Marie said, “We haven’t told them anything yet. We wanted to follow up all of our leads before we suggested the need for a major police investigation.”
Billingford was quietly nodding again. He looked from Marie to me, and back again. Then asked me, “And I presume that I, myself, am one of your leads?”
“That is correct,” Marie said.
“We know what you were doing with Izzie,” I said.
“Of course you do,” the Senator nodded, but I caught something in his eyes — just for a fraction of a second, and then it was gone. Surprise, perhaps. Uncertainty. He revealed too much of his hand — he had fully trusted Izzie to keep quiet about her affair with him, about everything that had happened to her under his patronage. As he had trusted all the women, no doubt.
“You know that we do, or else you wouldn’t have allowed us in your office,” I said, but now reached forward to put my iPhone onto his desk.
He flinched, and I wonder if he didn’t imagine for a second that I was putting some kind of explosive device there, or some kind of weapon to threaten him. In his eyes, I could be a jealous husband willing to blow all of us up in order to wreak revenge on the man who had slept with my wife.
But instead, there was merely an iPhone playing a video clip, a clip that showed the Senator himself, along with his good friend Joseph Goolden, enjoying Izzie and the young blonde intern. The video that Izzie had sent me.
“Enough,” the Senator said, and for the first time almost lost his reserve.
“We have footage of you striking her, as well,” I said.
Billingford seemed quietly stunned. He looked at me, and for a moment I could tell that he really had thought his little scheme had been perfect.
“Everything I did with her…” the Senator said quietly, “…it was all consensual.”
“Oh, I know that,” I said. “Why do you think I let it go on for so long?”
Another look of surprise from the Senator, less veiled now. I felt as though I’d landed a good blow in a fist fight. He honestly hadn’t anticipated the husband of one of his women to be aware of what was going on, and to approve of his wife’s infidelity.
“No court of law in the land would…” the Senator said.
I interrupted him, “The court of public opinion doesn’t have much in the way of standards of evidence, though, does it?”
He blanched, visibly.
“So this is it, is it? Blackmail?”
I shook my head. “Not blackmail.”
“What do you want? What are your demands?”
“Only that you return my wife to me,” I said.
“And if I don’t know where your wife is at the moment?”
I’ll hand it to him, he was a good actor. I suppose all politicians have to be performers to some degree, particularly those who get to the top.
I said, “I’m betting that if you don’t know where she is at the moment, you have the resources at your disposal to locate her. Being a United States Senator.”
He nodded. I was pleased at how I’d been able to reign in my anger, because just now I genuinely believed that this man knew where Izzie was, and the other women, too. This man was a nasty piece of work.
“And if I do return her?” he said.
“And the others,” Marie chipped in. A blank look from the Senator prompted her to continue, “Daisy Morgan, Gillian Haughton, Sally Marshall. They’re other women you’ve been involved with. Your network, anyhow. They’ve also gone missing recently.”
“If they return?” the Senator said.
“All this goes away,” I said.
I didn’t like saying it. Marie and I had debated — I don’t want to say ‘argued’, because ultimately we both knew we would ultimately have to do what was necessary to get Izzie back — over the making of a promise to the Senator to bury the whole story about his sexual proclivities — and the procurement of women for his political friends.
It didn’t seem right to let a men like this get away with anything. But we had little choice just now.
“It goes away,” Marie said, “But you would be advised to stop what you’ve been doing.”
The Senator sighed, as though he felt he had some kind of moral high ground. “You pay a blackmailer, and he simply comes back another day with more demands,” he said.
“You stop, and that’s it,” I said. “If we see you continue to earn favors in Washington by exploiting women — even if the women appear to be consenting — then we’ll be forced to consider exposing you.”
He nodded. “And you really think I believe that reporters from the Washington Messenger and the New York Times would really bury a story like this?”
“You don’t have much of a choice but to believe us,” Marie said. “And if anything happens to us, or to Izzie, or any of the women involved…”
“… Procedures are already arranged to share what we have with many of our colleagues across the media industry,” I finished for Marie.
Senator Billingford sat in his chair, a dejected shadow of his former self. He seemed almost to have deflated, wilted.
He finally said to me, “If your wife, or any of the women you say I’m involved with, are involved in… risky… sexual activities… I cannot be held responsible.”
“Unless you are involved,” I nodded.
Billingford put his hands together on the desk in front of him, almost as though praying. He paused, considering what we’d put in front of him.
Another sigh.
Then, he said, “I will do what I can to find your wife, Mr MacDonald. And the other women. I assure you, I do not know where they are right now. But I will put everything I have toward finding them.”
“Thank you,” I said.
And that was as much as we were going to get from Senator Billingford.
Chapter Thirty-Four
There was no black Mercedes on our tail as we left Capitol Hill that time.
Marie and I went together back to my house, where we fixed some lunch and made another round of phone calls to our various contacts to see if any had heard anything of Izzie since the previous day.
I would say we both seemed calmer since our meeting with Billingford.
“What do we do?” Marie said once our calls were done.
“Wait,” I said.
“You believe he knows where she is, don’t you?”
“The Senator?” I asked. “Yes, I do.”
Marie nodded.
We waited.
It was about four o’clock in the afternoon that we received a call back from the Montgomery County Police Department — with whom I’d attempted but failed to lodge a missing person’s report earlier in the day.
“Mr MacDonald?”
“Yes, that’s me.”
“Sir, we have a report that a young woman who fits the description of your wife was found an hour ago in northern Virginia.”
My heart leapt. I hadn’t filed a missing person’s report, but somebody in the police department must have remembered how I’d described Izzie, and taken down my number. Unless Billingford had engineered something, of course. I didn’t care how the news came to me.
“Izzie? They found Izzie? Where is she now?”
“She was picked up at a gas station outside Banco, Virginia, Mr MacDonald. She was found without any form of ID, and she was quite weak when they picked her up…”
“She’s going to be okay?”
“She’s been taken to the UVA Culpeper Hospital for checks — “
“UVA Culpeper Hospital. I’m on my way.”
The officer on the end of the line said, “Sir, she was found without any clothes. And she has various bruises about her person. Can you shed any light on that? They’re not serious-looking, but — “
I sighed. Poor Izzie. What had she gotten herself into? Or what had Billingford or his cronies gotten her into? I had to suppose that the Senator had given word for her to be released from wherever she was held. For word to get to us via t
he police, rather than through the Senator himself.
“I’m afraid she got involved… with some bad people,” I said.
The police officer said, “My colleagues in the Culpeper County Sheriff’s Department will want to ask you some questions.”
“Of course.”
“And we may need you to come down to HQ here in Gaithersburg…”
“Of course,” I said.
Marie and I were straight down to rural Virginia, maybe an hour and a half’s drive from DC. I trembling the whole way — I felt like we’d escaped something desperately awful. Izzie could have disappeared for good. Sure, none of us could go out there and write a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles tearing apart the political legacy of Senator Billingford and his friends, but you couldn’t have everything. I had my beloved wife, who was there lying in a clean, comfortable hospital bed, appearing to be in relatively good health despite how she had been found.
I felt strongly that I would have been willing to give up anything to make sure she was safe.
“What happened?” I said, once we were allowed a little time alone, with even Marie leaving the room.
She said, “They were playing a game with us.”
“‘Us’? You were with the other wives? Daisy Morgan, Gillian Haughton, Sally Marshall?”
She nodded. “I wanted to persuade them to go on the record. I was trying so hard… I completely forgot to tell you I was at that fundraiser. And then my phone battery died.”
“You said they were playing a game with you…” I prompted.
“After the fundraiser, a few of C’s friends wanted to take us to some big house somewhere. I don’t know… it was dark… everyone just wanted to party…”
“What happened to the husbands? Daisy, Gillian, Sally’s husbands?”
“Oh, they went back to their hotels after the fundraiser. They were under the impression that their wives were part of the group of volunteers helping clear up after the event…”
“So you were partying all night?”
I felt a little angry at the work that had gone in to track Izzie down, if she had simply been away somewhere having a good time. But perhaps there was more to it than that.
“We had a lot to drink… I guess…. There were drugs, too. I didn’t want to get involved, but I had to try to get some time with those women…”
“What happened?”
“It was really late at night… the men stripped us… they took away our clothes… and everything, phones, too… then we had to run and hide… or just run. They would catch us and… do whatever they wanted with us…”
Jesus. I felt bad feeling a little aroused at my wife engaging in sexual games out in some Virginia backwater. But right now, there was limited time to talk about what had happened to her.
“I think later on, one of the other women accidentally told a guy she was with that I was a reporter, that I had been trying to get her to talk about everything, for a story,” Izzie said.
I nodded.
“So what happened next?”
“They locked me in one of the rooms, in the mansion.”
“Billingford’s mansion?”
“No,” she shook her head. “Not somewhere I’d been.”
What had they been planning on doing with Izzie? I was suddenly relieved that Marie and I had gone to Billingford when we had. Perhaps if we’d delayed a little longer, my wife would have remained missing. Disappeared.
“They beat you?”
“No, these are from before,” she said, referring to her bruises. “Some of the guys were… a little rough… when they were playing with us…”
“They eventually let you go, though?” I said.
“Eventually. I was so scared. And then someone came in and put a blindfold on me — they put me in a car, and then after driving for a while, I was let out. And they drove off without giving me any clothes or anything.”
I held her, and kissed her, and she was shaking a little. I wondered if she was telling me everything, if there were things she was keeping back to avoid shocking me too much.
I told her about our meeting with Billingford, about promising the man that we’d kill the story to get her back. I kind of thought she’d be angry at me for doing that, though there hadn’t been much choice at the time.
“It’s over,” she said. “He knows it. Even if we don’t write the story, it could be written some day. There’s too much risk to him to continue it all, regardless.”
That was about all the time we had alone in that hospital. The trouble was, neither Izzie nor I wanted to press charges against the people who had done this to her. It took a lot of effort to dissuade the local police or sheriff’s department from looking into what had happened to Izzie. And I mean a lot of effort: social services were on the case fairly quickly, sniffing around her out of the genuine concern that she was a victim of domestic violence. Naturally as the husband, I came under some suspicion.
It was all very sensitive, though, and ultimately we were able to show the woman from social services that Izzie’s wounds were related to her own particular sexual tastes — the bondage, the handcuffs, the rope. Izzie had been persuasive in stating her preferences for such things, and in explaining how being dumped naked, miles from anywhere, had all been part of humiliating her, part and parcel of the whole sexual adventure.
“And your husband wasn’t involved in any of this?” the poor social services woman asked my wife, struggling to quite comprehend what had happened.
“My husband lets me do as I want, sexually,” Izzie said.
“With other men?”
The woman looked at me, staggered.
I shrugged. “It’s up to her,” I said.
*
I guess we learned our lesson. If we’d been in a different State, perhaps we would have been in more trouble than we were. If we’d had children, the scary thing was that the authorities might have taken them away from us. The whole time, though, I felt we had Billingford to help smooth things over — and ultimately, he might even have got involved, behind the scenes, in helping everything to go away.
Eventually I got the full story out of Izzie, of what happened. She gave me the details of the game they’d played, of how Billingford’s men had staged a kind of hunt, chasing naked women through a dark forest in the middle of the night.
Until she’d had her cover blown, Izzie had been having a good time. Three or four men had caught her, surrounded her, and used her for their own sexual ends. It had been wild and rough and exhilarating, but ultimately consensual. She even said being taken like that, by perhaps four men, had been a long-held fantasy of hers. It disturbed me what had happened to my wife — the fact that it had essentially turned into a kidnapping, and who knew where it might have ended up if I hadn’t forced Billingford to step in. Yet I couldn’t help but share Izzie’s arousal about the concept of her being taken by four men.
If it was to ever happen again, though, I felt like I’d have to be more in control.
Back home in Silver Spring, Marie came round to our house the next day to check on how Izzie was doing, and she brought the news that the other women who had been with her had also returned to their families.
“They’re not going to press charges against anyone, either,” Marie said. “God knows what the wives told their husbands, though.”
“I doubt they’ve told them the truth,” I said.
“They’ve probably been paid off,” Marie said. “But I think if we hadn’t interfered… well, those women would have gone, for good. And Izzie, too, I’ve no doubt.”
*
Things went back to relative normality, you might say. The big surprise for us was that Senator Billingford seemed to take a public step back, and from what Marie told us, it also seemed to result in his friend Joseph Goolden ultimately deciding not to enter the Presidential race, at the Convention or any other time. Later, when Billingford decided not to stand for re-election in the Senate, Marie said she believed
the guy probably felt too insecure, with the kind of damaging evidence that was potentially out there concerning his activities.
Meanwhile, Izzie and I didn’t really talk too much about the Game for a while, things settled into a cozy monogamy again. I didn’t want to push anything, and she seemed to want a break from any bold adventures.
I still liked to remember the times my Izzie had strayed, of how wicked she’d been, of how exciting it had been to discover the clues that led me to finding out about her infidelity, or even to watch it. I regretted the fact that we’d lost our way in the Game, that we had to avoid it now.
Perhaps I should have felt bad, continuing to want my wife to go sleep with other men. I should have just accepted her as the most wonderful, most beautiful wife a guy could ever have.
But I did find myself wanting to show her off. When the two of us went to a dinner or some kind of event together — I wanted her to wear tight, revealing clothes. I wanted her to flirt with the guys around us, and maybe even quietly suggest to one that they should go find a hotel room.
I did find myself hoping she might be tempted by some other guy whenever she was away from home for the night — covering some story far away, attending some journalistic conference, whatever it was.
I let it lie, though. I left it to my fantasy life, I chilled out and simply read about fictional husbands sharing their wives in erotic literature.
That was that, wasn’t it? I guess the next thing now we were in our thirties was to think about having kids.
During the winter, I was actually distracted by a new business opportunity.
An old friend from journalism school, Marc Williams, found himself dumped from the New York Times just as I had — another victim of online news shaking up the print newspaper industry. Marc got in touch since I’d managed to just about claw myself a living as a freelancer after receiving my pink slip. Only rather than simply pick my brains about how best to set himself up as a freelancer, Marc also wanted to gauge me on the idea of starting up some kind of specialist online news outlet of our own.
The Game (A Hotwife Adventure) Page 28