by J. M. Barlog
“So, you look really great, Jenny. And after... well before you know it, you'll be back at the grind and this whole thing will be behind you. Has Kate been by yet?”
“She stopped by briefly the other day, talked to Warren because I was asleep and said the visit wasn’t for anything important. Seems the agency is keeping her hopping.”
As quickly as she said it, Jenny banished thoughts of the agency from her mind. She was still struggling with a black hole in her memory, those voices that kept calling to her, and, finally, the horrifying apparition that haunted her and seemed to want to harm her. There was no way she could even consider stepping foot in the agency now.
After Bridget departed, Jenny watched the fading sun out the living room window while her mind drifted aimlessly. Her life had been so perfect before the...
Now it was a nightmare.
With her head resting on her arm, she thought about Warren's needs and how she must sooner or later face being intimate with him. The very thought of it sent a shock wave through her mind. She would have to do something, have to allow him to express himself in a sexual way before he burst. What if her body repulsed him? In the past week, he had touched her once. If the very thought of the scars turned him off, how would it be when he had to see or touch them?
“Dinner,” Warren called, drawing Jenny out of her worries and back to the reality of living her life one hour at a time.
Jenny regretted having to return to her bed after dinner. That bedroom had become her dungeon. The place where she was kept away from the rest of the living world. The light and the air in the living room seemed fresher and brighter. The vitality of being in there seeped into her.
Warren dutifully cradled her in his arms, kissed her gently on the lips, and then carried her up the stairs despite her insistence that she was ready to give it a try on her own. His kiss erased all the things that had worried her earlier. He loved her, she thought. He had to, to be so patient with her.
She resolved it was time for them to make love.
“Another week and you can try the stairs,” he said, setting her gently upon the new king-size bed and bringing the blanket up. When he kissed her, his hand began to gently massage her breast. His breathing inflated with the heat of pent-up passion.
“You need some, don't you?”
“Desperately.”
“I don't know if I'm ready. But...” Jenny found herself saying, though inside she had instructed herself that this was something she must do.
Warren peeled back the blanket and moved his hand slowly up her nightgown behind her legs. He felt the warmth radiating from between her thighs. His other fingers took her stiffening nipple between them. Warren's breathing became urgent; his kisses trailed down from her lips to her neck, then inside her gown to her breasts.
Jenny opened herself up and shifted to allow Warren's hand under the leg band of her panties. She wanted so much to feel the excitement of their love. Could that be what was missing from her? Would everything fall back into place after making love with Warren?
Warren knew as his hand found her spot that Jenny was not responding to his efforts to set her afire.
“I love you,” he whispered.
Jenny knew she was expected to give those words back. She couldn't. Something inside forbade her from saying them.
While Warren groaned in mounting ecstasy, Jenny sought to ignite the fires of her own passion. Somewhere in her mind there must be memories of the pleasures they shared as lovers. But nowhere inside could she locate them. Her fire sputtered and died, leaving her cold inside. She tried to hide her emptiness from Warren.
In his excitement, Warren worked his hand up and brushed his fingers across her scar. He recoiled as if burned.
The action forced Jenny to tense up.
“I'm sorry, Jenny. Did I hurt you?” Warren asked when their eyes met.
The awkward moment stripped him of his longing. He felt the life drain out of his erection and knew he would be unable to revitalize it now.
The doorbell's ring and Chips' subsequent barking signaled Dwight's return, right on cue.
“The shit is back.”
Warren pulled himself from the bed and smoothed Jenny's night gown to its proper place.
“I guess it's a cold shower in the meantime,” he said, returning the blanket over Jenny's body. Jenny's eyes offered an apology, though Warren sought to reassure her none was necessary with a kiss to her forehead.
Yet Jenny saw the deep disappointment in Warren's eyes. Why couldn't she say what he so desperately needed to hear? Why were those words suddenly so foreign to her? She must have told Warren she loved him a million times during their first year of marriage. Now her stomach convulsed every time she even thought about the words.
Warren was certain he would never last another day with Mr. Ghostbuster in this house.
20
After a number of delays from Kate Matheson, Rick finally had his hands on the ledgers from the Matheson Garrett agency. Had the books been turned over in a timely fashion, and had Kate not hesitated in responding to his request, Rick would have given the information no more than a cursory examination. But, that slight hesitancy could mean there were things in those ledgers that Kate wished to keep from Rick's eyes.
As a result, inconsistency became the target of Rick's inspection. Because inconsistency then pointed to where the books may have been doctored. And doctored books could lead him to a new suspect.
Rick began his inquiry by cross-checking gross expenses against gross revenues. Gross revenues are easily obtained through bank records. Gross expenses, however, had to be tallied from a number of different sources such as payroll, vendor invoices, etc. Initially, the numbers seemed to match and substantiate that Matheson-Garrett was, indeed, a good tax-abiding corporate citizen. No red flags rose to wave above the numbers.
The agency's revenues seemed quite high, but then again, Rick knew little about how the advertising game really worked. Their revenues did support Kate's claim that the agency had seen a consistent 20 percent annual growth over the last few years. Of course, if expenses are steadily rising thirty percent over the same period, the company could still get itself into trouble. Too many young companies outspend their revenues under the assumption that sales will eventually outstrip expenses. When that fails to happen, debt becomes unmanageable and the company must seek alternatives to bankruptcy.
Rick finally found the focus of his initial search: the agency's annual premium to the Occidental Insurance company of San Francisco. A telephone call got him the head of accounts, where Rick learned that Matheson-Garrett had in force a fairly standard 'Partners Insurance' policy. Like all conscientious partners, it had been taken out at the agency's birth five years ago. Everything seemed normal so far.
Rick circled the pay out he had hastily scribbled down earlier given him by a supervisor. A million bucks gets fed into the agency if either partner dies while the policy’s in force. The supervisor also confirmed that Matheson-Garrett was never once late with their premium.
A million bucks... flowed into the agency if Jenny Garrett died.
Rick stared at the number for a long time after returning the receiver to the cradle. Kate Matheson becomes sole owner of the agency—maybe—and takes possession of a million bucks. Even though the policy was without a double indemnity clause for accidental death, it still provided a hefty sum, making it much easier for Kate during a transition to a one-owner agency.
“So what if…” Rick found himself saying to the empty room.
Would Kate go so far as to try to kill Jenny for the money? For a reason yet unknown to Rick, he doubted Kate had the moxie to attempt murder. While she cloaked herself in corporate armor, inside she was still a woman and few women were capable of murder. But instinct cautioned him to rule out no suspect until he became convinced of their innocence.
The ledger account also listed payments to the agency's law firm and accounting firm. Rick's inquiry to the lawyer han
dling the Matheson-Garrett legal affairs confirmed what Rick had suspected from the beginning: there was a clause in the agency charter that guaranteed rights of survivorship to a spouse. Therefore, if Jenny died, the million went to the agency and Warren then became Kate's partner.
Rick wrote Warren and Kate's name on his pad and drew a heart around them. Anything is possible, and everything has to be checked.
Playing out a what-if scenario, Rick surmised that if Warren and Kate were romantically involved, they could eliminate the sticking point—Jenny—and fill up their bank accounts at the same time.
Four more hours of cross-checking ledger entries and innumerable telephone calls led Rick down a whole new path of investigation. No matter how hard he tried, Rick still failed to account for inconsistencies in some of the Matheson-Garrett ledger entries. Sloppy accounting? Maybe. But Rick knew to keep digging until he made his way to the bottom of the irregularities.
Rick's job could have been made easier had he been able to access the agency's accountants directly. But accountants tend to have loose lips and itchy palms. While Rick had no reason to suspect the accountants in Jenny’s accident, they might very well be involved in the anomalies staring Rick in the face.
So far, each questionable entry led to a blind alley. At first anyway. But Rick's tenacity and telephone calls all ultimately led to the same place—a dummy company bank account that gave Kate Matheson signing privileges.
Piece by piece, Rick assembled the truth, despite someone's slick attempt to bury it. He finger-poked the buttons on his adding machine, then hit the key for a total.
Bingo!
Sixteen thousand dollars in the last two quarters had been funneled from the Matheson-Garrett agency account into a dummy vendor account, which then fed into a non-existent supplier account, and was finally transferred into the dummy company account where Kate had sole signing power.
Kate Matheson was embezzling from her own agency. Foolish—but a legitimate reason for wanting a partner permanently out of the way. Upon further inspection, Rick surmised that the number could triple in size.
Against the curtain of a starless night outside his window, Rick concluded that one of the accountants at Jarvison and Lewis had to be privy to the scam. There was no way Kate could hide that sort of operation for long from a conscientious accountant.
But was the money reason enough to kill Jenny?
Over a pizza and a six-pack of beer, and with a Bureau friend's help, they determined that the embezzling went further back than Rick had originally thought. Careful scrutiny eventually turned up sixty-two thousand dollars that had been funneled through the dummy companies and into Kate's account.
From Kate's bank records, Rick also determined that the money never stayed in Kate's secret account for very long. Kate was either spending the money, or moving it to another, still hidden, account. But why? She co-owned the agency. She could write herself bonuses any time she wanted. All she needed was her partner’s agreement....
Exhausted and elated, Rick went home, hoping to shut the books out of his mind. But in the middle of the night, while Rick thought he was asleep, his subconscious took hold of the Garrett case facts and began shuffling them around as if it were playing with a Rubik's Cube. The more his subconscious turned a piece in his head, the easier it was to find the place where it lined up.
“Warren,” Rick said, awakening with a start. “Could Kate be moving the money into one of Warren's accounts?”
Over the Sunday morning paper, Rick appraised the notion that Warren and Kate were romantically involved with each other. Rick already determined that Warren's business was in deep trouble, and maybe he was getting money from Kate to keep it afloat? Maybe they were lovers? And maybe they realized they could collect a windfall in insurance if Jenny were out of the way.
Two insurance policies to collect on and joint ownership in the agency. Not a bad reason to take Jenny out of the picture.
There was one way to know for sure. Monday morning he would set up surveillance on Kate and learn what she was doing with the money. If it went where Rick suspected, he might catch them in the act and put a lid on this whole case.
****
Dwight sat in a musty, deserted, and very cluttered storage room in the second basement of the University of New York library. Only Dwight and the maintenance men ever came down this far into the bowels of the building. A place long used as storage for university discards and the forgotten, Dwight had been afforded this space to store the thirty-six file boxes that made up the archives for his field of interest. Paranormal investigation never warranted premium space—being a field that few believed in anyway.
Rather than sit at the Garrett house, Dwight was here, sifting through moldering pages of paranormal research dating back to the late eighteen hundreds. This mountain of faded material had, over the years, provided the source for countless fictional ghost stories that saw the light of publication. Funny, when someone tells a ghost story and confesses it as fiction, everyone enjoys it; but the moment someone says, 'this is a true story,’ people turn their backs in disbelief.
The thought of it made Dwight laugh. Readers never realized the writer had based his scary story on an actual account documented by a tenacious paranormal investigator, who believed enough in what he was doing to stick with it until he could find at least some basis for truth.
Dwight perused every article available on paranormal phenomena, all the time kicking himself for his laziness about organizing this stuff. Of course, if he lost his grant, he would have plenty of time to spend with these crumbling old papers.
His previous day's research had been fruitless, and for a time, he believed there was nothing left to uncover. But a voice inside his head urged him to persist. Turn that one more page. Open one more folder. He had only an inkling in the very back of his mind of what he sought. But he had to stay with it, for Jenny's sake.
For a moment, his mind drifted away from research and onto the way her eyes sparkled. Her skin had a heady fragrance all its own. Seeing her in his mind's eye stiffened him involuntarily. He shook off the inappropriate excitement and grabbed another thick folder out of the box beside him.
About a quarter of the way into the stack, he uncovered a third article of the kind relating to his quest. This new recurring phenomena convinced Dwight to bury his previous theory of astral projection as an explanation of Jenny's episodes. At first, he thought Jenny's astral body was separating from her physical body, then returning. However, in all documented cases of astral projection, there was never physical contact between the projection and the host.
And Jenny insisted that her image had physically touched her. That physical contact meant that the spectral form was somehow penetrating into the dimension of the living world. The thought sent a shudder through Dwight's bones.
Such an occurrence of physical interaction forced Dwight down a darker path. A path that sent an icy chill through his veins.
The phenomena Dwight now suspected Jenny was experiencing was that of a Doppelgänger—a ghostly image of herself. But beyond a concise definition, he had little else to work with.
Dwight had in hand three documented case histories of Doppelgänger sightings. Each of the claims were studied by paranormal investigators and included verification from other sources. But none of the three had occurred in the second half of this century, and none involved physical contact between spirit and host.
The Doppelgänger episodes, like paranormal research in general, were fleeting and, at best, sketchy. But out of the three studies, Dwight extracted a pattern that sent a coppery fluid into the back of his throat. He swallowed hard to force it back down as he contemplated what was emerging in the case histories.
One case in particular seemed to worm its way into Dwight's head and refused to lie dormant. A yellowed research journal published in London in 1967 contained an article near the rear of the publication that struck an uneasy chord. Written by a Dr. Wilhelm Grayworth, a renowned psy
chiatrist at the time, it chronicled the case of a twelve-year-old boy, Josef Lukenhan, under treatment for chronic schizophrenia. The boy, however, insisted he was being terrorized by a ghost of himself. The young lad could even describe the manifestation in terms beyond the clarity Dr. Grayworth had ever previously experienced.
In one encounter, the boy was rushed to a nearby hospital after inflicting himself with multiple slash wounds with a hunting knife. The boy, however, claimed that the malevolent ghost had attacked him with the knife.
Throughout the two years of psychiatric treatment, which took place between 1957 and 1959, the lad's terror continued unrelentingly until the death of the boy's father forced the relocation of the family to Vienna.
Dr. Grayworth used the term Doppelgänger at the time only in the sense of indicating an alter-ego personality capable of dominating the boy's psyche. Though the term was never used in the paranormal sense, it did provide valuable clues as to the actual extent of the boy's hallucinatory manifestations.
Again, Dwight realized the rational explanation for a Doppelgänger was a hallucination. And a simple hallucination could put the whole idea of a ghost of a living person to rest without any need for investigation.
Dr. Grayworth justified his rationale citing examples of cases dating back to the early 1900s; though, at no time did he give credence to the boy's claim of an actual spiritual haunting. Instead, Grayworth sought to separate the two personalities inside the boy's mind and enable him to deal with each one individually.
Young Lukenhan, on the other hand, persisted in his claim that the Doppelgänger, or spirit double, had been terrorizing him for four years. Grayworth attributed depression and delusion as the true cause for the Lukenhan boy’s schizophrenic tendencies and instead tried in vain to substantiate instead his claim of a new form of schizophrenia.