...And Never Let HerGo

began to lose a lot of weight. His cheeks were drawn—he just didn’t look good. He looked like a sad person.”
    Jackie had always seesawed in her opinion of Tom, but she felt really sorry for him as Christmas approached. Anyone would have, she thought.
    “What’s wrong?” she asked. “You’re not eating.”
    He only shook his head sadly and told her he wasn’t sleeping well, either. “He never went into it,” she recalled. “He tried to put a smile on, and said, ‘Things aren’t going good—I’m depressed. We’ll talk about it.’ ” Tom told Jackie he would come down sometime and tell her about his problems, but he never did—not until just before Christmas. “It was the second week of December that he said he wanted to kill himself, that he was suicidal.”
    Jackie was very worried about Tom and tried to talk to him, buthe just turned and walked away. She immediately called Anne Marie, told her that Tom was talking about suicide, and asked her what they could do to help him. But Anne Marie, who was usually the first one to jump in to help someone in trouble, seemed strangely detached.
    “He’s OK, he’s OK, Jackie,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with him. He’ll be fine.”
    Jackie wasn’t so sure. But Annie knew Tom better than anyone, and if she said he was OK, he was OK.
    Tom
was
OK in every way except for his rage at Anne Marie for trying to slip out of his grasp. He knew that she was dating Mike Scanlan and he was furious. It didn’t matter that he had promised to marry Debby MacIntyre, or that he had begun dating one of the legal secretaries in his firm in November. Susan Louth was thirty-two, a “great-looking blonde,” according to one of Tom’s attorney friends, and they were having a rollicking, passionate affair. They had a lot of private jokes, and he often took her to the Villa d’ Roma in Philadelphia for dinner. It was the same restaurant that Debby considered “their special place,” but the management was very discreet.
    Susan knew that Tom dated other women, and he seemed to relish the fact that she dated other men; oddly, he didn’t obsess about her. She didn’t want a man she could count on—Tom was what she termed “a challenge, and that’s what I like in a relationship.”
    Tom took Susan to his mother’s house and introduced her to Marguerite. Thereafter, when his mother referred to Susan, she called her “that slutty little girl,” which Tom and Susan found hilarious. When he sent Susan notes, Tom addressed them to “Dear Slutty Little Girl.”
    Tom was also trying to renew another love affair; he had been looking for Linda Marandola for a long time. He’d heard she was back in town. He appeared to view women as either whores or madonnas. He held less tightly to the former and never quite let go of the latter.
    And Tom still walked into his former home whenever he liked. He didn’t seem to want Kay, but he would not let her have her own life either. One night, Kay was giving a dinner party when Tom strolled in, uninvited and unannounced. As she sat at the table with her guests, he took his shoes off and plopped his stockinged feet in her lap. He wanted her to massage them. He had embarrassed her in front of her guests, and everyone there, even those who knew that Tom could be imperious with women, was disgusted.
    I N late 1995, Tom was still threatening suicide to Jackie Steinhoff, promising marriage to Debby, jumping into bed with Susan, doing business as usual at Saul, Ewing, and considering new conquests. And he was still trying to
buy
Anne Marie.
    Tom’s money had always gotten him what he wanted. He told Anne Marie that he had more money than Louie, which was a lie, but his net worth
did
top $5 million. That was more than enough for him to buy whatever he needed. He persuaded Anne Marie to go for a drive and took her to a ten-room house. He offered to buy it for her if she would come back to him. No one who hadn’t been without a home could even imagine what pretty houses meant to Anne Marie. She often wrote in her diary about her friends’ wonderful houses. A home of her own was the ultimate in security and serenity for her.
    Tom also tried to buy her a Lexus, knowing that she had trouble with her Jetta. She looked at him, appalled. He found out that Anne Marie and Kim were hoping to go to Spain together after Christmas. And that was a trip he could approve of. It would get Anne Marie out of Wilmington and away from Mike Scanlan.