“What a shitheel.”
“This is just for openers. There’s probably more where this came from.”
“Oh joy.”
She chose one of the two visitors’ chairs and took a seat, pausing to align the chairs so they were parallel. Her eyes strayed to the window blinds. “You mind?”
“Have at it. Eventually, I’ll tidy up, but I thought I’d sit here and appreciate the care and planning that went into this.”
She crossed to the window and adjusted the blinds, corrected the blinds on the other window, closed the file drawers, and then sat down again. “You must be his type, the same way I was.”
“That makes three of us, including Pete’s widow, Ruth.”
“He paid her a visit, too?”
“She found her door standing open when she came home from work. Scared the hell out of her. I can’t figure out how he knew about me. It looks like he’s been getting into her place to listen to phone messages and diddle around with her things, but that doesn’t explain how he came up with my name and address.”
“It’s probably something obvious, but you’ll worry about it for days, which is all part of his plan. Aren’t you going to ask why I’m here?”
“Who cares? I’m glad to have company while I’m freaking out.”
“I should let you decompress.”
“I don’t want to decompress. I want to call the police.”
She slid her watch around on her wrist so she could check the time. “Call ’em later. Took me eight minutes to walk over here. We’ll assume another eight on the return. I have a client coming in on her lunch hour, so I need to get back in time to intercept her.”
“I hope you’re here to help.”
“I am,” she said. “Feels odd, though. I’m not used to being on this side of the confessional.”
“What made you change your mind?”
“I’m tired of having Ned rule my life. You want to know about my relationship with him, I’m happy to oblige.”
“Ready when you are.”
“Fine. Let’s start with the lawsuit and why I settled instead of fighting the good fight. I had a nervous breakdown when I was eighteen. The doctors decided on a diagnosis of clinical hysterical personality, derived from the Perley-Guze checklist: fifty-five symptoms, any twenty-five of which had to be present in at least nine of ten predetermined symptom groups. Can you believe this shit? I was having extended panic attacks that presented as psychotic breaks. I was in the hospital for two weeks and I came out on a cocktail of prescription medications. Once they got the mix right, I was fine. Chat therapy, of course, but that was more to benefit the psychiatric staff, composed of—guess what? All guys.”
“And that’s what Byrd-Shine came up with when they did the deep background on you?”
“Oh yes. They turned up the name of the hospital, admission and release dates, my doctors’ names, and all the drugs I was on.”
“How hard did they have to dig? You must have had friends willing to supply all the nitty-gritty details.”
“That was my assumption. None of my friends were sworn to secrecy, but I assumed I could trust their discretion. What a disappointment.”
“So what was the big deal? You spend two weeks in the hospital and then you’re fine. Where could Ned’s attorney go with that?”
“Character assassination. He’d paint me as a basket case—unstable, vindictive, and paranoid. I was suing Ned for emotional harm. All Ruffner had to do was to point out how nuts I was and Ned became the victim of my delusional state.”
“Didn’t you have proof he harassed and threatened you?”
“I had phone records, but no witnesses. I didn’t realize how carefully he set me up.”
“Meaning what?”
“I had all the notes he left on my car and my front porch and my mailbox and anyplace else he could think of that might unnerve me. You wanna know what the notes said? Things like ‘I love you.’ ‘Please forgive me.’ ‘You mean the world to me.’ ‘I wish you’d let me get close.’ I could see how it would look to a jury. I’d have been burned at the stake.”
“How’d you get involved with him in the first place?”
“We worked for the same company. I was marketing. He was outside sales.”
“Wasn’t that a no-no?”
“Yes and no. Generally, it was frowned on, but the policy wasn’t spelled out in any great detail. As long as we didn’t let the relationship impact our work, everybody looked the other way.”