A Tangled Web

by Leslie Rule

  “I left some things at your apartment that I need to get.”

  “Can’t it wait?”

  “I really need to get my things now.”

  The situation was exasperating. Liz was suddenly worried about a couple of T-shirts, a toothbrush, and some pans, items she had left at his place weeks ago and had gotten along fine without until now. “She wanted me to immediately drop what I was doing and go get her stuff. I told her I was on a date and to leave me alone. I went back to my date. We got done eating, hung out for a little longer talking, and then I invited her over to my place to play cards, watch TV, or whatever.

  “We met at my place, we went inside, and we didn’t even get to sit down before my phone was blowing up again, and the security doorbell was ringing. That was Liz trying to get my attention.” Dave could ignore his phone but not the obnoxious buzzer on the security door. It was loud and grating, and there was no way he and Cari could have a conversation with all that noise. His intercom was broken, so he had to go to the building’s vestibule, where Liz stood on the other side of the locked glass door. “I need my stuff!” she insisted. “I want it right now!”

  “You don’t need to come in right now!” Dave said. “I have a date in here.”

  Red faced, with tears drifting down her cheeks, she stood her ground. “I need my stuff right now! I’m coming in!”

  “I’ll bring it to you later.”

  “I want it now!”

  Defeated, Dave went back inside. “I’ve got a situation here,” he told Cari, explaining that a woman he’d been dating was nearly hysterical, refusing to leave. Later, he would remember what a good sport Cari had been about the whole thing. “She laughed it off. She said something like, ‘Okay! We’ve all been there! Call me when you get it straightened out!’ It didn’t bother her one bit.”

  He walked Cari to the security door where a pouting Liz waited. He didn’t bother to introduce the women, and they didn’t acknowledge each other as he played gatekeeper. He let Cari out, and Liz rushed in. “Liz comes into the apartment and gathers up her stuff, and we have kind of a heated conversation. She’s upset, and when she finally gets her stuff, she doesn’t want to leave anymore. She wants to talk about it, argue, cry. She wasn’t happy with me at the moment. I asked her to leave. I wasn’t up to dealing with her. I was very irritated. Here my first date with Cari is ruined, and now I got Liz upset! At that point I just wanted to shut my door and call it a night! Not long after that, maybe ten minutes or so, I called Cari. She was on her way to her house, and she invited me out to her place.”

  It was barely 9 P.M., and he did not hesitate to take her up on her invitation. He made the forty-minute drive to Macedonia and found her in her charming little house, smiling her beautiful smile at him as she brewed coffee. The two-bedroom house, built in 1870, had belonged to Cari’s grandparents, and they had sold it to her at a fraction of its value to keep it in the family. It was warm and welcoming, and Cari had decorated it in an eclectic style of antiques mixed with newer furniture. They had the place to themselves. Cari’s son, fourteen-year-old Maxwell, was staying the night with his grandparents in their nearby home.

  Cari was perfect! Easygoing, beautiful, funny, and brainy! “She was exceptionally smart,” he emphasizes, confessing that he thought she was far more intelligent than he was, and he found that to be very attractive. “She had her shit together. That was at least as attractive as her being a very pretty woman.”

  Cari handed Dave a steaming mug of coffee, and they sat down on the couch. This was the first time they had been alone together. The two minutes they had spent at his apartment didn’t count, because Liz had burst in on them almost immediately. There was no denying the powerful attraction between them. Within minutes they were kissing passionately. Before things went too far, Cari had something to tell him. She wasn’t looking to commit, she explained. She, too, had had relationships that had soured, and she wasn’t ready to be tied down again.

  In addition to her divorces, there had been serious romances that had fizzled. Though Cari didn’t mention it to Dave, in one case an ex had been reluctant to let go and had become so aggressive that she had been compelled to file a restraining order against him. She hadn’t seen Alec in at least two years, but his bad behavior had made her wary. The last thing she wanted was more drama, and she told Dave that she was open to having a physical relationship, but he shouldn’t read too much into that. She was not ready to give up her freedom.

  “I felt like I hit the jackpot,” he remembers. She wanted the same things he did, fun and excitement without expectations. After months of Liz badgering him, Cari’s freewheeling approach to love and life was a welcome relief. “It was all laughs and giggles from there.” He stayed the night, and though they were both busy over the next couple of weeks with their jobs and their kids, they made time for each other and saw each other about every other day. Their chemistry was incredible, and between dates he looked forward to seeing her again.

  Liz, however, would not let go. On November 1, at 7:38 A.M. she sent Dave a rambling email: I know you don’t know what will happen down the road, and you don’t really want to think about it. Are you asking for the long break, so you can forget everything? I’m going to give it to you, so don’t worry. I was just wondering, sorry. I guess I need closure. Do I forget everything about us? I’m going to date others, but if no one catches my eye, do I get to hope time makes the heart go fonder? Or do you want me to go and never come back? I’m not saying we will ever get back together. I’m just asking, do I go and never look back? I guess I hope even if you’re dating others that you’ll look back and smile when you think of me, that someday you’ll let me back in, no matter what it be, a friend or whatever.

  The email went on, with Liz urging him to tell her what he was thinking, apparently oblivious to the fact he had told her multiple times that he liked her, but she didn’t mean all that much to him and that she should never ever expect him to stop seeing other women or to commit to her. She ended the email telling him she hoped he had a great day and that she would understand if he wanted to stop talking to her. A few minutes later she wrote again, explaining that she hadn’t hugged him the last time she’d seen him because it would have felt like “a goodbye.” It was not as if Dave were sitting around fretting about why Liz had not hugged him. He was pretty annoyed with her after she’d barged in on his date, and all he had wanted that night was to get her out of his hair. He didn’t care, and frankly didn’t notice, that she hadn’t hugged him.

  Twenty-four hours later, at about eight in the morning, Liz sent Dave another email, sarcastic and abrupt. Apparently, she had not meant it when she said she would understand if he wanted to cease communicating with her. She was obviously offended that a full day had passed, and he had failed to reply to her heartfelt emails. Well thank you for no response to email, she wrote. I get the answer. That’s it. Later. While she was stewing because he was ignoring her emails, he probably hadn’t even read them. He didn’t check his email every day, and his focus was on Cari. She was spending a lot of time at his place, and he wished he’d fixed it up nicer. He was the first to admit his apartment was not exactly luxury quarters.

  He could not afford to buy new things after his split with Amy, and he had furnished his place with garage-sale finds and castoffs. “I had an ugly couch that Liz had given me. Supposedly from her grandparents’ house. It would be something you’d expect to find in your grandmother’s grandmother’s house. It had a wood frame and a floral pattern on horrible, scratchy corduroy.”

  Cari teased Dave about his ugly couch, and it became a standing joke between them. She had impeccable taste, and he had been impressed when he saw how beautifully she’d decorated her home. When he said that he wasn’t about to spend money on new furniture, she told him he could find great deals on used stuff on Craigslist, a free online website of classified ads. She made it her mission to find him a nice couch, and she sent him links to sofas she found, but they ended
up going to Goodwill where Cari spotted a loveseat in a soft shade of silver at a bargain price. Dave bought it, and they loaded it into her SUV. Back at his apartment, they rearranged his furniture to make room for Cari’s find.

  While Cari shared her expertise on interior design, he advised her on cars. They had been seeing each other for about a week when she found a car she thought her son would like. Max would begin driving soon, so she bought it for him, though it wasn’t yet roadworthy. “It was an old Volkswagen,” says Dave. “Some kind of fancy sports model. She wanted to fix it up, so she brought it to the shop. We did quite a bit of work on it.”

  He and Cari were having a great time together, but when Liz called to say she realized she hadn’t gotten everything she’d left at his place and was wondering about some pans she’d left behind, he offered to bring them to her. Later, he would not be able to recall the exact date but estimates he went to Liz’s home sometime between November 6 and 8. He had planned to just drop off the pans, but she had something else in mind. He was barely in the door when she brushed her body provocatively against his. “We ended up getting naked right there,” he recalls. “We had sex in the entryway. We didn’t even get past the couch.”

  Liz had managed to make him forget about his new girlfriend for the duration of the sex act. But she didn’t change his mind. He continued to see Cari. He didn’t mention his encounter with Liz to Cari. It wasn’t as if he were cheating on her, because they were not exclusive. Still, he wouldn’t have sought Liz out for sex. In his mind, his relationship with Liz “was over,” but when she threw herself at him, he figured it was “one last fling.” He admits that it was fun, but that his attitude about their parting could be summed up in a few short words: “Whatever. Goodbye. Here’re your pots and pans!”

  Liz saw things differently, though she tried not to seem desperate. On the afternoon of November 10, she emailed him and asked: If sometime, not saying right now, but if I felt like it, would you be comfortable as friends grabbing a drink or dinner or both sometime? Like I said, not sure when, kind of busy next few weeks, just seeing if you’d be comfortable with it.

  Even as she attempted to set up a date with Dave, Liz was trying to make it appear that it would happen only if she felt like it, and that she might be too busy for him. There would come a day when a prosecutor would ask Dave if he went out for that drink with Liz, and he would testify that he was certain that he had, and that while it was during the time that he had been seeing Cari, he did not recall the exact day.

  Only one person in Dave’s world was aware that something horrific was about to happen that November 2012. None of the others would realize until much, much later that the sequence of ordinary events would one day be scrutinized. He had no way of knowing he’d be asked to recollect times and dates of seemingly trivial things, or that they would hold any more significance than any other myriad occurrences in the thousands of mundane days of his life.

  Dave Kroupa would wish mightily that he could step back in time and change those events, that he could relive those days but do so with a superhuman ability to recognize evil.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  WHEN SAM CARTER ASKED to be her friend, Cari Farver wasn’t sure what to think. She didn’t recognize him, but he seemed to know her. He didn’t accost her on the street, but through a popular venue in cyberspace. Facebook. Sixty-eight percent of adult Americans use the online social network, according to the Pew Research Center, an established “Fact Tank,” that gathers data via polls and demographic research. While two thirds of us use Facebook, most of the remaining one-third have at least heard of it, though they are often confused by talk of “walls,” “likes,” “shares,” and “friending.”

  The walls on Facebook are simply pages that fill our computer screens when we click on prompters. Each Facebook user has their own wall where they can post things such as photographs, opinions, jokes, and videos. Facebook friends are users whose pages connect to each other. They become friends when one user sends another a “friend request,” and it’s accepted, but requests can also be rejected. Most Facebook friendships stem from relationships outside of the cyberworld. They know each other most often because they are family, real-life friends or have met in school or at jobs, past or present, though many connect on the site because they are on the friends’ list of mutual Facebook friends.

  “Likes” are thumbs up icons that users click on to indicate they approve of a post. “Shares” are posts that friends copy and add to their own Facebook walls by clicking the share icon. They can also type comments beneath their friends’ posts and send each other private messages.

  While some users rarely log on, others spend hours interacting each day, sometimes so compulsively they post photographs of their meals. Facebook can be a friendly place where cute pet photos receive many “likes” and kind comments. It can also be an aggravating place where offensive or political posts incite verbal wars with users snarking at each other in the comments section. This often results in “unfriending.”

  Facebook, which boasted a billion active users in the fall of 2012, can be a convenient place for people to connect with each other, but it can also be dangerous. Scammers go phishing there, taking on fake identities in order to steal, or in some cases molest or kill. While no one can be physically harmed in cyberspace, criminals lie in wait there, constantly contriving new ways to lure victims out into the real world where they can prey upon them.

  Did Cari feel a ripple of warning when Sam requested her friendship? There was nothing overtly sinister about him. His photo showed an attractive fortyish guy with thick black hair. He wore a dark suit with a bright red tie, and he leaned toward the camera with a friendly smile of straight, white teeth. He appeared respectable enough, but it was odd that his profile said he was from Cari’s hometown. Macedonia had a population of just 240, and she knew everyone there, but she didn’t recognize him. Odder still was the fact he spelled the name of his alleged hometown wrong. Mecedonia with an “e,” rather than Macedonia with an “a.”

  Most people would have hit the ignore button and rejected the guy. Cari, however, never wanted to hurt anyone’s feelings. She glanced at Sam’s wall and saw that he’d posted several photographs of familiar places in Macedonia. She didn’t reject Sam’s friend request but didn’t accept it either. What if she did know Sam, maybe from a forgotten encounter years earlier? She would give him a chance to refresh her memory rather than reject him outright. Early in the morning on November 13, she sent him private message. Do I know you? She had spent the night with Dave.

  In fact, she was spending several days with him because she was in the midst of a time-consuming project at work. West Corporation was so close to Dave’s apartment that Cari could have walked there if she had chosen to. By skipping the commute to and from Macedonia, she was able to shave nearly two hours off her day. Meanwhile Maxwell was happy to stay with his grandmother.

  Cari’s mom and stepfather, Nancy and Mark Raney, also lived in Macedonia. They were very close to Max and promised Cari they’d make sure he got to school. She was relieved to know he was in good hands but a little bit frustrated that the work project demanded such long hours because she would have to miss his football game that week.

  Max was an active kid, and his mother not only attended all of his football games, she was also there for his track tournaments, basketball and baseball games. Her supervisor had assured her she wouldn’t miss too many games. The hours would let up when the project was completed.

  At least it had worked out well that Dave lived close to West Corp and had invited her to stay with him. The relationship was still fresh and exciting, and in the two weeks since their first date, they’d spent a lot of hours together and hadn’t had a disagreement. Though Dave had yet to find flaws in Cari, he realized people are on their best behavior at the start of relationships. Obviously, she was brilliant and gorgeous, and he could tell by the way her eyes shined when she spoke about her son that she was a dedicated mom.
But only the passage of time can reveal true character.

  If he had known Cari better, he would have been even more impressed. She was tenderhearted and loyal, and one of her most admirable traits was her tolerance for all types of people, no matter how strange their idiosyncrasies. A defender of the underdog from the time she was a little girl, she stood up to bullies on the playground when they picked on other kids.

  Cari’s mom recalls that as a child she was naturally fastidious and always kept her room neat, but she never criticized others’ sloppiness. When Cari was eleven years old and babysitting for a family they didn’t know well, “She called me and said, ‘Mom, there’s not much to eat here, and the kids are hungry!’”

  Nancy rushed over with cookies for the children, and when she walked into the house, she was shocked. It was the filthiest home she had ever seen. “I walked into the place, and it was just awful,” she says, remembering the garbage piled up in the corners and the sink stacked high with dirty dishes.

  Cari must have noticed the mess, but she did not say one word about it to her mother. She was too nice of a girl to speak badly about anyone, even when they were out of earshot. Almost anyone else would have made a snide comment, but not Cari. She didn’t say mean things about people because she thought kindly of everyone. Her nonjudgmental attitude was one of the things that made her many friends love her so much. They knew they could tell her anything, and she wouldn’t criticize them or raise her eyebrows. She listened, and she offered advice only if they asked for it.