Call Me! (31 page)

“What is it?”

“Nothing important.”

“Show me.”

She opens the lid, reaches her hand in the box, and pulls out some plaid schoolgirl skirts.

“What gives?” I say.

“Are you kidding me? After what happened yesterday with Jaqui’s photos? I thought about the whole
teacher’s pet
thing and wanted to vomit.”

“Why?”

“My fantasy game isn’t cute
or
sexy, it’s perverted. I’m no higher up the food chain than Colin Tyler Hicks, or…
ManChild
.”

“You can say Ben. I’ve accepted it.”

“Well anyway, the skirts are going straight to Goodwill.”

“Sofe.”

“What?”

“There’s a huge difference between
teacher’s pet
and the other kinds of thoughts.”

“There is?”

“Of course.”

“Enlighten me,” she says.

“Well…um…”

“Yes?”

“Okay, so nothing comes to mind. But I haven’t had my coffee yet.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’m done with it.”

“No more
teacher’s pet
?”

“Never again. I can’t believe I never saw the creep factor before yesterday.”

I sigh.

“What?”

“I can’t believe I’ve done this to you.”

“What?”

“I’ve taken the fun out of something you enjoyed. It wasn’t dirty, wasn’t perverted. You played your games with grown women, yes?”

“Not
that
many women,” she says.

“How many exactly?”

“Two. But I’ll never be able to play it without thinking of that poor child. So I’m done.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“That’s so
sad
,” I say.

She shrugs.

“No more sex games? Really, Sofe?”

“I didn’t say
that
.”

I look at her. “What do you mean?”

She enters the closet and comes out with a sparkly outfit in her hand and a smile on her face. “We can still play
casting couch
!”

SOPHIE AND I spend the rest of the day reading Janie’s manuscript. Then I call her to discuss the passages she highlighted, where she asked for additional input.

“I loved it,” I say. “Thank you so much for all your hard work.”

After I hang up Sophie says, “Did you mean that?”

“What?”

“You told her you loved the manuscript. Did you?”

“Yes. Didn’t you?”

“It was very difficult for me to read.”

“I know. But the way it’s written is exactly what happened.”

“You never told me Hicks said those things to you.”

“I know. But it’s a huge part of the story.”

“Still.”

I look into her eyes. They’re welling with tears.

“What’s wrong, Sofe?”

“I mean, it’s really creepy.”

“Yes.”

Her eyes appear to have contained the tears, but she blinks, and suddenly half her face is wet.

She says, “I can’t believe you went through all that. It’s…I mean…I could never…”

“Never what?”

“Your attitude. It’s…so perky. So bubbly. And positive.”

“I survived.”

“Yes.”

“Colin Tyler Hicks took several years from me, but I’ve come all the way back. You helped.”

“I did?”

“Yup.”

She kisses my cheek. Then says, “Are you sure you’re comfortable publishing it?”

“It’s exactly what happened.”

“I know, but still.”

“I know, Sofe. But it’s exactly what happened.”

“Jesus, Dani.”

MONDAY

THE POLICE ARE gone now, and only a dozen reporters are hanging around. I doubt they’ve ever encountered anyone as stubborn as Sophie and me. We haven’t so much as opened a curtain since returning from the funeral ten days ago. We’ve gone through the original provisions Betty’s pilots secured for us in Cincinnati, but she stops by nearly every day to work with Sophie on the songs for her new album. When she does, her bodyguards always bring at least one basket of goodies for us.

Betty heard me singing in the kitchen a few days ago, and appears to have lost interest in using me for backup vocals.

The girls are working hard at the piano in the den, so the bodyguards open a dining room curtain to scowl menacingly at the reporters outside. Pat Aub calls and asks if I’m still planning to be in Cincinnati tomorrow to meet with the attorney to review Ben’s
Last Will and Testament
. I tell him that’s the plan, and mention Sophie’s coming with me. Pat offers to meet us at the airport and take us to lunch.

Pat’s a good man and a good friend, but I decline his offer. It wouldn’t be right to lead him on, since I know what he wants, and I’m not feeling the connection.

WEDNESDAY,
NINE DAYS LATER

WITH EACH PASSING day I steadily detach myself from the emotional connection I once had with Ben. I’d been living with a perverted monster, and have willed myself to hate him. I take great comfort knowing we never had children together. Though Ben left me the house, I signed it over to his son. I refuse to step inside it, even to retrieve my personal items.

Nothing sexual has happened between me and Sophie yet, and she’s gone back to sleeping in the upstairs bedroom down the hall just like she used to. That said, I’m starting to look at her a little differently. Last night when we climbed the stairs to go to bed, I accidently-on-purpose dropped a hairbrush on the floor, and peeked down her pajama shirt when she bent over to pick it up for me.

It was an experiment, to see if viewing her nakedness would have an effect on me. I could have gotten my answer by offering to have sex with her, but that would take us past the point of no return. The worst thing I could ever do to Sophie is wind up in bed with her and not be interested.

Since I’ve told you this much about the experiment, I suppose I owe you a summary of the results. When I glimpsed her breasts, my pulse quickened, and I felt my face flush. A few minutes later, I must’ve made a sound from my bed, because Sophie called out, “Is everything okay?”

Everything was.

TWO WEEKS LATER…

FUNNY HOW THE mind works.

You get a visit at your office from a guy like Roy who knows about your past. He makes some claims about your husband having a fixation on a fifteen-year-old girl, and even though you know it doesn’t make sense, he’s created a wedge of doubt because he’s right about you being The Little Girl Who Got Away.

Then you get a hinky call from
ManChild
, the killer-rapist you’ve been trying to track down, but that sort of call doesn’t fit his profile. Then your very healthy husband dies, after complaining about being “sick as a dog” for several days, and all this evidence turns up, complete with a dead girl’s panties and Ben’s fingerprints.

Everyone’s rushing to judgment, including you, because the cops and Feds are convinced, and that’s what they do for a living.

So you accept the fact you’ve been living with a killer-rapist and you’re glad you never had his children. Not that you can have children in the first place. But you’re happy to get it all behind you and move on with your life. After all, you’ve got a budding relationship with a wonderful lady with whom you’re falling in love. It would be so easy to buy the official explanations, and trust the evidence.

But what if Ben didn’t do it?

If he didn’t do it, shouldn’t his name be cleared? Doesn’t his son have the right to know if his father was a decent man?

I’ve never been comfortable accepting the fact I was living with a child rapist and killer. I know the family is always the last to believe their son, husband, or father was a killer, and that’s a good thing. But somewhere in all those assumptions and accusations, somewhere among all the evidence and fingerprints—the cops failed to ask me the simplest question. It’s the first question the police always ask on TV, the thing everyone in America knows you need when you’re accused of a crime.

An alibi.

No one ever asked if Ben had an alibi the night Jaqui Moreland went missing.

I’m sure I could call the police today, and they’d have a half-dozen witnesses who saw Ben in the area where Jaqui’s body was found. But if that’s true, it only proves how far the police are willing to go to perpetuate a fraud.