Chapter 13

Within the next three weeks, Gregg Collins married his fiancée, Miss Amanda Dorn, known affectionately now as ‘Mouse’, at a ceremony held – once again – at Jan and Brad Pittman’s house. This time, there were very few attendees, as Mouse and Gregg both had asked for a small gathering.

Afterward, the happy couple took up residence in their new home; another expansive and magnificent place in the Riverside Estates. Conveniently, this was the same subdivision in which the Pittmans already resided and in which the Morrises were currently building their new home. It would be nice, they all thought, if it could be arranged so that more of the Executive staff of J.A.M. could eventually be neighbors there.

But, even before the Collins’ wedding, word had reached Jennifer of the inclusion of ‘Mouse’ in some of the very bawdy activities of some of the reputedly more adventurous executives and wives who were close friends with Jan and Brad Pittman and David and Midge Burton. Most of the direct intelligence on these activities came from Jennifer’s conversations with Matt after his evenings of driving these more sexually liberated revelers around to some of their favorite places of enjoyment in the area.

When Jennifer inquired about this, she was surprised to learn that these places included the Sweet Nothings Boutique, Ken’s Steakhouse, and the mysterious club in the hills that Matt finally revealed to her as a place called ‘The Slave Traders’. But the wildest and most surprising destination for this special J.A.M. Aluminum ‘in-crowd’, in Jennifer’s opinion, was – of all places – a strip club, called the Wild Joker.

No matter how much she badgered him, Matt said that he could not tell Jennifer about what the folks did inside the club, as he was not privy to it firsthand, due to his having to remain with the limo outside. Along with Mr. Morris’s driver, Robert; Mr. Pittman’s driver, Dennis; Mr. Newman’s driver, Doug; and Mr. Collins’ newly-assigned driver, John Davidson, who formerly had driven for Gene Kennedy; he could only guess and imagine. Rene Florissant, who now drove for Tim Davis, had not been there, but he had been included in the conversations in the executive protection chauffeurs’ weekly security update sessions with their contract Program Manager at Mohawk Solutions, William ‘Pete’ Peterson.

“And I have a very active and sexy imagination,” Matt told her with a wiggle to his eyebrows that caused Jennifer to laugh. Since they were in bed together during this discussion, the laugh became a moan of longing as Matt leaned over and kissed her while his hand caressed her breast on its way down her naked tummy toward her pussy.

Matt raised up for a second and gazed into the eyes of the woman with whom he was rapidly falling in love; he had finally resolved in his mind that this was happening; he had just not said the magic word yet, observing to see if his feelings might be reciprocated by Jennifer.

‘Soon,’ he told himself. ‘Soon, I am going to come clean and tell her how I feel.’

‘Very soon,’ thought Jennifer as her breathing rate increased with the stimulating touch of Matt’s fingers on her pussy, ‘I am going to have to tell Matt that I am falling in love with him. I just hope that it does not scare him off; and that he can grow to love me and the kids too.’

A few days after Gregg Collins’ wedding to the beautiful Amanda, known now firmly to everyone around the company as ‘Mouse,’ Heather was in Mr. Morris’ office. The company President was conducting an interesting telephone conversation with the speaker activated so that she could hear both sides of the conversation.

Just moments before, Mr. Morris had buzzed Heather at her workstation.

“Heather,” Mr. Morris had said, “please put in a call to Steadman Products over in Salisbury, and ask if I might speak to Ms. Lori Olson, the plant manager out there. Once you have her on the line, please come on in here. I want you to hear the conversation so that I don’t have to repeat a lot of the things that Ms. Olson and I need to discuss, and to which you will need to be privy all too soon.”

“Yes, Sir,” Heather responded, and then proceeded to place the call. “Good morning. This is Heather Cunningham, Senior Executive Administrative Assistant to Mr. Richard Morris, the President of J.A.M. Aluminum, calling for Ms. Lori Olson, please.”

“Oh, good morning; please hold,” the woman on the other end said before the click and the elevator music played as Heather waited for only about fifteen seconds before there was another click on the other end.

“This is Lori Olson,” came the firm but still feminine voice over the phone.

“Good morning, Ms. Olson,” Heather said with a smile in her voice. “I have Mr. Morris on the line; please allow me to connect you.” Then Heather hit the hold, then the buzz to her boss, and, seeing the light color change from amber to green, signaling that Mr. Morris was now engaged in conversation with Ms. Olson, Heather locked her terminal and walked to his office as he had instructed.

Closing the door behind her as she entered her boss’s office, Heather heard Mr. Morris say, “Ms. Olson, I am on speaker and I have my Senior Executive Administrative Assistant, Heather Cunningham, in the room as well. Is that all right with you?”

“Yes, Mr. Morris; I’m fine with that,” Lori Olson answered.

“Please, call me ‘Mo’,” encourage Mr. Morris.

Heather could hear the woman on the other end chuckle. “Okay ... Mo. And please call me ‘Lori’.”

“Good,” Mo continued. “I am calling to inquire about that offer I tendered to your company several weeks ago. At that time, one of your department managers responded, as you were out of town. He said that Mr. Steadman was taking an extended leave of absence from the active management of his company and that you were in charge in the meantime, but that you and your staff were reviewing my proposal. And that you were authorized to act on behalf of Mr. Steadman in his absence on most agreements.”

“Yes,” Lori responded, “we have all been trying to give Dean enough time to recover from the tragic death of his wife about a year ago. He was hard hit by that loss; and all of us here at the company felt her loss as well. She was very well-liked and respected around here.”

“Yes,” Mo responded, “please accept my sorrows for the loss that all of you have experienced.”

“Thank you,” Lori said softly. “And I will pass your sentiments on to Dean.”

“So, you are in routine communication with him?” asked Mo.

“Not for a while. He was in a self-imposed seclusion at his cabin a few miles from here for the past year, and he had asked to be called only in the case of a real emergency. But I did hear from him just last week,” Lori informed him.

“Oh?” said Mo with interest, “My offer did not happen to come up in the conversation; did it?”

“No, I am afraid that it did not come up then because of another situation that sort of took precedence,” Lori answered. Heather had moved to a sofa near Mo’s desk and listened as Lori continued. “He was checking in so that he could respond to a voicemail that I left him when I read in the paper about his recent troubles up at the cabin. Did you hear about it?”

“No, I can’t say that I have,” said Mo with a raised-eyebrow glance at Heather. She shook her head, as she was not aware of any recent articles in the local papers about someone named Dean Steadman; at least none that she had seen. Of course, she did not regularly read the paper cover to cover, and often did not read it at all, since she relied on several news feeds that she received electronically at her workstation here at J.A.M., and she focused mainly on business news items that could be of interest to Mr. Morris or other Executives here at the company.

“Well, I probably should have Mr. Steadman tell you about all of that, if he decides to contact you. He could tell you better than I can about the terrible things that evidently happened up there. But the gist is this.

“It seems that a young girl working at a so-called gentleman’s club in Burlington was targeted for death by some area gangsters related to that club. Somehow, she managed to escape them, and she sought refuge at Dean’s cabin one night. These gangsters and their boss in Burlington later somehow ended up dead and the police questioned Dean and the girl, trying to gain insights into the circumstances surrounding how those criminals died. I don’t know what came of the investigation, but it seems that Dean and the girl were cleared of any involvement.

“Meanwhile, the police received a tip about the possibility of the remains of some other missing girls being buried in a field within a mile or two of Dean’s cabin. The media from as far away as Boston was all over that one,” Lori said. Mo seemed to recall the hubbub in the news about a week earlier about the discovery in the hills north of Middlebury of the remains of several missing women; all reportedly former exotic dancers and waitresses at adult clubs in Burlington; and he saw Heather nodding that she was familiar with that story.

“Anyway,” Lori continued, sounding as if she had paused to take a sip of coffee, “Dean responded to my voicemail to tell me that he was okay and that he and that young girl whom I mentioned earlier – he called her Andrea – would be coming here to Salisbury from the cabin soon.”

Here she paused. “I ... I guess that she has been staying with him in his cabin ever since she showed up there on his doorstep, so to speak.” Then, she added, “Although, I am sure that they are abiding by the rules of appropriate decorum.”

Heather and Mo just smiled to each other. With what they knew of all the sexual goings-on around here at J.A.M., the idea of ‘rules of appropriate decorum’ meant something quite a bit different to them than it did to others.