by Wendy Wax
All eyes are on Meena as she hesitates once again. “When I told him I just wasn’t ready for that, he ghosted me.”
“What does that mean,” Annell asks. “Ghosting?”
“It means disappearing without a trace,” Wesley says.
“It sucks,” Phoebe adds. “Especially when someone’s been really responsive and then they’re just . . . gone.”
“Yes,” Meena says slowly. “It hurt a lot. Plus, I felt so stupid, you know. Because if he’d really cared about me, he wouldn’t have disappeared the minute I said I wasn’t ready for that.” Her face is filled with regret. Her cheeks flush with embarrassment. “Anyway, I just wanted you to know. It just seemed like so much fun that despite the book’s disclaimers, I didn’t give any real thought to how easy it is to get hurt. Or how you open yourself up to people you don’t really know.”
“Lots of people out there got an angle,” Carlotta says. “Or they’re lookin’ for something they’re keeping to themselves.”
My heart thuds in my chest. I’ve finally found the courage to try to move on and change my life. But what am I opening myself up to?
“There are people who target divorced women or widows of a certain age,” Chaz adds. “They’ll put on a show so they look super successful. Then they flatter and act like they want to build a relationship. They tell you that they’re swept off their feet. That you’re ‘the one.’ Scammers that are focused solely on getting money out of a mark tend to operate from a distance over a longer period of time. They may live in another country and use someone else’s photo for their profile shot, often a man in uniform because that inspires trust.”
We have all fallen silent.
“But then there are the scammers in our own backyard who don’t waste any time wanting to meet. Sometimes moving in and mooching off someone can be the goal, though that’s almost never stated. They want to charm you into asking them. If you have other assets, that’s just icing on the cake,” Chaz says.
“How do you know so much about this?” Meena asks in a whisper.
“Because I have friends in law enforcement. And . . .” He hesitates. “Because last week I caught a 911 call at a woman’s house who’d been a victim of a guy like that.”
We wait. It’s clear the ending to this story is not going to be pretty.
“He lived off her for a year. Took pretty much everything she had. Distanced her from friends and family. When there was nothing left, he moved on. She was so humiliated when she realized how she’d been played, and so heartbroken that he’d never really loved her, that she slit her wrists.” Chaz’s warm French vibe is long gone. “She bled out just before we got there.”
There’s a hush. Every last bit of fun has fled. If there were a drop of champagne left, I’d be drinking it.
“She’d documented the whole thing on her computer,” Chaz says quietly.
Without a word passing between them, Wesley and Phoebe pull laptops out of matching messenger bags, set them on their laps, and tilt open their screens so that we can see.
“Your Frank may just be a bozo without feelings. But it couldn’t hurt to do a search on his name and his email. That’ll lead to an IP address, which will tell us the exact computer his emails came from,” Wesley explains.
“We can also do reverse email and image searches and check for aliases,” Phoebe adds.
“Aliases?” Nancy Flaherty shifts uncomfortably in her seat. “Is it really that easy?”
“I’m sure he doesn’t have aliases,” Meena says, not sounding sure at all.
I can tell she’s already sorry she brought this up. But we are all leaning in and listening intently. This is that car wreck you can’t quite look away from.
“If that was Frank’s game, Meena, you’re well rid of him,” Chaz says. Either way, in today’s world, these are steps everyone should probably take before going out with someone they don’t know. I’m only sorry I didn’t think to suggest it when we had our online dating class.”
“What’s his name?” Wesley asks as both twins’ fingers fly over their keyboards.
“Frank Vincent,” Meena answers almost reluctantly. “FrankieV at gmail.com.”
A few more keystrokes. Some scrolling. Photos pop up on both screens. The face is attractive and clean-shaven. Dark hair threaded with gray. The eyes are a brilliant blue, their expression trustworthy. The square chin has a comma-shaped cleft in it. He looks to be in his mid-sixties.
“That’s Frank’s profile photo from match.com. But he already took it down,” Meena says.
“You can take a photo down; that doesn’t make it disappear,” Phoebe explains as their fingers continue to fly. More photos pop up. I see the shot of him Meena took on the beach in Mexico. The group photo at dinner. “There are quite a few different email accounts using the same computer,” Wesley says.
The carriage house is completely quiet except for the sound of the twins’ fingers tapping on their laptop keyboards. No one makes a move to leave. Even Erin, who’s probably far more computer savvy than most of us, is spellbound. I may have stopped breathing.
Other photos of what looks like a completely different man pop up. This one has iron-gray hair, an equally gray mustache. Mossy-green eyes are partially hidden behind a pair of rectangular tortoiseshell glasses.
“Oh my God!” Dorothy gasps. “That’s Dean, Dean Francis. The man I met on SilverSingles.”
Sara looks over her mother-in-law’s shoulder at Phoebe’s computer screen where the new photos line up next to those of Frank Vincent. “The chin is the same, but if you didn’t see these photos together and weren’t looking for it, you’d never know it was the same man,” Sara observes. “He looks early seventies like he told you.”
“I haven’t heard from him since last week when I told him that I live with Sara and don’t have a house of my own.” Dorothy shakes her head. “He actually told me off for not sharing that information sooner.”
“This guy’s got a lot going on.” Once again, the twins’ fingers are on the move. Photos of a third man appear beneath the others. He has close-cropped brown hair and eyes that are partly hidden by narrow black-rimmed glasses, a stubbled face, and a chin with a cleft that is beginning to look very familiar. His name is Howard Franklin.
“Oh no,” Annell breathes. “That’s Howie.”
“Are these really all the same person?” Sara asks.
“The facial structure and the chin are identical. He’s using colored contacts and glasses and wigs and hair dye . . . but it’s the same man,” Wesley says.
With a stroke, Phoebe pulls up the three men’s bios. Once again, she places them next to one another. “They all have very impressive backgrounds. Harvard. Yale. Big-name firms. Most of which seem unlikely to hold up to fact-checking.”
“Did ‘Howie’ ask you about your living situation?” Chaz asks Annell.
“Not exactly.” Annell can’t seem to drag her eyes away from the growing number of images. “But he seemed intrigued by the fact that the store was in a historic home. He said he’d like to come over and look at the carriage house and especially the garden. He sounded so sincere . . .”
“He is sincerely pretending to be at least three different people,” Jazmine observes.
“And he’s sincerely looking for a relationship. As long as she’s willing, has a home of her own, and no one else is there to object to him moving in,” Nancy posits.
Dorothy’s shock has not faded from her face, but she’s fallen quiet.
“I don’t know what else he might have on his mind, but three different identities on three different dating sites? Frank/Dean/Howard is making an extremely calculated effort,” Chaz points out.
“He used ‘Frank’ in some form in all three profiles. Do you think it could be his real name?” Angela asks as Wesley and Phoebe continue to tap away on their keyboards.
“His name
is Frank all right. Frank Anderson,” Phoebe says, pulling up a shot of the same man taken at some sort of charity fundraiser. The face is the same, only his hair and eyebrows are white and he’s not wearing glasses of any kind. His eyes are a bluish gray.
“Why is that name familiar?” Angela asks.
“Because he was a well-known money manager and an Atlanta A-lister who married into a prominent family,” Meena says. “I used to see photos of him and his wife in the newspaper.”
“That’s right.” I peer at the photo. “Nate met him once or twice at charity golf tournaments. I think he ran for a state seat a couple years ago.”
“Yep.” Wesley opens another file. “Apparently, his wife divorced him. The money was hers. It looks like he’s still trying to act like he’s big league, but . . . that doesn’t exactly jibe with his actions.”
“What about his children?” Dorothy asks. “What does it say about them?”
More keystrokes. “Frank Anderson and his wife never had children,” Phoebe says.
Dorothy inhales sharply.
I look around me, my stomach churning. The world is such a different place than it was when I was last single. How could someone treat these women, my friends, this way? And what if we’d never had this conversation? Would one of them have ended up saddled with this man? Would he have stolen their possessions and their self-respect? “What can we do about this?”
“Can we at least report him to the authorities?” Sara asks.
“You can report him to the dating sites, but he hasn’t harmed anyone that we know of, at least not physically. And if he hasn’t stolen from any of the women he dates, it’s not illegal,” Wesley says.
“Well, he’s stolen people’s trust,” Annell says. “We can’t let him continue to get away with lying to and manipulating people.”
“That is for damned sure! We need to teach this creep a lesson.” Carlotta stamps her foot. “Anybody got any ideas?”
“I read about a woman in India who strangled her husband and buried his body in the kitchen and then built a mud stove over it,” Nancy Flaherty says.
“If only we had dirt floors here,” Jazmine says dryly.
“There’s plenty of dirt in the garden,” Nancy replies. “We could bury him there and then . . .” A smile spreads over her face. “I know! We could camouflage his grave with a putting green.”
We all blink at her in surprise. I’m not entirely sure she’s joking.
“I just finished reading a book about black widow spiders,” Angela says. “They eat their partner after sex. They don’t even need dirt.”
“Yeah, that’s why women who kill their husbands or lovers are called black widows,” Carlotta, who is wearing all black and looks gorgeously dangerous, points out.
“I read about those black widows, too. Apparently, women tend to prefer antifreeze followed by dismemberment,” Angela adds. Her eyes get big. “One woman fed the remains of her lover to neighbors at a barbecue.”
“I’m starting to feel like I should call Perley and warn him about your reading material,” Jazmine says with a teasing glint.
“Dismemberment would be too good for this guy,” Meena pronounces. “Running around trying to find women to live off.”
“Did you guys see the episode of Good Girls where they hog-tie Boomer, the attempted rapist, and stash him in the kids’ tree house in the backyard?” Erin asks. “I bet we could stash Frank in the garden shed—or in the storage room—and no one would ever know.”
Chaz folds his arms over his chest. “I’m all for teaching this guy a lesson, but we are not going to break the law. There will be no tarring and feathering or tearing from limb to limb, which I believe qualifies as dismembering,” he says. “I think we should just scare the crap out of the man, expose his bad behavior and true identity, and prevent him from targeting other women.”
“I don’t know.” Dorothy is our lone dissenter. “Maybe we should consider ourselves lucky that none of us fell all the way for it and let it be?”
“Hell, no,” Meena says. “I say we at least have to out him like Chaz said.”
I look at the angry and determined faces around the circle. We are smart, and we are here for one another. “I agree with Meena,” I say. “I don’t think we should just let him walk away.”
“Okay,” Phoebe says. “If we’re going to make sure Frank/Dean/Howie, forevermore to be known as FDH, sees the error of his ways, we need to expose him as widely and completely as possible.”
We all lean forward to see what she’s pulling up on the screen.
“What do you think of this . . .”
Thirty-Five
Jazmine
It turns out it’s not all that easy to pretend that you haven’t had sex with someone. Especially when that sex was so good.
You know how as soon as you decide to cut out caffeine and sugar, all you want is a Caramel Macchiato? Rich Hanson is kind of like that. I did just fine without sex for most of the last fourteen years, and now I can barely look at him without thinking about it. It’s like all of a sudden my body woke up, realized what it’s been missing, and wants to make up for lost time.
The only thing that keeps me from dragging him into a broom closet is replaying Larry’s advice to Rich about “getting me on board.” Even the thought that he might have slept with me in order to solidify his position makes me sick to my stomach; the fact that I’m the one who kissed him and invited him into my bed only makes it worse.
If only he would disappear now that he’s “won me over,” I think I could get my equilibrium back. But he’s invited me to lunch, out for drinks, and has even asked to go with me to watch Maya play. I keep saying no, but it’s all I can do to treat him like I would any other colleague when I want to avoid him completely and fall back in bed with him all at the same time. The man isn’t even my type. Or shouldn’t be. And why on earth am I so attracted to him when the perfectly perfect Derrick Warren barely crosses my mind?
“Rich Hanson is here to see you.” Erin’s voice squawks on the intercom on my desk because apparently even thinking about him causes him to appear.
“Sorry, on my way out,” I say, jumping up. Because now I need to go somewhere so that I don’t look like I’m avoiding him. “Can you schedule something toward the end of the week?”
I’m shoving files into my tote bag when Rich strolls into my office. “You never struck me as the kind of person who would run away.”
“I’m not running away. Something has come up, and I need to get to an unexpected meeting.”
“Erin said your calendar was clear.”
“Erin doesn’t know everything.”
His eyebrow goes up, indicating that he knows that to be a lie. He moves closer. I fight the urge to step back. Or maybe I’m just trying not to walk into his arms. I hate the way standing too close to him clouds my thinking.
“Larry told me he advised you to get me on your side if you wanted to make your mark here.” The accusation in my voice is clear. So, no doubt, is the jut of my jaw.
“I didn’t need Larry to tell me that. It was obvious the first time I saw you in action. I wouldn’t have even considered trying to create the academy without you.”
I blink. “So, you admit you were using me.”
“Using you? Of course—I was using your brain, your experience, your . . . you. And I assumed we’d use what I bring to the table, too. It’s called collaboration. We formed an alliance—it’s only smart to do that with colleagues you respect. We work well together when you’re not pissed off at me, or afraid of me, or not trusting me. Which provides a very short window in any given day.”
“We shouldn’t have slept together.”
“No,” he says, closing the gap between us. “We probably shouldn’t have.”
“Oh.” I feel a distinct twinge of disappointment. “So, you’re sorr
y it happened, too.”
“I didn’t say that. I refuse to be sorry about anything that felt that good.” He steps closer, which is theoretically not possible, and lowers his voice. “I don’t believe you’re sorry, either. I think you’re afraid because you lost control, which is something you almost never do.” I can smell his cologne and his intention. If I don’t stop him, he’s going to kiss me.
More appallingly, if I don’t get out of here, I might kiss him first. Again. “You said we could pretend it never happened. We agreed we wouldn’t let it happen again. And I meant it when I said I’m not interested in being a notch on someone’s belt.”
“First of all, I am doing my best to pretend it never happened.” His voice is ragged. “But I can’t seem to actually forget. And I meant it when I promised you no notches. Seriously, Jazz, I don’t even own a belt.”
I snort. But I don’t linger. The longer I stand too close to him, the less willpower I possess. “Fine. But that doesn’t change anything. We stick to our promise, and we keep our relationship strictly professional. I have never seen a workplace romance end well. There’s no reason why we can’t work together, but there’s every reason why we can’t slip up and sleep together.”
Judith
Meena is here at the house helping me sort through what to keep and what to let go. Or more to the point, she is sitting on the basement couch, talking to me while I pull things out of closets and shelves.
I’ve been working down here for three days, and it’s amazing how many ordinary, everyday things now cause a lump in my throat.
“Ethan used to love Monopoly,” I say when I open the bookcase doors and pull out the battered game box. “Nobody wanted to play with him because he always won.” I open the lid and pick up the silver-colored Scottie dog piece, and the past wafts out. “Nate taught him to buy everything he could, even if he had to mortgage something later.” I remember how daringly he played and how much he wanted to emulate his father. “I think he went into finance because of this game. Is it silly to keep it when we haven’t played it in years?”