Epilogue

If Nina and I hadn't been such good friends, if we hadn't been so deeply in love, I don't believe our relationship would have made it through our first few years in Seattle. There was no conflict between us during this time, don't let me lead you to believe there was, but we simply had a very limited amount of time together. We spent our first year there in the college dorms, seeing each other only on nights I didn't have to work and on the occasional weekend. When we did get to see each other we were usually tired and confined to public places. Nina was carrying twenty-one units and I was carrying eighteen. Our days went by in a haze of lectures, notes, homework, stolen kisses between classes, and the occasional date to a cheap restaurant.

We were drawn closer together during this period by the fact that we were unable to establish any real friendships with other students. Neither of us developed any sense of camaraderie with those that shared our majors. I was majoring in International Business because that was the subject that would prepare me to take the greatest advantage of my pre-knowledge. Unfortunately the only people that majored in this subject, beside myself, were aspiring future businessmen of the type that represented everything I always found distasteful about capitalism. They were all clean-cut, conservative, right wing spouting members of the young republicans. They were the people who would one day make the sorts of decisions that would destroy the lives of thousands and then go on to a three-martini lunch to celebrate. They all wanted to be millionaires by thirty and would stop at nothing to achieve this goal. They were young men and women in the process of selling their souls.

Nina's classmates were of two different varieties. There were the rich elite, those that had had their money handed to them all of their lives, who had gone to private academies and had grown up in the lap of luxury. They were the sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters of plastic surgeons, cardiac surgeons, and family practitioners to the elite. Their snobbery, Nina complained, was so entrenched within their personalities that they wouldn't even talk to you unless you had a last name that they could recognize. The second group was the super-smart nerds, the kids that had damn near aced their SATs but that had been scarred by persecution in grammar and high school. They were the kids that used to have their books knocked out of their hands, that used to be the favorite victims of the Richie Fairviews. They were better than the elite but not by much. Many of them had an inferiority complex a mile high and were so competitive that they were incapable of friendship. Nina spoke sadly of them in her discussions, not even realizing that she had been fated to be one of them.

But we had each other and that was enough. We could talk together, share our fears and frustrations together, congratulate each other, and occasionally, very occasionally that first year, make love to one another. It was always sweet.

We went home for the summer and quickly became immersed in our wedding plans. Mary proved to be a fabulous planner, taking to her task with zeal I'd never seen or suspected. We were married on June 28th, 1985 before more than seventy guests. It was the happiest day of my life, either life, to that point. After the reception we climbed on a plane and flew to Los Angeles where we boarded a cruise ship for a seven-day trip to Mexico and back. For the first time in our relationship we had all the time in the world to enjoy each other's bodies. We missed two of the three ports of call and probably spent more time in our cabin than we did on deck.

When we returned to Spokane after the cruise we were faced with the bizarre situation of not having anyplace to stay besides either her parents' house or mine. We both agreed that it was less weird to stay with mine. Less weird, but still weird. Sleeping with your new wife in your old bedroom while your parents are in the house is strange no matter how you slice it. We found ourselves making love on the floor when the urge struck us because we didn't want Mom or Dad to hear the bed squeaking.

Ironically, the best example of my business skills came our sophomore year in college, long before I picked up my degree in it. We had to rent an apartment in Seattle - there was no way we were going to stay in the dorms another year - but we needed to protect our capital from taking a serious ding from this. In order for my first major move to be successful, I needed to have as much of the twenty some-odd thousand dollars in stocks and bonds available at that time. I could not let it whittle away bit-by-bit paying for living expenses. I constructed a paupers budget that had us eating Rice-a-Roni, hotdogs, and bologna sandwiches a lot but that served to use up my hospital salary, the interest on the bonds, and the growth of the stocks in such a way that we were still making more than we were putting out. Our apartment was less than six hundred square feet and was in such a bad neighborhood that you practically had to do an armed reconnaissance before you dared to venture out to the car or the bus stop, but we got by.

Both of us kept up our maddening pace at school, sacrificing time together in the early years because we knew it would be returned to us when we were older. We somehow managed to keep our spirits high, to keep our love strong. The best part of those years were the nights after I'd returned from work, when I would find Nina just putting her studying aside, her body clad only in a long T-shirt. We always kept a bottle of cheap white wine in the refrigerator and we would often share a glass of it before retiring to the bedroom for a lovemaking session before dropping off to sleep.

In 1986 the day I'd been waiting for since my return finally came. The business section of the Seattle newspaper announced that Microsoft Corporation would have an initial public offering of stock. The price was twenty-one dollars a share. I called my father, I called Tracy, I called Mike, I called Jack, all of whom had begun investing at my advice. I told them what they should do. I myself was probably among the first to buy when the market opened that Monday. I took everything I could spare, all my bonds, all my stocks that were simply holding money, nearly twenty-three thousand dollars worth of capital and bought Microsoft with it at twenty-one a share. That was nearly eleven hundred shares of what would eventually become the staple of the computer industry. By the end of the day that price had already risen to twenty-six a share. In less than eight hours I'd already made more than five grand. And it would do nothing but go up and up.

I continued to shove my money into Microsoft exclusively until the price rose into the forties per share. Then I began to concentrate on other IPOs that were just coming to bear.

In June of 1987, only three years after her first day of college, Nina finished her undergraduate degree. She was consistently on the honor roll and had no problem securing both admission and a student loan for the medical school. She began her classes there in September of 1987.

In January of 1988, a semester earlier than most of my classmates, I graduated with honors with a bachelor's degree in International Business. Before I'd even been given my degree I was offered a job with one of the more prestigious investment firms in the Seattle area. They were impressed with my honor roll placement, my interview skills, and most of all, my portfolio. I was singled out as a rising star; going to work in a place that usually only hired those with family connections. The starting salary was forty-eight thousand a year; a considerable amount for that time period. Nina and I stayed in our apartment, paying five hundred and twelve dollars a month in rent and stashing most of my salary into more rising stocks.

I hated every minute of it while I worked there but I learned much. I was considered somewhat of an eccentric, a square peg, but they were very impressed with the witchlike feel I had for the stock market and for picking out trends in it. It wasn't hard to do when you had knowledge of how the system worked coupled with knowledge of future events. I learned to research and invest in small, unheard of stocks that were about to benefit from some technological or sociological advance. Things like the latex glove industry in the face of the AIDS crisis.

Not surprisingly most of my brilliant insights were in the medical industry and the pharmaceutical industry. For instance, I knew from my previous life that there would be a big push to equip every major fire department engine and truck company in the country with semi-automatic defibrillators. So, using the skills I'd learned, I would research which companies made those things and direct my clients to invest their money there. Invariably I was right and my clients made money. My reputation grew and I began to develop contacts; the most important thing in that business. The fact that I couldn't stand most of my clients didn't matter. I learned to put that aside. My clients were my ticket to freedom.

By 1990, just as Nina was starting her third year of medical school I had both the contacts and the impressive reputation I needed. I resigned my position with the firm and Stevens Investment Consulting was born. My price was high, higher than anyone in the Seattle area. I did not advertise in any way shape or form. But I had more clients than I could handle. Word of mouth had spread that if you wanted to make some guaranteed money, you went and saw Bill Stevens. I rented a spacious office near downtown. I hired an attractive secretary to staff the front desk. And I dispensed killer advice that never, as far as I know, cost anybody a dime in losses. Amusingly enough, a good portion of my clients were the investment counselors I'd worked with at the firm. After all, who knew better than they how accurate my predictions were. None of my clients ever knew that I lived in a pauper's hovel in South Seattle and drove an old Datsun to work. None of them knew that I was cramming every spare penny into the same stocks I was recommending to them.

Our net worth climbed past the million-dollar mark about the time that Nina started her fourth and final year of medical school. We celebrated by making a few purchases. I bought my wife a Volvo with all the bells and whistles. I bought myself a BMW with all the bells and whistles. I bought the both of us a three-bedroom house in one of the middle-class suburbs, putting down twenty percent and assuming a thirty-year loan at seven and a half percent. The real estate agent that sold it to us thought we were mad once she got a look at our credit report and earnings sheet.

"But, sir," she'd nearly pleaded, "this house is only two hundred and twenty thousand. With your income and assets, you qualify for well over nine hundred thousand. Why would you want to..."

"Ma'am?" I'd interrupted, "this is the house we want. Are you going to sell it to us or not? If not, I'll be happy to find another agent who will."

She sold it to us of course. She certainly did not want to lose her commission. We moved into our first house on September 18, 1991. We made love in the bedroom that first night before we even began to unpack.

Nina Stevens became Doctor Stevens on June 3, 1992. My parents, her parents, Tracy, even Mike and Maggie flew up for the ceremony. After they all returned home Nina was left with four weeks before her residency in emergency medicine began. I took a vacation from work - it's easy to do when you're the boss - and I rented us a condo on the leeward side of Maui. Except for our honeymoon it was our first real vacation. We spent three and half weeks relaxing on the beach, eating in restaurants, sightseeing, and making love at least twice a day; sometimes in our condo, sometimes on a deserted stretch of beach as the sun went down, and once in the bathroom of a sightseeing dinner cruise boat. That last one was not exactly making love, it was pure lustful fucking, through and through. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

When we returned to Seattle the hell of residency began for Nina. She would work thirty-six hours at a stretch at least three times a week, learning the finer points of treating medical and traumatic injuries in the busiest emergency room in Washington. If she was allowed to get any sleep there at all it was typically less than an hour at a time. When she was home she was exhausted. Many was the time that she dragged herself into the house at some forbidding hour and tried to tell me about her shift but fell asleep in mid-sentence. I would carry her to bed like a child on these occasions, undress her, and tuck her in.

I concentrated on my own work during this period, spending hours at my computer terminal in the office or in the den of my house, researching companies, finding out what they made, how they made it, what kind of raw materials they used to make it with. I spent even more hours on the phone with my clients, advising them to buy this, to sell that. My reputation continued to grow to the point where I had to turn down clients because I simply didn't have the time to consult with them. And of course, under the rules of capitalism, my price went up along with the demand for me. I received so many offers of employment at outrageous salaries from large firms that I lost count of them. I had so many rich pricks offer to partner with me that I had to develop a standard speech for turning them down.

I suppose it was inevitable that one day two gentlemen in suits entered my office and approached Darla, my young secretary. They spoke a few words to her, showed her some identification, and a second later my phone was ringing on my desk. She told me about my visitors and I instructed her to let them in.

"Mr. Stevens," said the taller of the two, his eyes flitting around my office, looking for something incriminating. "I'm Special Agent Talon, FBI." He flipped open a little leather case, displaying his credentials. "This is Agent Sparks from the Securities and Exchange Commission." Sparks displayed his own credentials. "Would you mind if we had a few words with you?"

"Not at all, gentlemen," I said, suppressing my nervousness at the appearance of a couple of feds. "Please sit down." I waved them to the chairs before my desk. "Can I have Darla bring you some coffee or tea? Maybe some bottled water?"

"No, thank you," Talon answered for both of them. They took their seats and spent a moment just looking at me.

"What is it I can help you with?" I asked.

"Word among the investment community," Sparks said, speaking for the first time, "is that if you want to make some guaranteed money in the market, you go see Bill Stevens at Stevens Consulting."

I gave a small smile. "Glad to know that my reputation proceeds me."

"Uh huh," Sparks continued. "We did a little checking on you, Mr. Stevens. When we hear something like that it makes us a little curious. Guaranteed money? In the stock market? There is really no such thing. The stock market, as you surely know, is little more than a respectable form of gambling. Some have a flair for it. Some do not. But nobody has the reputation that you have. Nobody."

He leaned forward, his gray eyes burning into mine. He was trying to intimidate me. "You charge nearly three times what other investment consultants do," he said. "There is no reason or justification for such an outrageous fee in a business such as this. None at all. But somehow you not only get away with it, you have more clients than you can handle. We sent one of our agents to try and sign up with you just to check you out and he was turned away, not because he's a fed but because you have no time to take on new clients, you're that booked."

"Is there something illegal about that?" I asked, starting to get a little angry.

Sparks ignored my question. "We've talked to many of your clients. It seems that you have quite the ability to spot and exploit trends in the market. An almost spooky ability. Time after time we were told how you advised them to put their money in this stock or that stock, usually something obscure that they'd never even heard of, and then lo and behold, that stock begins to go up and up. Not one person we talked to complained about their stocks going down. Not a single one. Not one of them bitched about the fee you charged. Not a single one. Do you find that a little strange, Mr. Stevens? Because I surely do."

"My clients talked to you?" I asked, appalled. I don't know why that surprised me but it did.

"Oh yes," Sparks smiled, perhaps sensing a little uplifted corner of my persona that he could pry at. "They were quite willing to talk to us once we implied to them that something illegal might be going on and that they might be implicated. Most of them happily showed us the records of their buys and sells. They sold you out in an instant at the mere suggestion that they themselves might be in danger."

"Figures," I muttered, seething at this knowledge. I recovered myself quickly. "But I'll ask you again, gentlemen, have I done anything illegal?"

"I don't know, Mr. Stevens," Sparks asked me. "Have you? From everything we've learned it certainly looks like a fair amount of insider trading is going on here. Somebody is feeding you information, probably several somebodies inside of these corporations."

"Are you serious?" I asked, feeling myself on a little firmer ground. "You're suggesting that I have contacts inside of more than a hundred corporations that are feeding me inside info? Do you really believe that? It would have to be that many because that's how many companies I routinely advise my clients to invest in. I'm sure you know that if you've checked on me like you said. That's an awful lot of inside information, isn't it?"

"So you say you're doing nothing wrong?" Sparks asked. "That you're just very adept at picking the right stocks time and time again? So adept that you never guess wrong?"

"Basically, yes."

"Would you mind if we took a look through your files?" Sparks asked next.

I laughed out loud, not able to help myself. "Let you look through my files? Are you mad?"

He gave me a reasonable look. "If you have nothing to hide, Mr. Stevens," he said, "then why should you mind letting us take a look?"

I shook my head at them. I'd had about enough of this. "Gentlemen," I asked, "this is the United States of America, is it not?"

"Yes, Mr. Stevens," Sparks said tiredly.

"Good. Then I'm protected by a little document called the constitution am I not? A little addition to that document known as the fourth amendment? If you want to look through my files then you go get a judge to give you a warrant allowing you to do so. But you can't do that, can you? Because you don't have any probable cause that I've committed any crime. You're just here on a fishing expedition, hoping that I'll break down in front of you and bust open some international insider trading conspiracy. Well sorry to disappoint you, gentlemen, but that's not going to happen. There is no conspiracy and you will not be looking at any of my files."

Talon took a deep, angry breath. "Mr. Stevens," he said, "I have some very good friends at the Internal Revenue Service. I can make a few phone calls and you would find yourself under very intense scrutiny every time you filed your taxes."

"You're threatening me?" I barked, laughing. "You've got to be shitting. You know damn well you've already had your buddies at the IRS look into my background. You could probably recite my net worth as well as I can. You want to have them audit me every year? Go ahead and bring it on. They'll find nothing. I pay every penny of capital gains tax and income tax that I'm responsible for. I take no questionable deductions. I'm sure my clients have told you that I'm somewhat of a weirdo in that regard. When they bitch about their capital gains tax I always tell them they should be proud to pay it, that there is not nearly enough distribution of wealth in this country. I tell them I think the tax should be greater than it is, that the rich should be hammered with taxes. Bring on the audits guys, you can't threaten me with that."

They both stared for a moment, feeling the balance of power shifting on its axis. "Mr. Stevens," Talon started again.

"Gentlemen," I said, standing up, "I'm a very busy man and I have work to do. I think the time has come to put an end to our discussion. If you wish to talk to me again, please call in advance and set up an appointment. I'll be sure to have a lawyer present. Good day."

Despite my bravado in the face of the feds, the encounter disturbed me greatly. They might not have known what they were dealing with but the fact remained that I had been noticed. I did not like to be noticed. I went home that night and found Nina in the bathtub, fragrant bubbles covering her body as she soaked after an exhausted sleep. She was due back at the hospital at six the next morning.

I leaned next to the tub and gave her a kiss. Somehow my hand just happened to drop into the water and land against her slippery thigh. The kiss deepened and two minutes later I was naked in the tub with her. A considerable amount of water splashed onto the carpet in the next fifteen minutes.

After, as we lay in our bed naked, staring at the ceiling fan going around and around I told her about my visit from Talon and Sparks. She was very alarmed by it.

"Feds?" she asked, looking at me. "You're not in any trouble are you, Bill?"

"No," I assured her. "They were just harassing me. They thought my record was a little suspicious and were trying to see if I was doing anything wrong."

"But you haven't been," she protested sternly. Nina was well aware of my prowess at picking stocks. She used to express doubt that I was committing so much of our net worth to a particular issue but she'd long since learned to trust my "instincts". How could she argue with constant success? If she had any suspicions about where my knowledge was coming from, if she ever thought it was more than just my own common sense and thorough study, she never mentioned it, either directly or indirectly.

"No," I said, "I've always gone out of my way to be on the up and up. I've never cheated so much as a penny on our taxes. We have nothing to worry about in that regards but at the same time I think it's time for a change."

"What kind of change?"

I told her. We talked into the wee hours of the morning. By the time she left for the hospital a decision had been made. I put it into motion the very next day.

On November 16, 1993, at the age of twenty-six, with a net worth of 1.9 million dollars, I retired from work. I was free. I didn't spare a thought about the clients I was abandoning. After all, those assholes had talked to the feds about me, had shown them records. I could understand that. But not a single one of them, not one out of the forty or so the feds talked to, had bothered to give me a little call and let me know that the SEC and the FBI were sniffing up my ass. Fuck them. They'd paid me their money and I'd advised them well. Our relationship ended right there.

Darla was another matter. The closing down of Stevens Consulting left her without a job. I'd lured her away from a job she'd hated by offering her a handsome salary. This had been in the days before sexual harassment became the issue it is today and Darla had been expected to offer special services to her previous boss as a condition of continued employment. Naturally she'd been prepared to offer those services to me when I hired her and had been quite surprised when I didn't request them. I had changed her view of the world as she knew it.

She became a very loyal employee, a secretary that other businessmen and women could only dream about. She also became a friend during the many hours we spent alone in the office. She was very attractive and I can't say that I hadn't enjoyed looking at her nyloned legs on occasion as she typed on her computer or answered the phone, but I never once considered bedding her. I told her the news of the closure of Stevens Consulting and she broke into tears.

Her tears dried up when I gave her her severance package. I gave her a check for thirty thousand dollars and a lifelong offer to consult in investment for her free of charge. If she played her cards right she would never have to work again and she knew it. She gave me a huge hug, a kiss on the cheek, and an unspoken offer to continue the affections in my office. I gave her an unspoken denial and we parted.

Though Nina was still locked in the rigors of residency, I had nothing but time on my hands now. Using my computer I could monitor and adjust our investments, dispense advice to my few clients - Maggie and Mike, Jack and Mary, Mom and Dad, Darla, Tracy - by checking my computer and spending less than two hours per week before it. Our net worth had reached the point where it could only get bigger as long as I kept shifting it from rising stock to rising stock. I began to spend a little on self-pleasure.

During the last two years of Nina's residency I learned to fly an airplane and purchased a Cessna that could hold four people. I learned to sail on Puget Sound, even venturing into the open water of the Pacific Ocean and learning the finer points of open sea navigation and handling. I learned to play golf, bringing my handicap from an initial twenty-six all the way down to a nine. I learned to hunt for deer and elk, my father-in-law taking on the responsibility of teaching me. I purchased a Winchester 30-06 and fired it at a range until I could hit a target the size of a quarter from two hundred yards. My first trip to the Idaho panhandle in October I brought down a four-point buck. The next October Jack and I climbed into my Cessna and I flew us to the most remote airstrip in northern Wyoming we could find. We spent a week camping out, drinking beer, and basking in maleness. We both bagged an elk on that trip and had to arrange for the meat to be shipped home via ground transport because it's sheer weight would have overloaded my plane.

I kept myself amused by my many pursuits during those days, never recklessly spending money, but gratefully abandoning my miserly ways at the same time. We remained in our simple three-bedroom house, our neighbors never knowing or suspecting that we were multi-millionaires. In fact, since they knew Nina was a doctor in residency, they kind of figured that I was some sort of unemployed loser that had latched onto her. I never bothered to correct this impression.

As the end of her residency began to come into view we began to talk about what was next - where we would go, what we would do. It wasn't a long discussion. Both of us longed to leave Seattle behind. We hated the weather, we hated the bustle of living in such a large city. We both wanted to go home.

Three things happened in the last six months of her residency. The first was that Nina began looking for a position in a Spokane emergency room. The trauma center expressed immediate interest in her and the employment process began. I flew her back and forth for interviews three times and she was offered the position. Her starting date was to be two weeks after she passed her final boards.

The second thing occurred directly because of the first. I began to scout out locations for our future home. We had long talks about our dream house during this time. I assured her that we could afford whatever it was we came up with and that I would make it happen. We both listed what we wanted and compared the lists. Eventually we came up with a master plan. I searched out and eventually found a good architect. He flew with me to Spokane and we began scouting out land for sale in the region. It didn't take long to find exactly the plot we were looking for. I started the legal process of purchasing the land while my architect began the process of planning the house we wanted. Construction began three months before we were to leave Seattle.

The third thing that happened had nothing to do with houses and jobs. Well, almost nothing. Nina and I had several long discussions and finally, two months before we returned to Spokane, a month after our new house had begun the process of being built, Nina threw away her birth control pills. October 18, 1995, the day she started her first day as a staff physician in the emergency room of the trauma center, she was two months pregnant.

We spent our first six months back in Spokane living in a house we'd rented in the River View section while construction on our dream-house was underway. Nina swelled up with pregnancy, her breasts edging into the territory of the C-cup for the first time in her life. She continued to work and I continued to oversee the construction, making sure everything was just right.

Our house was being built on six acres of shoreline property on Lake Pend Oreille. It was a very rural part of the lake, accessible only by a twisting, two-lane road. Our land was covered with evergreens and brush. No water or electricity ran there and we had to arrange to have it, as well as a septic system, put in. The location was exactly forty-two miles from the Spokane city limits, forty-eight miles from the trauma center. Nina assured me she didn't mind the commute. It would take her just under an hour both ways but since her schedule was only three twelve-hour shifts per week, it wasn't a terrible hardship. After the horrors of internship the schedule, including the commute, seemed almost serene.