of the day—that was the phrase she remembered the lawyer used to set up nearly every sentence he uttered—she'd get half of their marital assets, which were relatively meager, composed mainly of the equity in the house that would result from the forced distress sale. He also said that New Jersey matrimonial law entitled her to twenty-five percent of Rick's income as child support, but only until Emma turned eighteen. As for alimony, that was a maybe, but if she got any, it would be relatively little and not for very long. The bottom line was that—
at the end of the day
—she'd get somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty grand and maybe a few hundred dollars a month for a couple of years, and she'd have no place to live.

The lawyer not only couldn't guarantee that she'd get sole custody of Robert and Emma, but opined that it might be a bit of a long shot. He pointed out that even the abuse was going to be hard to prove, the proverbial he-said/she-said situation, as she had never filed a police report or sought medical attention. Jackie's counter that Robert and Emma could corroborate Rick's violence was met with a shrug and a “Do you really want to put your children through that?” remark, as if making her children testify to the truth was more damaging than subjecting them to living part-time with an abusive father. Perhaps recognizing that Jackie was willing to do anything to keep her children away from Rick, the lawyer said that no matter what the children said at trial, Rick's side would find an expert to explain that children can easily be manipulated into testifying to abuse that never actually happened.

Leaving the lawyer's office, Jackie fully grasped the grim picture he'd painted. And yet it was still Shangri-La compared to being married to Rick. So she went home and told her husband she wanted a divorce.

He laughed in her face.

“I won't give you a penny. I'd sooner go to jail.”

“I don't care. I just want to be rid of you.”

“I'll fucking take the kids,” he said.

She knew that was just an idle threat. Not only would a judge never take children away from a loving mother, but Rick wouldn't even want the kids full-time because it would impinge on his drunken skirt chasing.

“No you won't!” she shouted back. “If you're lucky, you'll get visitation every other weekend like any other asshole divorced father.”

It was what he said next that stopped her cold, however.

“Then I'll fucking kill you, Jackie. Guaranteed.”

She knew that wasn't just talk. Jackie had become an expert in knowing when Rick was lying. About this he was speaking the stone-cold truth.

So she stayed. And things got even worse because now Rick knew she was trapped. The cheating became more open and the beatings more vicious. All she was left with was the dream that Rick would someday die and then her family would be free. Like when Dorothy threw the bucket of water on the Wicked Witch of the West. Even her children would rejoice over the death of the monster that terrorized them.

Tonight, however, she had to live a different dream. Not hers, but the one that the people she went to high school with a thousand years ago believed: that the prom queen married the high school quarterback and they both lived happily ever after.

K
urtosis
and
heteroscedasticity
.

These are the words that Haresh Venagopul is saying over and over into the other end of the phone. In between are words that Jonathan
does
understand, but they don't help him comprehend what Haresh means. What is abundantly clear, however, is that Haresh is very agitated.

Jonathan is sitting in the middle of Wolfgang's, a high-end steak restaurant on Park Avenue and Thirty-Third Street, and the entrée—steak for three, medium rare, extra char—has just arrived. His dinner companions are the hedge fund's two biggest investors: Michael Ross, who heads the capital investment group at Maeve Grant, the sixth-largest investment bank in the world, and Isaac Goldenberg, the octogenarian casino magnate, who views investing with Jonathan as just another form of gambling. Neither of them is going to want to hear that the guy who monitors the fund's position is in a full-blown panic.

“Can I call you right back?” Jonathan says to Haresh.

“I'm sorry,” Jonathan says to his dinner companions, getting up. “It's my wife. I'll only be a minute.”

Ross raises a fist and flicks his wrist while making the pussy-whipped sound. Goldenberg chuckles at that and helps himself to more steak.

It's raining outside. Not a driving storm, but more than a drizzle, so Jonathan takes shelter under Wolfgang's awning. The combination of the wind and the fact that the overhang is not very wide results in Jonathan getting pretty wet, so he's hoping that this will be a short conversation, and that the steak will still be warm when he returns.

“Okay, Haresh. I can talk now. What's the problem?”

His second-in-command says the gibberish words again.
Kurtosis
and
heteroscedasticity
.

“Goddammit, Haresh. I get that there's a volatility issue. What I don't get is why you're calling me about it. There's always volatility somewhere in the position.”

Jonathan can hear Haresh sigh. “You know what a tail is, right?” he says.

Jonathan hates it when Haresh talks to him like he's a second grader, although he likely deserves it for talking to Haresh like he's an idiot, which he most certainly is not.

“Yeah,” Jonathan says sharply. “What normal people call the variation of risk, you guys in the bull pen refer to as tails.”

“Right,” Haresh says, apparently with no recognition that Jonathan is being short. “It's because that's how the position shows up on a chart as deviating from the mean. We expect a small amount of deviation, but it should be negligible. Maybe .03 percent. But when the distribution is farther away from the standard deviation, it shows up on the chart as the tail getting fatter.”

“Haresh, I've got a hundred billion bucks sitting inside eating steak, and I'm standing here in the rain, so I'd really appreciate it if you get to the point already. And
in English
, please.”

“Our tail is fat as fuck.”

Haresh had these Chicken Little moments from time to time. Jonathan had come to believe that his second fancied himself as the lookout man on the
Titanic
, the last set of eyes that could avoid catastrophe on the horizon.

Jonathan, however, prides himself on being a man who exhibits grace under pressure. The one who keeps his head while those around him are losing theirs.

“So . . . the gap is widening,” Jonathan says with an air of calm. “Big fucking deal. It'll close eventually. I mean, the sun is still rising in the east, right? We increase our position and then we'll maximize our profit when the alignment hits?”