Mayhem Takes a Dare: The Second Marisa Adair Mystery Adventure (Marisa Adair Mysteries Book 2)

by Jada Ryker

  In her mind, another image superimposed over the conservative Marisa reflection. Willowy body in a short skirt, the hemline just south of indecent exposure, low-cut, skin tight top, black boots with four-inch heels laced up to the knee, her hair teased to within an inch of its life. The image was herself, when she was the out-of-control addict.

  “Six years ago, when I was twenty-five years old, I had an affair with a fourteen-year-old boy. Whether it was a wish to get caught or pure stupidity, I posted the details in my blog.” Cindy snorted. “I might have gotten away with it, if not for my ex-husband. We had recently divorced, and I didn’t know he was reading my blog.

  “Amazingly, the man who could not keep from overdrawing a checking account or remember to take out the garbage cracked my little code and figured out what I was doing. Guess he did not have shit for brains after all. He alerted the police. It wasn’t difficult for the police to trace the boy. The next thing I knew, I was arrested. The police thundered into the law office where I worked as a paralegal. They slapped handcuffs on me, and they hauled me off in a police car.

  “Sitting in that jail cell was the most miserable time of my life. I lost everything. I was evicted from my apartment. My belongings were put out in the garbage. I was so proud when I bought a new car after my divorce. With no one to make the payments, it was towed away by a repo man. My friends and family turned their backs on me. Even my attorney wouldn’t look me in the eye. My life had turned into a mournful country music song.

  “When I looked out in the courtroom during my trial, I saw the mother of the boy, her face and her body rigid with hate and loathing. I saw my ex-husband, his face gleeful. I saw the old people and the unemployed, passing the time of day listening to other people’s tribulations.

  “And do you know who else was out there? Timothy, the man I started dating after I had broken it off with the boy. He stayed through the trial, listening to the damning evidence of my affair with the boy, through my jail time, and my being put on the sex offender list. He loved me as no one had ever loved me, and he married me.

  “And even now, even when we have people who show up at our house, wanting to know why I’m on the sex offender registry, he stays with me. Even when parents find out I’m on the list, and yank their children away from our children, Timothy stays.”

  Cindy raised her arms to the ceiling, whether in supplication or to defend herself, Marisa wasn’t sure. “After everything he and I have been through, and I still want to cheat on him? What the hell is wrong with me? It should never cross my mind…yet it’s all I can think about!”

  Next to her, Marisa felt Heidi shift in her seat.

  Marisa turned her head, and saw the tears in Heidi’s blue eyes.

  Heidi shook her blonde hair out of her normally sunny face, and managed a weak smile for Marisa.

  Marisa reached out and took the other woman’s hand. She noticed Heidi’s fingernails were bitten and her cuticles were raw. As Marisa held Heidi’s hand, she felt it trembling.

  Marisa leaned over and gave Heidi a one-armed hug. As she did, she caught the peculiar, distinctive smell of alcohol. She shifted slightly closer to Heidi, and sniffed experimentally.

  Damn. Heidi was drinking again.

  Heidi was a cute, bouncy little blonde who’d gone through rehab with Marisa. With her hair the color of wheat in the sun-flooded fields, vivid blue eyes, and round, smiling face, Heidi reminded Marisa of a perky cheerleader. As she worked her way through the rehab program, her body had filled out from its anorexic slimness, and her behind had gently grown to a cute little bubble butt.

  Heidi always helped everyone around her, and put the needs of her family and friends ahead of her own. She ran countless errands for her self-centered sisters, helped her passive-aggressive mother care for her bedridden stepfather, and made endless sacrifices for her two selfish, grasping teenage daughters.

  At what cost, though, had she taken care of everyone except herself, Marisa silently asked herself. Heidi had lost her job. Her husband, with no previous experience with addictions, thought that her stint in chemical dependency rehab should have “cured” Heidi. Tired of her lies and broken promises and continued drinking, he had kicked her out of the house and divorced her. Heidi was living with her mother, who gleefully embraced the chance to run her daughter’s life and use her as unpaid labor to care for her bedridden husband.

  Marisa wondered if the unmanageable strain of taking care of everyone around her contributed to Heidi’s inability to control her drinking.

  It wasn’t an excuse. But it was a reason.

  Heidi leaned close to Marisa’s ear and whispered, “Come home with me after the meeting.”

  Marisa shook her head. “Heidi, you smell like a distillery,” she whispered. “I think I’m getting a contact buzz sitting next to you.”

  Heidi’s eyes filled with tears and she rested her head wearily on Marisa’s shoulder. “It’s just too much to keep going without something to dull the pain,” she whispered. “And you’re in pain, too, Marisa, I can see it! Why should we suffer? It’s so easy to get relief! Come home with me.”

  Marisa squeezed the shaking hand. “I know your weaknesses, Heidi, after our weeks together in rehab. You always want to take care of everyone around you. Even in the program, you tried to be the hostess in the group meetings, ensuring everyone had coffee.”

  Heidi raised her head in surprise. “So, I like for everyone to be happy. So what?”

  Marisa shook her head and put her mouth near Heidi’s ear. “As they have for years, your family takes advantage of you. Or rather, you allow them take advantage of you. Say no to their whining, unending, unreasonable requests! Take charge of your own life, Heidi, and you won’t need the liquor! Just try it!”

  Tears fell down her face as Heidi shook her head and pulled her hand away. She leaped to her feet, knocked over her chair, and dashed out of the room.

  Marisa half rose from her seat, then sat down. She wanted to help Heidi. On the other hand, being around Heidi could jeopardize her own sobriety. She decided to call Heidi later. Perhaps she could offer support over the phone, without taking the chance of messing up her own hard work in staying sober.

  Marisa felt the vague, niggling sensation of someone watching her. Looking up and across the circle, she caught the dark molasses eyes of William.

  She repressed a slight, involuntary shudder. She’d been in the small group setting with William on previous occasions. Now, however, she went out of her way to never be in a small group with him ever again. The small setting, outside the larger meeting, was meant to offer a therapeutic environment of open, caring support.

  Marisa felt able to offer compassion to everyone she’d ever met in the group...except William.

  In the small group several months before, William had shared his conviction years ago for molesting his little step-daughter. Although he had stated that he wanted to overcome his addiction and never commit his crimes again, he had admitted he still felt attracted to children.

  Marisa couldn’t bear to speak to him or be near him.

  Fred, his wide blue eyes puzzled in his perpetually worried face, raised a hand. “Hi, I’m Fred, and I’m an addict. What the heck is a blog? Sounds like some kind of a marshy swampland, but that doesn’t make any sense.” He tugged on the edge of his shirt, which had been in the midst of creeping up his protruding belly.

  Cindy answered, “It’s a web log.”

  Fred ran a wrinkled hand over his sparse hair. The lines at the corners of his eyes deepening, Fred looked more confused. “A spider in a pile of wood?”

  In spite of her evident distress, Cindy smiled. “No, it’s an online diary. Web as in world wide web. Log as in captain’s log. A web log is a blog.”

  Fred’s eyes rolled in his face. “Don’t you know the cardinal rule, young lady? Never ever put anything in writing!” he admonished.

  Noticing lots of heads bobbing agreement all around the circle, Marisa decided the group was ge
tting off track. “Regardless of should have or should not have, Cindy did. Now, I think she needs to think about what she wants in the future. I believe there are friends and family of us addicts who let us get away with too much! They stay with us when we cheat. They may say they stay because of religion. Or because of the children. Or whatever. If we had a therapist in here with us, he’d probably say that family members who stay with us in spite of our inappropriate behavior are ‘enabling’.”

  Fred shuddered. “I hate the word enabling! You might as well say ‘doormat’ as say ‘enabler’! I think we need the people who love us to draw the lines in the sand...to say, they are not going to put up with us cheating or drinking or overspending...whatever our addiction may be.”

  Janine raised her hand, causing the loose flesh hanging on her arm like a bat wing to sway. Several months ago, she had announced she was having stomach banding surgery. Now, after her rapid weight loss, she was smaller, but her skin was not catching up to her new body size. “Hi, I’m Janine, I’m an addict. I betrayed my husband, but not with a man. Or a woman,” she added, mindful of the alternative sexualities in the room. “I am fifty-seven years old. My baby is a year old.”

  At the shocked gasps, she smiled slightly. “I’m sure those sounds are not because you think I look so much younger than my age.” The mouth, baby doll small in the center of the flabby cheeks, twisted. “My husband and I tried to have a baby for ten years. Two years ago, he said we were too old. Too old! After everything we’d been through…the painful procedures, the constant appointments...” She pushed some strands of lank hair out of her face. “I went on with the in-vitro fertilization without him! After he said he wanted to stop, after I had agreed we would stop, I went on without him! The clinic had his sperm stored. I didn’t need him to keep going with me! So, I got pregnant. That was the betrayal.”

  Fred shifted in his chair.

  Interpreting his fidget as censure, Janine laughed bitterly. “He wasn’t too happy about that, to say the least. I thought he’d be fine once the baby got here. We’d have what we’d wanted for the last ten years!” Her face crumpled. All trace of Janine’s laughter was wiped away. “She cried and fussed all of the time! I continued to work full-time as a nurse. My husband was angry with me all of the time. He never had one kind word for me! I was sick and tired of my life. I just didn’t want to feel anything. So I started stealing drugs at work. Instead of injecting painkillers into my patients, I injected them into myself!”

  A single tear worked its way down the creased line of Janine’s face. “I got away with it for months. You’d think the hospital’s anti-drug-theft controls would have caught me! But no! Do you know what it was that finally busted my ass?”

  Janine’s shoulders shook, with laughter or tears, or perhaps both. “One of the other nurses saw flecks of blood on my sleeve. That’s it. Flecks of blood on my sleeve. I told her a patient got his blood on me. She was stubborn. She was disbelieving. She flatly refused to buy my story of the patient accidentally smearing blood on me. Maybe she suspected from my behavior, I don’t know. I was marched into the nursing director’s office. The next thing I knew, I was fired and I lost my nursing license. I was at home, with a husband who despised me and a baby who wouldn’t stop crying. I didn’t have any painkillers to help me, so I ate to kill my pain. I ate and I ate and I ate!”

  Janine pulled herself to her feet. She jabbed a finger at her own mouth. “You see this insatiable maw? It eats everything in sight! I had to have an operation to slow down its sucking up of food!”

  As Marisa rose and put her arms around the trembling shoulders, the door creaked open. Marisa twisted her head to see who it was. As a group, they had to be careful. Since their meetings were held in one of the Sunday school rooms of the church, they didn’t want church members who were in the building after hours to accidentally wander into their group and overhear their discussions.

  The figure at the door hesitantly poked its head into the room. The face was covered by a dark ski mask. The torso and arms were covered by a baggy gray sweatshirt.

  Confused, Marisa thought, Ski mask and sweatshirt? Could it be Henry Worthington, head of the Church of the Eternal Devotion, who always attended meetings in disguise?

  The figure slipped into the room. Below the ratty shirt, he was naked.

  Definitely a “he,” thought Marisa, her fingers tightening on Janine’s shoulders. But definitely not Henry Worthington.

  He ran gracefully around the circle of frozen men and women.

  Like children playing duck, duck, goose, thought Marisa in shock as he skipped past her.

  The long, white legs were bony, the hips nearly fleshless. His manhood was jiggling as his legs pumped up and down.

  Marisa couldn’t seem to move. Her eyes involuntarily flicked to Fred. Since he had been the hero of the dramatic conclusion of the incident involving Marisa and a crazed murderer, Fred had been carrying himself more confidently, walking straighter, and he had a new glint in his eye. She was also fairly sure his belly, while still large, had shrunk.

  Fred’s blue eyes, rounder than ever with shock, met hers.

  She found herself expecting him to do something.

  Fred must have felt it. In a single fluid motion, Fred rose from his chair and hefted the heavy suitcase from its place at his feet. In the suitcase was The Library.

  Marisa was fairly certain The Library defied several laws of physics. The battered case held all of the literature associated with the group. Addiction books, newcomer notebooks, and pamphlets were all neatly housed in The Library’s compartments. Marisa had seen the contents spread out on tables on several occasions. The stacks of books and papers were three times the size of the suitcase. Therefore, she was certain The Library had to be larger on the inside than it appeared on the outside. She wondered if Fred stood inside the open case, would he be folded up neatly and completely in one of the compartments?

  As the half-naked man passed the half-way point of the circle, Fred cut directly across to intercept him.

  Through the holes in the ski mask, the intruder saw the older man headed for him. Breaking into an energetic sprint, he outran the lumbering Fred and his Library and sped out the open door.

  Increasing his pace, Fred followed him out into the hallway.

  Several people surged from their chairs to follow Fred.

  As everyone started talking at once, asking one another questions to which no one knew the answers, Marisa ran over to the small, high windows set in the concrete wall. She hopped up on a chair.

  Although it was nearly nine o’clock, it was still faintly light outside. She watched as the nearly naked man jumped into a car, revved the engine, and squealed out of the parking lot. Although it was too far for her to read the license plate, she was fairly certain it was a plain, Kentucky plate. It wasn’t one of those farm plates or specialized plates with pictures of deer or butterflies or children’s handprints.

  Through the window, Marisa could see Fred. He stood in the parking lot, The Library locked and loaded, shaking his fist at the disappearing car.

  “Wow, what a freak!” Cindy settled back into her chair.

  Jason, his earrings catching the light and his arms dark with intricate tattoos, raised one brow at the irony. “He should have sat down and joined us instead of running off. I’d hazard a guess he has an issue with exhibitionism.”

  Fred jogged back into the room. He plumped into his seat, panting and sweating. “God knows I’ve seen a lot of things in these meetings in the past twenty odd years. But I have never seen anything like that!”

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Clay, how do you know Moira Peters?” Althea’s voice came out as a wheeze. After all that energetic dancing, she thought, it’s a wonder I can get out more than gasps.

  The loud beat of the music reached them out on the patio. Light from the huge dance hall spilled out, with the glittering diamonds of the spinning disco ball painting the dark shrubs and trees with a dizzyin
g round of colorful lights.

  Althea practically reeled into the metal patio chair.

  His exertion level seemingly on a par with a leisurely stroll around a garden, Clay slid into the chair across the table from her. Even though it was dark, the umbrella was up.

  Althea glanced around the deserted outdoor sitting area. There were a few other people, disguised by the darkness, sitting at various tables. She could see the glow of a cigarette at one end, and hear the muted laughter at another. Just beyond the patio, she could see the parking lot. It was filled with empty buses and vans, which transported the folks of the area assisted living centers and the senior citizen’s center for a huge dance. A mixer it would have been called in the old days, she thought.

  Althea continued to wait. She knew Clay had heard her and would answer her question when he was ready. In the darkness, the warm breeze touched Althea’s heated cheeks and arms, fluttering strands of her dark hair with its gray streaks and her silky green dress. Surrounded by trees, the community center gave the illusion of a country setting. Only the occasional sound of a car reminded her that the center was actually quite close to the city.

  “Thea, I knew Moira many years ago. What we had between us died a—” Clay paused, and looked around him. Because of the widely spaced tables, the other dancers enjoying a respite were well out of earshot. “—fiery death many, many years ago. Moira Peters is toxic. I don’t want what you and I have to be contaminated by her.”

  Althea placed her thin hand on top of Clay’s warm, solid one. “From what I saw earlier this afternoon at the assisted living center, and here at the dance tonight, Moira Peters is poisonous. Even though she has her pick of the unattached men, and has even collected a fairly large group of them, she still tried to lure Sonny O’Brien away from Mrs. Craft.”

  Clay nodded. “In the wake of her sarcastic attacks and her willful disregard for others, she leaves wreckage and debris.”