by Steve Richer
Chapter 26
Tom watched his wife leave. Standing in the shade of the garage, he wondered if she was even going to come back.
She looked so lonely, walking to her Ford Focus. So vulnerable.
She pulled the door shut softly, as if hoping not to draw attention. Not wanting confrontation. More confrontation.
She sat quietly inside for a long time. She looked as if she had her arms folded across her chest, hugging herself, but the dim lighting made it hard to see. Was she crying?
He should go to her, but his feet were rooted to the spot.
The engine fired and the lights came on, not shining directly at him but still dazzling. Had she seen him? He didn’t know, but the car started to pull away regardless. Moments later she was gone.
He was shivering. He put it down to the cold wind, nothing more. He went back inside.
He couldn’t believe she’d actually said it out loud. The accusation. That he was sleeping with a sixteen-year-old.
Did she realize how offensive that was? How much it hurt? That would be so many levels of wrong.
He didn’t know if she actually believed it, or was doing it for some kind of effect. To shock him out of his own jealous behavior, perhaps.
Either way it hurt like a punch to the gut.
And one of the reasons it particularly hurt was how close it came to the truth.
Not Marissa Sigley, but… Just how close had he come to giving in to Libbie’s advances?
He’d been angry. Frustrated. He’d found himself in that place where, when you believe you’ve lost everything, what more is there left to lose?
He closed his eyes and leaned back against the door, pushing it shut against the wind.
He’d kissed her.
Or she’d kissed him.
The semantics didn’t matter. They’d kissed.
He could still feel that ethereal touch of her lips against his. The tightness of his shirt where her closed fist had bunched it against his chest so she could hold him close, pull him closer.
It had lasted a fraction of a second. So brief, it had barely even happened.
But it had.
They’d kissed.
He’d felt that surge in his abdomen. The rush of his heart. His body responding.
And in that fraction of a second, that what the hell? reaction. That What have I got to lose anymore?
“Come on, Thomas Granger!” The words came out in a hiss.
If he’d been able to slap himself he would have. He needed to pull himself together.
What mattered most? That he’d almost given in, or that he hadn’t? That he’d seen what mattered and had resisted?
Maybe he was kidding himself, but he clung to that thought.
He loved Alice, damn it! Everything else was noise. He loved her.
He looked around, saw that damned figurine on the floor. For a moment, all his resentment focused on the thing, and he almost swept it up and put it in the trash. Then the OCD in him took over and he gathered it up, the figurine and the fragment that had chipped off the arm.
Maybe it was a metaphor. On closer inspection, the small porcelain figure looked old and worn, as if it had seen better days. But it had survived. Even with that fragment chipped off the arm, it could still be fixed. Made just as good as new, in fact. Just like their marriage. Surviving. Enduring. Fixable.
He went through to the kitchen and rummaged in the utility drawer where they kept scissors, string, glue, and old keys that no longer had a lock to fit.
He sat on a bar stool at the kitchen counter where the light was good and peered at the figurine.
The broken fragment was a near-perfect fit, apart from a flake of porcelain that was missing from near the shoulder.
Odd, though, the figurine appeared to have been repainted. A brown figure with a white jersey. The shirt even bore what looked remarkably like a Brewers logo. Had Libbie herself repainted the figurine to look like a Brewers mascot, or had she simply seen the shirt and thought of him?
Underneath the white, the figure of the smiling bear had originally been wearing orange.
Weird. He’d thought the figure was oddly familiar when Libbie had given it to him, but he’d been unable to place it. But now… That orange jersey.
Instead of gluing the fragment back into place, he went back through the house and upstairs to the spare room he used as an office.
A couple of minutes on Google was enough to confirm his suspicions.
The bear was a ghost from his youth, the mascot from the summer camp he’d been to in his teens.
Surely, this was some kind of freakish coincidence? Maybe an orange-jerseyed bear was a commonly used mascot for summer camps, not just the one he’d attended. There could be a million of these things in circulation.
And the paint job? Well, even Tom had taken it for a piece of Brewers merchandise when he’d first seen it. Libbie must have seen him in his team jersey and picked it for that reason.
What other explanation could there be?
~ ~ ~ ~
“I’m sorry.”
They both said it at the same time, as soon as Alice stepped into the house.
Their eyes met, they hesitated, as if both still uncertain of how to move on from this shaky territory, and then they stepped toward each other and were suddenly in each other’s arms.
“I’m sorry, I really am.”
“I was stupid. Thoughtless.”
“I was angry. Not at you, but at… everything.”
He held her, felt her heart pounding against his chest. Breathed in the scent of her hair as he pressed his face down against the crown of her head.
“How did we ever let it get that way?”
She tilted her face up and he dipped his down and they kissed, a kiss they’d shared a million times before but rarely one that carried as much meaning as this one did.
He brushed her tears away with the tip of one finger.
“I think I messed up,” Alice told him. “Everything. Us. This. Work.”
“We’re a team, sweetie. We both messed up.” A wink. A smile.
She laughed, briefly.
“We’re good,” he told her. “Whatever goes wrong, whatever we have to go through, we still have us.” Saying it out loud, he even believed it.
They moved through to the kitchen and sat on bar stools swiveled to face each other.
“What’s happening at work?”
Alice looked away as soon as he said this, and he knew it was bad.
“Michael Tuckett,” she said, her voice so small he had to strain to hear. “He’s taken the Mapleview account from me. Says I’ve made too many mistakes. I’m too big a risk factor. He’s given it to Lloyd and Jilly.”
Tom snorted. “Of course he has.”
“He’s right. I’ve been screwing up. I processed a whole batch of figures to include in the pitch and then somehow left them out. I still don’t know how I did it.”
Tom said nothing. She’d been showing the strain recently. Irritable and distracted. Had that transferred into her work? It wouldn’t help anything for him to say that out loud, however.
“So what’s the plan?” He reached out and squeezed her hand. Alice always had a plan, whatever went wrong.
“I almost finished the pitch anyway,” she told him.
“So you might as well do so.” Finishing her thought, just as they always did for each other.
She smiled. “Maybe he’ll see he was too quick to take it off me.”
“Maybe.”
She clearly believed it about as much as he did.
Now, she reached across to where he’d left the broken figurine. “Sorry about that,” she said. “Is it fixable?”
“A bit of glue, that’s all it needs. But do you want to know the strangest thing?”
She said nothing, just raised her eyebrows, waiting for him to go on.
He took the figurine off her and held it to the light. “See here? Where the top layer of white has flaked away?”
/> She studied it, but didn’t seem to understand.
“Orange?”
“Remember summer camp?”
While Tom had been a regular at summer camp through his teens, Alice had only gone a couple of times, so maybe the memories were less imprinted.
“The mascot,” he prompted her.
At last, he saw the recognition in her eyes.
“I wasn’t sure, so I checked on Google Images. There’s no mistaking it. That’s our summer camp mascot.”
“But…”
“I know, right? It’s almost certainly some freaky kind of coincidence. After all, it was painted in the same colors as my favorite Brewers shirt.”
“But underneath…”
Not only could they finish each other’s sentences, they could read the other’s expressions, too, and Tom knew when Alice’s mind was racing.
As it was now.
“What is it, sweetie? What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” his wife said slowly, as if measuring her words out one by one. “But…”
He waited. Gave her time to gather her thoughts before continuing.
“I’ve been talking to Walter.”
He felt a surge of the old jealousy but clamped down on it. Of course she’d been talking to Walter. He was a colleague. A friend. Tom shouldn’t resent that she had friends! He knew that, just as he knew that those jealous feelings were symptoms, signs of a problem and something to be fixed.
“About…?”
“Libbie.”
He waited for her to go on. He could tell this wasn’t going to be good.
“I was getting a little… uncomfortable about her. Some of the things she said and did. Walter offered to do some digging.”
“What did he find?”
“Nothing. That’s the problem. He should have found something. But her digital footprint is almost non-existent. He said it was like those fake Facebook profiles that try to friend you. She has an online presence, but it’s only superficial. No substance to it.”
“There must be something.”
Alice was shaking her head. “No, that’s the thing. Think about it. Just how much do we know about her? Go on, list them now.”
“She’s a photographer.”
“With almost no online presence, and what she has is a gesture at best.”
“She came here from Manhattan.”
“How many million people live in New York? What do we specifically know that confirms that, or gives us any more detail?”
“She…” He was struggling already. “She went to NYU, didn’t she? Some kind of IT course.”
“That doesn’t exist. Or at least, it only exists as a recent course at NYU Abu Dhabi!”
“Abu Dhabi?” he repeated blankly. “That’s impossible, I checked her references.”
Alice shrugged. “How easy is it to buy fake references? I don’t know. I’m not saying she did, just that we don’t know she didn’t.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying Libbie Burchett, our previously perfect tenant, doesn’t seem to add up.”
“But… why?”
Neither of them had an answer for that.
“What can we do?” Tom asked, instead.
“I’d hate to over-react,” said Alice hesitantly.
“But if you think about it, everything started to go sideways when she stepped into our lives, didn’t it? Even if there’s nothing malicious going on, it’s as if she’s some kind of magnet for catastrophe.”
“Rusty. Marissa. All the things going wrong at work.”
“Us turning on each other.”
“Or being turned on each other.”
It was true. How much had all of Libbie’s little digs and observations mounted up to feed the growing turmoil?
“We should ask her to leave,” said Tom. “She’s like a bad-luck charm.”
“Or a voodoo doll.”
Maybe that wasn’t quite the right analogy, but he knew what she meant.
“She wouldn’t go, though, would she? She’d want to know why, and what would we tell her anyway?”
“The truth,” said Alice. “She’s… Well, I think she’s poison. Poison in the groundwater, contaminating everything she touches. We have to flush her out, Tom. The more I think about it the more sure I become.”
He squeezed her hand.
“We will, sweetie. We will. It might take time though.”
They both had a lot of professional experience in real estate and they knew that any legal move to evict their tenant might be a protracted affair.
“We should talk to someone as soon as possible, start things moving.”
“And in the meantime, avoid her as much as possible.”
Poison. That was as good a word for Libbie Burchett as any Tom had come up with.
And all you can hope to do with poison is flush it out of the system.
~ ~ ~ ~
Dr. Holt and his team of therapists had trained Libbie well.
That initial rush of anger. The sheer rage that made you want to lash out, destroy something. Someone.
They’d taught her how to recognize it the moment it was triggered. How to clamp down on it. Hold it in. Even when the provocation was at its greatest.
Like when someone said you were poison.
A bad luck charm.
When someone said they wanted to throw you out on the street.
She sat in the kitchen of the shabby, badly decorated apartment they so generously let her rent. The only light came from a lamp on the work surface. Shining down onto the scrapbook before her.
The only movement, the repetitive back and forward of one hand, clutching a pair of scissors that were inverted so the tip of the blade scratched, scratched, scratched on what had been the face of a man in a white Brewers jersey.
How dare they!
She fought to control the anger, the rush of thoughts.
So they’d seen through her. They knew she wasn’t who or what she claimed. But they’d as much as admitted there was nothing they could do about it. She still had time, even if she had to speed up her timetable a little.
Still had time to destroy the oh-so-perfect Grangers.
For now, though, she contented herself with the scratch, scratch, scratch obliteration of Tom Granger’s face in the scrapbook before her.
Chapter 27
Walter was an addict. If there was a Gamers Anonymous, he’d be there every week, trying to earn those medals, following whatever twelve-steps plan they had, all in the hopes of leveling up.
But no. Who was he kidding? That would mean he wanted to actually give up his addiction, and here he was, back in the office at the crack of dawn, having left some time after midnight.
The network connection here was fast, better than anything he might eventually get at home. And there was something about gaming in an office environment… something vaguely illicit.
He took his kicks where he could.
He knew he didn’t have the looks or the personality. He didn’t have the confidence. He was never going to be the star of the show. He was never the guy who got the girl.
Particularly a girl like Alice.
Of course he had a thing for Alice. He always had. Sure, they joked about those couple of dates, about their one kiss. He had the whole line about it being like dating your sister.
They were friends. He’d settled for that long ago.
Nothing creepy about it. Nothing stalkerish.
Walter was old school. He knew the rules. Knew the boundaries. Friendship with Alice was just about the best thing in his life, and he was good with that. That and gaming.
So here he was, first thing in the morning before anyone else had stirred, back in the office.
SwelterificJones, swinging back into action.
He sat back down at his desk with a double espresso. Another addiction.
The conversation with Alice last night had disturbed him. Yes, he’d done his research, digging in
to the online presence—or lack of presence—of her perfect tenant. But he’d thought it was simply a case of someone guarding their privacy.
It hadn’t really shocked him until he saw Alice’s reaction. Until he realized how his contribution was just one piece of a puzzle that seemed to be adding up to something far more disturbing.
Who was Libbie Burchett? And why had she infiltrated herself into Tom and Alice’s life?
Was she a long-forgotten girlfriend with a grudge? Was she running some kind of elaborate scam? He couldn’t work it out.
So now, instead of feeding his gaming habit, he opened up the folder he’d saved. The folder called Perfect Tenant. He'd saved everything. The few, mostly repeated images he’d found in her social profiles. A text file containing URLs and what few mentions he’d found of her.
Not much at all.
He tried a search again that he’d carried out the day before. Plucking one of the few images he had of Libbie and reverse-searching it.
He was wasting his time. The search results just came up with the handful of places he’d already found where that image had been used. Facebook, Instagram, nothing new.
Idly, he clicked to expand the search to similar images, setting all the search parameters as wide open as he could.
How many million results? How many young women with chestnut hair were there in the world? He really was wasting his time. Rather than broaden the search even further, he narrowed it by a few of the parameters he knew. New York—she’d mentioned NYU, and claimed to have moved from there, so maybe there was an element of truth in that.
He hit Return and waited.
When a gamer finds the hidden shortcut, or the easter egg a coder has left hidden as a joke, or simply when you’re on a long unbeaten run, you get a particular kind of a rush. Something maybe only a true gamer really understands or recognizes.
Walter felt that rush now.
He’d hit the jackpot. He’d found the hidden trapdoor in Libbie Burchett’s carefully constructed facade.
Only that wasn’t her name.
Because of course it wasn’t.
The picture on screen before him was of a girl of maybe fourteen or fifteen, but the baby fat and pigtails didn’t disguise the fact that it was her. A boarding school photograph. An alumni page.
He started reading, pausing every so often to open a new tab with a related search. Digging ever deeper.
