by Mary Monroe
Libby and Marshall had the longest and most vicious tongues of all. In one of Libby’s newspaper interviews, she made Lola sound like the stepsister from hell. “She had the temperament of a shark, so I kept my distance. I was afraid of her. When my mama married her daddy, Lola was still in middle school, but she was already as loose as a goose.” She told another reporter, “Lola was such a sex addict, she started throwing herself at my husband when she was a teenager, but I put her in her place.” Libby never mentioned that Jeffrey had left her because he found out she had cheated on him. Marshall, one of the homeliest men in town, even claimed that Lola had repeatedly come on to him. “I didn’t like to be alone with my stepsister because she made me nervous. She was too affectionate, if you know what I mean.” Those two jackasses’ lies, delusions, and exaggerations didn’t faze Lola, but it pissed me off. I prayed that I would never run into those two scumbags in public, because I was afraid of what I would say, or do, to them.
In one newspaper article, a reporter implied that Calvin’s experience in the war in Afghanistan may have had something to do with his breakdown. Another referred to him as a bad seed who’d had evil festering in him from the day he was born. I didn’t buy that, and neither did Lola. From what we’d been able to determine from all the things we’d read about Calvin’s background, he had been a model citizen until the night he killed his wife. His worst known “crime” was a speeding ticket when he was seventeen. The only bad seeds I knew of were Libby and Marshall. I honestly believed that their evil ways started when they were still in Bertha’s womb. Other people felt the same way. At the end of the day, Calvin had still been a monster and got what he deserved. And I knew that someday Libby and Marshall would also get theirs.
Everybody felt sorry for Sylvia Bruce, Calvin’s clueless fiancée. Well, not everybody. When she appeared on a local live TV talk show, one mean-spirited female audience member insisted that Sylvia had to know something about Calvin’s murderous activities. Sylvia emphatically denied it, but the woman wouldn’t let up until the host stepped in. By then it was too late. Within seconds, Sylvia had a complete meltdown. She started crying and spewing gibberish, and had to be helped off the stage.
Calvin’s family refused to talk to the press, but a man named Robert, a neighbor who also claimed to be one of his closest friends, couldn’t stop talking. Almost everything that came out of his mouth was negative. “I always knew something wasn’t right about my homeboy. When his wife went missing, he didn’t seem the least bit concerned. And another thing, he was real particular about who he let in his garage. One time when I asked if I could store some frozen goods in that big-ass freezer he had in there, he got nervous and told me some cock-and-bull story about the freezer being on the blink. He never let me near his garage again.”
Pictures of Calvin, the one that appeared in his high school yearbook and one of him in his marine dress blues, were splashed all over the newspapers, right above the ones of the three dead women he’d hidden in his freezer.
When the investigators searched his house, they found a box in his attic that contained IDs and other personal items he had collected from some of his victims. These items eventually helped identify most of the murdered women. I was glad that the families finally knew what had happened to their loved ones.
After I left Mama’s house and went back home, I talked Lola into staying with me until the tenant had vacated the apartment Jeffrey’s father was going to let her have. She cried off and on every one of those days. One night she ran out of the guest room screaming and jumped into bed with me. It took an hour to calm her down. “I still can’t believe that the only reason Calvin was interested in me was because he wanted to kill me and put my body in his freezer. What did I ever do to deserve something that awful?” she sobbed.
I was still just as rattled as she was, but I was better at hiding it. I cried in private. “The only thing you did was meet the wrong man,” I told her, as I handed her a shot glass filled with vodka that I had set on my nightstand a few minutes earlier. “Drink this and go back to bed.”
One mighty swallow was all it took for Lola to empty the glass. After a loud belch, she continued. “Thanks for letting me stay with you. I’m sorry I almost got you killed. I wish you hadn’t been there.”
I rolled my neck and eyes at the same time. “Shut your mouth! What’s wrong with you, girl?” I scolded. “Be thankful that you’re still alive only because I was with you.”
“I am. I really am thankful to be alive.” A frightened look suddenly crossed Lola’s face. “What if I had married him and then found out what he was planning to do?”
“Don’t even think about that,” I said with a shudder. We remained silent for a few moments.
There was a gleam in her eyes that I hadn’t seen since the last time she fantasized about marrying Calvin. I couldn’t wait to hear what she was going to say next. In a deadpan tone she told me, “When you buy some more pepper spray, get a can for me. With people like Libby and Marshall, not to mention all the potential Calvins, running around loose, I may need it.”
“I’ll pick up several cans,” I said.
Epilogue
Lola
Two years later
SOME PEOPLE WERE STILL TALKING ABOUT THE NIGHTMARE THAT Joan and I had survived. Last Saturday afternoon, a middle-aged white woman I’d never met stopped me on the street. “You look like one of the women that Look-Alike Killer almost killed a couple of years ago,” she told me, giving me a sympathetic look.
“I know. I hear that all the time,” I replied.
“You’re lucky the cops stopped him from killing women who looked like the wife he’d murdered, because you look just like her. Ted Bundy also went after women who resembled a girlfriend who’d dumped him. A friend of mine was one of his victims. She and I looked a little like the girl who had driven him to kill.” The woman’s voice cracked, and tears pooled in her tired blue eyes. “I was supposed to hang out with her the day Bundy got her, but I bumped into a boy I liked, so I decided to hang out with him instead. If I’d met up with my friend, we’d both be dead. You and I were lucky, huh?”
“We sure were, ma’am,” I muttered. The woman gave me a hug. It pleased me to know that people who didn’t even know me cared about me.
And a lot of people cared about me.
Last year Elbert proposed again and I accepted. All those months that I’d wasted fantasizing about Calvin, my true soul mate had been right under my nose the whole time! I didn’t know what true love was until I realized what a good man Elbert was. It didn’t take long for me to fall head over heels in love with him.
The day after we returned from our two-week honeymoon in Tahiti, Joan called me and asked if he was good in bed. “He’s the best lover I’ve ever had. We can’t keep our hands off each other. If we had slept together before I got caught up in that sex club, I would never have joined. But I’m glad Elbert had enough respect for himself, and me, to stick to his principles. He is every woman’s dream.”
“Do you still think about Calvin?”
“Only when the media mentions him or when somebody else brings up his name. The night before he came to kill me, I had had a very nice dream about the lavish wedding we were going to have. I had been having nice dreams about him almost every other night for several weeks before that. I haven’t dreamt about him since.”
* * *
Elbert purchased a beautiful house for us near the meat market he managed. Two weeks after we exchanged vows, I quit my job at Cottright’s and went to work for Elbert, and not just because he made me his head cashier and doubled my salary. I wanted to work for him so we could spend as much time together as pos-sible.
Our son, David, will be three months old in two days, so we must have created him on our wedding night, the very first time we made love. Unfortunately, Elbert’s mother didn’t live long enough to see us get married. Six months after the Calvin incident, she and her new husband died in an automobile accident.
<
br /> Despite the massive grief I’d endured and the dangerous choices I’d made, I finally had everything I ever wanted.
Joan didn’t date again until a year after her divorce. She started a relationship with the son of one of her stepfather’s friends, a nice, quiet man who treated her like a queen. She sold the condo and bought a smaller, much less expensive one located in the same neighborhood where we had grown up. She is very happy now and anxious to remarry and have more children.
Ironically, Grace deserted Reed less than a year after he married her for a man closer to her own age. Grace received a huge settlement and full custody of the daughter she had with Reed. The last time I caught a glimpse of him walking down the street, he looked like a man who had lost his will to live. And maybe he had. He had done enough to bring it about.
Joan and I eventually stopped mentioning the sex club and Calvin, but I thought about each one from time to time. One day last year, I got lost trying to find a new discount store. I ended up on the same street where I’d almost lost my life. I slowed down as I drove past the yellow house. A couple in their thirties occupied a glider on the front porch. There was a fussy toddler in the woman’s arms. A teenage boy was in the driveway bouncing a basketball. I was pleased to see that the house had new tenants, because it was a nice place. I probably would have stayed in it for a long time if it hadn’t been for Calvin. I didn’t know why, but after that night I no longer feared anything yellow. A few months ago while I was shopping in one of my favorite boutiques, I saw a skirt with a matching jacket that I just had to have, but the only one in my size was yellow. I purchased it, and when Elbert saw me in it, his jaw dropped and he couldn’t stop staring. “That color makes you look even more beautiful. If I had better legs I’d get the same outfit for myself.” I promptly added several more yellow pieces to my wardrobe. Joan was pleased to hear that I had gotten over my fear. She had several yellow frocks in her closet that she’d outgrown, and when she offered them to me, I accepted every single one. I wore the color so often, she told me that I had begun to remind her of a sunflower, which was my favorite flower. It was one of the nicest compliments I’d ever received.
After Jeffrey divorced Libby, he joined Match.com and met the woman he married last month. “Lola, if things don’t work out with Elbert, check out a few dating sites. The Internet is the best place to find a suitable mate these days. Food courts, like the one where you met Calvin, are as bad as bars. They attract a lot of beasts,” he told me. Even though millions of people had positive experiences with Internet dating, I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that that was where I’d met my “beast.” He had always held me in such high regard, I hoped that he would never find out I’d already tried online dating, but only to have casual sex. Realistically, I knew I couldn’t keep my dirty little secret forever, especially from my husband.
Last week when I heard that a very famous true-crime author was planning to write a book about the incident, with or without cooperation from Joan and me, I panicked. I had read a lot of true-crime books, so I knew that those authors found all kinds of ways to get the information they needed. Sometimes they even paid their sources. Most of the greedy people I knew would sing like a Christmas choir for enough money. I didn’t want Elbert to read about my misadventures; I wanted him to hear it directly from me. I told him while we were having dinner yesterday, and I left no stone unturned. It took more than an hour to tell him everything, and the whole time he remained silent.
“Sweet Jesus,” he murmured when I stopped talking. With a blank expression he reached for another pork chop and cut it in half before he spoke again. “It’d take an eggbeater to beat a story like that.” He took a deep breath and then he looked at me with his eyes glistening. “Baby, whatever you did before I married you is your business.”
“You mean you don’t care that I was a . . . a . . . that kind of woman?” I asked, holding my breath.
“All I care about is the kind of woman you are now. You made one hell of a bad choice, and you paid a very high price for it. We all do at some point in time. I sure did.”
“Huh? What did you do?”
Elbert took another deep breath and continued. “I cheated on my first wife with her best friend.”
If he had told me that he had once been a hit man for the mob, I couldn’t have been more flabbergasted. “You did?” I was so taken aback I almost fell out of my seat. “But I didn’t know—”
Elbert dropped the pork chop onto his plate and held up his hand. “A lot of people didn’t know me that well back then. When I came home from the military, and even before I went in, my two best friends were cocaine and alcohol.” He paused and gave me a pensive look. “And I loved the ladies.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me—”
He immediately cut me off by snapping his fingers. “Let me finish. Anyway, I lost my wife, I disappointed my mother, and I lost respect for myself. It took a drug overdose, and what I believe to this day was a near-death experience, for me to come to my senses. When I got out of rehab, I promised God, my mother, myself, and everybody else who cared about me that I would turn my life around. And I did. That’s why I don’t drink, do drugs, sleep around, or do any of the things most people our age are doing in three shifts. And I’ve been very happy ever since.”
“But I never heard anything about you doing drugs, drinking, or chasing women while you were still married! You had me, Bertha, and everybody else in town fooled!”
Elbert nodded. “I sure did. I was just as sly and deceitful as you and Joan were. I had no idea what you were doing, and I’m not about to judge you. Everything you just told me will stay with me.” He took my hand in his and gazed into my eyes. “The man you married is not the one he used to be. The woman I married is not the one she used to be. Let’s leave it at that.”
And we did.
Joan eventually told her family everything. After they had talked about her like a dog and called her a nasty buzzard, a shameless hussy, and a Jezebel (and a few other choice names that she was too embarrassed to tell me), they forgave her. It didn’t even faze her son. All Junior cared about was that his mother was happier than she’d been in years. Joan decided not to tell Reed about her former secret life. She was still so angry with him, she wanted him to find out when that author published his book. “I want him to know what all I was up to when we were still married. And I want him to see it in print. It’ll have a bigger impact and will last longer than it would if I told him,” she told me with a snicker. I thought she was being cruel, but if Reed didn’t deserve to be treated cruelly, who did?
One of the best things that happened in the past two years was that Libby and Marshall finally got a visit from karma and it made up for lost time. According to Kandy’s House of Beauty grapevine and other reliable sources, six months after Libby’s divorce, she met a “between jobs” musician in the same casino where she had lost a huge portion of her inheritance. He was handsome and so slick, within a month he had sweet-talked her into letting him move into the townhouse she had purchased. Kevin hated his mother’s new lover, so he moved in with Jeffrey, but Libby was so hopelessly in love, all she cared about was pleasing her new man. She gave him power of attorney, so he handled all of her finances. Four months into the relationship, she returned home from an all-day shopping spree and got the shock of her life: Her sweetie had packed up and disappeared. He had helped himself to the large collection of expensive jewelry she had purchased with Bertha’s money, a set of heirloom silverware Bertha’s family had owned for three generations, and all of the money she had left. To add insult to injury, he’d also taken a large ceramic piggy bank she had been putting loose change into since she was twelve.
Libby’s lover had also maxed out all of her credit cards and left her thousands of dollars in debt. She was so furious, she approached a couple of local thugs and asked them to find her a hit man who’d be willing to do a job on credit. They laughed in her face. It wouldn’t have done any good if she had fo
und a contract killer, because the man she had trusted with everything she owned had been using an alias. None of his associates even knew his real name or where to find him.
Creditors stalked Libby so aggressively she had to file for bankruptcy. She had no marketable skills or work experience, so she had settled for a housekeeping position in the same sleazy motel I had moved into when she evicted me. Her salary was so low she couldn’t make the payments on her new Jaguar, so the repo men paid her a visit. A week later, the bank foreclosed on the townhouse she’d purchased and she had to move in with Marshall. He had also made a mess of his life, so his situation was almost as bleak as hers. He had squandered most of his inheritance on two luxury cars, high-end prostitutes, bad investments, and numerous trips to the casinos in Vegas and Reno.
Shortly after Libby moved in with Marshall and started throwing her weight around, his meek, long-suffering wife threw in the towel, moved back in with her mother, and immediately filed for a divorce. The icing on the cake was, all the years Marshall had been fooling around with other women, his wife had had a lover. She married him four months ago. I didn’t like to gloat, but when it came to Libby and Marshall, I made an exception.
Last but not least, Shirelle Odom, the brazen mistress my daddy had moved into our house when I was in middle school, was back in my life. I still thought of her as “my other mother.” Three days ago, she waltzed into the store five minutes before the end of my shift. I was glad she was the last customer in my line so we were able to chat for a few minutes.
“Oh my God,” I said hoarsely when she placed the new issue of People magazine and a bottle of wine on the counter. Except for a few wrinkles on her face and about thirty extra pounds, she looked as glamorous as ever. Elbert was helping another customer two counters over, so I lowered my voice. He knew about Shirelle and Daddy, and he was one of the few people who had never said a mean word about her. But I still didn’t want to talk loud enough for him to hear, because I had no idea what Shirelle was going to say. “What a surprise to see you again!”
