“Can’t they tell by the angle of the impact?” Clint asked. “I’ve seen stuff like that on crime shows.”
“I don’t think so,” Jennifer replied. “She didn't hit me with a crowbar or shoot me, after all. The book didn't leave much of a mark. Like I said, it was kind of a glancing blow. I don’t even have much of a bump there.”
Clint sighed. “Well, we still need to tell Chief Dennison what happened. I’m going to call him tonight, in fact. And tomorrow I’m going to find out which hospice Richard Vennekamp is staying at, and I’m going to talk directly to him.”
“Maybe you should,” Jennifer said.
That was when they both heard the doorbell ring.
When they opened the front door, they found Chief Dennison on the front porch.
“We were just now talking about you,” Jennifer said. “Thanks for your follow-up call today. I was going to call you back—but well, it was kind of a rough day for me.”
“May I come in?” he asked.
“Sure. Come and have a seat with us in the living room. Can we get you anything to drink?”
“No thank you, Mrs. Huber.”
Neither of them had anticipated an unannounced visit from Dennison. If he was here, that must mean that he had some break in the investigation of the vandalism incidents. Perhaps he had even found evidence that linked Deborah Vennekamp to the ongoing harassment, the conflicting evidence of the visitors log notwithstanding.
But Chief Dennison had another matter to report.
“The two of you are going to have to stop harassing Mrs. Vennekamp,” he said. “I’ll level with you: She called my office today and filed a complaint. She told me that you, Mrs. Huber, stopped by the library and began making accusations at her place of work. She’s very concerned about that, since she needs the income from that job at the library.”
“What?” Jennifer protested. “But she was the one who assaulted me.” She gave her version of her interaction with Deborah, including the thrown book.
“I hear you, Mrs. Huber; but I have to ask you: Did anyone else see Mrs. Vennekamp assault you with a library book?”
“No,” Jennifer replied glumly.
“I mean,” the chief continued. “The library is a public place. If Deborah Vennekamp threw a book at you, then someone else must have seen it.”
“We were behind a row of library shelves,” Jennifer said.
“Well, then why didn't you file a complaint immediately? According to both you and Mrs. Vennekamp, you dropped by the library around 5:30 this afternoon. That was almost four hours ago.”
Feeling defensive and trapped now, Jennifer said: “I—I wanted to get my bearings. I didn't know how to handle it.”
Dennison paused, and gave her a long sigh. “I want to believe you, Mrs. Huber, but please see this situation from my perspective. I realize that there has been some bad blood between you and Mrs. Vennekamp. And I realize that you hold her responsible for the problems the two of you have been having. But whenever I investigate one of your claims, there is never any hard evidence to support your version of events. I’m not accusing you of anything, Mrs. Huber. I only want you to see this from my perspective.”
How did I become the one under suspicion here? Jennifer thought, but did not say.
“Actually,” Clint cut in, “I was planning to talk to Richard Vennekamp about the situation with Deborah, and all of these…issues we’ve been having. Richard Vennekamp seems to be a very reasonable, approachable person. I’m thinking that if the two of us could simply talk man-to-man about this, we’d be able to put a stop to all of these problems.”
“I’m afraid that isn’t a very good idea, Mr. Huber, for several reasons. Mrs. Vennekamp spoke with me about her husband’s condition. It seems that Mr. Vennekamp has taken a turn for the worse. He may not be with her for long. She divides her time between her job at the library and Mr. Vennekamp’s hospice. She explained that she’s under a lot of stress right now, which is why your confronting her today upset her so.”
“Whoa!” Jennifer said. “I would never have spoken to Deborah Vennekamp again after our closing if it weren’t for all of these incidents: the condition of the house at the time of move-in, the dead cat on our porch, and then what she did last night.”
“You say, ‘she’, Mrs. Huber, but there is absolutely no evidence, at this time, which connects Mrs. Vennekamp to either nighttime incident at this house over the past two weeks. As for the condition of your house on the day you moved in—I’ve already explained to you that that was a civil matter, which you chose not to press at the time.
“Now, it is apparent to me that someone is bothering the two of you. We don’t yet know who that is; but I must ask you to leave Deborah Vennekamp alone. Leave Richard Vennekamp alone. I managed to calm Mrs. Vennekamp down, but she told me that her next steps will be to file a formal complaint against you, Mrs. Huber, and to ask a judge for a restraining order.”
Jennifer could not believe what she was hearing. Throughout her life, she had always been one of the people that others had wanted to be around, often to the point of pestering her. Once in college, she had briefly considered a restraining order against a boy whom she had dated briefly, a boy who could simply not let her go. (This had been only months before she’d met Clint.) The idea of someone filing such an order against her was almost inconceivable. She didn't harass people. She only wanted Deborah Vennekamp to leave her and her family in peace.
“Anyway,” Dennison said, standing up from the sofa in the Hubers’ living room. “I didn't want to let the day end without telling you that. I want to ask you both to please be patient. The Mydale Police Department will continue to look into this. But I must advise you very strongly against initiating any further contact with either Deborah or Richard Vennekamp. That could open up legal problems for you that you simply don’t need.”
22
They stood together in the doorway and watched the chief of police drive away. The blood from the most recent nocturnal attack was still visible on one of the pillars of the front porch.
As Clint closed the door silently, Jennifer felt her frustration boil up inside her: Deborah appeared to have beaten her—to have beaten them both.
“So now what?” she asked. Having taken matters into her own hands this afternoon and failed, Jennifer was now ready to entrust them to her husband. Let Clint play the knight in shining armor. Let him ride in on a white horse and save the day.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Clint said. “Tomorrow at lunch I’m going to research the latest and greatest home security systems. We’re going to fix up our property so that anyone who steps within a foot of our yard is going to be on-camera. We’ll get one of those systems that’s hooked into a call center with real, live operators, who call the police for you if anything goes wrong.”
“Clint, you know that that sort of system costs hundreds, maybe thousands to install. Then there’s a monthly fee, too. That sort of security doesn't come cheap.”
She realized what she was doing: A moment ago, she was ready to leave matters in his hands, and already she was second-guessing him.
“I don’t care,” he said. “You heard what Chief Dennison said: Deborah Vennekamp has an alibi for every night that we had a problem here—”
“And I don’t believe her for a second. Do you?”
“It doesn't matter what I believe. What matters is what we can prove. What matters is whose side the law is on. Based on what the police have told us, it sounds an awful lot like the law is on the side of Deborah Vennekamp.”
“But Clint—you weren’t there this afternoon. You didn't see that look in her eyes. She’s crazy.”
Clint shrugged. “She might very well be. But she’s also a clearly unhappy woman whose husband is dying. For some reason, she has a perverse attachment to this house. We aren’t going to give in to her, but we aren’t going to provoke her anymore, either.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
&nb
sp; “It means, honey, that you probably made a mistake this afternoon, when you went to the public library and confronted that woman, knowing, as you did, that she almost certainly had an alibi for where she was last night.”
A half dozen different retorts competed for priority in Jennifer’s mind. What she finally said was: “What about the fact that Deborah Vennekamp threw a book at me?”
“Jen, if Deborah Vennekamp were a man, I would gladly go punch her out. But she’s a woman, and she’s about the same age as my mother. I can’t do what I’d do if she were a man.”
“No one’s asking you to punch her out, Clint.”
“Besides, you told me that your head is okay, right? I offered to take you to the doctor to have it looked at. But you said that the book only grazed you.” He stopped and shook his own head. “Man, this is a ridiculous conversation. I’m sorry, honey, but I don't know what else we can do but beef up our home security and stay away from Deborah Vennekamp.”
She had no doubt that had a man assaulted her in any way, nothing would have stopped Clint from retaliating with physical violence. But few men, it seemed, were comfortable intervening in a quarrel between two women. It wasn't that Clint didn't take her side—he was simply out of his depth. He wanted to forget about Deborah Vennekamp and pay money to a security company, then hope that the problem would go away.
But Deborah Vennekamp, Jennifer believed, would not go away.
They went to bed shortly thereafter. As had often been the case when there was any sort of tension in their marriage, they attempted to patch things over with a physical release. This had been the case in the aftermath of the disastrous holiday party, with her horrible secret, the blowup about Clint’s going out with his friends, and his promises to change his ways. Their frequency had dramatically increased in those subsequent weeks, a fact that had not gone unnoticed by her husband.
“Wow,” he’d said one night. “If I had known that this would be the result of my partying too much with my friends, I’d have done more of it long ago.”
She had laughed off his comment as a joke at the time. Besides, what she had (almost) done was potentially far more damaging to their marriage. And she was then only beginning to understand the weight of the secret hanging over her head—the power of the weapon that Jim Lindsay could now bring to bear against her.
Tonight, too, marital passion masked a fundamental disagreement, an unspoken truth that—if revealed—could pull them apart.
And this was the fact that Jennifer did not want to let Deborah Vennekamp off so easily. Oh, she would be willing to forgive and forget—despite the numerous attacks on her home and the physical assault in the library—if forgiving and forgetting would make Deborah stop.
Clint’s plan was to enclose their house within a security perimeter. But even that would not keep them safe. What would happen, then, when mysterious packages began to arrive in the mail, filled with dead rodents and animal blood? Would their cars be safe?
And what about Connor?
Clint, in his good-natured tendency to believe that everything would work out for the best, wanted to believe that Deborah Vennekamp was an adversary who could be deterred with better outside lights and a burglar alarm. But Clint had not faced Deborah in the library today.
The root cause of their problems was not a general lack of security; nor did they live in a dangerous neighborhood. Quite the opposite, in fact: Mydale had a reputation as a low-crime community; and they were paying a premium to live in Mydale—in the original cost of their home, in property taxes, in the extra time and gasoline it took to commute to their jobs. Jennifer was galled by the thought that Deborah Vennekamp would now impose an additional expense on them—in the form of a deluxe security system that they otherwise would not need.
Jennifer heard the sound of Clint breathing easily beside her. As was often the case, he had fallen asleep almost immediately after sex. In better times, sex would have put her to sleep, too.
Thoughts of Deborah Vennekamp naturally segued into thoughts of work: At Ohio Excel Logistics, she had allowed herself to be forced into unnatural and unwanted constraints. Well, that was at work; and she had made the foolish decision to go home with Jim.
But she could not allow herself to be forced into similar constraints at home, by a person who had no reasonable grievance against her.
Their problem was Deborah Vennekamp—that much was clear. But what to do about her?
The first thing she needed to do was find out more about her enemy. (“Enemy”, she thought, uncomfortable with the word. Until just a few years ago, she had never had to think in terms of “enemies”. Rivals, yes, antagonists, perhaps; but enemies—no.)
Police Chief Dennison had told her not to go near Deborah Vennekamp in person. He had said nothing about going near her online.
23
Jennifer launched Internet Explorer, and typed in the Web address for Google.
Then she typed the words “Deborah Vennekamp” into Google’s search box.
After hitting the Google Search button, she double-checked to make sure that the door to the upstairs “computer room” was closed. The Hubers kept their computer in one of the house’s spare bedrooms. Their Dell computer, desk, and printer shared this space with three large bookshelves, and sundry cardboard boxes that they had not yet unpacked from the recent move.
Jennifer was disappointed—but not completely surprised—to find that Deborah Vennekamp had very little in the way of an online presence. The only link that came up in the initial Google search was a page on the site of the Mydale Public Library. A photo showed a smiling Deborah Vennekamp standing behind the checkout desk. There was no hint in the photo of the woman who had called her a shitbird, or hurled the Civil War book at her. And there was certainly no indication that this friendly-looking librarian would be capable of planting dead animals in closets, decapitating dolls, or appearing on lawns in macabre disguises in the middle of the night.
Jennifer shuddered, suddenly recalling in vivid detail the events of the afternoon and the previous night.
But she wasn't going to give up so easily.
Deborah Vennekamp apparently had no Facebook account. When Jennifer searched directly on the social networking site, the only hit was a teenager in California who went by the name “Debbie Vennekamp”.
Again—no big surprise. Most of Jennifer’s thirtysomething friends were on Facebook; but the Facebook craze seemed to stop with adults in their forties. It would make sense that the fiftysomething Deborah Vennekamp wouldn't have a Facebook page. Nor could she expect to find Deborah on Twitter, Myspace, or LinkedIn.
Maybe she should approach her amateur investigation of Deborah Vennekamp indirectly. Deborah Vennekamp might be too old to spend much time on the Internet—but what about David and Marcia? According to Jennifer’s estimates, both of them should be in their thirties.
If they were alive, that was: Today in the library, Deborah had said, “My children are gone.” What exactly had she meant by that? Certainly she hadn’t intended to say that both of them were dead. That would indeed mean a highly unusual tragedy—a catastrophic automobile accident being the most likely possibility.
She Googled the names of both David and Marcia Vennekamp. Like their mother, they were both shy in regard to social media. Neither of them could be found on Facebook.
She was, however, able to find address listings for both of Deborah Vennekamp’s children. The listings had been recently updated. When Deborah said that they were “gone”, she had been speaking figuratively: Both David and Marcia Vennekamp lived within ten miles of the house in which they had grown up.
There was a light tap at the door, and then Clint pushed open the door of the spare bedroom. His face was bleary with sleep. He frowned when he saw she was on the computer.
“I woke up and you were gone,” he said. “I thought—I don't know, maybe something with Connor.”
“Uh, no,” she said; but she knew that her voice sounded guilty, li
ke she was hiding something.
“You aren’t emailing your boyfriend, are you?”
Jennifer smiled and raised her eyebrows. “Yeah, right.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “You don't have to tell me why you crept out of bed to use the computer. I’ll just assume that you were checking out the latest sales on Lands End or JC Penny.”
She had hoped to keep her little ad hoc investigation a secret—at least until she could tell if it was going to pan out or not. But if she didn't explain herself, he would understandably wonder what she had been doing. She already kept one ominous secret from her husband. She did not want there to be any additional secrets between them.
“I was Googling Deborah Vennekamp,” she said. “And her kids, David and Marcia.”
“May I ask why?”
“Isn’t it obvious? I want to know about the woman who’s been harassing us.”
“Jen, I thought we agreed that we were going to do our best to forget about Deborah Vennekamp—to put her out of our minds and out our lives. We don’t know for sure that Deborah Vennekamp is behind all of this. And I promise you, I’m going to look into that new security system tomorrow. Now, would you please come to bed?”
“Give me a few minutes.”
He sighed, then he seemed to relax. “If I didn't love you so much…”
“Well, you know I love you, too. Give me a few more minutes to satisfy my idle curiosity, then I’ll be in.”
Clint closed the door before going back to bed, so that the light from the spare bedroom would not awaken Connor. Suddenly, Jennifer had another idea.
If David and Marcia had grown up in this house, then they had almost certainly gone to Mydale High School. She remembered that Classmates.com sometimes had scanned copies of old high school yearbooks online. Jennifer had accessed her own sophomore yearbook on the site not long ago, as she had long since misplaced her own hard copy.
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