And Never Let Her Go (22 page)

A
T
first, Anne Marie hadn't realized that Tom was manipulating her emotions as if she were a puppet—but as much of a romantic as she was, she was also very bright. She had begun to see a frightening pattern. Tom had done so many nice things for her, but there always seemed to be a payback. The biggest payback was her loss of freedom and being aware that she could not make even a simple plan to do something with her friends without Tom's entering into it. In the summer of 1995, she pondered more and more often about what her life would be like without Tom. But even as she did, she felt disloyal—torn between gratitude for all he had done for her and her own need not to be controlled.

Even so, when Tom told Anne Marie he was taking her on a vacation in August of 1995, she tentatively agreed to go. He had
chosen a luxury resort in Virginia called the Homestead. “The Homestead is the kind of place I always wanted to go to,” Tom recalled. “But my kids are beach people. It's in the mountains; therefore it's cooler. It's something I had wanted to do, but also to be with her alone and away from everything, for . . . four days . . . we went [there] to work on our relationship.”

Tom repeated a pattern that Anne Marie had seen many times before. He had been insistent that she should go to Virginia with him, but a night or two before they were supposed to leave, he abruptly took back the invitation. He was very solemn when he told her why he had decided against going. And once more he said that he thought it was time for her to move on without him. “Therefore, I told her we should not be going to the Homestead,” he recalled. “We had a major discussion and she was very tearful, and she cried and cried and cried on my shoulder, [and said] that she wanted us to go and wanted us to work on our relationship.”

His perceptions may have been skewed; Anne Marie was already thinking that it was time to move on. It's questionable whether she really cried. She
was
an emotional woman, who might well have wept over the end of an affair. But as it turned out, it was not the end. Tom changed his mind again and they went to the Homestead after all.

Tom remembered that they had had an idyllic time during their four days there. He said he had taught Anne Marie to play golf, and that they had massages every day and strolled around the grounds. He had prevailed upon her to dance with him, because he loved to dance, although she hated it. She didn't think she was graceful enough and she felt foolish, but he got his way as he usually did.

On the drive back from Virginia, Tom took the long way home—even though she hated car trips. “She said herself she wasn't very good company in a car,” he said. “She liked to look at the scenery . . . and on the way down, we really didn't talk much. We just played tapes.”

On the way back to Delaware, they
did
talk. Anne Marie carefully pointed out how many things they differed on. It began with something as prosaic as the fact that she liked Pepsi and Tom drank Coca-Cola. She began to write down their differences, calling it the “Coke/Pepsi list.” He thought it was all in good fun, and it may have been. It may also have been a very subtle and safe way for Anne Marie to show Tom how ill suited they were for each other.

In retrospect, she was probably trying to ease out of the hold Tom had on her. The list covered everything from food preferences
and sleep habits to his being Italian and her being Irish. She was a Gen-Xer and he was a baby boomer; money bored him, and she was very conscious of every penny. For three pages, Anne Marie wrote down their differences in her distinctive hand with round letters and fancy capitals. And somewhere, hidden within the dozens of unimportant things, she noted
very
important things.

“She wrote down that I'm academic,” Tom said, reading from the list a long time later as he was questioned by a friendly inquisitor. “She was nonacademic. . . . I was observant, and she described herself as ‘spacey.' She wrote that I had a double standard and that she did not have two standards. I
do
have a double standard. I think there are things men should do and women shouldn't. It's that simple.”

Anne Marie put down the thing about Tom that bothered her the most, sheltering it between the silly things. “She wrote down quite correctly that I'm a homebody,” Tom said. “I don't like to travel and she loves to travel. She wrote down that I'm a control freak. She was in control of the
pen,
so she wrote that,” he said with a laugh.

Tom was asked: “She didn't write down anything opposite, under her name?”

“No, she didn't, which is interesting. . . . I remember getting into sort of a jocular argument about [that]. ‘How can you say I'm a control freak when you usually do everything you want?' And she never wrote anything—I might have made some suggestions, you know, to complement that—but she never wrote anything down, and that's odd, so to speak.”

Anne Marie bent her head over the pages as Tom drove his Jeep Grand Cherokee toward Wilmington. She noted the things they
did
have in common: “Bread (from DiFonzo's), Sinatra, music in general, National Public Radio, pasta, Italian food, movies on the VCR, reading, restaurants, finer things, children, wine, people . . .”

It wasn't nearly enough.

And Tom's memory of their trip as being idyllic warred with what Anne Marie told Kim Horstman. “She said it was a disaster,” Kim recalled. They had fought for most of the trip, and Anne Marie said she had just wanted to have it over with and get home.

It wasn't too long after that trip when Tom told Anne Marie that he was thinking seriously about leaving Kay. She was horrified. She knew she could not live with the responsibility of taking a man away from his wife. She was having enough trouble with her Catholic guilt about being involved with a married man. But mostly,
she didn't want to be with him any longer. He would put so many walls around her that she could never get out.

In one of her moments of strength, Anne Marie told Tom that he had to make up his mind whether or not to divorce his wife based purely on what
he
wanted. He was not to consider her as part of the equation. If he left Kay, she warned, it couldn't be because of her. He always nodded, but she wondered if he really heard what she was saying.

Tom was now living in Louie's mansion in Greenville—he
had
left Kay. He asked Anne Marie to stay with him for a few days while Louie was away. Why she agreed, only she knew. She may have viewed it as a way to talk with him and to somehow extricate herself gently from their relationship. Anne Marie was enchanted with Louie's house, the grounds and pool, but she was sorry she had come. Tom didn't want to talk about detaching. And he most definitely did not want to change their relationship.

She was trying to separate herself from him, but she didn't know how to do it. Anne Marie felt sorry for Tom because he seemed so unhappy, and she'd been there to listen to him complain about his life—but she realized now that she had been led into something she could never have imagined. Everything had happened much too fast and it seemed to Anne Marie that in whatever direction she turned, Tom was there blocking her path, hemming her in. She began to be a little frightened of him, although she might have been hard put to give a name to her fear.

Anne Marie had had relationships with men before, and many men had left her bereft because they weren't ready to make a commitment. But now she was caught in something that she couldn't understand. Being with Tom was like being in a carnival house of mirrors. Things kept changing. Just when she thought she was perceiving something one way, the light shifted and it became something else. And what seemed to be an exit or an open space was really only a cramped hallway with no way out.

O
NE
of the friends Anne Marie had made in Governor Carper's office was Siobhan Sullivan, the young state trooper who helped to provide security for the governor. Attractive, tall, and slender, with sun-streaked hair, Siobhan had been a basketball star before she joined the Delaware State Police. Anne Marie had introduced her to Tom at a function at Woodburn, the governor's mansion, and Siobhan noticed then that the two of them seemed to be very good friends. Anne Marie often had tickets to concerts or sports events
and Siobhan would tease her, saying, “Tell me where you got those,” and it was usually Tom who had bought the tickets.

Tom was such a familiar figure in Delaware political circles that no one noticed how often he called or dropped by the governor's suite on the twelfth floor of the Carvel building. Siobhan's position made her a little more curious than most people and she asked Anne Marie about him more than once. “She always said he was one of her best friends—and that they talked occasionally.”

By September of 1995, Siobhan became aware that Anne Marie's friendship with Tom had frayed somewhat. He had begun to leave calls on Siobhan's pager, which surprised her a little since she didn't know him very well. “He would ask me if I wanted to go out for a beer, always when I got done work that night with the governor. He knew I coached basketball and wanted me to help his kids, coach them.

“One night, he was quite insistent. He wanted to know if I wanted to go get a beer and talk about basketball. I said I'd had a long day and needed to get home.”

Tom asked Siobhan if she had spoken to Anne Marie during the day, and then said, “She's really mad at me.”

“You have to just let her be, Tom,” Siobhan answered.

“You know I left my wife and I'm just really lonely right now.”

Siobhan tried to avoid a discussion about Anne Marie's personal business by pointing out that working in the governor's office sometimes left people stressed out. He would not be sidetracked. “Siobhan, that isn't
my
fault. I tried to get Annie to take the job I set up with my brother, but she wouldn't do it.”

Siobhan knew about the job offer from Louie Capano, with the free apartment. Anne Marie told her that she had considered it—mostly because working in the governor's office
was
very stressful, part of the job that Siobhan understood. “We had a lot of stress,” she said. “We probably had the most stress of anybody in the office. My stress would be safetywise, and Anne Marie's stress level would be she had to make sure the schedule flowed correctly for the governor.”

It was clear to Siobhan that Tom was checking up on Anne Marie, trying to find out where she was and who she was with. As it happened, Siobhan didn't know. When she saw Anne Marie after the weekend, she mentioned that Tom had called her and paged her. “He was looking for you.”

This was obviously not welcome news and Anne Marie's cheeks flushed. Her usually cheerful voice was angry as she looked
at Siobhan. “He is a possessive, controlling maniac. I'm just getting tired of him!”

Before Siobhan could say anything else, Anne Marie stormed out of her office and went back to her own desk.

Anne Marie was the sunshine in the governor's office, her laugh rising distinctively above all others. It was out of character for her to show her true feelings to anyone other than Siobhan, Ginny, or Jill, but occasionally others saw behind her mask.

“I sometimes rode the elevator down with her,” a woman who knew her only by sight recalled. “There were times when she looked so forlorn, like a different woman. She didn't know me, so maybe she let down her guard. I wondered what
she
could possibly have in her life to make her that sad.”

T
OM HAD
,
INDEED
, left his wife. Kay and their four daughters had been living alone in the bishop's residence on Seventeenth since September 1995. After twenty-three years of marriage, he had walked out. Since Kay
never
discussed problems in her marriage, friends could only speculate about why she and Tom had separated. Their split was shocking to a number of people in Wilmington. Tom had always been the steady, dependable Capano brother, and there were precious few people who knew about his affair with Anne Marie or even his fourteen-year relationship with Debby MacIntyre. Anne Marie and Debby still did not know about each other, and Kay appeared to be unaware of Tom's infidelities. He was so meticulous about his secret lives that, even in a town where gossip spread like wildfire, Tom had maintained his reputation as a man who always smoothed things over for
other
people when they made mistakes.

While he looked for a house to rent, Tom lived for a month in a wing of Louie's mansion in Greenville. He still visited his daughters, and if Tom and Kay had any angry discussions, they had them in private. Tom's world went on as it always had, only he had more freedom to come and go. He still saw Anne Marie, and he still saw Debby.

It had been many years since Debby had any hope that she and Tom might be together as man and wife. He hadn't told her that he
was leaving Kay—not until a few days before he actually left—and she was amazed and happy when he did. Their relationship had continued since 1982 with daily phone calls and physical intimacy at least one night a week and sometimes more often. Debby loved Tom; she had loved him for a very long time. She was in her mid-forties in 1995, although she hardly looked it. She was still trim and athletic and very attractive. She and Anne Marie—and Kay, too, for that matter—were physically three completely different types. Debby had short blond hair and was tiny, Anne Marie had long brown hair and stood close to six feet tall, and Kay was somewhere in between them in height, with olive skin and dark eyes and hair.

All three were pretty, intelligent, and had good figures. They were all Catholic. But though they looked nothing alike, they all had something very important in common. Each was principally concerned with making other people happy before she thought of herself. The three women whom Tom encircled had all grown up in homes where alcohol caused problems that made children walk softly and try, at great lengths, to please and to appease.