Free Innocent Spouse by Carol Ross Joynt

fallen in love with the captain, a tan, ripped, and sun-bleached California surfer dude named Lewis Starkey. With him as my teacher I became a sailor quickly. After seven months in the Caribbean and falling out of love with Lewis, I spent four months enjoying the south of France.
    That was enough. I loved the vagabond life, but I missed my work. On the day before the 1976 bicentennial, almost a year after leaving the Cronkite show, I flew home to New York, breezed into CBS News, and got hired on the spot as a writer for the upcoming Republican National Convention in Kansas City. After that I relocated to Washington, and was over the moon when an old friend, the new chief of the NBC News bureau there, hired me to run the night assignment desk, essentially a flight controller’s job. It was exactly what I wanted, an ideal perch back in network news. I didn’t intend to stay in Washington; I wanted the world. Then I met Howard.

Ch apte r 7
    A FTER MEETING WITH Howard’s lawyers, panic hit. Twenty-four hours earlier I had thought Howard’s death was the worst that could happen to us, and now I was a federal tax fraud defendant who owed the government almost $3 million I did not have. The lawyers—now
my
lawyers—didn’t believe I was an innocent spouse. They believed I was guilty.
    The first stage of grief is shock, whether the loss is a person or everything you believed was solid in your life. I went into shock. I went off the deep end. With Spencer tucked in, I attacked Howard’s large mahogany partners desk. There were four drawers on either side and one drawer in the middle. One was mine, the others were his. I never went into them. Barefoot, in jeans and a T-shirt, I crouched on my knees and pulled out every drawer. My goal was to dig through everything. He was so amazingly organized. One drawer held only canceled checks going back years, but I didn’t know what to make of them. I slit open envelopes, pored over documents, fingered through manila folders—all without a clue as to what I was looking for.
    I did find one seemingly relevant file that held a page from a yellow legal pad. In Howard’s precise prep school scrawl was a list of things we owned. Beside each item he’d jotted an amount of money, a value. At the bottom of the column was a total. It looked like he was calculating how much money he could come up with if we sold everything. And he listed every last thing: our Chesapeake Bay home, the two modest apartments in Georgetown, cars, art, antiques, boats, stuff. The total was $1.2 million. Distraught, I tossed the list across the room. “This is hopeless,” I said out loud. “Not even close.”
    But who was I kidding? Whatever Howard had done wasn’t going to be found in a lockbox with a secret code attached explaining everything for me. I sat in the middle of the floor, haggard, hands covered ingrime, with all this crap around me, absolutely paranoid about what the IRS could rain down on me. The later the hour, the darker the fears. Would jackbooted IRS muscle kick down the door to drag me away in handcuffs, my sobbing child clinging to my ankles? I knew it had happened because at CBS News we reported on that very thing—IRS agents, minus the jackboots, coming in the night, carting people off to the slammer. That story made a lasting impression. It didn’t matter at that moment that perhaps my case didn’t qualify for prison (yet); I was in a panic.
    It lasted through the night. The clock hands moved from midnight to two, then three. The dog looked at me, head cocked, wondering if we would ever go to bed. I took paintings off the walls and carted them to the basement storage bin. I took my few pieces of real jewelry and hid them in socks. Socks! It didn’t occur to me that this was a waste of time. Either the IRS wouldn’t care or they’d look first in the storage bin and sock drawer.
    I didn’t understand what had happened to me, I didn’t understand how it had happened, and I certainly