Chapter 22

We still hadn’t decided on a plan when Mel’s phone rang. She looked at the display and put it on speaker. I recorded with my iPod.

“Melody?” her mother said uncertainly. “You said you’d call back about dinner, but I haven’t heard back from you.”

“No, Mother,” Mel said testily. “I’ve had rather a lot to handle. Your husband has managed to disrupt our vacation completely. He’s performed identity theft on us, canceled our hotel reservations, and forced us to spend most of the afternoon freezing all of our accounts so that he can’t get into them to create further problems for us.”

“You could come and stay here,” she offered gently.

“I’ll never set foot in a building with him again,” Mel spat, enraged by the thought of giving her father what he wanted. “Rand’s been kind to me and patient and loving. He’s been better to me than my own father. Did you know that your husband made money off me marrying Stan? He sold me like a prostitute. Rand confronted him about it, and he couldn’t deny it. So, he’s no father of mine. He sold your daughter into a miserable life as a prisoner.”

“I’m sure it’s all just a misunderstanding,” she said, trying to calm Mel down.

“He called to gloat about it,” Mel told her. “The closest that we could get a hotel at all was Baltimore, so I think we’re just going to change our car rental and drive back to Charlotte tonight.”

“I was really looking forward to seeing you,” her mother said in stark disappointment.

“I was looking forward to seeing you too, Mom.” Mel said sadly. “You’re my only living relative now.”

“Don’t talk that way, Melody,” she scolded. “He’s still your father. He wants what’s best for you.”

“If he wanted what was best for me, he’d have hugged Rand and welcomed him to the family,” Mel said tartly. “If he wanted what was best for me, he’d have stopped his precious Allison from being such a bitch to me for all her life. If he wanted what was best for me, he wouldn’t have spent years telling me how stupid I was and praising everything that she did, no matter what. He doesn’t care about me. He wants the money from Stan’s estate. I’ll put it in a big pile and burn it before I let him get his filthy hands on it.”

She sighed, and I could tell this was a woman that was torn in the middle of a family dispute.

“Mrs. Carmichael?” I said softly.

“Yes,” she replied. “Is this Rand?”

“It is, Ma’am. I’m sorry to introduce myself under these circumstances, but Mel’s pretty upset right now. I don’t know what your husband’s business is, but he seems pretty desperate to get his hands on the money. That’s not really important right now, though. I understand that you feel very torn about what to do. I think the best thing for all of us is to defuse the situation. Your husband took away our place to stay, so that Mel would have to come crawling back to him for a bed to sleep in tonight. We’re going to leave town tonight. We haven’t decided yet if we’re going to go back to the airport and fly home, change our car rental to drop it off in Charlotte and drive, or whether we’ll take the hotel room in Baltimore that the manager here was able to find for us, but we’re clearly not welcome here. Sometime down the road, we’d like you to come visit us. Not Allison and not Dennis. Neither of them is welcome in our home. If he causes you any difficulties in coming to visit, we can make all the arrangements, but this week is pretty much ruined for us.”

“I think ... I think that’s probably for the best,” she admitted sadly. “I wish we could have met, but I understand that you’ve had a miserable day. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

“You have nothing to apologize for,” I assured her. “I’ll be frank with you, Melody has told me about how Allison has terrorized her. I don’t want anything to do with her. She stole Mel’s first boyfriend by putting out when Mel wouldn’t, and she threatened to do the same with Stan. That pushed Mel to sleep with him, just to keep Allison away from him. She suspects that if she ever introduces me to her, that Allison will try to seduce me for no better reason than to steal something else from Melody.”

“Whether that assessment is fair or not, their lives together have been hostile enough to make her a real threat. I don’t want that. Mel’s been very short on people she could count on. If her father had given a damn about her, he would have reviewed the prenuptial agreement and blown his stack about how much of a trap it was for Mel. If her sister had given a shit about her, she wouldn’t have felt like she needed to rush into sleeping with Stan. She speaks highly of you, but none of the rest of the family are particularly in her good graces.”

Mrs. Carmichael sighed.

“I can’t go against my husband,” she said quietly. “I just ... can’t.”

She sounded anguished.

“I understand, Mrs. Carmichael. We would have liked you to be part of our family, but if that’s not possible, then we hope that you’ll wish us well,” I said, sensing that this was the end of the road for Mel’s family.

“I’m sorry, Melody,” she said, sounding like she really did regret it. “Maybe once your father has calmed down, we can al...” her voice cut off as Mel hung up on her.

I pulled her into my arms and held her. She trembled but didn’t cry.

“I’m not going to fall apart,” she said adamantly. “Let’s get the hell out of here!”

We took our bags out to the car and drove back to the airport. We couldn’t get a flight back to Charlotte for at least three days, so we changed our rental to a drop-off in Charlotte and got out of there, setting the car’s GPS for Charlotte and heading south.

About an hour later, we got another call, this one from a protection agency that Angela had called.

“We understand that you need a protection detail,” the man on the phone said, identifying himself as Luther Brown from an agency that did security work up and down the east coast.

“We actually left town over the issue,” I told him while Mel held the phone on speaker. “Our attacker had hacked into our itinerary and canceled our hotel reservations. We couldn’t find suitable lodgings and we received a phone call to taunt us that the attacks would continue, so we cut off our vacation and left. I do have another idea though. Your firm does investigations, right?”

“Yes, Sir. We do all sorts. Corporate due diligence, infidelity, child support, you name it.”

“Dennis Carmichael,” I said. “I want you to tear his life apart. I want to know his business, his friends, his pets, what he eats, where he goes, who he owes money to. If his shit turns a weird color, I want to know. I want so much information that he’ll think I replaced his left eye with a camera. I want to know how long his dick is and where he’s sticking it. If he has a mistress, I want all her details. If he has a dozen, I want to know everything, down to the contents of their underwear drawers. If he drinks, I want to know what. If he has a dirty little secret, I want it. If he owes money, I want to know how hard they’re squeezing him. I want all the dirt there is to have on him.”

“Mr. Carmichael is the source of your woes?” he asked, and we could hear him typing on a computer.

“He is, indeed. Is he a current client or part owner?” I asked, dreading that thought.

“Owner, no,” he said, combing for the name. “He’s not a client either, so that’s not an issue. I want to check one thing though. Let me call you back and then we can talk in more detail.”

Mel hung up and took my hand in hers.

“What are you thinking?” she asked gently.

“I’m thinking that your father has the resources to hack into our email at the very least, and possibly into our other accounts. That’s why we froze most of them,” I explained. “I think that he’s going to try to be a pain in the ass to us until he gets what he wants or ruins our lives. I’d rather ruin his. I’m especially interested in finding out if he has a mistress so that we can give your mother the proof. I’d love nothing more than to find out that he had more in common with Stan than business. I also want to know what his business is that he’s so desperate for money.”

We drove for a while, each wrapped in thought when the phone rang again. Mel put it on speaker phone. It was Mr. Brown again, but he wasn’t alone.

“Mr. Dunn,” he greeted me. “I have someone else with me on the line. Victor Farnsworth asked us to start an investigation some time back that overlaps with what you’re asking about. I spoke to him about using some of those details in the investigation you’re asking about. He was curious about your interest in Mr. Carmichael. Victor?” he prompted him.

“Hello, Sir,” he said somberly. “May I ask why you’re looking for information on Dennis Carmichael?”

“Hello, Mr. Farnsworth,” I said and pulled over into a rest stop while we talked, since we needed gas and a chance to eat before we tried to tackle the rest of the drive. “My name is Rand. I’m engaged to Mr. Carmichael’s oldest daughter, Melody, and Mr. Carmichael is intent on getting his hands on our wealth. He’s made several threats and taken action to make us cut our visit to Washington short. To put it bluntly, I want to find out the best way to hurt him and then to make sure he goes on hurting for a long time. I’d love to put him out of business so that he doesn’t have the financial resources to try to follow us around, continuing to make us miserable, but if I could hurt him badly enough to make him not want to ever hear from us again, I’d take that.”

“Would you be willing to share information back and forth?” he asked tentatively. “He’s been sleeping with my wife for a while now. We’re still gathering evidence, but we’ve got quite a bit already.”

“Mr. Farnsworth,” I said sympathetically, “you have my deepest sympathies. I’ve been where you are right now. I would be happy to help any way I can. If you’re willing to share what you’ve gathered in your investigation, I’ll pick up the tab for the rest of the investigation and consider all the findings to be jointly owned by you and me.”

“That sounds perfect to me,” he said and thanked me. “Some of the documentation is ... embarrassing. It’s...”

“I understand, Victor,” I said. “I found out about my ex-wife’s affair when I had to be treated for an STD she brought home. It wasn’t with Dennis, but one of his business associates. I’ve felt all the emotions you’re feeling, and I promise that I’ll treat those details with respect. What happened isn’t your fault. Remember that.”

“Thanks,” he said. “Alright, Mr. Brown. You can release what you have to Mr. Dunn. He’s taking over the investigation at this point. If I can help in any way, let me know.”

He dropped off the line and I told Mr. Brown that I’d have Angela contact him for billing because of the difficulty that Dennis was causing me.

“Dennis has found a way to access our information somehow. He knew what hotel we were staying in and the answers to the security questions so that he could cancel our reservation. He also knew our flight details and that’s somewhat more troubling. I suspect that he’s hacked our email, but if he did it from the other end, isn’t it a federal offense to access flight information?”

“It is,” he agreed. “We’ll look into how he might have accessed your travel information, but it’s far easier to hack your email than airline servers.”

“Understood. In that case, you should send the investigation results to Angela. She’ll be local, so we can just stop by her office to get the updates.”

“That’s easy enough,” he agreed. “I’ll send her what we have already and Fed-Ex out a hard copy of the disks.”

We thanked him and hung up, getting out to stretch our legs and get a bite to eat.

“He’s not going to go away, is he?” Mel asked of her father.

“I think our best bet to get rid of him is to ruin him,” I said truthfully. “He’s been beating you down for years and now he sees you as his path to Stan’s money. Once he had it, he’d go back to beating you down or maybe try to marry you off to one of his other business contacts to see if he can make lightning strike twice. He’s already headed for a divorce. When your mother hears about his mistress, she’s going to lose her mind. She sounds like she’s a lot like you. He’s just had more time to convince her that she needs him. Hopefully, the investigation turns up something that we can use to make him leave us alone.”

“You mean like blackmail?” she asked, surprised.

“No,” I said immediately. “I wasn’t thinking about threatening him with whatever the investigation turns up. I was thinking about using it in the way that does the most harm to him, like finding out one of his business deals breaks some law, so that he has to spend a lot of time and money fighting to stay out of jail.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky and we’ll find out that he has more than one mistress,” she said darkly. “I don’t know if one woman is enough to make her leave him.”

“I guess it depends on the woman,” I said with a shrug. “If it was one of her friends and it was going on for years? That might be enough rage to push her to act.”

“She’s really the only person in the family that I want to ever see again, but she’s chosen to support him, so I guess that’s that,” she said with a sigh.

I reached out across the table and took her hand.

“You’ve got plenty of family without them. Terri, Bella, Mary, Stephanie and even Beth are as good a crop of sisters as you could ask for. Claire is the best aunt in the world. Jason is the brother you always hoped would look out for you. May and Glen love you like their own. It’s a little disturbing to watch you bend Glen to your will, actually.”

She laughed a little at that and it lightened the mood some.

“I feel bad for Mom,” she admitted. “We just abandoned her to the wolves.”

“We offered her a chance to come see us. She turned us down,” I said with a sigh. “We’ll keep the lines of communication open with her and when we find something out about your father, we’ll be in a good position to help her through it. She may be under the same situation you were with Stan.”

She nodded, and we finished our Subway sandwiches before we went to get drinks for the drive. We used the restrooms and then got back on the road. We were actually pretty lucky. We’d gotten out of DC just as rush hour started, so we only saw a brief glimpse of the gridlock. Stopping for supper let us avoid the tail end of the evening commuter traffic there, too.

“We should be home somewhere around midnight,” I told her. “If we don’t get delayed by an accident, we’ll be able to drive straight through.”

She nodded and sighed, taking my hand.

“It’ll be good to be home,” she said. “I just wish we could have seen Mom.”

“Next time we come up this way, we’ll sneak her out to lunch,” I promised.

With any luck, the next time we came to DC, it would be to burn Dennis out of our lives, but I left that particular sentiment unspoken for now.

“We’re really not going back to DC,” she said knowingly.

I shrugged. “I think we’ll show up there at some point,” I said lightly. “We’re planning on touring as much of the US as possible, right? We still haven’t seen the White House or the Capitol or any of the monuments. It’d be nice to get around to do some tourist destinations. There’s also that confrontation that you wanted to have with Tanya. We never got around to that.”

“We can do that in LA,” she said lightly. “It’s warmer and we can eat lunch in celebrity hangouts.”

We chatted about LA for a little while, and then about places that we might want to see. Mel wasn’t interested in Mardi Gras, so we weren’t planning on New Orleans for anything in particular.

“I would have thought you’d want to be there for the party,” I said lightly.

“I don’t particularly want to take a romantic vacation to a place where girls are flashing their tits for plastic beads,” she told me with a smirk.

I shrugged. “I’ve resisted your suggestions to hook up with Terri, Tanya and Allison so far,” I pointed out. “I don’t think random drunk co-eds are a threat to you. Besides, I’d be too busy trying to keep the guys away from you to worry about other girls.”

She chuckled at that. “Gonna go cave-man on them for looking at your chick?” she asked playfully.

“Maybe not quite that bad, but I don’t want to have it get out of hand. Maybe if we had a room with a balcony where we could throw the beads or catch them without getting mobbed, but walking around the crowd? Way too much effort.”

“Well forget it,” she said with a giggle. “Besides, the girls would be asking you to show your tits,” she teased.

“Maybe we should go” I laughed. “We could have a contest for who gets the most beads.”

“Maybe next year when we’re married,” she said with a chuckle. “For now, let’s get home.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” I agreed heartily.

We made pretty good time, but two accidents and a stop for gas, restrooms and snacks put us in Charlotte at just after 1AM. We decided to go back to my place since we wouldn’t startle anyone that way, and we collapsed into bed, leaving our luggage downstairs. The next morning, we slept a little later than we would normally and got up to face the day.

I was way too late to go to yoga, but I was able to get out my mat and perform for Mel’s delight before we showered and dressed. We called Eliza, so she wouldn’t be shocked, and she promised to have the kitchen restocked for us. We dropped off the rental car and then we went to see Angela.

She had the original file from the investigations team, and we went through it slowly. Dennis had been carrying on an affair with Victor Farnsworth’s wife for at least the past year. They were in the process of figuring out when it started and how they’d met at this point. As soon as the pictures of Mrs. Farnsworth came up on the screen, Mel answered that question.

“That’s Connie!” she gasped. “She used to babysit me and Allison years ago. You don’t think...”

“That your father has been carrying on with her all this time?” I finished. “Why not? He’s rich, powerful and seems to be as amoral as they come, from what he showed us yesterday.”

Angela called the investigator and requested that they conference Victor in, so we could give them the first break in the case. When he heard Mel’s information, Victor hit the roof.

“Ten years?!!?” he thundered, flabbergasted at the revelation that she’d known her lover longer than she’d known him.

“Victor?” I said to get his attention. “Do you have any kids?”

“No, thank GOD! I’d have to go get DNA testing done, at this point, if we did,” he growled and then took a deep breath. “I want to thank you for letting me know,” he said. “I wanted to know how they met. I’m guessing that they started back then. Whether they stopped or not, I don’t know ... I really don’t care anymore.”

“Is it possible that he was blackmailing her?” I asked. “We’ve just started going through the file. When Mel recognized Connie, we decided that was news that couldn’t wait.”

“I have no idea what he could be using against her,” he said with a sigh. “I guess it’s time to file the papers. This was the one piece of the puzzle that I couldn’t figure out.”

“I hope you do okay in the divorce,” I told him. “I’d suggest confronting her with the evidence. She may be able to answer some of the lingering questions. At the very least, you’d get some closure. I’m really sorry this happened to you.”