Chapter 3

Originally, Jude started out going to yoga class only on Wednesdays and Fridays, in the afternoon, while I was at work. After a couple of weeks, she added Monday morning. Shortly after that, Jude was doing yoga every day. When she wasn’t in a class, she was practicing yoga at home. Yoga became a dominating activity in her life. She was either doing yoga or talking about it. She was into everything about this New Age lifestyle.

She redecorated the house, turning it from Cowboy Rustic to Bohemian Chic. Our home looked like we lived inside an Earthbound store. There must have been two rules in her decorating: 1) use a shit-ton of pillows, and 2) no two pillows could look alike or match anything else in the house. Her wardrobe also changed completely. She seemed to wear a cross between Altar’d States and 1970’s Haight Ashbury, with a healthy dose of Lululemon tossed in for good measure. The house stank of a variety of incense, candles, and potpourri all day long. Strange crystals appeared all over the house, even in our Brita water pitcher. Why the hell we needed crystals in our water was beyond me. I was even beginning to wonder if Jude wasn’t smoking The Weed with her friends when I was not home.

Jude didn’t limit her excitement about her new lifestyle to just annoying me with it. She told all her lady friends, and several of them joined her class. She was spending all her weekdays with her lady friends and at the yoga studio, but when it started encroaching into our evenings and weekends, I decided to put my foot down.

“Jude, why do you have to take our time to go do your yoga stuff? You have all day, every day. I would really like to have my wife with me when I’m home and enjoy her company.”

“I’m here more than you are, Mr. ‘I have to work late, again’, what are you talking about?” she asked defensively.

“Twice this week you were gone in the evenings when I got home until around nine. Now you’re telling me you’re going to spend this Saturday at the studio. We are supposed to go to the Lake this weekend with the Clarks.” The Clarks were our neighbors and friends.

“Oh, I forgot all about that,” she said as she seemed lost in thought. I expected her to change her plans, but instead, she totally surprised me. “Can you call them and put it off a week or two? We have an open house at the studio, and I promised Marcel that I would help out.”

“It’s ‘we’ and ‘Marcel,’ now?” I asked. “When did that happen?”

“When did what happen?” she asked, fixing me with that look she got whenever she was perturbed.

“When did you drop the all-important honorific title? You used to call him Yogi. When did he become Marcel to you?” I was getting an uneasy feeling.

Jude blushed.

Oh shit.

That could not be good.

“We work very closely together, and he told me that I could call him Marcel when others aren’t around. I call him Yogi during class, but I’m just so used to calling him Marcel,” she said, then quickly added, “It’s not a big deal.”

“Whatever you say Boo-Boo,” I replied, watching her closely. The Detective in me was kicking in. I studied her body language, looking for deception.

“And anyway, you’ve been working so much overtime lately,” she said, trying to shift the focus to me. “You’re home much less than I am. This case you’re working on is taking all your spare time. You probably shouldn’t take the weekend to go on a boondoggle anyway.”

What she said was true, to a point. I was working a lot of late hours and even some on the weekends. There had been two more attacks, one in Plano and one in Fairview that seemed to fit the same profile as the three we already knew about. The worst thing was we had no evidence and no real leads.

“So you’ll call them?” she asked.

“No, I won’t.”

“Ok, then I’ll call them. I’m sure it will be fine. One weekend’s the same as any other, right?”

“No, not really. This weekend is the annual summer celebration. Bowling for Soup is playing and will be fireworks, a balloon festival, all kinds of stuff happening. We agreed to go weeks ago, and the Clarks paid extra to book the cabin you insisted on getting. Why am I having to tell you all of this? Are you so obsessed with your yoga stuff that you forgot about our marriage and our friends?”

“Can you not call it my ‘yoga stuff’? That’s very condescending.” She asked, ignoring everything else I said.

“Ok, what do you want me to call it?”

“Yoga.”

“So, yoga is ok, but yoga stuff is not ok?”

“Right.”

I shook my head as if to say, “Whatever,” but I knew better than to vocalize my thought. Instead, I let her know what I expected.

“So, you need to call Marcel,” I told her, deliberately not using his title, “and tell him you can’t make it to his open house. It’s not like you work there or are an owner. You’re just a student. These are our best friends, and we have been looking forward to this trip. You were looking forward to it, too, before you changed. There will be more open houses. We are going to the lake.”

I didn’t want to be an asshole, but sheesh. Jude was being ridiculous; She could sense my mood and my determination. She relented and called Marcel later in the day to tell him that she couldn’t attend the open house. Jude gave me the cold shoulder all weekend. She was moody, short-tempered and acted like a woman with a perpetual case of PMS.

I knew this was neither reasonable nor acceptable behavior on her part. I was determined to find out why she was this obsessed over an exercise class. Come Monday, I would start using my detective skills on more than just work.

Jude’s cold treatment of me was apparent. My buddy Tony could tell something was wrong, and he asked me about it.

“Yoga withdrawal,” I said, then went on to tell him everything that was going on as we drank beers out on the docks overlooking the lake.

“You know Tammy was going there for a while,” he said, “but I made her quit when I met that asshole Marcel Marceau or whatever his name is.”

“Beaufils,” I corrected him. “Marcel Beufils. Why what happened?”

“He was just this smug, punk-ass little bitch that acted like he was God’s gift to the Universe and women in particular. You know the type. He thinks he can fuck any woman he meets. You know damned well that asshole is banging half the women that go there, and probably all of the men.”