Shawn used the mop handle to right himself as if it were a walking stick. Then he raised it over his head.
“Now let’s see how you like this, bitch!”
“Try it, you bastard!”
For a split second she almost wished that he would strike her with the confiscated weapon. Because then, she was quite sure, she would kill this man. She would find a way.
Shawn, however, seemed to be rethinking what he was about to do—and who knows, perhaps what he had already done. The mop handle hesitated in the air. Then he dropped it to the floor, placed it under his foot, and slid it behind him. The wooden handle rolled backward until it struck the far wall.
“Don’t even think about going after it,” he said.
Then she imagined for a moment that Shawn was going to strangle her with his bare hands. A single vein was standing out on his forehead. He glared at her with unmitigated, implacable hatred. Incredibly, Shawn considered himself to be the affronted party in this exchange.
“This isn’t over,” Donna said.
But it seemed to be over for the moment. They had reached a stalemate—Donna and this much larger man, who had taken her only available weapon.
“You know,” he said, suddenly smiling. “I ought to cram that mop handle up your ass. Or no—maybe you would enjoy that.”
His remark unleashed a fresh fury in her; and the blatant sexism in his words was not their most offensive aspect. By making light of the situation, Shawn was effectively stating that he considered Alyssa and her to be nothing more than mere trifles. He would get away with what he had just done. In the end she needed this cleaning contract; and there were no witnesses but the two of them.
She leapt at him, feeling ugly and unfeminine—determined to tear that smug smile off his face.
But this time he was ready for her. He effortlessly batted her aside with one hand. She collided with the wall and slumped down beside Alyssa.
Laying on the floor now, she looked up at him. She was not hurt—not seriously—though she would probably have a nasty bruise on her shoulder. Shawn was still smiling, and shaking his head now. He was looking down on her in more ways than one.
“Finish up,” Shawn said. “And get the hell out of here.”
Chapter 37
Donna and Alyssa left immediately. There were still tears in Alyssa’s eyes as they passed through the service entrance, where contractors and the company’s factory employees entered and exited.
Donna noticed that the guard who was usually on duty was absent. Strange—but maybe not so strange. Shawn might have had the foresight to summon him away from his desk, so that he would not take notice of the distraught fifteen-year-old girl who was shambling out, supported by her mother.
Once in the parking lot, though, Alyssa seemed to recover. “I can walk just fine by myself, Mom,” she said.
“I’m taking you to the hospital,” Donna said.
“And tell the doctors what?” Alyssa asked. “That I got my boobs felt?”
Donna felt her cheeks turn red.
“Did that man—”
“Mom. He didn't remove any of my clothes. And not any of his, either.”
She helped Alyssa into the van, and once again the girl protested. “There’s nothing wrong with me! Please!”
Alyssa had now climbed up into the van.
“We’re going to the police, then.”
Donna saw that her daughter’s cheeks were flushed red. “I wasn't raped, Mom! I am not going to the police. Please—just leave me alone for a few minutes.”
“Honey, I’ve got to drive you to the police—or home. Somewhere.”
“First you need to get the equipment that we left inside the building.”
This was an obvious attempt at distraction; but it was true nonetheless. This much had not occurred to Donna. Most of the equipment belonging to the Chalmers Cleaning Service was still inside the UP&S facility. She would need to retrieve it.
“I’m not leaving you here by yourself.”
“Mom, please! Do you really think he is going to come out here and try that again? After what you did to him? Look—over there: The security guard is right there in his office.”
Alyssa was correct: The security guard who had been so mysteriously absent a few minutes ago was now seated behind his desk inside his little glass-walled office. His name was Pete something-or-other. Shawn might be bold; but he would not be brazen enough to attack Alyssa in the full view of a witness who would be sure to intervene.
Then she heard the sound of a high-performance car roaring to life. She glanced up to see Shawn Myers speeding by in a silver Audi. He kept his gaze straight ahead as he drove by them.
“That was him, Mom. Now, please—just go in and get the equipment. I don't want to talk about this any more right now!”
Maybe Alyssa was right. Still—it seemed wrong to leave her here by herself. Even briefly.
On second thought, Donna decided that it might be a good idea to give Alyssa a few minutes by herself. But the truth was that she was the one who really needed a bit of time alone to think about this. During her married life, her husband Todd had been the one who had handled confrontations with outside forces, when it had come to that. Now that she was both father and mother combined, she would have to take on that role, too.
She wondered if she was up to the task. She recalled how Shawn Myers had swept her aside so easily, as if she was nothing.
“Wait here,” Donna finally told her daughter. “I’ll be right back.”
They arrived home less than half an hour later, though it seemed like much longer. When the van pulled into the driveway, Alyssa practically jumped out. The girl had said nothing the entire drive home, despite Donna’s repeated attempts to persuade her to talk.
Donna made sure that the cleaning van was locked, and then headed inside the house. She found Alyssa in her room, reading a novel: apparently one of the Twilight series. Why did so many young girls seem to take an interest in vampires, Donna wondered. There were real enough monsters made of human flesh and blood.
“Alyssa,” she said.
“What, Mom?” Alyssa looked up from her book; and what struck Donna as odd was how normal her daughter looked.
“Nothing,” Donna said. “I just wanted to see how you’re doing.”
“I’m fine,” Alyssa said brightly. “It was tense for a moment there, but I actually enjoyed watching you hit him with that mop handle.”
“We’ll talk later,” Donna said.
“Whatever.” Alyssa shrugged and returned her attention to her book.
My God, Donna thought. She can’t be over it already. If something like that had happened to me at her age, I would have been catatonic for days.
It was possible, though, that her daughter was more resilient than she had been at the same age. Kids nowadays grew up hearing terms like “hooking up,” “date rape,” etc. Sex was everywhere—on the Internet, in their conversations over lunch in the school cafeteria, and of course on TV. Even history itself was no longer the sanitized topic that Donna had known at the same age: When Alyssa was much younger, the mainstream news reports had been filled with accounts of Bill Clinton’s romps with a young White House intern, the intern’s semen-stained blue dress, and the president’s phallic cigars. Donna couldn't imagine a similar spectacle occurring during the Carter or Reagan days of her own youth.
So times had changed; and even the “good” kids were far from naïve. But what about Alyssa? Donna knew that her first duty was not to respond to her own anger. (That course would have led to her scheduling a rematch with Shawn Myers—armed this time with one of Todd’s old golf clubs rather than a wooden mop handle.) Nor should she make the situation more disruptive for Alyssa than it had to be. If Alyssa possessed the capacity to quickly put this unpleasantness behind her, would her daughter be served by dragging out the drama and the trauma?
She also had to consider the economic issues that were at stake—as tempting as it was to f
ocus only on the emotional ones. Their issue was with Shawn Myers—not TP Automotive, the corporation whose money was making it possible for her to keep the cleaning company for at least a few months longer. The checks from TP Automotive had formed most of the seed money for Alyssa’s college fund—which Donna had only recently begun adding to for the first time since Todd had left.
Shawn Myers had no right to take that from her—to take that from Alyssa.
She would continue her cleaning work at UP&S until someone on the company’s management team decided to fire her. And she didn’t think that they would do that. No, the company’s first impulse would be to try to smooth things over, to make the incident go away, pretend as if it had never happened. In fact, no one at the company was likely to even know about tonight’s confrontation, unless she brought it up.
But she couldn't simply keep silent. She could not simply take what Shawn Myers had dished out. Shawn Myers had laid his hands on Alyssa, with the apparent assumption that he could do whatever he wanted to her.
That realization steeled her resolve. She would make sure that Shawn Myers was punished. However, she would work within the system: She would go to the police.
The legal route might be difficult, though. Donna was no legal expert; but she knew that criminal cases required evidence. As Alyssa had said, the older man had done little more than feel her up; and there had been no other witnesses. Would that survive legal scrutiny, and the highly paid legal counterattack that Shawn Myers was sure to mount in his defense?
She didn't know; but that didn't matter. Shawn Myers had laid his hands on her daughter. Her daughter. That offense could not go unanswered.
Nor could Alyssa’s attacker make any claim to abject loneliness or sexual deprivation. (Not that either of these would have been valid excuses, anyway.) Myers was a reasonably good-looking man of roughly thirty-five. He had a high-paying job, an Audi that drew stares from a mile away. How much trouble would a man like that have in attracting legitimate female company?
Donna knew that Shawn would have plenty of takers in the dating pool. And it caused her no small amount of anguish to admit that superficially, at least, she had initially seen Shawn Myers as the sort of man she might like to meet herself—a rich, young savior who could take her away from cleaning factory facilities late at night. A man who could rescue her from the month-to-month struggle to balance the household budget, to figure out the bookkeeping entries for the cleaning business. A man who would make sure that she would never again be alone.
Not that a man who drove an Audi would be interested in an early middle-aged single mother who drove a chemical-smelling van. Those initial thoughts about Shawn Myers had occurred before she realized that he was a creep, a pervert, and possibly a psychopath. The fact that she had been so easily fooled by his external appearance made her even angrier. Had she really become that desperate since her husband had left her?
Walking into the bathroom, she looked at her face in the mirror, at the frown lines that had recently furrowed their way into the skin of her forehead.
What is going to become of us, Donna wondered. How am I going to handle this by myself?
She had never felt so completely alone.
Chapter 38
Alyssa hoped desperately that her mother would not hear her crying. As soon as Donna closed the bedroom door behind her, Alyssa put down the novel she had been reading—or rather pretending to read.
The tears came quickly, unexpectedly, a sudden break in the tension that had nearly overwhelmed her as she smiled and reassured her mother that yes, everything was all right—that what had happened in the hallway at UP&S had been no big deal. The fact was that it had been a very big deal.
Her skin still burned and crawled in the places where Shawn Myers had touched her against her will. He had groped her—suddenly and without any attempt to gain her consent, not that she would have granted it. No boy had ever touched her in those places. How could Shawn Myers have assumed that right unto himself?
She had been feeling more than a little vulnerable anyway, over the past year. Her father’s departure had finally sunk in. His absence was bad enough by itself; but it also meant that she and her mother were alone in the world. Alone. This had forced all sorts of new responsibilities onto Donna. Some of these Alyssa could not fully understand—but she could sense that her mother was in over her head.
And then there was the unfriendly environment of New Hastings High School, a place divided into a few reigning cliques, none of which Alyssa was likely to fit into. New Hastings High School was like a foreign country for her, an environment where she had to maintain her guard and keep others at a distance.
There was one boy at school whom she sort of liked: a tall, dark-haired boy named Noah. She and Noah were in three of the same classes. On several occasions she had caught Noah looking at her, sneaking glances during Mr. Markley’s biology class. She noticed that Noah often made excuses to talk to her. He was shy; and he would usually resort to some pretext, like asking her for a confirmation of the due date of a class assignment. These pretexts were transparent, and they delighted her despite their fundamental lameness. She had been wondering when Noah was going to make his move and actually ask her out.
Although Noah was attractive (at least in Alyssa’s opinion), he seemed to exist on the fringes of the main factions that dominated the social life at New Hastings High School. He was smart; he read books. Alyssa had figured that this factor might contribute to making them a good pair.
She would have been more than willing to let Noah kiss her. Yes, definitely. And as for anything else—well, they could take that as it came.
But even that much seemed to be in doubt now. The idea of someday kissing Noah had once been a pleasant daydream for her. Now when she thought about Noah, his face seemed to merge with that of Shawn Myers. After all, Noah might be her own age, but he was nearly a man; and at least one man had already violated her in a deep and personal way.
What did all of this mean? Would she ever be able to let her guard down? Would she ever be able to trust a boy? Trust Noah?
Alyssa plunged her face into her pillow, still feeling Shawn Myers’s handprints on the most intimate spots of her body.
Chapter 39
After slamming Shawn Myers against the wall that night, I had assumed that he would leave the cleaning woman’s daughter alone. Well, it turned out that I had been wrong about that—as I was wrong about a lot of things.
I knew something was up when I saw the police car pull into the front parking lot of the UP&S facility. It isn’t everyday that the police visit a private company. When they do, it generates a great deal of buzz in the workplace.
“Here comes a cop car,” someone in accounting said. Those five words caused about half of the office staff to turn away from their work and await the imminent spectacle. A few people even stood up from their desks and craned their necks in the direction of Route 128, the rural two-lane highway that ran in front of UP&S.
Lucy was seated in the desk adjacent to me, Alan’s empty desk forming a vast no-man’s land between us. Lucy was still inconsolable in the wake of Alan Ferguson’s sudden departure. Beth Fisk had told me about the awkward meeting she had held with Lucy on the day of the forced resignation. Beth informed me that Lucy took the news poorly—and her subsequent mood had corroborated Beth’s claim in this regard: The cop car was the sort of thing that would have sent Lucy into fits of speculation in the past. Now she simply glanced out the window, glanced back at me, and shrugged. She had completely retreated into her shell.
I knew that Lucy was still talking to Claire, though. That was more than a little ironic, considering the role that Claire had played in Alan’s termination. Lucy still trusted Claire, then. This also told me that Alan had not violated the terms of his separation agreement. If Lucy had attempted to contact him, her calls and emails had gone unanswered. Perhaps this was the primary reason for her moroseness: She felt that Alan had abandoned her.
“Maybe,” Lucy allowed.
I watched the New Hastings police car as it made a right turn into the UP&S parking lot. It had been approaching from the north along Route 128, and I could see it across the flat, empty field that stood between the road and the factory grounds. (When the company selected a desk for me, they at least gave me one that faced the window.)
The police cruiser did not have its lights on. This set the tone for the exchange that followed—an exchange at which I was not present, which I only later learned the details of.
The officer in the police cruiser was Dave Bruner, the police chief of New Hastings. Bruner was in his early fifties. He had a trim, compact build that suggested a certain scrappiness during his younger days. Bruner had been in his current job longer than any local employee of UP&S. He had been police chief of New Hastings for nearly twenty years.
Bruner did not walk directly into the office, as would have been his right as an officer of the law. Instead he stopped off at the guard shack, where he asked Scott Cole, the day shift security guard, if he could be connected to Kurt Myers via one of the internal company lines.
Scott Cole lifted the receiver of his own phone set and dialed Kurt Myers’s extension. “Right away, Dave.” The two men were well acquainted. Scott Cole had retired from one of the police agencies in the next county.
When Scott handed him the telephone, Dave took a deep breath before speaking. “Mr. Myers,” he said. “Police Chief Bruner here. I regret this, Mr. Myers; but I have some rather unpleasant business that I need to discuss with you this morning. I think you’d prefer that we meet privately, perhaps in one of your rear offices. Yes, Mr. Myers, I’ll be right there.”
“Thanks, Scott,” Bruner said, handing the phone back. He proceeded to walk toward the room Kurt Myers had indicated via a circuitous route, passing through the employees’ entrance and into the factory area. He had seen the office staff gawking as he approached in his cruiser; he didn't want to turn this visit into a public circus.
Termination Man: a novel Page 22
