Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [115]
One day my after-lunch ramble took me to a hotel lobby. There were a few decent-size hotels in Sayulita, inexpensive places that catered to kids from Europe on their gap year, backpackers and free spirits and families who’d decided that bare-bones quarters with shared bathrooms was a fair exchange for the gorgeous beaches, the fresh fruit, the quaint streets with their little shops and the men who’d sit in the square at night, playing sad love songs on their guitars. The hotels had computers, usually an elderly desktop perched on top of a folding table in the lobby, where you could rent time online.
I’d ditched my iPhone in the ladies’ room at the airport in Philadelphia, sliding it into a trash can without a second look, even though I’d felt a momentary pang about the leather cover, monogrammed, soft as butter. Now I brushed my salt-water-stiffened hair off my cheeks and thumped the keys on a wheezing, overheating Dell, logging into my e-mail for the first time since I’d left, opening a screen so I could Google my name.
There it was. First, a column in the Post about how I’d missed the funeral. Then, three days later, the story I knew someone would find eventually. It was in the Daily News, illustrated with my mug shot, from when I was twenty-three, and another picture of me as a teenager, at a party, in a Flashdance-style sweatshirt, ripped at the shoulder. “Runaway Bride Was Bigamist.”
“Here we go,” I muttered, and clicked on the link. India Bishop, the new wife-turned-widow of recently deceased financier Marcus Croft, who raised eyebrows across the city after she was a no-show at her husband’s funeral on Friday, changed her name when she moved to Hollywood as a teenager. No surprise: it’s a move many young aspiring actresses make. But when Bishop filled out the paperwork that would legally turn her from Samantha Marie Stavros to India Bishop, she never mentioned that she’d been married as a teenager, and that she’d never obtained a divorce. Bishop, 43 (not the 38 she’s been claiming), a public-relations executive, was wed in 1985 to David Carter, a substitute drama teacher at New London High School in New London, Connecticut, who was more than fifteen years’ Bishop’s senior at the time. “It was a major scandal,” said Andrea LeBlanc, a classmate of Bishop’s. “We all figured she was pregnant, but, if she was, she wasn’t showing by graduation . . . and, by August, she was gone.”
Bishop left New London and moved to Hollywood, where she worked odd jobs and was eventually arrested in a round-up of women who were working as waitresses at a party and charged with prostitution (she was eventually released, and the charges were dropped). Two years later, she was hired at JMS Public Relations under her new name.
I gripped the edges of the table, my stomach clenching, thinking that if there was any consolation to be found, it was that Marcus had died before he’d found out the truth—that I’d filed papers, but David, it seemed, had never signed them and, even decades after the fact, I had still been married to David Carter when Marcus and I had said our vows. I forced my eyes back to the screen, scanning to the bottom to read the story’s final line. Reached in his New London home, David Carter declined to comment.
I bent my head, imagining the story being zapped around the city, landing with a cheery little chirp in the inboxes of everyone I knew. I pictured Bettina’s smirk. Then I forced myself to look at my inbox. There were dozens of e-mails from Annie—the last one, under “subject,” read PLEASE CALL ME! I’M WORRIED! Another few dozen from Leslie at the clinic, saying basically the same thing. Bettina had written: Where Are You? More spam, more reporters; a note from my saleslady at Saks, who, apparently unaware of the changes in my life, wrote to say that the new Jimmy Choo open-toed leather lace-up booties had arrived and were available in dark brown