“You’re prettier than the woman in the photos,” Mark said. And for a second, Jessica believed that the situation had been salvaged. “But I’m not happy about the nutso ex-boyfriend.”
“Well, I’m trying to get away from him.”
“That’s true, but you got together with him in the first place.”
Jessica was going to suggest that they simply call it an evening. This was a disaster. Mark Quinn was warier than any of the men she had met on the dating sites so far—even the handful who, for one reason or another, she and Travis had ultimately decided to reject as targets. Strictly speaking, she was wasting her time.
But then the waiter appeared at the table. He was a young guy; he had the look of a college student. If she called it an evening now, she would have to make a scene. And that might be bad. While Mark Quinn would probably forget his evening with “Lisa”, there was a small chance that someday the police would question him about tonight. She did not want to give him any cause for extraordinary suspicion.
“Have you made your selections?” the waiter asked.
Mark tilted his head toward Jessica. “After the lady.”
“I’ll have the grilled salmon,” she said. “With the au gratin potatoes and roasted asparagus.”
The young waiter made some notes on his pad and turned to Mark.
“Sir?”
“I was going to have the veal,” Mark said. “But salmon sounds good, now that you mention it. I’ll have what she’s having.”
“Very good,” the young man said. “I’ll be back with a couple of drink refills in a moment.”
Jessica looked across the table and gave Mark her best smile.
She took Mark’s decision to order what she was ordering as a sign that he wasn't going to press her any further on her multiple inconsistencies.
The dinner ended without any more excessive interrogations. He asked her about her work, and she told him a half-dozen generic stories about the travails of life as a temporary office worker. Since she purported to have worked at a variety of different local employers, Mark didn't expect her to know much about any one of them.
Nevertheless, she had a feeling that Mark Quinn was going to be a no-go. He walked her to the main entrance of the restaurant, where they had met for the first time less than two hours before.
“Well,” said Mark, “We’ll be in touch, okay?”
Jessica nodded. That was even more vague than, I’ll call you sometime.
She had spooked him; that much was obvious. And he clearly knew that she was hiding all sorts of things. But Mark Quinn would have had no idea exactly what she was hiding. So this man didn't represent a danger to her and Travis—at least not at this point.
For a split second it looked like he would lean in for a goodnight kiss, and she started to back away from him. She always avoided physical contact with the men as much as possible. This was one of Travis’s rules. At the later stages, a little bit of kissing and cuddling was usually unavoidable, though.
Then Mark shifted his weight in the other direction. It had either been a false alarm, or he had thought better of it. They were in the foyer of a restaurant, a public place, after all.
“Well, Lisa, bye.”
“Bye.”
14.
And with that he walked out. She waited half a minute, watched him walked down the sidewalk and turn the corner. She had purposefully parked a block away from the restaurant, in what would be considered an inconvenient location, so that he would not see her vehicle.
She walked the two blocks to where her Jeep was parked—the Jeep that was registered in her name, though Travis seemed to think that he was the primary owner. Damn that Travis.
Thirty minutes later she arrived at the little efficiency apartment that she and Travis were sharing. They had made a deal to rent it by the week, paying cash, signing false names on the papers. As such, it wasn’t much. But the place was only temporary. A few more big scores, she told herself, and the two of them would be living high on the hog. They would rise late in the morning and lie on the beach until the Caribbean sun grew hot. Then they would make love, take a siesta, and awake in the early evening.
Or they would both end up on death row. It could go either way, really.
When she entered, Travis was sitting comfortably on a cheap vinyl recliner in the center of the apartment’s living room. He was barefoot, clad in jeans and a pullover shirt. He was typing something into the keyboard of the untraceable laptop that they had recently acquired. The apartment offered few amenities, but it did offer free Wi-Fi.
“Hey, baby, he said. “How did the ‘date’ go?”
“Not so good. Hey, you aren’t accessing one of the dating sites, are you? We could be traced to the network here, you know.”
There she was, getting paranoid again. While he was in prison, Travis had been housed with a con who had taught him how to be invisible and untraceable on the Internet. That was why they used only secondhand devices that had no paper trail, and they did all their work from anonymous public networks.
Travis closed the laptop, set it on the floor’s threadbare brown carpet and stood up.
“Now baby, you’re forgetting who learned about all this cyberbullshit to begin with. Was that you who spent two years in the pen?”
“No,” she admitted.
“Who was it?”
“It was you, baby.”
He moved toward her, and for perhaps the millionth time she was struck by the beauty of him. Travis was six feet, four inches tall, broad shouldered, and seemingly without an ounce of body fat. He wore his blonde hair shoulder-length. On his right side, between his ear and his shoulder, he had a vertical tattoo: a depiction of a length of barb wire.
Travis reminded her Brad Pitt twenty years ago, of the long-haired role Pitt had played in Legends of the Fall.
Travis pulled her against him, kissed her hard, and ran his hands over her. She thought that he might lead her into the adjacent bedroom, but he abruptly stepped back from her and asked.
“What do you mean, the date went ‘not so good?’”
“He was suspicious. He knew that something wasn't quite right. He noticed right off that I wasn't the woman in the pictures. He made a big deal of it.”
“Jessie, do you think this character we’ve created—Lilly, or Lilith, or—”
“Lisa, this time,” she corrected.
“Or Lisa. Do you think that this Lisa is the first woman—or man, for that matter—to use fake photos on a dating site profile? I’m sure hundreds of women do that.”
“That isn’t the point, Travis. Hundreds of women aren’t hiding what we’re hiding.”
“Don’t talk yourself into a scare, baby. I’ve told you about that.”
She nodded. “I know.”
“So if this guy is going to be some kind of a wiseass, no big deal. Oh, this one didn't try to get fresh, did he?”
“He didn't even shake hands with me, Travis.”
“Good, because I might just kill him anyway, money or not if he got fresh.”
Jessica shivered involuntarily. The walls of this cheap rented apartment were thin, and who knew who their neighbors might be? Maybe someone on the fringes of the law, who might get busted sometime down the road, and might be eager to turn jailhouse snitch. Travis, for all his positive qualities, was a loose cannon.
“Shhhhh,” she said, bringing a finger to his lips. She pointed at the walls that surrounded them.
“Okay,” he said, his voice a little lower this time. “If this guy doesn't look like a winner, we’ll just go online and pick somebody else. Simple as that.”
Jessica shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“What? You don’t know? Don't know what?
“Sometimes I think that we’ve pushed our luck enough already—that we ought to just quit while we’re ahead.”
“Oh really? Are you saying that you want to quit? Right now we got about forty grand. That’s enough to hold us for a while,
but no way is that enough to quit on. And do you still want to retire in the islands? Heck, you were talking about us retiring in the islands just the other day.”
“Yeah,” she admitted. “I was.”
Travis knew her Achilles heel. Once in her life—back when she had a decent job at the bank—she had gone on a cruise to the Bahamas. It was one of those discount affairs, built on the tour company overpromising and under-delivering.
Her room had been cramped, and the food was plain old institutional fare—not the gourmet cuisine she had been promised. But nothing could detract from the glory and beauty of those sun-baked, sand-covered islands.
Travis bent his legs at the knees, so that their eyes were level. He took hold of her shoulders.
“I know what you’re thinking about, Jessie. And I’m telling you—that can be real. That can be our life. But we gotta work for it. We gotta take chances for it.”
She sighed. “Yeah, living on the beach. It sure does sound nice. A far cry from Ohio, huh?”
“Yeah, and that will take money, lots of it. A lot more than forty grand.”
“But we can’t spend any of that money if we end up in jail. They’ll put us in the lethal injection chamber, Travis.”
“There you go again—talking yourself into a scare. And over nothing. You want to try getting another job in a frickin’ bank?”
“No bank would hire me now, Travis. Not after what happened. I’ve told you that before.”
“Well, then.”
“Well, then,” she reluctantly agreed.
15.
She finally gave into Travis, even though she knew that his judgment was flawed, even though she knew that he was less intelligent than she was—despite him happening upon his computer-related knowledge during his time in prison.
She told him that yes, they could go back to the dating websites and find someone to replace Mark Quinn. She would take the new laptop to the University of Cincinnati’s library tomorrow. The university had a guest WiFi; and in that environment, she could easily blend in. No one would take any notice of her. She would look like just another graduate student.
“I just want to see you on that beach, baby,” Travis said, when she relented. “I just want to see both of us there—together.”
Jessica decided that she should be patient with Travis. Even though he frustrated her at times, she knew that she was bound to that dark rage that pulsated inside him. She was drawn to his strength and his sheer physical beauty.
And Travis, moreover, was the one who kept her hands clean.
Jessica knew enough about the law to realize that the legal system would regard her guilt as more or less equal to that of Travis. And Ohio was a death penalty state. If they were ever caught, she was certain that she and Travis would have more or less equal chances of winding up in the state’s lethal injection chamber. Just like she had said—even though Travis had not wanted to hear it.
And yet, she had never set out to become a murderess—not even an accessory to murder—which was probably a better description for what she had been doing with Travis.
But all actions had consequences—and they often led to additional actions. She told herself that she had to be realistic about that much. Her current life—a life of crime with an ex-con named Travis Hall, had been more or less inevitable, hadn’t it? It all revolved around men and sex and money, men and sex and various forms of leverage.
Jessica had long ago reached two conclusions about men: First of all, that she could easily manipulate them; and secondly, that men could not be trusted. When push came to shove, men would always betray you—they would always let you down in the end.
She had learned the second lesson first. Jessica’s father had been a factory worker in Iron Mills, Ohio, a bedroom community of Cincinnati. He had left when Jessica was only six, leaving behind a single mother and a daughter.
To this day, Jessica had few distinct memories of him: He was a big man who wore a padded denim jacket during the cold weather. Jessica’s father had also worn a green John Deere cap. He smelled of cigarettes, and the oily chemicals that stuck to his clothing at work.
Jessica’s mother had coped with the situation by setting herself two objectives: to make as much money as possible, and to try to find a replacement for the husband/father who had deserted them both.
It was the late 1980s, and Iron Mills had been relatively prosperous: Jessica’s mother found work at a factory that made electronic components for the automotive industry. The factory paid good wages during that time—though it closed around the turn of the new century, another casualty to the low-wage, industrial behemoth of China.
Jessica’s mother worked the swing shift. For many of these years, Jessica was effectively raised by her maternal grandmother. For several years, her mother seemed to exist only on the weekends, and then she was dead tired.
Even at a young age, Jessica could tell that her mother was growing prematurely old. The cold facts of aging and sexual economics were staring her in the face. If she was going to replace the man who had departed, she would have to replace him soon.
Then one Saturday afternoon, the year she turned twelve, Jessica was introduced to Floyd, her mother’s new boyfriend.
Floyd was cut from the same cloth as Jessica’s father: a big, blue-collar man with simple tastes. The first time they met, Floyd tilted his head and gave her a broad, tobacco- and coffee-stained smile.
Shortly after her introduction to Floyd, Jessica’s grandmother had a stroke. Jessica’s mother and her mother’s two siblings arranged for the grandmother to take up residence in a subsidized nursing home. Afternoons with her grandmother were now a thing of the past. At the age of twelve, Jessica came home every afternoon to an empty house.
But the house wasn't completely empty. By that time, Floyd had already started sleeping over on the weekends. Now he started sleeping over during the week as well. At twelve, Jessica’s mother deemed her no longer a child, but not an adult either. And she seemed to want the girl to develop a bond with Floyd—though not the sort of bond that Floyd would eventually have in mind.
At first Jessica welcomed the change in living arrangements. Her father had been gone for over half a decade; and there was something sterile about the all-female household that consisted of only her and her mother. Floyd usually worked the night shift, so when Jessica arrived home from school, he was only beginning to stir.
She mostly stayed out of Floyd’s way while he was getting ready for work—not because she was in any way afraid of him, but because she knew that her mother could be a crab when she was rushing to get out of the house and leave for her shift. She assumed that Floyd would be of a similarly distracted nature. Floyd, for his part, greeted Jessica with an almost shy formality.
Then Floyd began to grow more comfortable in his new second home. (Jessica did not know if Floyd had maintained a separate residence during this period.) He began to act less like a guest, and more like the man of the house. His possessions were no longer confined solely to the bedroom he shared with Jessica’s mother; his clothing was now nearly as ubiquitous around the house as her father’s had been. He made superficially minor, but somehow meaningful changes in the knickknacks and wall decorations that adorned the home.
There were other changes as well: Jessica had begun to “develop”. Over the course of less than a year, puberty transformed her body from one of a gangly child, to what might be fairly described as the body of a young woman.
And during that year, Floyd’s attitude toward her changed, too.
It was almost imperceptible at first, and easily overlooked: a glance that lingered a bit too long, a tone of voice that was a tad too familiar.
“Just you and me,” he would sometimes say, when they ran into each other in the kitchen. “Just you and me and the four walls.”
Half-sensing what was going on, Jessica would nod and excuse herself as quickly as possible.
Then one day Floyd emerged from the bathroom, having
taken a shower. He had conveniently forgotten his towel.
Her eyes were involuntarily drawn to the part of him that was partly swollen. Jessica knew what that meant. She had known all about the birds and the bees since the age of ten.
“Oh, I didn't know you were home already,” Floyd said, even though Jessica had been home for the better part of an hour. Almost casually, he walked back into the bathroom. When he came out again, a towel was wrapped around his waist.
It was a game, Jessica quickly realized. He wasn't going to molest her, wasn't going to force her. He wanted her to make the first move.
And there was no way that was going to happen. Jessica didn't yet have any experience even with boys her own age, and Floyd was thirty-seven or thirty-eight.
Floyd continued to make suggestive comments and stares, and Jessica continued to ignore his covert advances.
Once or twice she considered discussing the matter with her mother, but there were two obstacles: First, between her mother’s job and Floyd, alone time between mother and daughter was now rare. Secondly and even more importantly, Floyd seemed to realize that there was a line he could not step over. Although his intent was clear enough to her, Floyd had actually done nothing that she could put a name to: He had never tried to kiss her, never fondled her.
To the best of her recollection, in fact, Floyd had never even touched her. Yes, there had been the incident with the shower, but that could be explained away. And Floyd could truthfully report that he had apologized and returned to the bathroom to wrap his lower body in a towel.
In later years, Jessica would learn the name of the principle involved: plausible deniability.
The game continued until she noticed that Floyd’s presence in the house was becoming more and more infrequent. Jessica had been a small child when her parents split up. Thirteen now, she was better at reading and observing adult relationships. And the relationship between her mother and Floyd was going south.
One Saturday, the first Saturday in recent memory when Floyd had not put in at least a brief appearance, Jessica’s mother broke the news to her daughter: She and Floyd were splitting up. She might see him one afternoon during the following week, as he planned to stop by and pick up his things. Then he would be gone.
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