Promise Me

by Richard Paul Evans

  “That’s what George said. I know this is very personal, but do you mind me asking how much he was supposed to take out?”

  “Well, I think he said it would be about three or four thousand dollars. And we took some out at the bank as well. But he wasn’t going to take it all at once.”

  “Oh, no,” Margaret said.

  “Is there a problem?”

  “Beth, he’s taken a lot more than that.”

  “How much more?”

  “He took more than sixty thousand.”

  My chest constricted. “What?”

  “George said he maxed out the home-equity loan.”

  “Why didn’t he stop him?”

  “I’m sorry. George didn’t handle the transaction, but he said it was perfectly legal, Matthew was on the account.”

  I felt as if someone had just slugged me in the gut. “I’ve got to go.”

  Margaret sensed my panic. “I’m sorry. Maybe there’s an explanation.”

  “I’m sure there is,” I said angrily. “He wanted my money. Thank you for calling.”

  As I hung up the phone, Roxanne stared at me. “Hey, what’s wrong, hon? What happened?”

  I just looked at her, breathless.

  “Teresa,” Roxanne said. “Cover for us.”

  Teresa looked at her incredulously. “There’s like, a million people.”

  “Deal with it.” Roxanne walked me back to the break room. She pulled a chair out at the table and sat me in it. That’s when I completely melted down.

  “Honey, tell me what happened. Is it Matthew?”

  “What have I done?”

  “He broke up with you?”

  I wiped my face. “He stole my home.”

  “What?”

  “It was a setup. He never loved me. He was playing me all along.”

  “I don’t believe that. Tell me what happened.”

  “He offered to remodel my basement, so yesterday we set up a loan and I gave him access to my account so he could take money out for materials. He took every penny. Sixty-three thousand dollars.” I almost hyperventilated saying it.

  Roxanne gasped. “Oh, honey.”

  “I’m such an idiot. He’s one of those guys you read about who preys on desperate, gullible women. He steals their life savings, then disappears. How could I have been so stupid?”

  “How could you know? We were all enchanted by him. Anyone could have made that mistake. Can you find him?”

  “I know where he lives.”

  “Go. Teresa and I will cover for you. I’ll call Jan and have her pick up Charlotte. She can spend the night at our place.”

  “Thank you.” I leaned into Roxanne and broke down again. She patted my back. “There, there, honey. Maybe it’s not what it seems.”

  “What else could it be?”

  She groaned. “Oh, baby.”

  “I wanted it to be good. I wanted to be loved by someone.”

  “It’s my fault,” Roxanne said, “I wanted it for you. I pushed you into it.”

  “It’s not your fault. It’s what I really wanted. I wanted it so bad I closed my eyes.”

  I was nearly hysterical and blind with tears as I drove from the cleaners to his apartment. I was fortunate that chance had taken me there just a few days earlier, as up to that point I had no way to contact him. My mind replayed our last conversation. Is this what he meant by the “big deal—sure thing” he was about to close? He had played me like a Stradivarius.

  I parked my car in front of his house, sliding the front of my car into a bank of snow, and climbed out. I looked for his car but, not surprisingly, it wasn’t there. It had snowed through the night and the cement walkway to his apartment had not been shoveled. I could see footprints coming out of it.

  I followed them down the stairs to his apartment. There was no doorbell so I pounded on the door. “Matthew! Open up.” I pounded again, then checked the doorknob and found it was unlocked. I pushed open the door. Through the dim light from the window wells I couldn’t believe what I saw.

  The room was empty. The only furniture was a twin mattress on the floor in the corner of the room with a sofa pillow and a wool blanket.

  “Matthew!” I screamed. I turned on the light, a single, naked globe above the kitchen sink, and walked through the house.

  In the bathroom there was a can of cheap shaving cream and a disposable razor on the tile counter, next to a bottle of Old Spice, a bar of soap and a tube of Prell shampoo. I went into his bedroom. There was no furniture, just two cardboard boxes—one was empty and the other had some white briefs and two pairs of socks. I opened the closet. Inside, on a hanger, was only one shirt, the red flannel shirt he had worn on our date to the ranch and likely abandoned. I went back out to the kitchen. The fridge held a nearly empty plastic gallon jug of milk, two cans of Coke and a salami sandwich that had mold growing on one side. The cupboards were bare except for a box of Grape-Nuts and Cap’n Crunch cereal.

  There was a full plastic garbage can next to the stove. I dumped it out on the kitchen floor. The contents were mostly fast-food wrappers and empty soda cans. I combed through it hoping to find something that might give me a clue to where he’d gone. I came across a folded scrap of paper, scrawled in ink were the words “U of U, Beta. Todd Fey, 292-9145. Fake I.D.”

  I gasped. I didn’t even know his real name. I shoved the note into my pants pocket and kicked the wall on the way out of his apartment.

  I went upstairs to the house’s front door and rang the bell. It was a couple of minutes before the door opened to an old man. He was short, with a ragged gray beard, and he looked at me with an expression of annoyance. “No solicitors,” he growled.

  “I’m looking for the man who rents from you downstairs.”

  “I don’t know anything about him.” He started to close the door.

  “Wait,” I said, pushing against the door. “He stole from me. You can tell me or I’ll call the police and you can talk to them.”

  He scowled but seemed frightened by my threat. “What do you want?”

  “Did you see him leave this morning?”

  “Didn’t see nothing.”

  “Do you have an address for him?”

  He looked at me as if I was stupid. “This is his address.”

  “I mean, maybe there was a different one on a check, when he paid his rent.”

  “He always paid in cash. That’s all I know. He stole from you? You call the police. He always paid his rent, that’s all I know.” He shut the door and locked it.

  I stepped down from the porch as tears welled up in my eyes. I drove to the Conoco gas station on the corner across from the soup restaurant where we’d eaten a few days earlier. I foraged through my car for a quarter, then went to the pay phone. I took the note I’d found out of my pocket and dialed the number.

  A young voice answered. “Beta Sigma Pi, Delta Eta chapter, this is Pledge David speaking.”

  “I’m looking for Todd Fey.”

  “Just a moment.” I heard him shout, “Is Todd here?” I heard a few grunts, then after what seemed an eternity a different voice answered.

  “This is Todd.”

  “My name is Beth Cardall. I found your name on a paper. You made a fake I.D. for Matthew Principato.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said nervously.

  “I’m not trying to get you in trouble or anything. I’m looking for this man. He stole from me.”

  “You got the wrong guy.” He hung up.

  Smart, I thought. Real smart.

  I got back in my car and drove the gray, slushy streets around Holladay, Cottonwood Heights, and Murray for nearly five hours looking for his car. At one point I followed a navy BMW for nearly ten minutes until the driver pulled into a gas station and I saw that the driver was an elderly woman. I finally went home around nine. I called and checked on Charlotte.

  “What did you find?” Roxanne asked.

  “His apartment was abandoned,” I
said. “And I found a phone number where he got his fake I.D.”

  “Holy mother-of-pearl,” she said. “Have you called the police?”

  “What could they do? Everything he did was legal.”

  “Oh, baby. What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going out looking again in the morning. Is Charlotte okay?”

  “Yes. She’s asleep. Don’t worry about a thing, we’ll take care of her.”

  “Thank you.” I started to cry. “I can’t believe this is happening. What did I do to deserve all this?”

  “You don’t deserve any of this. I don’t know why bad things happen to good people, but don’t you believe for a second you did anything to bring this on yourself.”

  “But I did, Rox. I totally brought this on myself.”

  “Don’t say that. What did you do to bring this on yourself?”

  “I trusted.”

  The most dangerous of all indulgences is trust.

  Beth Cardall’s Diary

  Sunday morning was gray, the sky streaked with dark, spidery clouds. I got up early and went out looking again—still wearing the same clothes from the day before. Nothing. It was around five in the afternoon that I faced the inevitable. He was gone. My money was gone. My house was gone. He had probably skipped town, gone back to Italy or wherever it was he really came from. I pulled into a Kmart parking lot and called Roxanne from a pay phone.

  “Any luck?” she asked.

  “No,” I said crying. “He’s vanished.”

  “I was hoping you’d call. I’ve got news.”

  “What?”

  “This morning I told Ray about what had happened, and he said that he saw Matthew yesterday afternoon at the Chevron station. I asked him how he knew who Matthew was and he said he didn’t, that Matthew had just walked up to him and asked if he was my husband.”

  “How he know that?”

  “I have no idea. Anyway, Ray didn’t know he had stolen your money, so they were just slinging spit, you know, talking man stuff. Ray asked if he was going to watch the Mike Tyson fight, and Matthew said he was headed to Wendover to put a little down on it.”

  “Oh, no,” I said.

  Wendover is a small gambling town about an hour and a half from Salt Lake City just over the Nevada border—a cultural by-product of Utah’s antigambling laws.

  “I’ve got to go out there,” I said. “I’m going to get my money back.”

  “Honey, let me and Ray go with you.”

  “No. I’m going to do this. I have to do this.”

  “Honey, you be careful. There’s no telling what he might be capable of.”

  I ran back out to my car. So that was it. He was a gambler. A thief, a liar and a gambler, and he was about to lose Charlotte’s and my future.

  The drive to Wendover is 120 miles west on I-80, passing the Great Salt Lake and the Bonneville Salt Flats, one of the flattest places on the planet—so flat that you can see the curvature of the earth. The flats are the grounds where dozens of world land speed records were claimed, from Ab Jenkins’s 1935 Duesenberg “Mormon Meteor” to Craig Breedlove’s “Spirit of America,” the first car to reach 600 mph.

  For me it was a hundred miles of nothing to see—nothing to distract me from the cauldron of panic that boiled in my chest. I wondered how many other women Matthew (I could barely think his name without feeling sick) had scammed in this way.

  On a practical basis there were other things to worry about. What would happen when I got there? Would I find him? Was he violent? Would the casino help me? What if he had already lost all my money?

  First Marc and now Matthew. I wondered why I was so adept at attracting broken men. Maybe they were all broken.

  I reached the neon glow of Wendover around eight-thirty and drove past a sixty-four-foot-tall sheet-metal cowboy pointing down at the stripe across the road that separates Utah from Nevada. I stopped at the first casino I reached, the Rainbow Casino, a brightly lit trap in the desert landscape. I parked my car in the crowded parking lot and ran inside, fueled equally by adrenaline and emotion.

  The casino interior was cavernous and crowded, echoing with the clinking, whirring sounds of slot machines and the electric song of illuminated wheels of fortune. I ran up to a tall, uniform-wearing man standing at the concierge desk.

  “May I help you?” he asked.

  “Where do they gamble on boxing?”

  “The Tyson-Douglas fight,” he said. He pointed past a large, illuminated field of slot machines. “Over past the lobby at the Race Book. But you’re too late to get anything down, the fight’s started.”

  “Am I too late to get my money back?”

  He looked at me dully. “Once the fight starts, no money changes hands.”

  I stepped away from him, speechless. I was too late. I walked over to the part of the casino where the man had pointed. There was a large neon sign that read RACE AND SPORTSBOOK. Beneath the sign was a large bank of televisions—an entire wall of screens—the majority of them tuned to the boxing match. The Tyson-Douglas fight was clearly the main event, and a large, excited crowd of mostly men were talking and drinking and shouting out as the two fighters danced around the ring exchanging blows.

  Then I saw him. Unlike the rest of the crowd, Matthew seemed detached from the event, sitting alone at a small round table. He held a drink in one hand. The sight of him made me feel sick and scared and angry in equal parts. “Matthew!” I shouted. He didn’t respond. I shouted louder. “Matthew!”

  He looked around, then over at me, clearly surprised to see me. He stood as I approached. “Beth. What are you doing here?”

  “I want my money back.”

  He said calmly, “You’ll get it. And a lot more.”

  “I want it now.” Several of the other patrons looked over at us. “Hand it over,” I shouted. “Now!”

  He looked around, embarrassed by the attention I’d drawn. “I can’t do that. I don’t have it anymore.”

  “Who has it?”

  “The casino.”

  “How much of it did you gamble?”

  He looked at me warily. “Listen—”

  “How much?!”

  “All of it.”

  I slapped him. “You crook. That was everything we had.” I began to hyperventilate. “That was Charlotte’s schooling. That’s what keeps us off the street. I can’t believe I trusted you.”

  More people were now watching us than the monitors.

  “Beth, you have to trust me. I would never do anything to hurt you.”

  I was crying. “Are you insane? You’ve hurt me more than anyone I’ve ever known. You’ve hurt me more than Marc.”

  “Beth, you don’t understand.” He reached out to me and I screamed.

  “Don’t you dare touch me! Don’t you ever touch me again. I don’t ever want to see you again.” I began backing away from him. I was hysterical. “You stay away from me and my daughter. If I ever see you again, I’ll call the police. Stay away from me!” I turned and ran out of the casino.

  I sobbed almost the entire way home. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to drive my car across the divider into every semi I passed, and if it weren’t for Charlotte, I might have. About thirty minutes from Salt Lake, just west of Tooele, I got pulled over by the highway patrol. I almost couldn’t stop crying long enough to give the police officer my information.

  The officer didn’t give me a ticket. When I was finally able to tell him what Matthew had done, he was sympathetic. “Are you sure you can make it home?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know you’re upset, but slow down and drive carefully. We don’t want to add an accident to this.”

  “Thank you, officer.”

  “You’re welcome, ma’am.” He handed me back my license. “You say it was the Tyson fight?”

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  “Well, let’s hope he bet on the long shot, because Tyson just got knocked out.”

  I got home around midnight. Charlotte was
still at Roxanne’s, leaving the place as dark and empty as I felt inside. It had snowed off and on all day and my home was covered with nearly a foot of new snow. My home? It wasn’t mine anymore. How could I have so casually lost it? How could I be so gullible? When he asked to be a cosignatory, his accessing my entire account had never even crossed my mind.

  I think I cried all night. I cried less about the money than the confirmed reality that my deepest suspicions were right—he never wanted me. I was nothing to him but a dope. I was unlovable.

  The next day I was still lying in bed at one in the afternoon when Jan brought Charlotte home.

  “Mrs. C?” she shouted. “We’re back.”

  I didn’t want Jan or Charlotte to see me as I was, unshowered, undressed, my face puffy and tear-streaked. “Thank you, Jan,” I said gruffly from behind the door. “Can I pay you tomorrow?”

  “No problem, Mrs. C., Charlotte, Molly and I had a great time, didn’t we, girl?”

  “Yep.”

  “I’ll see you later,” I heard Jan say. “Give me skin.”

  A moment later my door opened. My bedroom was a cave, the blinds drawn and the light off. “Hi, Mom,” Charlotte said. Through the darkness I could see she was holding her Molly doll and wearing an oversized raccoon-tail hat.

  My voice was strained and weak, but I tried to sound normal. “Did you have a good time, honey?”

  “Yep. Can I turn on the light?”

  “Let’s just leave it off.”

  “Are you sick?”

  “I have a headache,” I said.

  She walked to my side, close enough to see that I had been crying. “What’s wrong, Mom?”

  “Nothing.” Charlotte just stared at me. She knew better. “Nothing I can talk about.”

  “Is it Mr. Matthew?”

  I burst into tears. How could a six-year-old be so astute? Charlotte climbed into bed and snuggled up with me. “You can hold Molly.”

  “Thank you. I’d rather hold you.”

  “Mr. Matthew said he wouldn’t make you cry.”

  I ran my hands back over her cheeks, pulling back her long, blond hair. “He’s not who we thought he was.”

  “He’s not Mr. Matthew?”