Chapter 7

“Do you want to know my deepest darkest secret, by far the most shameful experience of my entire life?” She asked, right as we were starting to pack up the camp to head back to baseball complex. “Now that I’m fairly sure I’m soon to be rid of you, you might as well know about a couple of things that I once did. Secrets I’ve mostly never told to anyone, and ones that will likely never escape my lips ever again. Think of it perhaps as learning the very worst things about me, so that years from now you can remind yourself that you’d had a lucky escape avoiding my clutches.”

“Why not?”

“Ok, I’d grown up as a happy kid, with two parents that I wasn’t too embarrassed to be seen in public with. We had it really pretty good actually, until I discovered boys and then discovered that I was a slut who liked sex and wanted more of it. Then pretty quickly thereafter I decided that I loved having sex and soon was spreading for any just about any high school guy who even hinted that he’d like to take out. Word got out fast in our school that I’d ‘do it’ on the first date. Kids talk and there wasn’t much sense in denying it. I had a different guy under my arm almost every week. Being young, I was stupid. My parents were religious Catholic and against birth control, so I bought condoms. My boyfriend’s even sometimes used them, so eventually, spinning that roulette wheel of luck and danger a few times too often, I found myself knocked up by the start of my senior year. No one’s fault but mine.”

“Happened to more than few girls in my own senior class,” I agreed. “A rural school in a rural county where all of the kids lived on farms or ranches and knew most the facts of life by middle school. Half of the girls I knew were already married or pregnant before graduation.”

“Nope, I wasn’t the only one in my city school either. Honestly, I couldn’t have narrowed down the list of potential father’s to just one hand, so I didn’t even try. Besides, even if I had known who the father was, I wouldn’t have wanted to marry him and go respectable either. So ... I fessed up to mom and dad, told them I’d been stupid, and that I’d already scheduled for an abortion at the nearest women’s clinic in our city. They went apeshit and stayed apeshit for over a week, until the date of my ‘procedure’. I had the offer of going to a special girl’s catholic school with other girls in my similar condition and giving birth t0 give the child up for adoption ... or walking out the door that day, and never again setting my foot back into it. Easy decision; I walked out that door and had the procedure. No, this wasn’t even the shameful part either ... that’s still yet to come.”

“The nurses and volunteer staff at the clinic knew a few places for a young girl to go stay, assuming that she was unwelcome at home, and after checking some lists, I decided to go a different girls shelter at the next nearest city, slightly smaller but only about an hour or so away by bus. So I went there. After I arrived there, reviewing the want ads and job listings on some public bulletin boards, I saw a card with small hand-written notice asking for a ‘ladies companion’ to assist with a little light housework in return for room and board. That sounded pretty good for a girl that hadn’t finished her high school diploma, so I went to their home address and applied for the position. They accepted me in nearly immediately, and within days it was like we’d been living together for years. I had my own bedroom, but within a week I was sharing their bed.”

“That sounds like you ... even a younger you.

“The couple, barely in their thirties, were established swingers and both were actively bisexual. Tanya, the wife, was my first female lover, and until I’d met Roberta, still my best. She’d been in a car accident with leg injuries that were still healing and she was also in the early stages of another troubled pregnancy. She’d already suffered two miscarriages and was now on full bed rest, doctor’s order, to help avoid a third. Lesbian oral sex more than helped to fill the time, and after a few months together I really found myself quite in love with her. Her husband, a bit less so. We all slept together, and he could fuck me anytime he wanted to, and he often wanted to ... but something always just seemed off about our relationship together. He’d hint sometimes that the two of us should go to this town he knew of in Utah, so that he could officially marry me also, and I could then be his second wife. Somehow, something inside of me always told me to say no, even though I wanted to do just exactly that. If Tanya had ever once asked me to do this, I would have, immediately ... for her! But always this idea would always originate from her husband, at times when we were alone. I thought I was happy, but I was just barely eighteen and mostly I just enjoying being fucked regularly by a guy and a girl with someone else paying the bills.”

“We went on this way for about another six months, until Tanya had another miscarriage. She bled out a lot, constantly for over a week. She went to the doctor and was hospitalized briefly, but the bleeding never entirely quit. She wanted to die at home and after another day, she did. Her last gift to me was this silver ring that I wear on my little finger. She called ‘our lesbian wedding ring, just between you and me’. After she passed, I should have left, but I was ‘comfortable’ and stayed. Tanya had wanted to now do for her husband what she couldn’t, so I warmed his bed and dutifully became the new wife of the household, but without any legal ceremony.”

“I think I’m beginning to sense where the trouble started,”

“Almost right away,” she agreed. “Now, once Tanya was gone, Jim’s demands on me grew and he began to become extremely controlling. He didn’t seen to be mourning for his dead wife at all! I wasn’t ready to pack up and leave and I had no money of my own, so I decided to just wait and bide my time there awhile longer. He next wanted me to go with him to the swinger clubs that he and Tanya had used to attend, and sometimes go to extra weekend parties as well. I was comfortable being nude around strangers, and even fucking them, anyone and everyone Jim told me to spread for or suck off. Soon, other guys and gals were coming home with us regularly, fucking in our bed and even staying for a few days to fuck nearly endlessly. I also started to notice that Jim had regular, steady girlfriends in the swinger community and when one of them, Nadine, visited for a weekend and then stayed on, permanently as my ‘co-wife’, I couldn’t help but to start smelling a rat.”

“You had to know, or at least suspect that something was wrong by then.”

“I did ... but I was too innocent then to really believe it ... I only found the proof by accident,” Leah added after a long pause, “even after her death it was still sitting right there in the medicine cabinet for all of the world to see, he hadn’t even gotten rid of it or tried to hide it. I couldn’t pronounce the drug’s name, but when I looked it up on the internet I learned that it was an extremely powerful blood thinner, used only under hospital conditions treating possible blood clots and strokes. A very dangerous controlled drug, I don’t think anyone could get it from a pharmacist at any local drug store! If a normal person, like Tanya was given this drug regularly, she’d soon bleed out like a hemophiliac ... which is what I believe happened. I knew then he’d killed her, murdered her, and I didn’t even wait to pack up a bag of my stuff before I ran out of there. I barely had the good sense to grab some of the petty cash that Tanya kept in the kitchen cookie jar and I was on the first bus out of town. I had a few pictures of Tanya in my purse, both dress and being rather intimate, and that was all I really wanted from that house.”

“You didn’t think to phone the police?” I wondered.

“I wasn’t thinking at all. By the time the thought came to me I was already on the bus, and then it was too late and I just tried to blot the entire thing out of my mind and move on. For the next year, I worked odd jobs, fast food, and housework mostly, and even saved up enough to go to a local community college that offered almost free trade skill classes for the poor and destitute, which I certainly was. I learned to be a professional secretary, all the office and computer stuff during that time and became close friends with a young girl for the local Zuni Indian reservation, and she got me a job there working for her sister. It was actually a pretty nice job working as a receptionist clerk and maid of all work at the visitors’ center of a local. The boss, the sister of my friend, was a half-blooded gal who wasn’t much older than me, took a shine to me and let me sit in as an invited guest at many of the local events, not open to the visiting public. I got to learn a lot about desert herbs, the lore of the coyote and the wisdom of the owls. It was one of the happier years of my life, there.”

“Then one day, completely by surprise, I saw outside of the visitor’s center front window, a familiar car pull right up. It was Jim, along with Nadine, who looked several months’ pregnant, hand-in-hand with another younger girl who must have still been a teenager, at best. Jim had started fucking me when I was still just seventeen, and that seem to be the right age for him to bring in the next generation of young quim, that he preferred screwing. Probably another runaway like me! I guessed poor Nadine was likely to also suffer some sort of unfortunate medical accident sooner, rather than later. My boss had seen that I had gone all white in the face from sheer fright, so she took me into the back file room, sat me down and coaxed out my story about Jim ... and his wives. I told her that he’d murdered at least one woman in cold blood and was likely to do exactly the same again to this poor pregnant slut and the likely innocent young gal next to them. Nadine would die and this poor girl would be groomed to become his next sex slave, until he got bored of her and disposed of her too. All this was certainly true, but the real part that scared me shitless was the realization that if I’d followed Tanya’s last wishes, that could and likely would have be me out there. Knocked up by a monster, with my replacement already waiting by my side!”

“That just had to be horrible,” I admitted, “and so you felt you had to do something about it.”

“Had to. By that point I was so stressed and panicking that I started to hyperventilate and nearly fell over off of the stool I had been sitting on. My boss grabbed me by the arm and half pulled and half carried me to a small traditional pueblo house just off from the central main tourist area and brought me inside. There sitting in front of me was an old tribal elder about as old as the hills. He was one of their best medicine men, my boss told me, and he could sooth my distress, physically and mentally. After an emotional, several minute long conversation between them spoken entirely in Zuni, my boss scuttled off and shut the door behind her. The old medicine man then arose from where he was seated and opened various pots and drawers full of herbs and powdered them while chanting and then lit a small fire next to me and burned them. With another bundle of flowers, sticks and perhaps other herbs, he then walked around me gently tapping me with the bundle, first all dry, and then moistened from a clay pot of water. I could figure out easily enough on my own that this was some kind of cleansing or purification ritual and I admit that it did really relax me.”

“The smoke began to billow around me and soon it was like I was in a trace, completely relaxed and without any fears at all. Then he spoke to me, softly, like I was in a dreamlike or trance state, and he told me to tell him all of my troubles, so that they might be banished ... and I did. I told him everything about my life – everything. I don’t think I could have lied or even exaggerated anything, even if I had wished to. I think he asked me why I had been so frightened with dread, and I told him that I had seen my friend’s murderer and I felt deep in my heart that another young woman would soon die also. I don’t remember the words, it really was just like if it happened in a dream, but I remember the intensity of that emotion, of my soul regurgitating up all of the bile I felt about Tanya’s murder, and the severe guilt I had felt since that I hadn’t understood what was really happening until it was far too late ... and as her friend and lover I should have protected her somehow, or at the very least done something, like tell the police, to save other future victims from him. I then last remembered my pain and anger leaving out through my body, in a shimmering reddish-black mist, as the healer’s left hand held mine as his right hand pressed against my chest, chanting more forcefully. My dark humors that had been ejected from me were soon swallowed up entire by the herbal smoke for the fire, to be destroyed. Then I either fell asleep or passed out.”

“About two hours later, after I had been taken to the medicine man’s house, I awoke on a cot inside the nurses’ station building, just behind the visitor’s center. I’d had a dizzy spell, my Boss told me, but if I felt better after sitting up and drinking a bottled water, I could go on home early today and take tomorrow off from work too, so I could rest up. I didn’t argue or even ask any questions, I just felt completely emotionally and physically drained. I did ask if I could thank the old healer again, before leaving, but my boss just laughed at me and said that he only spoke the tribal tongue, and couldn’t speak any English.”

“So, I went home and rested and returned to work the next Monday and really never thought again about that shock that seeing Jim again had given me. I felt happier; in quite every way imaginable. My sleep was restful for the first time in years and my dreams seemed to all very happy ones. Somehow, I was a new woman with confidence I hadn’t felt since I was a stupid pregnant seventeen year-old slamming the door of my parents’ house. About a month later, I suddenly had the will to try and reconnect with them now, years later to perhaps start healing that old wound too, and quite to my surprise they were more than willing, and even wished for me to return my old home town for a lengthy stay so that we could properly reconcile as a family.”

“Resolved then, I decided to return back home, so I turned in my two weeks’ notice to my boss, they seemed sincerely sorry to see me leave, but they more than most people, really understood the importance of family. It wasn’t I was back in my old city, unpacking my few things into my old bedroom at my parent’s house, that I looked into a small envelope that my old boss had given me as we hugged goodbye. As I expected, there was a nice 8x10 of all us, the entire visitor’s center staff, taken in front of the team of costumed Zuni dancers during some recent ceremony. Everyone had signed it, on the back of the photo and I still have it, on the wall in my bedroom here at the park, in case you’ve never seen it. They really were all wonderful people! Now I thought the envelope was then empty, but it wasn’t quite, inside folded over a few times was a newspaper cutting from Tucson, the city were I’d lived with Tanya and Jim. It was a news story that said that Jim had been arrested by the local police and had been accused of attempting to poison his wife Nadine. She’d started to suspiciously bleed too, during her pregnancy and a very smart Ob-Gyn doctor became suspicious enough to order specific lab tests and discovered the poisoning. When a court order was signed to exhume Tanya’s grave too, Jim, who was then out on bail, knew the jig was up and shot his new under-aged sex toy (she survived) before turning the weapon on himself. The article hinted that Jim might have had other wives and victims in perhaps two other states, and that the investigation was ongoing.”