THE WILL

by Vandemonium1

As this story is 16 Word pages long I will tell you it is most similar to my story, ‘Chased’, and SemperAmare’s, ‘A Rich Fetish’, in that it is all aftermath. This one has been independently rated at 3.5/5 pickaxe handles on the rating system that you can find via my and CreativityTakesCourage’s joint profile, SemperAmare. There is no sex.

Once again, your thanks should go to the beautiful CreativityTakesCourage for improving this story with her editing skills. You can read her stories on this site and our joint stories under the username SemperAmare. When we are together, we’re a killer team and I think that shows in our joint stories. You don’t have to feel bad saying she is a better writer than me, I know.

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CHAPTER 1

I looked around the room at all the sad, tearful faces present. I wasn’t surprised at all by their grief. My husband, Dave, had been a terrific father, successful businessman, great supporter of our community, and a loyal friend.

As a husband, I couldn’t have asked for a better man. He’d done his share of the household duties willingly, fully supported my wish to be a stay-at-home mum, then, in later years, my wish to limit my out-of-house activities to church roles and volunteering. He’d been a far more attentive father to our three children, Molly, Derek, and Anne than most men, and that showed in their successful lives since leaving the nest Dave and I had made for them. Well, Molly and Derek had left. Anne, I was sure, was on the cusp.

I looked around at the miserable faces of my children. All of them looked devastated; even my normally reserved Derek. Me? I was still in shock at the suddenness of Dave’s passing and struggling to accept that the man I’d loved totally for thirty-two years had gone to play golf one bright and sunny Saturday morning and had never returned.

His lifelong friend and our family solicitor, Jack, who was sitting at the head of the large oak conference table, next to his secretary, had been the one to tell me. Apparently, Dave had driven off the fourth tee then just collapsed. The results of the medical examination had yet to be made public, but, according to Jack, Dave was dead before he hit the ground. They’d performed CPR on him, but by the time the ambulance guys fitted a defibrillator to him his heart showed no shockable rhythm. He was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital.

By the time Jack had managed to track me down—I had my cell phone turned off at the time—he’d gotten word to all three of our children and they were all at the hospital before me. That was only four days ago, and I think we were all a little stunned still.

Jack opened the folder in front of him, took a deep breath and began to speak.

“I thank you all for coming today for the reading of the Will of the late David Brown, husband, father, and the best friend I ever had.”

Jack was obviously pretty emotional. Beneath his eyes were dark shadows and his voice sounded as if his throat was lined with gravel. That must be why his wife, Julie, was in the office that day. She was one of my friends and had been since she met Jack shortly after my wedding. Our relationship had cooled somewhat, ten or so years ago, but I still considered her a friend. I’d seen her hugging her husband in his office as I’d been led to the conference room where all the children were already seated.

In the here and now, I watched as he drew a deep breath and settled himself to become the consummate professional I knew him to be.

“I know it may seem a departure from standard practice to read the Will before the funeral, but, as I will reveal, it was Dave’s express wish. I should point out, though, that this is quite unusual, and nothing can be ratified until the full period of probate has expired. Now, to business.”

He then began reading the actual Will. I didn’t need to listen, after all, Dave and I’d always updated our Wills together. I knew there was a list at the start of specific items Dave wanted individuals to have. Derek, our middle child and only son, was to get Dave’s medals from his time in the service with the army Corp of Engineers, or ‘Sappers’ as Dave liked to call them. That was when he developed his love of explosives. His rock collection was to go to Molly, our eldest, etcetera.

Tuning out, I looked around at the sombre expressions on my children’s faces. Molly, at just thirty, seemed to be taking it all stoically, even though she and her dad had always been close. When I’d come in the room, I’d left her alone as she was looking at the wall with a tear in her eye. I could remember her and Dave talking about those rocks many times. She’d begun a promising career in science until she’d become accidentally pregnant to her boyfriend of about a year. Luckily, he was nice guy and did the right thing and made an honest woman of her. They’d been married for five years now and seemed as happy as ever. Two beautiful grandkids for Dave and me to spoil.

Derek, at twenty-eight, followed in his father’s footsteps and was an engineer by day and an army reservist in his spare time. How long that would last was debatable, though. His wife of two years was eight months pregnant with their first. With his dad as his hero, I’m sure the child will be called David if it’s a boy. I’m sad that my Dave won’t be around to spoil the first grandchild to share his surname. Derek was staring at Jack. I felt for him. He looked as if he’d aged five years in the four days since his father’s passing. Skin sallow, eyes red-rimmed.

Anne, my baby, was officially a mistake. Dave and I had decided two children were enough but hadn’t been sure enough of that to do something drastic, like getting one of us neutered. Birth control pills had always messed around with my hormones, so we’d relied on condoms. One of them must have the failed because ten years after Derek, Anne made an appearance. Dave got snipped after that.

Anne was about to start college and, like the majority of people that age, didn’t know yet what she wanted to do. She’d been helping Dave in his demolition business over the summer. She still lived at home but was spending more and more time at her boyfriend’s house and I knew it was only a matter of time before I had the house to myself.

That led me to thoughts about the house; I should look at either downsizing from the six-bedroom monstrosity or hiring a housekeeper and gardener to help me out. With the contents of our bank account, and Dave’s life insurance policy, I knew I’d be comfortable for the rest of my life.

I half tuned back into Jack’s voice. As we’d agreed, Dave was leaving his Mustang to Anne and his trusty old jeep to Derek.

The business would be turned over to a trust, administered by the children, with the three of them acting as the board, with equal voting rights. Derek could manage it if he so chose, for a generous salary. That was fair. I knew nothing about business and wouldn’t need the income.

I tuned out again as more details on running the business were read out. Fond thoughts of Dave and my life together were helping me get through the shock of his loss. He was a remarkable man, dragging himself from the poor house he’d been born into and creating assets from scratch that meant we survivors would want for little in our lives.

Suddenly, my third ear picked up a little discord in Jack’s words.

“I’m sorry, what was that last bit, Jack?”

With a look of annoyance, Jack turned the page he was reading back over and started re-reading the paragraph I’d missed.

“The house is to be sold with all profits going into a trust to be administered by Jack Percell, to be used solely at his discretion for the education of my grandchildren from Molly White, nee Brown, Derek Brown, and Anne Brown. To this trust will be added the entire contents of my private bank accounts, with said Jack Percell having my power of attorney to access those accounts. He is also authorised and directed to cancel all credit cards held in my name.”

My mind was reeling at this point. We’d gone well off the script of the Will that Dave and I had updated in this very office, not two years ago. What the hell was going on? Had Dave secretly changed his Will from what I knew about?

“And, as per the nomination of beneficiaries form, lodged with the insurance company, the entirety of my death benefit is to be paid to Ms Jennifer Sarah Jardine, of 12 Pedley Court, Summertown.”

Suddenly, I was on my feet, having made no conscious decision to rise. My body was on autopilot. Bank accounts emptied, house to be sold, insurance payout to… who? My husband’s P.A.? I think I yelled something like, ”What the hell?”

A deathly hush suffused the room. The tension was palpable. I stared at the familiar face of Jack. He stared right back; a look of disgust on his face. I recoiled. To avoid that look I glanced to his right. Straight into the eyes of his secretary. I didn’t know her at all, she was new since I’d last been here. The look of contempt on the face of this stranger was possibly even worse than Jack’s expression.

Turning my face away from both of them forced me to look at my children. Anne and Molly were looking expressionlessly at the table. Even their postures mirrored each other; heads bent, shoulders tense, hands clasped in laps, knuckles white. Derek was the only one looking at me. Looking was the wrong word. He was glaring at me and with such a depth of anger it made me wish with all my heart he too was looking at the table.

Suddenly, a cold thought entered my head. Surely, they didn’t know. In my last lucid moments before emotions ruled supreme, logic supplied the answers that wishful thinking was suppressing.

Dave had known. He’d told Jack and amended the Will. Now the icy reception I’d received when I entered this torture chamber made perfect sense. Jack must have given my children a heads up before I arrived. Call me a coward if you like but I turned and bolted from the room.

Julie was still in the office, sitting at the reception desk, on the phone. A rush of relief flooded my roiling belly. Boy, did I need a friend right now. I walked around the desk to her. I was but two paces away when her words penetrated my over-heated brain.

“If you check your records, you’ll see that his wife’s cell phone was on a contract under his name. He is deceased now but if you give me your fax number I can send you the power of attorney my husband was given over all his affairs.”

I watched stunned as she jotted down a number on the legal pad before her. She still hadn’t acknowledged my presence when she thanked the person on the other end of the phone line and rang off

As she put down the phone, she stood, putting the chair between us. The look of disgust on her face was another blow. I felt like I’d gone ten rounds with Muhammad Ali.

“Jack showed me some of the photos Dave left in a sealed envelope to show your children. You sicken me. I hope the sex with your young lovers was worth destroying one of the finest men I ever knew.”

With that, she walked into the conference room. I watched, rooted to the spot by her words as she walked around the huge table and hugged her husband. If I wasn’t mistaken, he was shaking. No one looked my way. No one cared about my devastation. Feeling more alone than I ever had, I fled.

Once outside, I heard the ping that I’d received a text. It was from Jack and said it was Dave’s express wish that I not attend his funeral.

CHAPTER 2

How I made it home without totally losing it, I will never know.

I sat on the couch, stunned. I thought Dave loved me with everything he had. Sure, our sex life had suffered in the last ten or so years, slowly dwindling to nothing. But, hey, neither of us were spring chickens anymore and, after thirty-two years, who could blame us?

Fuck! About ten years ago? Could it have been eleven?

Julie’s words of an hour ago echoed through my rattled brain.

“I hope the sex with your young lovers was worth destroying one of the finest men I ever knew.”

Lovers. Plural. Oh my god! Dave knew not only about Justin, but Mario as well. No, he couldn’t have. Mario was years ago. No way could Dave have stayed with me that long without saying something.

No, he could only have known about Justin and Julie made a mistake in the heat of the moment. Yes, that was it. However, even that knowledge had shaken Dave enough cut me out of his Will, and even worse, tell my children. What hate would drive him to that extreme?

It was all too overwhelming, so I grabbed the gin bottle and filled a hi-ball glass. I spilled some as my hands were shaking badly. The fire in my throat did calm me down slightly.

How could Dave do this to me? I still loved him.

My god, did Dave know that I still loved him? Was part of his problem in bed that he thought I was going to leave him? Now I think about it, he did become colder in the last year or so, but I was too busy to put the pieces together. I realised I’d subconsciously rationalised his backing away from me emotionally as being embarrassment about his problem.

Tears once again brimmed, threatening to spill over. I blinked them away. I needed to think. I wondered how Dave had stood to live with someone like me for the last year-and-a-half. The pain in my chest was physical. I pressed my hands to my ribs as if they could stop my soul from tearing apart. Tearing apart for the pain and fear Dave must have felt for some time. He’d thought I didn’t love him or, even worse, was planning on leaving him. Why else would he have set out to destroy me so totally?

“Wrong, wrong, wrong, Dave,” I screamed to the empty room. “I never loved you any less. It was just sex with the others. I never meant to hurt you and would never have left you.”

I slumped back onto the couch, devastated by one surety. Dave had died not knowing that.

My mind went into Lalaland for a little while, for self-preservation, I think.

CHAPTER 3

 “Rita, are you in there?”

It was my sister, Mary’s, voice. The gravel rattling against the open upstairs window, combined with her yells, woke me from my hung-over slumber, fully clothed on the master bed.

Staggering to the window, I blearily looked out, then staggered downstairs to let her in the back door. She and her husband had been on a cruise for the last ten days. As far as I knew, she didn’t even know Dave was… no longer with us.

“Rita, are you all right? I heard about Dave, you poor thing. Why aren’t you answering your phone?”

Freshly awoken, reminded of my loss, her questions overwhelmed me. Without a word, I let her in, wandered over to where my cell was on the charger and tried it. Dead. I sank onto one of the kitchen chairs and burst into tears as everything came flooding back. Mary sat next to me and held my hands in hers.

“Oh my god! How could they leave you alone in this state? Hang on, I’ll ring Anne. Why isn’t she here?”

Just as she reached for her phone, my loud, “NO”, stunned her to immobility. She sat there as I pulled what was left of me together and mentally prepared to lose my sister’s respect, along with the rest of the world’s. Finally.

“Do you remember that time about eleven years ago, when Dave was doing that job for the coroner in the ACT, you know, after that girl was killed during that demolition job?”

Mary nodded. I’d been right proud at the time that my husband was considered expert enough in his field to be called as an assistant investigator. Dave was away for almost two weeks.

“Well…”

Shit, this was harder than I thought. Mary was my little sister and had always looked up to me.

“There was this young guy, he was on the same church committee as me, and we’d… er… flirted a bit in the past.”

Mary frowned at me but remained silent.

“Well, while Dave was in Canberra I agreed to go to dinner with the guy, Brian, his name was. He was in his late twenties and hot, if you know what I mean. I had two or three glasses of wine with dinner and…”

At the look of horror on Mary’s face  my courage almost failed me, but I took a deep breath and ploughed on. I sought solace in the memories of that time. I was paying for my infidelity at the moment and, twisted though the logic was, the memories of the fun I’d had straying from my marital vows were the coins that offset that price.

“Oh, Mary. Brian was big and energetic. He took me to his place and just had me over and over. The guy was a battering ram. I had so many orgasms…”

“Rita! Oh, my god, stop. Are you here to unburden your soul or brag about the joys of extra-marital sex?”

At her rebuke, heat filled my face. I apologised for getting off track and returned to a fairly dispassionate account of the all-nighter with Brian and not staggering home until the next day. Mary was shocked I’d betrayed Dave in a drunken mistake like that.

But not as shocked as when I went on to recount that once I’d quieted my conscience I’d gone back for more, again and again. Only stopping when Brian had been blinded in a freak accident at the school where he taught chemistry. He was working alone in the lab when the glass container he was heating up exploded. The combination of shattered glass and the corrosive liquid in the flask took out both his eyes. He’d only been wearing glasses rather than the regulation face shield. I’d lost contact with him after that. Mary sat stunned throughout my narration.

“So, when did your affair end?”

“That affair ended a little over ten years ago.”

That sentence hung between us for many seconds.

“That affair?”

“Um, yes. Oh, Mary. You wouldn’t believe how a girl’s ego is boosted at our age by having someone on the side. Someone young, attractive and… er… energetic, if you know what I mean.”

I lapsed into an embarrassed silence; praying Mary wouldn’t follow up with what her expression told me she was thinking.

“And, I imagine, judging by the smug look on your face, that the sense of superiority you got pulling the wool over Dave’s eyes was a factor.”

I’d always known my baby sister was smart. She was proving it once again. I’d often wondered if part of my motivation for finding a replacement for Brian, a little over a year after his disfigurement, was because of an innate sense of inferiority I felt when compared to my husband. I recalled that time. Sure, I wasn’t a successful businessperson, like Dave, but I was a brilliant parent. Then I remembered it striking me, like it was yesterday. Dave was both a brilliant parent and a successful businessman. I’d always known, deep down, that that was probably the motivation for what I continued to do.

“I, uh, don’t know. Maybe. I certainly didn’t want to hurt him.”

“But you went out and found someone else, didn’t you?”

Shamefacedly, I looked down at the table. “Yes.”

“And this guy was young and fit as well, wasn’t he?”

My silence was all that was needed.

“Spill.”

“Well, Michael wasn’t totally my fault. About this time, Dave started having problems in the, er, performance department. I felt like I wasn’t exciting him anymore no matter what I did or how I tried. I was still in my sexual prime and that hurt…”

“Cut the crappy self-justification, Rita. Get to the bit about going out and getting your ashes hauled by another super-stud.”

“It wasn’t just about the sex, Mary,” I protested. “Michael was a nice guy. He was romantic and smart; we always had a great time.”

“And you always ended up at his place staring at the ceiling while he satisfied your needs.”

“Well, yes.”

“And how long did Michael last? Until he tired of being seen out with someone old enough to be his mother? Until he wanted to settle down and have children with someone his own age?”

God, this was embarrassing.

“Um, no. Michael was killed after about five or six months.”

“Killed, how?”

“I never really found out. He’d invited me over for a barbeque; he was going to cook me one of the burgers he said he was famous for. Then, after some bedroom time, he intended taking me out to meet some of his friends at a football match. I… er, did what I normally did, parked at the shopping centre about two blocks away and walked to his place. As I approached his house there were firefighters all over the place and the house was partly collapsed and fully on fire. I didn’t have a choice, did I? I went home. Michael wasn’t answering his phone and in the paper the next day it was reported the homeowner was killed. I went back two days later and talked to a neighbour. Apparently, everyone thought that Michael was trying to light the barbecue and the gas bottle exploded; oh, Mary, it was horrible.”

“Yes, I can imagine. Having a friend killed can be traumatic.”

“Yes, that too. But it could have been me. If Michael had waited until I got there to fire up the barbecue, I could have been killed as well. Not only that but the investigators were still there and the neighbour introduced me as someone Michael knew. They questioned me like the explosion wasn’t a horrible accident. I convinced them I couldn’t help, but I lived in terror for the next few months that they’d discover more and somehow Dave would find out.

“Don’t look at me like that, Mary. I know you think I’m a serial adulterer and, maybe even that I’m a self-centred bitch, but I only wanted to protect Dave and my family from the fallout.”

I lapsed into silence, remembering the extreme fear of that time, years ago.

“So, you reverted to being a dutiful wife and mother after that?”

I debated with myself on whether to stop my confession at that point, but I couldn’t. The fact that I’d not known my husband nearly as well as I thought I’d done; to the extent that he’d successfully hidden his knowledge of my affairs for god only knew how many years, had severely rattled me. I was a Christian but not a Catholic. I couldn’t get solace from a confessional and the thought of unloading on a relative stranger was abhorrent.

“For about three years, yes.”

Mary just looked at me, deadpan.

“Again, Mary, I don’t think it was all my fault. Dave’s erectile dysfunction got worse and worse. Oh, he tried, but he never made it past half-mast, if you know what I mean, and that changed him. He continued to emotionally withdraw from me; it was horrible. I bought sexy lingerie, tried talking dirty, but nothing seemed to work. He began staying later at the business and working the weekends. He was still great with the kids but being with me seemed to make him embarrassed or something.

“Then there was all the pleasure I was missing out on; you know; in the bedroom. It was like all the orgasms young, well-built men could give me had a hold on me. So, I went out and found a replacement for Michael. His name was Jerome. He looked like a real stud. You know the sort; muscles on top of muscles, gym-junkie but, I have to say, he was a little disappointing in the sack. He’d done steroids at one point and I think that shrunk his whatsits. It only lasted six weeks or so and I was going to break off with him, but before I could, he disappeared.”

“Disappeared?”

“Yes. I went around to his house one day and it was empty. Packed and gone. Between you and me it was a little insulting. I thought he had some genuine feelings for me and would at least have called to say goodbye, but, no, he just up and left. I haven’t heard a peep from him since.”

This time when I stopped, Mary’s raised eyebrow was all I needed to keep going.

“I… er, hooked up with Mario not long after that. He was the best of them, in bed, I mean. He couldn’t make love to a woman if he tried. He just took me whenever he wanted to. Oh, Mary, you wouldn’t believe how good that makes you feel. It was like being back in high school.”

Mary’s renewed look of disgust made me skip the details.

“Mario was a bad boy, or so he tried to appear. Said he ran with hard men in Melbourne. I thought he was full of shit until… Anyway, he started getting pretty demanding. Said my insistence on only meeting him privately was cramping his social life and insisted we go out in public with his friends. I only went once, to a bar on the other side of town, but I spent the whole time there petrified that someone I knew would see me. Besides, he was starting to arc up about having to use condoms. I didn’t want to risk my health like that. I knew Mario had other girls he was seeing besides me.

“I tried to break it off after that, but I just couldn’t. I’d grown addicted to the sex I think. I rang him a week or so later and he must have missed me as much as I missed his cock because he agreed that I could come around to his place the following Friday.”

“So, how long did good old Mario rock your world after that? Did you find out he wasn’t full of shit after all? Let me guess. You turned up at his place on the Friday and all his mob mates were there waiting to gangbang you.”

My dejected facial expression seemed to cause Mary to mellow her sarcastic tone slightly. I remembered that time painfully.

“No. I never went to his place that Friday. His sister, who I’d become friendly with, rang me on the Thursday night and asked me if I’d watched the news. I hadn’t. Mario had been killed in a car bombing. It seems he really was running with the wrong crowd and there was a turf war going on among the local drug dealers. That shook me to the core. Again, it could have been me.”

Mary watched as tears escaped my eyes. She didn’t reach around to hug me. I couldn’t blame her. Even I didn’t know if it was pity for my former lover or the remembered fear from that time four and a half years ago. She allowed me to settle.

“Was he the last, Rita?”

Now came the hardest one to divulge. Now came the confession that my conscience hadn’t had time to justify yet.

Now Mary would find out that while my husband was receiving CPR on a golf course, I’d been in bed in a seedy motel with my latest lover, happily rutting away with my phone safely ensconced in my car at another shopping centre carpark. Which is why I was one of the last to learn I was a widow.

“No, Mary. Sadly, Mario wasn’t the last.” God, this was hard. “I behaved for over two years this time. Then I met this new guy who started on the church committee, Justin.”

“Not Justin Smith?”

Shit. I’d forgotten Mary was on some of the same committees with Justin as I was. Somehow, the fact she knew the guy made it infinitely worse.

“But he was married, with two little kids.”

Shame made me miss the obvious verbal clue I’d just been given.

“I was trying to break off with him. He was getting too clingy. He’d started to say that we were meant to be together. Said he would leave his wife and everything. I was starting to worry that he would tell Dave just to break us up. I’ve lain awake the last couple of nights worrying he might have sent Dave an email or rung him. Someone told me that just before Dave… passed, he received a call. What if that was Justin and that’s what triggered his heart attack?”

I finally had the courage to look at Mary’s face. All colour had drained from it. Her mouth was working but nothing came out. I was confused. Finally.

“My god, you don’t know do you?”

“Know what?”

“Justin is dead, Rita. He died the day before Dave. Someone sent his wife a letter telling her he was having an affair and she chucked him out of the house. He went straight out to the garden shed and apparently set fire to himself with a twenty-five litre can of petrol he had stored there.”

I was aghast. I’d been isolated in my grief for the first four days after Dave’s death and drunk since the reading of the Will yesterday. Or was it the day before? Obviously, all the well-wishers who’d come over this week hadn’t wanted to burden me with the bad news local gossip. I looked at Mary’s face again. If possible, it was even paler, now with shades of green.

“He knew,” she whispered, shaking her head. “All along, he knew…”

“Who knew what, Mary?”

“Dave. Think about it. Can’t you see the pattern?”

“What pattern? What are you talking about?”

Mary looked at me impatiently. “He knew, Rita. Dave knew about all of them. All of your lovers.”

I shook my head, unable to speak. No, no, no, screamed my internal voice. The pain of Dave knowing of all of my affairs was too much.

For every shake of my head, Mary nodded. Even in my stress I was reminded of our childhood arguments. Those infantile ‘No, I didn’t,’ ‘Yes, you did,’ rants that would continue until either Mum or Dad would tell us to be quiet.

“Yes, Rita. He knew about each and every one of them. Think about it. Your first lover, Brian. Blinded when something exploded in the chem lab. Who was the next one?”

“Michael,” I whispered.

“That’s right. Michael. Died when a gas bottle exploded the day you were going out with him to a public football match. That Jerome guy disappearing without a trace. Mario? Soon after you and he started going out in public, kaboom! Died in a car bombing. Now Justin. He was possibly going to expose your affair, but, no, again, kaboom, he’s dead.

“Can’t you see? You must. You can’t be that blind.”

At my silence, Mary snorted. “What did Dave do for a living, Rita? How hard would it be for a guy with his expertise in explosives and pyrotechnics to rig some targeted explosions while leaving no evidence? If anyone knew how to make any one of those explosions look like an accident it was Dave.”

I was incapable of speech as the symmetry of all Mary was saying sank into my exhausted, hungover head. It all made ugly, horrifying sense.

“If I’m right, and I’m certain I am, Rita, Dave knew about your dalliances all the way back to your first. He either faked his problems in the bedroom to avoid boning your cheating ass or really did have trouble getting it up with you. He kept an eye on you and your fuck buddies and when there was a chance of your dalliances being publicly exposed, and thus him being forced to act, he took measures.”

“But that can’t be right. He would have confronted me,” I offered lamely, still trying to cling to my delusion.

“What? And risk breaking up his family. You know better than me that family was the most important thing in his life. No, he would wait until Anne was out of the house before making a move like that.”

The pieces of the puzzle fit so well that I knew they were the truth as unpalatable as it was. The man I’d thought loved me completely was setting up to ambush me in the very near future as soon as our nest was empty. It was the most devastating certainty I’d ever known.

I was only vaguely aware of Mary standing. Her voice shocked me when she spoke from behind me, between me and the back door. I flinched.

“I’m going now, Rita. I know you need me, but, frankly, you disgust me. I would never have believed this of you if I hadn’t heard it from your own mouth. Besides, I have to cook Pete’s dinner.”

With those condemning words, she left me as well. I have no memory of the following hours, as the next thing I remember, it was dark.

CHAPTER 4

I was roused by quiet noises from the bathroom. Curious and a little afraid, I stood and walked in. Anne was there holding a clear plastic bag with Dave’s hairbrush in it. What the hell?

“Anne, honey, you scared me. Why do you want that?” I asked, pointing to the brush.

She glared at me with a venomous expression. I took a step back.

“Because, Mother, something Dad asked me to do years ago made sense to me today.”

I was really confused by her response and hurt by her facial expression.

“What?”

“When I was about eight, Dad took a DNA swab from me. Told me it was to check for any genetic weaknesses. I swallowed that at the time, but today it hit me; I think he wanted to check that I was his biological daughter. So do I, now.”

Anne glared at me as the implications of this statement hit me between the eyes.

Brian had been my first lover since I’d been married, but Dave didn’t know that.

By the time I’d recovered enough, I was too late. A glance out the window showed me Anne lugging two suitcases down the front path. She turned to walk along the street. I raced outside but was just in time to see and hear my husband’s old Mustang pulling out and away.

I’d never felt so utterly alone in my entire life.

I used logic to delay the crippling emotions I sensed circling; trying to find a way into my head and explode it. I went through what I could remember of Mary’s logic, wanting desperately to believe Dave couldn’t have known for eleven years. The only evidence to support my wish was my belief that he was too open and honest to hide his knowledge from me. The Dave I knew couldn’t have feigned that amount of love.

A niggling memory came unbidden. The day before the reading of the Will, I’d been going through Dave’s closet to find a suit for the funeral home, I’d thought he had more clothes than that. Jumping from the couch, I raced upstairs to the master bedroom and flung his cupboard open again. Sure enough, the remaining clothes were spread along the hangers to give the illusion of bulk. Dave was moving his clothes surreptitiously out of our house. With a shock, I realised that when Anne finally flew the nest, Dave would have been right behind her.

The one burning question searing my soul was, ‘How long had he known?’ Mary’s words came back to me and fit into a neat, unarguable pattern. The answer was eleven years.

With a dread certainty I now accepted that Dave’s sexual problems weren’t physical. He’d somehow found out about Brian and no longer wanted to have sex with me. That was horrible. Dave had been what? Forty-nine at the time. To practically give up sex at that age. Just because your wife wasn’t strong enough to resist the allure of unemotional monkey sex with a young stud.

But eleven years. Hanging around in a house, in a relationship with me. Why? The answer came to me instantly. It was exactly the man Dave was. In his eyes, he’d made a mistake in marrying me, but from that marriage three lives had been created. Three innocent lives. Dave would have felt they shouldn’t pay for his bad judgement. They were his responsibility. Walking away from the marriage would have put the emotional welfare of his children at risk and that is something he’d never do.

At the time I met Brian, Molly would have been nineteen, Derek seventeen, but little Anne only seven. A cold shiver passed right through me. He’d intended to hang around until the nest was empty, then, with his duty complete, what? Where were his clothes?

I can’t explain the depth of my shame… and frustration. Yes, I said frustration. I’d taken extraordinary precautions to hide my affairs. Now, Mary’s logic implied that he’d found out about Brian somehow; the timing of him developing performance problems proved that. If he’d confronted me, the façade of a happy family would have been forever ruined. The children’s welfare compromised. Unable to vent his anger on me, would he have lashed out at Brian? I couldn’t reconcile the Dave I knew with someone capable of maiming a fellow human being. Much easier to convince myself that Brian’s fate was an unhappy accident as I’d always thought.

Once it was known what I was capable of, it was exactly in Dave’s nature to look for recurrences. What had he felt when he discovered Michael? Devastation is probably not a big enough word. My soul cringed at the thought of him tracking my movements and behaviour, all the while maintaining his rigid façade for the rest of the world. Burying his disappointment in me and hoping I didn’t do anything to out myself and reveal him as a cuckold to the rest of the world; forcing his hand.

If Mary was right, and I instinctively knew she was, Dave was monitoring Michael and I closely enough that he knew we were about to enter the relational stage where the chances of discovery were high. Dave acted to protect my reputation and thus, his family. But could he kill? I couldn’t believe he would. Much more likely the gas bottle exploding was only supposed to maim, like Brian.

The three-year break after Michael must have been a blessing for Dave, but his continuing avoidance of sex with me proved he’d passed the point of forgiveness already.

And then, again, the shocked disappointment when his surveillance discovered Jerome. The loneliness of hearing, seeing, reading all the evidence of my betrayal and having no other soul he could unload to. With Jerome, I’d been pretty indiscreet. We’d done it in the office at the gym once, just before Jerome…

Again, the pattern Mary had spotted immediately. How had I missed it? Dave ignoring the threat to his family until the chances of discovery hit a landmark that only he knew. I wonder if Jerome’s bones would be found one day or he’d simply been made an offer he was smart enough to heed. Disappear without a look backward or…

How Dave’s opinion of me must have sunk even lower when Mario appeared with what now seemed like unseemly haste. Was Dave present in the bar when I went out publicly with Mario for the first time? Did he sweat from the threat of my exposure? Was I not the only one fearfully scanning the bar for familiar faces? For lingering looks? If only Dave had known my resolve to never go out in public with Mario again, or never loosen my unshakeable insistence on condoms. That way I could have saved his soul the tarnish of killing for the second or was it third time?

The three-year break between Mario and Justin must have been a relief for Dave. Did he have hopes he could get all the way to an empty nest and his escape without another casualty? Did he have someone by that time who could share the debate on whether Anne was old enough to be emotionally untarnished by him revealing my shame and breaking up of the family? Whatever. I knew Justin well enough to know he wouldn’t have felt bad enough about the destruction of his family to kill himself the way they said he did. His agonising last few seconds on earth when he walked into his shed, and Dave’s trap, did not bear thinking about.

For once, I hoped and prayed there wasn’t an afterlife. Dave deserved a long and happy one, but after the actions I’d forced on him…

All the logic and theorising made perfect sense after three big glasses of gin. What didn’t quiet were my thoughts of Dave’s loneliness throughout it all, and my frustration at the thought I’d never know what tipped him off in the first place. When did he see through my act? How exactly had he found out? And the worst; when was the first time he’d said, ‘I love you’, and been lying?

The gin bottle was empty when my shame finally morphed again. This time to a horribly bad conscience as I realised I, me, myself had been the one who killed or maimed those men. Not Dave. Dave had merely been the instrument. If I’d been strong enough to keep my damned legs together, or, at the very least, timid enough to keep my affairs discreet, each and every one of my ex-lovers would be alive or whole today.

Gutted and with the gin finished, I reached for the bourbon.

CHAPTER 5

I was still drunk three days later when Derek rang me to remind me not to show up at his father’s funeral. I got the impression he’d drawn the short straw. After unemotionally imparting that gem, he hung up.

Glutton for punishment, I went to the front step and retrieved three days of newspapers. There it was; Dave Brown’s funeral at three today. All were invited to the service, but the burial was private.

I may or may not have been sober enough to drive, but I did anyway. I didn’t want to make a scene, so I stayed well away from the graveside and watched from a distance. I couldn’t miss the opportunity that Dave’s soul may be following his body and I could apologise to him. Apologise and ask how he discovered my affair with Brian.

A bottle of something sweet and sticky was keeping me warm and fuzzy. The sight of Jen, Dave’s long-term P.A., acting the part of the grieving widow, hurt like hell. The sight of my three children comforting her made me realise they knew she was more than that to Dave.

Like a drama queen, the bitch sank to her knees as the coffin was lowered, Derek helped her up and braced her. She and my children were the last to leave the graveside. I shivered as I moved closer, ready to say my goodbyes.

Not long after I’d closed my eyes in the hope of sensing Dave’s spirit, I heard an ungodly shriek behind me. I turned to see Saint Jennifer flying toward me with fingers extended like claws. I backed away as she was subdued and led away by Derek and Anne. Molly stayed behind as rear guard.

She was about to turn away and leave without saying something, when I spoke. “What’s that bitch complaining about? She has a million of my bucks from Dave’s life insurance.”

“Who is calling who a bitch? That woman’s love kept my father alive for the last few years. Dad left us a letter. When his strength at putting up with your shit finally gave out, she was the one there for him. I owe her for the last few years of his company.”

“But why does she hate me?”

“You can’t be so obtuse.” Molly looked at me hard. “Or maybe you are. She blames you for taking the love of her life away. She only revealed to Dad she’d held a flame for him for ages a few years ago. Still, their relationship was purely platonic until you reverted to your sluttish ways with that Justin guy. Even then, she said it was ages before he would go all the way with her. She said you’d destroyed his sexual confidence and he had real performance problems with her. She only found out after he died that he’d bought some black-market Viagra and she’s convinced that caused his heart attack.”

With that, she turned and rapidly followed the rest of her remaining family. I thought about chasing after her and telling her of my suspicions about her father being far from the saint she thought him to be but couldn’t bring myself to. Everything Dave became, I caused. I couldn’t destroy his children’s memories of him when it was all my fault.

Later, much later, I thought of Molly’s revelations. Viagra? I recalled some of the things I‘d done with my various lovers, then imagined Dave watching them on video. The memories of the things I did with Justin, to keep him interested in my aging body, played out across the movie screen inside my head. That would without a doubt wreck any husband’s sexual confidence. This just got better and better! Not only had I destroyed Dave’s confidence in me and forced him to live a lie for eleven years. Not only had I to all intents and purposes left him, being the man he was, no choice in denying himself a sex life for years on end. Now I find out that I’d left him with very real performance issues. Issues that contributed to his death. Damn! My bottle was empty, and I badly needed to be drunk.

CHAPTER 6

The next two weeks were a busy blur. I used all the cash we had stashed around the house to buy grog and ate mainly tinned food we had in the pantry. When I bothered to check the mail, it was full of final demands from one utility company or another.

A bailiff knocked on the door one day to serve me with an eviction notice. I left a message with Jack to beg him to allow me to stay. He never returned my call and the process seemed to continue.

Calls to my children went unanswered. Was I really that bad a mother that they’d abandon me for a private matter between myself and their father? Then I remembered the size of my crime and the effects it had caused on a good man and felt I’d be lucky if my children ever spoke to me again.

I was hungover on the morning of the eviction. Some arrogant man in a cheap suit acted like he was doing me a favour by allowing me to pack some stuff to take. Finally, I was escorted to my own front step and told a taxi had been ordered to take me anywhere within an hour’s drive. I remember standing there for a while, in a daze, before Jack came up to me and handed me an envelope, letting me know in no uncertain terms he didn’t agree with the contents.

I ripped it open. Out fell a legal document and a typed single page. The page basically said that Dave had left provision for a small, one-bedroom unit for me and a modest allowance that would stop me starving. Oh, Dave! A good man to the end. The legal document was indeed a title deed.

I threw the documents to the ground and looked inside the envelope, looking for the explanation from my late husband. The one where he let off steam at me for betraying him for eleven years. The one confessing how he’d found out about my first affair, with Brian. The one, heaven help me, where he forgave me my transgressions.

The envelope was empty.

Just then the taxi arrived and tooted. I picked up the discarded documents and realised what they meant. What the lack of a letter meant.

Dave couldn’t be bothered writing me a letter. I’d been discarded; I was irrelevant; I was a detail. I don’t even think he made provisions for my future through any sense of responsibility or duty. I think he just wanted to ensure my survival so I could suffer for longer. Experience how it felt to lose everything of value and have the choice of giving in or trying to rebuild another life. Ponder how I’d wrecked our marriage and destroyed the best man I ever knew.

EPILOGUE

“Phew, thank god my colleagues managed to get her into the paddy wagon. Now, if the rest of you could please wait on the patio while I talk to, Mr. Burrows, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“While I talk to Mr. Burrows here, I’ll take your statements later. Please, no conferring about what happened. Now, Mr. Burrows, are you sure you don’t want me to call an ambulance for those scratches?”

“No, I’ll be fine thanks, Officer.”

“So, Mr. Burrows, you’re a medium?”

“I prefer the term spiritualist.”

“What’s the difference?”

“About twenty bucks an hour.”

“Whatever. You speak to the dead?”

“Of course not. I just convince a bunch of middle-aged idiots who were born yesterday and paid today that I can. I give them reassurance that their departed loved ones are happy beyond the veil. They give me sixty bucks an hour to do it.”

The spiritualist suddenly realised he’d just admitted fraud and abruptly stopped and looked uncomfortable. The policeman was an old hand at this.

“I don’t think we’ll trouble you on that. If a bunch of cows want to turn up on your doorstep and pay you to milk them, then good on you, I say. So, what went wrong tonight?”

“Well, Mrs. Brown, Rita, has been coming for a couple of weeks now. It normally takes that long for me to get enough details on what they want to give them a convincing story. I’d found out that she was recently widowed and was having trouble accepting her husband’s passing, but, honestly, tonight I was going to concentrate on Mrs. Gillespie, I’d found enough of her story on Google to know what to say tonight. Anyway, we were all holding hands and I’d done the eyes rolling back in their sockets act for them, hits them right in the wallet that one, when I said one of my regular spirit guides had shown up to act as a conduit to the other side.”

The con man paused to finger the two long scratches on one side of his face.

“As soon as I mentioned the guide’s name, Dave, Mrs. Brown just went off. She started screaming at me to tell her how he found out and other crap like that. I wanted this week to be all about Mrs. G. and I wasn’t prepared to guess what Mrs. B. was here for, so I said Dave was fading and another of my spirit guides was coming through.

“Mrs. Brown went berserk. She grabbed me by the throat and demanded I forgive her. Said the guilt and the loneliness was killing her. When I stayed silent cos I was stunned, quite frankly, she started lashing out with her hands. Scratched the fuck out of my face, the crazy bitch. She reeked of booze. Are you going to arrest her?”

“If you want to press charges and the other suckers…, sorry, participants, back up your story, I will, yes. We’ll let her out on bail, probably mid-morning tomorrow. If you come past the station, on the way back from emergency, they’ll show you how to apply for a restraining order…

THE END

NOW LIGHTEN THE FUCK UP.

An Irishman who had a little too much to drink is driving home from the city one night and, of course, his car is weaving violently all over the road. A cop pulls him over.

‘So,’ says the cop to the driver, ‘Where have ya been?’

‘Why, I’ve been to the pub, of course,’ slurs the drunk.

‘Well,’ says the cop, ‘It looks like you’ve had quite a few to drink this evening.’

‘I did all right,’ the drunk says with a smile.

‘Did you know,’ says the cop, standing straight and folding his arms across his chest, ‘That a few intersections back, your wife fell out of your car?’

‘Oh, thank heavens,’ sighs the drunk. ‘For a minute there, I thought I’d gone deaf.’