Chapter 2

A package arrived by UPS in mid-morning on Wednesday. When I opened it, I found what looked like a typical GPS device like the one I kept in my Toyota 4Runner. The note in the package, from Sonny, indicated that this particular GPS was not used to show my location or direction of travel. It was to show me the location of Claire's car--the tracker had been planted under the body of her car and I could see where she was--if she was in her car--any time I turned on the device.

My receiver could be powered by the car power adapter when I was on the road or by the USB connector to my computers at work or home so that I could monitor her location while at my desk or in my den. This was way cool; I felt kinda like Daniel Craig in one of the new James Bond movies--or, as the British entertainment media called him, 'James Blonde.'

Sonny's note also included a recommendation that I should check my email a couple of times a day for electronic records of her travels. Twice daily, the logs from the GPS device would be downloaded to a server somewhere out there in the world and the listings would be sent to me as an attachment to an email at work disguised as a legitimate marketing message supposedly offering me special discounts to fly with Delta Airlines. I just needed to make sure that my email client was set so that it did not screen these out as spam.

Now, I simply had to watch and wait. God, I hate that! I am just not the patient type. I need action rather than idle waiting.

With that, I called in my Administrative Assistant, Grace, and we went over the list of clients who were most in need of being scheduled for a meeting with me for an annual financial review.

That evening, the routine was just that--routine. We had supper and helped the kids with homework and enjoyed some family time. When the kids went down, I told Claire that I needed to check email and that I wanted to read a bit from an eBook that I downloaded from one of my favorite online eBook sites--David Baldacci had a new suspense thriller out that looked promising.

Retiring to the den, I woke the computer and went quickly through the home emails. Only a couple of them were of interest. They were from mutual friends of Claire and me, and they informed us of plans for upcoming end-of-school-year parties and kids' activities being planned. We were now in the middle of May and school was scheduled to end on the fifth of June--shortly after Memorial Day. There were also early notices for Claire's upcoming Fifteen-Year reunion of her graduating class, scheduled for the last week in June.

I had closed the den door--Claire was watching television in the family room--but the computer desk was situated so that I could face the door. I activated a file transfer software application on the computer and plugged the USB cables from the two remote phone recorders in my desk drawer to the USB hub sitting beside the computer. I wanted to transfer copies of all the recordings from her cell phone and the land line phone here at the house to the computer so that I could burn copies of anything significant to DVD-R or CD-R if needed.

Once the transfer was complete, I checked to see that the memory cards for the two digital recorders still had sufficient available space for recording a couple of more days of telephone traffic. Then, I disconnected them and put them back into stand-by mode and began to listen to the collection of audio gleaned from the land line phones at the house and from Claire's cell phone. I used my ear buds, so that the sound would be limited to my ears only as I listened and watched the door.

It dawned on me that I might need to get with Sonny later about some way to capture any message traffic that might occur when Claire used the texting feature on her phone. I sent myself an email to my work address to remind me to call in the morning, and then I cleared out the 'Sent' copy to keep Claire from seeing it if she checked the email.

The home phone traffic was limited only to a couple of solicitor calls that went directly to voice mail. Sometimes I wondered why we even kept land line phones anymore, since most of our communication in today's world was done on mobile devices. The traffic on Claire's cell phone today did not pick up until she turned the phone on as she was leaving work, and the only call recorded was her calling her stylist for a hair appointment for the upcoming Saturday morning.

Ah, well. So far, so good, I guess. It was only the first day, after all. I would just need to persevere for a while and see where this was all going to lead--if anywhere.

The week continued with nothing uneventful on the personal or electronic front. We both went to work and sent the kids off to, and picked them up from, the schools they attended. Nothing even remotely questionable came up from the recordings or the travel logs for the tracker on Claire's car for the next few days. Claire had her hair appointment on Saturday for a cut and wash and I did some work around the house and we made love passionately and vigorously on Saturday night for about two hours.

Finally, Sunday afternoon, there was one call of interest to the house land line. I listened to it with interest on Sunday night just before bed. I was using my ear buds, as usual, to keep the listening to myself without fear of anyone else hearing.

[Claire] "Hello?"

[Female voice] "Hey, Claire Bear, how are you?"

[Clair, with an audible sigh] "Hello, Gay. What's on your little mind?" Claire did not sound enthusiastic at all. In fact, she sounded a bit irritable. I remembered that Gay was one of the old A-crowd that Claire had been keeping at a social distance.

[Gay, evidently] "Now, Claire, you know that we are all excited about your upcoming return engagement. The last one was so exciting and the sex was just so hot!" She actually giggled when she finished saying this.

[Claire] "Look, Gay, I can't talk about that now ... here on the home phone. Wade might hear. He can never find out about that other time. I just don't think he could stand to keep me around if he found out."

[Gay] "Well, he doesn't have to find out if you stay calm. Look, Dwight, Harvey, and Tim each want to have a solo hook-up with you before the big Memorial Day bash--you know, to knock off the edge, so to speak. They all still think that sex with you is the best thing since Graham Crackers. I know that Tim has been drooling over the video that he keeps on our computer. He has watched it almost every night this week. Then, after he watches it, he gives me a hell of a ride after seeing you in action; it gets him all worked up."

[Gay continues] "They worked out a schedule for this coming week with Harvey on Tuesday, Tim and me on Wednesday, and Dwight on Thursday; Harvey and Dwight will arrange for their families to be out of the house on the nights of your expected visits. Then they will all three be there, of course, for the main event at the quarry on Friday."

[Claire, following a moment of silence] "I wish there were some other way. It would kill Wade if he were to find out about this ... or about the other time. I can't lose him, Gay; I just can't."

I could hear emotion in her voice and detected that she was probably on the verge of crying as she said it. Maybe she was experiencing some remorse for having already cheated on me and for the plans--which they were discussing--to continue doing so.

[Gay] "Now, Honey, if you are careful, he won't find out. After all, it will all be over after Friday, and we can simply keep those sexy memories for the rest of our lives and then be able to start up a program of making a lot of new memories, if you are game." Gay giggled again.

[Claire, after a moment's hesitation] "We'll see if it actually works out like you think it will. I just need to be as discreet as possible for now. Nothing about this must surface, or else my marriage and my life as I know it will be very much in danger."

[Gay, with irritation now in her voice] "You worry too much. Just make plans for your visits to see the guys individually and be sure that you are careful. We don't want poor Wade to get all upset at this point, now do we? Anyway, I gotta go. I'll call you later in the week to see how things went; and, of course, I'll be there Friday for the big event; just like last time. Bye."

Something in Gay's voice when she spoke about me held an edge of disdain. This bitch evidently did not think too much of me. I had no idea why, unless it involved my being a move-in rather than having grown up here with all of them. I had only met Gay a couple of times in passing at various events. Claire had not said too much to me about her, other than giving me the fact that they had grown up here in town and gone to school together and they had both been cheerleaders in high school.

[Claire] "Yeah ... bye." But by then, the other woman had already broken the connection.

I went to the family room and walked directly over to the book shelves that held Claire's high school yearbook from her senior year. Taking it back to the den, I sat down and thumbed through, looking for references to the names I had heard discussed.

I found Gay first, on the sixth page of individual shots, recognizing her from the few times I had encountered her. The legend identified her as Gay Marshall back then. Turning to the back, I looked up her name in the picture index and found several references. These turned out to be pictures of her with the varsity cheerleader squad. My breath caught when I saw just how gorgeous Claire looked in her cheerleader uniform standing next to Gay in the group shot. I also recognized Mindy's teacher, Carol Newman (Carol Hinson back then) as one of the other varsity cheerleaders.

Like Claire, Gay had been a real babe back then, but the expression on Gay's face in almost every picture showed that she was really full of herself, reflecting vanity and a sort of smugness. One shot showed her receiving a bouquet and a crown at the homecoming football game. The player presenting the bouquet was identified as Tim Harmon.

Now I had the Tim more than likely identified as Gay's husband, who I had seen around town as well. I did not know him personally, but I knew who he was, since his face, though a little older and fuller, looked down from a billboard out on Highway 6, advertising his auto dealership in town. I got the White Pages and looked up his name in the Residential section; I found it listed as 'Harmon, Tim and Gay', followed by the address on the west side of town and the telephone number. Well, that answered my question about how to locate Tim and Gay.

Back in the yearbook, I looked for other pictures of Tim and found football team pictures. In a shot of the offensive backfield players together, I found pictures labeled with the names Harvey Bland and Dwight Newman. I had remembered hearing about Harvey at my wedding reception--I deal in details, remember. I had also met him and seen him at Chamber of Commerce meetings a couple of times, but had never had the chance to talk to him much. The White Pages got me his address--also on the west side of town.

Dwight was someone I knew pretty well, along with his wife, Carol. I saw him and Carol regularly as a client couple and I remembered him from our wedding reception. Our families did not socialize, but we ran into each other quite often, since Mindy was a student in Carol's second grade class and Dwight was now the principal of John Bankhead Magruder Elementary School, where Carol taught.

I had always thought that Carol was nice, and she seemed to want to work hard at educating her students. Her parent-teacher conferences with Claire and me were always thorough and with the best interests of Mindy in mind. I would say that it was a good thing that she taught elementary school. As hot as Carol was, it would have been difficult for the boys in junior high or high school to pay attention to the subject matter with her in front of the class.