Jessie

by JJ Aughe

  What circumstances could Dave have that would prohibit him from investing in this project? He’s a billionaire for crying out loud. Seventeen million dollars should be almost nothing to him. The return he would realize on his investment alone, not to mention the satisfaction of knowing the public’s enjoyment of the finished project would be well worth the risk!

  So involved was he with his financial problems, Gilmore didn’t notice until it was almost too late to avoid a collision, that a car without its headlights on was coming at him on the wrong side of the street. Braking hard he swerved to the left and immediately back to the right as his car went into a skid on the wet pavement. The other car passed behind his as he steered over the curbing between a pickup and an SUV, coming to stop on someone’s front lawn.

  His nerves shook up, he slowly drove off the lawn and down the sidewalk past the parked SUV then back onto the street again. Seeing there were no cars parked across the street he pulled to the curb there and sat for moment with the engine running trying to get his nerves settled.

  “I better go see if there was any damage to that lawn,” he resignedly muttered. He started to open his door and saw a police cruiser pulled to a stop behind him with lights flashing. Oh, god, he thought. Now I’m going to get my first traffic citation.

  Chapter 2: Dreams

  Devastated by Gerald’s betrayal and his mistaken, vulgar, repulsive, even reprehensive, assumption that she would willingly go to bed with him, was even obligated to go to bed with him, Jessie tossed and turned into the wee hours of the morning. She finally decided that if she were to get any sleep at all she had better get her mind off of Gerald. She let her mind wander for a minute and tried to relax. Her last trip to the Seattle Waterfront came to mind and made her smile.

  She had just left the Rescue mission when she spied Gertrude Brown, an old friend from the UW, walking toward the mission. The woman smiled radiantly at seeing Jessie and asked if she would like to go have coffee to catch up on their lives.

  Gertrude had graduated the year before Jessie and immediately moved to New York to become the CFO of a prestigious accounting firm. She told Jessie she had thought it would be exciting, but, what with the traffic, the crowded sidewalks and the hours she had to spend at her office, it turned out to have almost made her go insane. She finally decided she had had enough, quit and came back to Seattle to start her own accounting business. They talked for hours and made plans to meet the following week for lunch. Before they parted that night, Gertrude turned to Jessie and, smiling broadly, confessed that she was going to be married in the spring to the most wonderful man she had ever met. The man was Charles J. Engles, a student they both had briefly met while attending the UW. She said that he had fallen head over heel for her then but had been too shy to confess how he felt. Then she had graduated and left town. His heart was broken for years. He didn’t know where she had moved to but pined for her so bad that he hadn’t dated or even associated with any other woman since.

  Then one day a few months ago he saw her photo in the local newspaper and made a beeline to her office to ask her on a date. She had thought him a perfect gentleman on that date and had continued to date him. Just the previous week he had proposed and she had said yes.

  The thought of her friend’s happiness calmed Jessie’s mind and, her eyelids sliding closed, she slept. She hadn’t slept long before she was again visited by the vivid dream she had began experiencing while on vacation in Belize at her parent’s vacation home at the age of four. The dream again awoke her.

  Though at times the dream varied in its locale, its one constant was a very beautiful young Native American woman. The mysterious woman’s beautiful image had been so ingrained on Jessie’s memory over the years she knew she could accurately describe the beautiful woman without a second thought.

  The woman’s straight flowing, waist length, ebony hair glistened with silvery blue highlights. She always wore a thin strip of tan rawhide tied at the back of her head. The rawhide was threaded through an oval piece of rawhide with a cougar’s head intricately worked into it and placed above the woman’s right ear. Hanging from the oval rawhide, another thin strip of rawhide with an eaglet’s feather attached to its end. The feather brushed the woman’s temple.

  The woman was always attired in a white doeskin garment with a large image of the head of a tawny, snarling cougar on the bodice. Though smaller, the same image was at each side of the large one. Jessie was certain the images of the cougar were important, but had no idea why.

  The young woman’s facial features were intriguingly beautiful. Her unblemished, sun-tanned complexion, high cheekbones, cupid’s bow lips, narrow nose and thick black eyebrows complimented each other. The woman’s eyes always first drew Jessie’s attention. The woman’s irises were deep brown, instead of emerald green as Jessie’s, but the silver and golden flecks in them mirrored the identical flecks of her own. Other than her own and her mother’s, Jessie had never seen anyone who had that same, very distinctive colored flecks in their irises. As always, when Jessie awoke from each of those dreams she remembered thinking that the petite woman’s eyes were the most beautiful, provocative eyes of any woman she had ever seen.

  In all of the previous dreams, the woman always made hand gestures similar to those of present day deaf sign language and seemed to be speaking to Jessie, but Jessie had never before been able to hear the woman’s voice. In this morning’s dream though, Jessie had actually heard the woman’s soft, soothing, yet firm, commanding voice. Even though she could hear the woman’s voice, Jessie could not understand the woman’s strangely familiar, yet unknown, language.

  This morning’s dream was also different in that while the woman spoke, one of her hands pointed toward Jessie and a man standing just to Jessie’s left. Jessie had been aware of the man in the previous few dreams but she had never seen the man’s face, only his right hand, arm and shoulder. She remembered marveling at the magnificently sculpted biceps the man possessed. As if he was in the act of lifting something very heavy, the muscles in the arm bulged, straining the short sleeve of the sport shirt he wore to almost bursting the seam. Every time the man’s arm moved, Jessie’s attention was drawn to its only imperfection, a jagged scar similar in form to a downward striking, four point lightning bolt that seemed to shimmer when the arm moved.

  When Jessie awakened from the first dream the man had appeared in, and in every dream since, she was certain she could detect the faintly erotic, spicy bay and sage scent of a man’s cologne or after shave lotion in her bedroom. Certain the scent was that of the man in her dream and feeling the need to personally meet him, she caught herself unconsciously trying to get a whiff of that same scent on every man she had met since the first dream he had appeared in. Her action was never rewarded though because no man’s scent had ever come close to matching that particular, erotically arousing scent.

  Now, with that erotic scent stirring her senses, Jessie shook the sleep from her eyes, tossed back the covers and swung her feet to the lush carpet. As she rose from the mattress, the erotic, masculine scent of the man in her dream seemed to fill the room and she had the sudden, distinct impression there was someone in the room with her! Instead of feeling alarmed at the presence, Jessie felt just the opposite. Her senses and her whole being seemed to be calmed. She glanced around the room trying to locate the scents’ source, but just as quick as it had bombarded her senses the pleasing scent vanished.

  “Whoever you are,” she heard herself breathlessly say, as if the man were standing in the room with her. “If you are real, are you my soul-mate and is today the day I will finally meet you?” Amazed at the craziness of her own words she anxiously glanced around the room. Half expecting to find the man standing in the shadows she scolded herself for her silliness. “Of course, you ninny, there is no one here!” Then her thoughts unaccountably went somewhere she never thought they would ever go again as she whispered, “But, oh how I would love to feel those strong, muscular arms holding me gen
tly to his chest!”

  Tremendously shocked by her thoughts, she chastised herself. “After last night, how could you even think something as stupid as that?” Then she shocked herself again, as she dreamily sighed, breathing, “But, wouldn’t it be so wondrous to be held in the strong arms of a real man like him?”

  She caught a glimpse of her wistful image in the vanity mirror and immediately became disgusted with herself, yelling, “No! After what Gerald has been doing behind your back, what he said to you last night, what he wanted you to do and especially what he wanted to do to you? It would be insane! All men are the same! All they are ever after is your body or your fortune, or both! Yeah,” she ruefully finished. “Remember this, girl, and don’t you dare ever forget it! All any man ever wants you for is a trophy wife and, of course, access to your body and your money. They would never be faithful! So, don’t go there!” Grabbing her terry cloth robe, she stormed into her bathroom to shower and wash her hair.

  Later, as was her daily routine, she sat at her vanity carefully counting her usual one-hundred brush strokes through her waist length tresses. As was her habit, she talked to herself as she went over what she planned to do during the day. “I know Maureen doesn’t approve of me spending so much time at the rescue mission and will probably frown when I tell her what I’m going to do. Never the less, I’ll talk with Burney again about Sam Durant’s situation. I really believe that if Burney were here, he would do exactly the same thing I want to do for Sam.”

  A frown creased her usually unblemished forehead as she thought about the poor man’s situation. She had hired an investigator to check Sam's background. The upshot of it all was that, through no fault of his own, Sam Durant had become homeless and desperately needed the Castleman Fund’s help. Jessie had to admit that when she had talked with Sam on Saturday she had been skeptical of what he told her. Her heart had gone out to the poor man though, when, as proof of what he claimed, he pulled his battered wallet from a pocket of his worn jeans and handed her the news clippings from the local newspaper. What she read in those clippings just broke her heart.

  “Though he had told me he had previously been a heavy equipment operator,” she murmured half to herself. “Sam told me he was working a second job at night as a short order fry cook to make ends meet. He had been half way through his shift when he had been called back to the manager’s office. I can’t even imagine what went through Sam’s mind when the manager introduced the man with him as a Bellevue Detective and walked out, closing the door behind him.”

  “From the horrible account in the clippings, there had been a natural gas leak at Sam’s home and something, the investigators thought may have been the natural gas hot water heater, had ignited the fumes. The house had virtually disintegrated, killing Sam’s wife, his six-year-old twin boys and infant daughter. His whole family wiped out in the blink of an eye.”

  Jessie had to wipe tears from her eyes just thinking about what Sam Durant must have gone through during that tragic time. Sam’s insurance plan from his construction work had taken care of most of the funeral costs but his auto insurance had taken months to send him a check for the contents of the house and his wife’s car, money that he would use to purchase the head stones for his family. Sam’s grief over his loss during that time had consumed him. He was so grief stricken that he couldn’t function at either of his jobs and was let go by both.

  Jessie had called both employers and asked what they were thinking. Why hadn’t they given the man a bereavement leave of absence instead of firing him?

  The response from each company had been the same. Each company’s union’s contract allowed for a short bereavement leave. They each give him a week. They claimed that length of time should have been enough. When he still couldn’t cope with his duties, he was terminated. End of story.

  Jessie thought the attitudes of the companies involved was completely outrageous and, as far as Jessie was concerned, if she had anything at all to say about it, the decisions of those companies would not be the end of the story! She immediately called Reginald Harper, her lawyer, for instructions on what she could do for Sam. Reggie had told her that, legally speaking, there was nothing she could do. Legalities were not going to stop Jessie.

  “I can honestly say that I know what Sam told me is true. I really feel the man deserves the Fund’s help. He doesn’t drink, take drugs or even use tobacco, and Jim Boles, the volunteer in charge of the Rescue Mission, says that when he arrives every morning to open the kitchen Sam is waiting outside offering to help.

  I still need to discuss it with Burney. I hope he will give me some sign, something that will let me know he agrees before I go forward with implementing the funds from The Castleman Fund to help Sam.”

  Her brush suddenly stopped half way down as the thought occurred to her that she needed to think about her most important need for the morning. A secretive grin had the corners of her perfect cupid’s bow lips rising as she finished that brush stroke. “I’ll see what kind of mood Maureen is in this morning before I tell her what I have planned for today. If she is in one of her over-protective moods again, as she tends to be when I mention Burney, I may not even let her know what I plan to do so she won’t hassle me about going to the cemetery. Which I will have to do first so I’ll be satisfied Burney would do this too. Then I will go to the bank for those Cashier’s checks I ordered last Friday and know whether to order a Cashier’s check for Sam that I can pick up later today.”

  “I’ll take the checks to Reggie for him to examine and mail. Then, if I don’t spend too much time talking with Reggie, I’ll go into Seattle to shop for a suitable evening gown to wear to Saturday’s dinner/dance benefit in support of our local Firemen and Law Enforcement personnel. Then I’ll stop at the Bank to pick up that Cashier’s Check for Sam and drop it off at Reggie’s on my way home.”

  Thinking of Saturday night’s affair at the country club again brought the depressing thought of what Gerald had inadvertently confessed to back into her mind. She again grimaced at herself in the mirror. “Get over it, Jess,” she ordered. “Gerald and all men, for that matter, are out of your life for good. It’s time to move on to better, more fulfilling things.”

  Giving herself a mental shake, she couldn’t help but ask, “But who is going to escort me to the fund raiser? Oh, I guess I could go unescorted, but that would mean being put in the position of being approached by Herman Oakes. And, Oh God! I could not stand it if that lecherous old man came anywhere near me. I always thought he was the biggest egotistical lecher in the Puget Sound region. Now I know that Gerald has that dubious honor! So I had better think of someone safe to escort me.”

  A few moments later, after mentally going over the available bachelors she knew, she disqualified all but George Witherspoon, heir to the famous John T. Witherspoon import/export fortune. Since G.W., as he preferred to be called, was a good friend and was presently unattached, she was certain he would have no objections to going to the function with her. She decided she would have to wait until after she left the bank to call him though because she knew he had been to last evening’s baseball game. She had no doubt that he had stayed until the game was over and had undoubtedly not left ballpark until long after the last pitch.

  That problem tentatively solved, Jessie stepped into her walk-in closet to decide how she should dress for the day.

  When Jessie had turned thirteen, to her mother’s delight, her father, sure his lovely daughter would need more space for a new wardrobe, hired a bed and bath contractor to remodel her small closet to make it a spacious walk-in wardrobe. The contractor had taken it upon himself to design the walk-in closet so that everything could be arranged on an electronic track system similar to those used at dry cleaners. The garments, all displayed in color co-ordinate order of complete outfits were sectioned in the various types of formal, semi-formal, casual and athletic. He had explained his reasoning by saying that if their daughter was ever rushed for time, all she had to do was press a butto
n for that specific type of clothing and the track system would rotate until the section she wanted, complete with lingerie, hose and shoes, would be displayed in front of her. Jessie hadn’t really appreciated the design until she had turned seventeen and been to her school prom. She had stayed out all that night and had an early appointment the next morning. She had raced into her room, flung open the walk-in wardrobe doors, pressed the button for semi-casual outfits and, instantly had what she needed. Realization struck her at that point and she sat down right then, wrote the contractor a note of thanks and added a promise to visit his office soon. Both the note and the promise to visit his office proved unnecessary as, following her appointment she decided to drive there to thank him in person.

  Jessie wanted casual clothes this morning and selected a floral print, white knee-length sundress with dainty fire-red chrysanthemums splayed on Kelley-green leaves, an outfit that would best show off her figure and emphasize her green eyes without detracting from the natural luster of her fire-red hair.