by Moriah Jovan
“Mitch, this just came for you by courier.”
He looked up to see Darlene crossing the office with a fat manila envelope in her hand.
“Thanks.”
There was no return address on the envelope, just a laser-printed label with his name on it. It wasn’t even sealed, just held closed with the cheap brass clasp.
Pictures.
Lots of them.
And a piece of paper that slid out on its own.
cc:
President David Petersen
Nazareth Pennsylvania Stake High Council
Bishop Mitch Hollander
Pictures fell from the envelope in a blizzard, eight-by-tens, color and black-and-white, professionally shot zoom photos of him and Cassandra.
Dancing at Cubax.
Snuggling on her doorstep.
Walking hand-in-hand down Park Avenue, talking, smiling, laughing.
Almost kissing, Cassandra’s hands under his suit coat, cupping his butt.
Sitting in a dark corner of an emergency room, Cassandra on his lap, Mitch’s hand up her shirt, the two of them kissing passionately.
It shocked him.
Mitch looked at Cassandra’s face, the glances she had shot him as they went about their courtship. How had he missed it, that nebulous thing he’d felt from her from the moment she’d fallen, giggling, into his lap on New Year’s Eve?
Mina had looked at him that way, and he’d always known it for what it was.
Cassandra had been in love with him from the beginning—
If you had also asked me for my client list, I would have given it to you... You are the only other person besides me who will have read this. I am trusting you with my life.
—and he had mistaken it for simple lust. She’d never admit it, since she went to a great deal of trouble to lie to herself, but now Mitch knew. He finally had the last piece of the puzzle that was Cassandra’s true motive for dating him, marrying him. But now that he knew, it was exactly the leverage he needed to extend that stupid one-year agreement to the rest of their lives.
How had he been so blessed as to love two women in a single lifetime who loved him in return?
He picked up another grouping of pictures and felt his gut clench—not in fear for his spiritual future, no. With desire, wondering how he’d resisted her all those weeks.
They sat in a cab, the camera perfectly aimed to show Cassandra draped over him, Mitch’s arm around her, drawing her closer. The night of the argument that had terrified him that he’d lost his chance when he’d refused to kiss her, and now...
It looked so much different from this angle.
It looked like they had been making passionate love and got interrupted by having been tossed in the back of a cab.
Her hand was wrapped around his neck, her lips pressed against his cheek, at the corner of his mouth. His eyes were closed, half ecstasy, half agony, his head tilted, letting her have her way with him.
Shot after shot, in rapid sequence. If he stacked them all together and flipped through them, he’d have a movie.
He did that.
And groaned with want, need.
But Cassandra was twelve hundred miles away and wouldn’t be home until tomorrow. Only two days without her, and he was out of his mind with missing her.
Find someone. Someone who can match you the way I never could, someone who’ll take care of you the way you deserve.
Let me take care of you. That’s why I married you, after all.
Mitch’s throat clogged.
His incredible romance, spread out in front of him. Every whisper and smile and moment that built their relationship, their love—
—yet giving every indication that not only had he not kept his covenants, but that he’d slunk away to New York to sin in secret.
With a hooker.
There, a picture of his feeding her a cherry cordial at Jacques Torres. Cassandra’s head was back, her eyes closed, her beautiful mouth pursed mid-chew, unable to see the pure desire on Mitch’s face as he held her to him and lowered the confection into her mouth.
The entirety of Cassandra’s birthday flashed through his mind, when they’d gotten high on sugar and traded increasingly nonsensical gobbledygook, laughed themselves silly over it, when Cassandra had looked at him, her face shining with delight.
He was captivated by her dry wit and her affection for mankind and its foibles, something he would not have expected from a woman who’d been a pawn most of her life.
He saw her reputation for fast, rude, and cruel for what it was: at once efficient and kind. Too bad she’d never had the stomach to turn it on her daughters.
He respected her as a financial powerhouse, one who, with nothing more than a lifetime of trying to juggle household budgets veneered by a token MBA, could step into Sebastian Taight’s role as America’s corporate hammer without a hint of insecurity.
No, it wasn’t sin that had drawn him to New York. He could’ve gotten sin anywhere.
And, according to the rumors Greg cultivated, he’d gotten it right in his own backyard with who knew how many women. Mitch couldn’t begin to sort it out, the whos and the whats and the whys and the wheres.
It didn’t matter now. He’d set the cogs in motion himself, back in November, by confronting Greg with his fraud, releasing him from the calling he needed to play his mind games and step up the ladder. Once the stake president and stake high council got their copies of these photos, Mitch could expect a knock on his door and an envelope inviting him to his excommunication.
The question was: Did Greg have the credibility necessary to get Mitch out?
He didn’t know.
There was only one person strong enough to hold him up right now, and he needed her so badly, needed to feel her strength behind him in a bathtub full of hot water lulling him to sleep because he knew she wouldn’t let him drown.
Cassandra’s phone rang and rang, but finally she answered. “Well, hello,” she breathed, her voice husky.
“What are you doing right now?” Mitch murmured, hoping she’d say something shocking.
“I,” she answered matter-of-factly, “am standing in the middle of the actuarial department of Vorcester & Minden, watching people scramble when I bark.”
He chuckled, then began to laugh when she barked, “You! Over there. Yes, you, in the cheap pinstripes. You put that file in the shredder and I’ll put you in a wood chipper. You—young lady! Taniqua? Get maintenance up here to get these fucking shredders out of here.” Pause. “NOW!” She sighed into the phone.
“You seem to be having a very good time.”
“God, I love this job— Oh, I don’t think so, sweetheart!” she bellowed, and Mitch’s eardrum protested. “You! Go downstairs. Tell the cops I need them up here. Sorry about that.”
“No problem. Cops?”
“Had to rustle up some shysters to get a court order and put the company into receivership, appoint me trustee. So now I’m having all the paper in this place, all the hard drives—everything—boxed up and sent to Nigel so he can figure out what the hell happened here. He started out in insurance, so he’ll know better what to look for than I do.”
“Mismanagement or theft?”
She paused. “You know, I’m not sure yet,” she said in a thoroughly bewildered tone of voice. “Usually I can tell, but this is...very strange. Probably a mixture, like Jep.”
“How’d you get a court order if you don’t know?”
“These old Southern men, you know. The judge didn’t hear a word my attorney said once I presented him with an entirely accidental view of tits and ass.”
Of course. “I miss you.”
“I miss you, too,” she said huskily, then lowered her voice even more. “I do love my job, Bishop, but I must confess there is one thing I like more than this.”
“What’s that?” he asked, fiddling with a fountain pen, his mouth twitching because he knew.
“Fucking you.”
Mitch
grinned, the pictures on his desk now back in their proper perspective: The documentary of a romance between equals.
“What are you doing today?”
Watching my enemy take me down and being unable to do anything about it.
“Thinking about you. About what to do when I get released from the bishopric.”
Next week.
“We could buy an RV. Like your parents.”
He sat stunned for a moment. “Uh... Am I speaking with Cassandra St. James? Midas the Second? My wife?”
She laughed with hearty, wicked delight. “Actually, I was thinking something like a Tuscan villa.”
“Everybody does that.”
“Caribbean. Lie on the beach. Dance with the natives.”
“Then see the rest of the world.”
“Together,” she purred.
Mitch could feel the thud of his heart through his breastbone. “That would...uh...take longer than a year.”
She said nothing for a couple of seconds, then murmured, “I might not remember that little detail. I...forget things that cease to be important to me.”
In the midst of tragedy, hope. “That would be okay with me,” he said, his voice gruff.
“Officer!” she yelled then. “Get that fucker away from the computers! Nobody touches the computers but my people!” Mitch burst out laughing and she muttered, “Good thing I brought my own techs. Just like children, feeding their dinner to the dog. Little bastards hiding their dirty deeds.”
“Done dirt cheap.”
“Around here, cheap is less than poverty level.”
“I called Nigel.”
“Oh, good. Now you won’t need to bug me about it.”
“Wishful thinking on your part.”
She snickered, then snarled at someone else for not jumping when she snapped her fingers.
“I better let you go.”
“Ever had phone sex?”
“No.”
“You will tonight.”
* * * * *
A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief
April 19, 2011
“Hello, Bishop.”
Mitch turned to see an older woman he didn’t know in the threshold of his office. Frail, a bit stooped, with thinning salt-and-pepper hair and sunken cheeks, she had the look of chaotic desperation about her.
It was Tuesday night and he was gathering his things to leave and lock up for the last time. He hadn’t been instructed to; in fact, he hadn’t heard a word from the stake president nor anyone else. Greg, as a newly called member of the stake high council, had attended different wards Sunday, which Mitch had otherwise spent presiding over sacrament meeting and a slate of other meetings, interviews, fires to extinguish.
As usual.
He’d thought the building empty, but no. His first instinct was to panic, being alone in the building with a woman he wasn’t married to, but it didn’t matter now. The silence from his superior after the delivery of those photos meant it wouldn’t be long until—
“Hello, Sister...?”
Her mouth trembled. “Guerrero,” she whispered, a tear sparkling at the corner of her eye.
Mitch thought his heart had stopped. He could barely breathe. “Inez.”
“I’ve changed, I know,” she murmured. “Don’t try to be polite about it. Nobody can pull that off.”
“I— Uh...”
“I heard you got married again.”
Mitch tried to take a breath. “Yeah. Uh, last month.”
“The brunette, Cathy...?”
“Cassie.”
“Yes. I saw her Sunday. She’s beautiful.”
“She is. What can I do for you, Inez?”
Asking the question was conditioned reflex, and he had too many strong conflicting emotions running through him to do anything other than act by rote.
Inez was here.
Why did you come back here, Inez?
Questions, protestations, confusion rushed his mind, turning it to mush, with only two thoughts screaming to be voiced:
Why? Why now?
She shrugged. “I have a list of things I’d like you to do for me, but all I really wanted was to say I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
Inez is here. Why?
“For what I’ve done to you.”
Mitch’s breath hitched.
“You don’t deserve it,” she said, no emotion coloring her words. “But I’m desperate. You’ve always seen me at my most desperate. I was desperate for a dance partner, there you were. I was desperate to be taken care of, there you were. I’m desperate now. There you are.”
She laughed then for no reason Mitch could think of, and he saw that time had wreaked havoc on her. She’d lived hard and he didn’t have to wonder if she had walked the streets after her lover kicked her to the curb. Cassandra had chosen her path deliberately as a means of exacting vengeance; for Inez, it had always been about survival.
“Turn your arms out,” Mitch said abruptly, but he didn’t need to see the tracks to know. He’d spent a good share of the last thirteen years dealing with junkies of one sort or another, in varying stages of addiction and varying states of remorse.
Inez complied slowly, but without hesitance. Mitch imagined she did everything slowly, and she was probably hardened to humiliation. She rolled the tattered sleeve of her dingy Oxford above her left elbow.
“Are you clean?”
“No.”
“Are you interested in getting clean?”
She shrugged. “I could say I was. I’d try. For you. But it wouldn’t last.”
Mitch’s breath left him in a whoosh, and he sat back on the edge of his desk, wiping his hands down his face.
“I had to see you again,” she said bluntly. “Let you take a look at what you escaped. I told you I wouldn’t be good for you, and you ended up marrying well. Good girls. I knew Mina. Barely. Nice little girl, good family. Your wife looks like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.”
Mitch barked a laugh, at once thoroughly amused and thoroughly saddened.
“And you made something of yourself. I knew you would.”
He searched for something, anything, to say. “How are your kids?”
“No idea. CPS took ’em away from me before they were teenagers.” That didn’t surprise him. “I told you what would happen with me, and I was right. I would’ve dragged you through life from ghetto to ghetto.”
Yes.
“What do you need, Inez?”
“Sixty thousand dollars.”
“You know I won’t do that.”
“What’s it to you? You won’t miss it.” She waved a hand. “For you, it’s like, what, sixty dollars?”
“Six,” he said flatly. “The answer’s no. And you know why.”
“Got over your rescue complex, then?”
He studied her, and saw none of the beautiful twenty-five-year-old woman who had left him behind with a broken heart. She’d be fifty now, but looked seventy. “No,” he said absently. “I just don’t use that method. Money doesn’t fix addiction.”
Inez laughed with no humor whatsoever. “You got that right.”
“Okay, look,” he said finally. “If you’d like a place to stay, an opportunity to get clean, I have a carriage house you can stay in. Free room and board. I can send you to the best rehab program in the country if you want.”
Not like he hadn’t tried that a couple dozen times over the years for a couple dozen other people.
She shook her head. “No, I’m good. For now. Got a little cash on me. I’ll be heading out, here in a couple of hours. Thought I might try to pop you for a few benjamins.”
“Have you eaten?” he asked, low, now too overcome with sorrow and pity to worry about propriety or what his enemy might do with it. “Let me give you dinner, at least. Cassandra can whip something up for you. She makes a killer gumbo.”
She shook her head slowly. “No. Thanks. Your wife wouldn’t want to dirty her kitchen for a whore.”
&n
bsp; “Oh, Inez. You have no idea how wrong you are.”
She looked straight at him then, held his gaze. “Maybe someday, you’ll forgive me.”
“Forgive you for what?”
But she was gone, and he followed. There, disappearing around the hall corner, into the foyer, toward the doors.
“Don’t,” she called over her shoulder as she put her hand on the glass door to head out in the darkness. She looked down at the ground. “Just...remember me kindly. That’s all I want.”
“Inez! Let me take you to a shelter at least.”
She looked back at him, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I love you, Mitch. I always have. And I will love you until the day I die.”
Mitch stood in the middle of the large foyer, watching her go, trying to make sense of it all, but it felt like swimming through mud.
“How. Fucking. Pathetic.”
Mitch’s jaw clenched.
Greg drew abreast of him. “You want to hit me, don’t you?”
No. He would not give in to the taunts.
“You’ve always had a taste for whores. What’d she ask you for? Sixty? Shit, I only gave her thirty. But at least now you’re fucking a whore with some class, who knows what she’s worth.”
Mitch swallowed. Hard.
“And your kid— Heh. Like father, like son. Do it, Mitch,” he murmured, getting closer. “Hit me. I promise I won’t hit back.”
Mitch’s nostrils flared.
“So, how much is Cassie worth? Sixty thousand? No, I know better than that. Six million, more like. Yeah, I looked up her tax returns. That was her lowest year. Girl topped out at twenty-nine million. Ah, but Inez is a cheap bitch. She always was. You escaped that train wreck pretty well, but you got a different one and as usual, you were a stupid shit. You should’ve slapped Mina in a cheap nursing home and been done with it. I bet she was a lousy lay, to boot, so I suppose I owe you for rescuing me from that.”
Mitch’s fists clenched.
“Poor Mitch, couldn’t bring himself to pay a whore for sex, but of course marriage makes it okay. Barely. How much did Cassie charge you to get her name on a marriage certificate? I’m sure there’s a time limit on the prenup—all the better for her to get out from under you. Really. Satisfy my curiosity. How much did you pay her for that sham of a marriage?”