It was my fault. I should have been there but I wasn't. I could have called but I didn't. Mary Ellen was always so self sufficient that I assumed that when I didn't show by a reasonable time that she would have gone on home and waited for me there. After all, that wasn't the first time something like that had happened. I'm not yet sure of what the cost is going to be, but it could be bad - it could be very bad.

It was a Friday night and I'd made reservations at Anton's for dinner. Because of a series of business meetings that would keep me tied up all day I had made arrangements for Mary Ellen to meet me at Anton's where we would have dinner and then go out for a night on the town. At the last minute a deal breaker came up in my last meeting and I got wrapped up in the problem. When the meeting was finally over it was almost seven-thirty, but I called Anton's on the off chance that Mary Ellen would still be there. After several minutes wait the maitre de came back to the phone and told me that she wasn't there. I headed on home to face the music, but when I got home Marry Ellen wasn't there. When she still wasn't home by midnight by midnight I called the police to see if maybe she had been involved in an accident, but they had no record of her. I fell asleep in the easy chair next to the phone in the family room, but it never rang. When I woke up in the morning Mary Ellen still wasn't home so I got on the phone to every friend and relative that I could think off, but none of them had seen or heard from her.

I got in my car and drove down to Anton's and found Mary Ellen's car still parked in the lot and I began to wonder if maybe she'd had a few too many martinis and had checked into one of the hotels rather than drive. The Marriott, Hilton, and Executive Suites had no record of her checking in so I drove on home. On the way I had dark thoughts. Maybe she was at one of the hotels, but maybe she hadn't gotten the room herself, maybe she was with someone. But no, Mary Ellen wasn't the type to do something like that. Besides, as far as I knew Mary Ellen had been completely faithful during our marriage, I'd bet my life on it. When I got home Mary Ellen still wasn't there. I called the police to report her missing, but they wouldn't take the report. They told me that she had to be missing for more than forty-eight hours and when I got upset with them the desk sergeant tried to calm me down. Apparently twenty-four out of twenty-five spousal missing persons show up within forty-eight hours.

"Are you and the wife having any marital problems sir? Any arguments or disagreements in the last couple of days?"

I assured him that we weren't and hung up. I spent most of the day and the rest of the night sitting by the phone chewing my nails and waiting for the damn thing to ring. At six-ten on Sunday morning the phone rang and I answered it to find a Sergeant Matthews of the campus police on the other end.

"Do you know a Mary Ellen Reardon?"

I told him that Mary Ellen was my wife.

"We found her sitting on a park bench on campus and she's in pretty bad shape."

I told him I would be right down and he interrupted me to say that she wouldn't be at the campus police station:

"We are having her transported to Mercy Hospital. She will be in the emergency room."

I found Sgt. Matthews waiting for me when I got there.

"She's in the exam room and I'll take you in to see her in a minute, but first, can you tell me why your wife would be sitting on a bench on campus at five forty-five in the morning?"

I told him about how she had been missing since Friday night and what the position of the local cops had been. He shook his head in understanding.

"Well, unfortunately, this isn't the first time that this has happened, but it is the first time it has happened to a thirty-eight year old woman. I'll be real curious to see how it happened, but unfortunately your wife wasn't in any condition to tell us."

I lost my temper, "Will you please tell me what the hell is going on? Why is my wife in the emergency room?"

He gave me a look that said that he was sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings and then said, "Your wife is being checked out because of the possibility that she may have been raped. I think that the finding will be that she has had sex with multiple partners, possibly as many as twenty or thirty." He saw the stunned look on my face, "Like I said, she's not the first one we've found sitting on a park bench at five in the morning totally out of it. I'm guessing that your wife spent Friday and Saturday at a frat house entertaining the boys." He saw me getting ready to blow, "I'm not saying that she knew what she was doing. What with all the date rape drugs that are out there now and with alcohol, pot and other drugs it usually isn't all that hard to get a girl in the mood. In your wife's case all some one had to do was buy her a drink, slip something in her glass and they could have walked her out of Anton's with no one being the wiser. Let's go see if she's coherent enough to talk to us."

She wasn't, but the doctor was able to tell us that there were no signs of force used on Mary Ellen, but that she had definitely had sex with multiple partners.

"No way of telling how many, but most definitely more than one."

Sgt. Matthews told me that he would be back later to talk with her when she was fully awake and he left us. I sat down in a chair next to Mary Ellen and waited.

It was eleven in the morning when I felt Mary Ellen clutch at my arm and say, "Where am I?" I told her and she asked why she was there. "I was hoping that you could tell me" and I told her about her being missing since Friday night and then being found on the college campus that morning. She looked stunned.

"Two days? I've been gone for two days?"

The nurse had called Matthews and he was there in twenty minutes. Mary Ellen couldn't tell him anything other than she'd been having a drink at Anton's while waiting for me to show up and she didn't remember a thing since then. Matthews told me that he would keep the investigation going and then he left. At three that afternoon I took Mary Ellen home. For the next couple of days I kept asking if she'd remembered anything and she told me that there were bits and pieces coming back to her, but nothing that she wanted to talk to me about. I pressed her and finally she told me about vague recollections of having sex with different men and even having sex with more than one man at a time and then she started crying and told me she wasn't going to talk about it again.