Love's Deadly Masquerade

by The Author- Yani

  “We take what we do very seriously. Countless women die every year by the hands of their abusers. The goal is not only to protect you, but to protect the women who have helped you travel through from stop to stop because in the event that your spouse is dangerous and decides to come looking for you, we put our lives on the line and we could be in danger as well. Which is why we do not allow contact to your past life,” her caretaker explained. Vanessa turned away and looked out the car window. She then looked in the wallet and took out the ID. It was a Georgia issued ID. She wasn’t even sure when the picture they used was taken. But it looked legit. “Carmen Thompson”, she said herself. “My name is Carmen Thompson…” she began reciting that in her head again and again before closing her eyes and taking the ride to the train station with her caretaker.

  7

  Eric had driven around for almost two hours trying to find where Vanessa had gone. He didn’t even realize that for three blocks, he was driving behind the car that she was in. Had he not been so impatient with how slow they were driving and sped around them as a light was turning from green to red, he would have seen Vanessa when she got out of the car to go into the first safe house.

  “Oh my God! That’s him!” Vanessa exclaimed in the back of the Acura with the tinted windows.

  “That’s who?” Marcella asked.

  “Eric, the man that’s been beating me for almost two years! That’s his car! I know that’s his car!” she panicked.

  “Okay, calm down sweetheart. Just calm down. He can’t see you because the windows are tinted and judging by the way he is driving, he seems to be preoccupied with something else.” Marcella told her.

  “I’m gonna be sick…” Vanessa said in a breathless voice before puking in the back of the car.

  Eric was ready to say fuck Vanessa, and let her go wherever the hell it was that she was going. He told himself that he was getting tired of looking at her and was ready to move onto someone else. But when he got back home that night, the sight of the trashcan that he previously kicked over along with the trash on the floor infuriated him all over again. He was going to wait until the morning to clean it up until he remembered that it was trash day the next day. He wanted to choke the life out of Vanessa.

  Eric grabbed the broom and the dust pan and began picking the trash up when he saw part of the pregnancy test box amidst the trash pile that he was about to dump back inside of the can. He picked it up and looked at it for a moment.

  “What the hell…?” he said out loud. He began to sift through the trash looking to see if the pregnancy test was in there. He found the first one and looked at the results and then looked at the box to see what the results on the test meant. He then looked for the other pregnancy test when he saw that there were two boxes in the trash and looked at both of them just as Vanessa had done earlier that day.

  “Well, I’ll be damned. She’s pregnant. She had the nerve to leave knowing she’s carrying my baby!” He threw the tests to the floor and grabbed his phone. He had called Vanessa’s phone numerous times while he was out driving around looking for her, but there was no answer. He dialed her again and felt stupid when he heard the faint ringing of her phone coming from the upstairs bedroom. He went upstairs to the room thinking Vanessa had come back. When he saw that it was only her phone and not her, he became even more pissed. He picked her phone up and silenced it.

  Eric was tempted to smash her phone against the wall but figured he better go through her call log and her texts to see who she was in contact with last. The only name that popped up was his name in calls and texts. Nothing from her friends and nothing from her mother.

  “Unless her ass deleted her phone activity…” he mused out loud. He went to her Facebook page to see if she had any updates but couldn’t locate her. “She deactivated her Facebook…” Eric then saw that she had done the same with her twitter account and her Instagram.

  “I bet that bitch Arianna knows where she is. But I ain’t asking her shit.”

  Eric ordered Chinese food and sat on the side of his bed picking at it more than eating it. “Who the fuck told you you could leave me? Huh, bitch? And while pregnant with my child at that? Who’s helping you?” Eric mused as he picked through his food. He wasn’t going to let her get away with this shit. He was beginning to wish he had killed her ass months ago when the thought first crossed his mind to do so.

  “See Ricky, I told you to get a better handle on these little young gals. You gotta knock the sass right outta ‘em because once they start thinking they have the upper hand on you, you’re never gonna be able to get ‘em to fall in line,” Eric heard his father’s voice in his head. He closed his eyes as his mind began to wander.

  Eric sat huddled in a corner with his knees pulled into his chest and his arms wrapped around them tightly with his head bowed. He rocked himself back and forth as he tried to block out the noises coming from his parents’ room.

  “Please, Kevin! Please, stop!” he heard his mother begging his father. It had become a regular occurrence in their home for his father to beat on his mother and terrorize him.

  Kevin cocked his fist back and smashed it into his wife’s face before grabbing her by the hair and throwing her onto the bed. “You yelling in my house, gal! I told you before about that shit! I’ma learn you today. I’ma learn you right hard and right now!” he said in a drunken, southern drawl.

  Eric could hear the struggle from his room and closed his eyes tightly before putting his hands to his ears to try to block out his mother’s pleas for his father to have mercy on her. But her cries fell on deaf ears and Kevin continued to unleash his wrath on her.

  He rocked himself faster and harder now joining in with his mother, begging God to spare her. He began to think that God could not hear him or her.

  Eric’s bedroom door opened and he jerked his head up. He trembled at the site of his father who was a tall, intimidating man standing at six feet and six inches. He weighed a little over 300 pounds and was dark as night. He was what the White folks in the south would consider to be a “burley nigra” or a “mandingo”, strong, and made for hard, physical labor. While Kevin had a job, it was one he hated; working in a meat packing factory. Eric remembered how his father always came home with a bottle of Absolut Vodka, smelling of blood and meat. Eric looked up at his father wearing his usual dingy white, tight undershirt that was stained from sweat and his navy blue trousers. His thick belly peeped out from beneath the undershirt and hung over top of the black leather belt that held his pants up. The stench of his musky body odor, blood and meat from that day’s work, along with the bottle of vodka that was in his hands, filtered into the room making Eric feel sick to his stomach.

  “Get up, boy!” Kevin said to his son in a loud and intimidating voice.

  Eric scrambled to his feet. “Yessir?” he answered, timidly.

  “Get your little scrawny ass over here. I wanna have a lil’ chat with ya about these sassafrass damn womens, running ‘round here like they don’t know their place.”

  Eric hunched his shoulders and sulked slowly towards his father. Kevin felt the boy wasn’t moving fast enough and snatched him by the scruff of his neck, yanking him closer.

  “Boy, when I say get here, I mean get here right quick!” Kevin piped.

  Eric whimpered, already putting his hands up, expecting his father to strike him just as he had done his mother moments before.

  “Put your arms down, boy. I ain’t finna touch you. Come in this room and have a look at your momma. I want you to see a no good, low down dirty, disrespectful whore in living color.”

  “Kevin, please… not in front of our son… not in…” Eric’s mother began to plead as she tried to hide the bruises in her face. She was cut off by Kevin’s strong hand as he slapped her back onto the bed. He stood over top of her, strong and intimidating, shaking his finger at her like a man would chastise a dog who had just pissed on the floor.

  “You shut your goddamn mouth unless I ask you to speak, un
derstand me!” Kevin bellowed. He looked at his wife Diane for a moment longer to make sure she didn’t try to challenge him, and then turned his attention to his son. He snarled in disgust as he saw the tears running down his face. “Cut out that damn sissy crying and act how a man is ‘spose to act. None of that pussy-boy crying ‘round here!”

  Eric sniffed and wiped his face as he stole a quick and terrified glance at his mother before looking back at his father. “Yes, daddy.”

  “Now there’s some womens in this world who knows they place and knows to do as a man says without question. And then there are whores like ya momma here, who got to learn the hard way. A gal like that, you ‘pose to knock ‘round when she step outta line ‘cause that’s the only way to get her back in line, ya understand me, boy?”

  “Yessir,” Eric replied.

  “Don’t you get you no uppity gal thinking she can say and do what she wanna ‘cause them bitches are the root of all evil. You get yourself a good wholesome girl, untouched, quiet and well behaved. Mark my words boy, anything other than that and you’ll have more trouble on your hands than needed, understand me, boy?”

  “Yessir…” Eric replied again.

  “But ya didn’t listen to me…” Eric heard his father’s voice in his head again.

  “Get out of my head, you old bastard,” Eric mumbled to himself.

  “You should have listened to me and none of this woulda happened to ya. Now you done fucked around and let that little gal get the upper hand. More than likely she got a man helping her and that man finna raise your youngin’ like his own. They probably laughing at you right now, boy.”

  Eric threw his food at the wall out of frustration. “Shut up! Shut up, shut up, SHUT THE FUCK UP!” Eric yelled. Before he knew it, he had slid to the floor with his back against the bed, his knees pulled to his chest and his arms wrapped around them, rocking back and forth just as he had done when he was a child. It took him a moment to calm himself and realize what he was doing.

  “I’m not about to let that man fuck with me…” Eric mumbled aloud. But the sound of his father’s words continued to echo in his mind, and the idea of Vanessa being with another man, lying in his arms while he assumed a father-role position over his child nagged at him.

  “Fuck this shit!” he growled. He snatched up his cell-phone and called a close friend of his that was a private investigator.

  “Hey, Tony. How’s everything going?” he spoke into the phone as he began to pace back and forth in his bedroom.

  “Hey, Eric! Everything is going good over this end. How about you?” Tony replied as he kicked back in his chair.

  “That’s what I’m calling about. Listen, I got another job for you.”

  Tony sat up at attention. Whenever Eric said he had a job for him that meant there was going to be some serious money coming his way. “I’m all ears, bro. Tell me what you need.”

  “I need you to track somebody down. Remember the young lady that I’ve been seeing for almost two years?”

  “Yeah, yeah. The cute little honey from La Salle that you had been scoping for a while before you finally got with her at the mall that day. What about her?”

  “Well, she ran off with another dude and I just found out that she’s pregnant. I’m positive the baby is mine, I just want to catch up with her to make sure she doesn’t do anything stupid,” Eric lied as he continued to pace.

  Tony was silent for a moment. They had been down a similar road almost three years prior with another young lady that Eric had been dealing with. He happily obliged when Eric asked for his help that time, thinking he was simply “tracking a person down”. Until Regina was found dead in the woods near Belfield Avenue, wrapped in a sheet after being raped and strangled to death. He suspected it was his good friend Eric, but he had a motto: If the money was there, he did not care.

  “Tony, you still there, bro?” Eric asked as he stopped pacing.

  “Yeah… I was just thinking about the last girl you asked me to track down…” Tony trailed off.

  It was Eric who fell silent this time. He waited to see if Tony was going to finish his thought. When he saw that he wasn’t, he cleared his throat. “Yeah… I thought I was never going to get over what happened to her. If only I had followed my first thought and went to see her instead of waiting…”

  “Yeah… I know,” Tony replied quietly. “Well hey, V-Dot ran off with this other guy, maybe the baby isn’t yours and she wanted to spare you the pain of thinking that it is only to find out that it ain’t, ya know?” While he had his motto, Tony didn’t want any more blood on his hands.

  “Nah, I know this baby is mine, trust me,” Eric replied adamantly.

  Tony put his hands to his head knowing there was no way he could deter Eric from his plans. “So who’s the guy?” he asked.

  Eric hesitated, “I’m not sure. Things happened kinda suddenly.”

  “Okay… how do you know she’s pregnant?”

  “Because I knocked over a trash can by accident and two pregnancy tests came out. Both of them were positive. Come on, Tony. I thought we were better than this. What’s with all the questions? Don’t I pay you well?”

  “Yeah but…” Tony started.

  “But what? Have you forgotten about that little coke incident I took care of for you. When the cops were on you, I took care of that. I risked my career adjusting that paper work to make your side money look legit,” Eric reminded him.

  “I know, I know. I didn’t forget,” Tony shook his head. He hated when Eric reminded him of the helping hand he extended to him.

  “I’ll tell you what. I’ll pay you double your fee. If you’re able to track her down sooner than later, I’ll add an additional bonus to your fee as well,” Eric said. He knew Tony was a money hungry bastard and definitely wouldn’t refuse him at that point.

  Tony didn’t need to think long. He reminded himself of his motto once again. “If the money is there, I do not care. After all, it’s not my hands that are actually getting the blood on them. All I’m doing is locating the bitch. What happens to her afterwards is not my problem,” he thought to himself.

  “Alright, give me 48 hours to access all camera footage in the area to see if I can get facial recognition or any footage on her. If she took the bus or a cab or got a ride, I’ll be able to look into where she went from any cameras in the area. Our best bet are traffic cameras if she was in a car or traveling on foot. The minute I have something for you, I’ll call you and let you know,” Tony told him.

  “My man, Tony. Good looking. I’ll send your fee to the usual account tonight. Thanks a lot.”

  “No problem,” Tony replied before hanging up. He got a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach as though something was warning him against completing this job for Eric. But then he thought about the amount of money he was going to make from it and shook the feeling off before getting to work.

  8

  Two months after Eric hired Tony to help him locate Vanessa, he received a much awaited phone call. He was lying in bed with a new young lady that he had met a month before Vanessa left him. Though he was planning on replacing Vanessa with this new young lady, the split was supposed to be on his terms and not hers. In his mind, he was the only one allowed to move on with another person. Many times he contemplated keeping them both as there were some things that Vanessa was good at that his new companion was not. He had a second apartment in the Chestnut Hill section of the city that he normally spent time with his new friend while Vanessa stayed at home. He knew that Vanessa was none the wiser of his cheating ways. And he also knew the new young lady Clarissa wasn’t too much worried either, considering he kept her blessed with the finer things in life. Eric knew that she wanted to keep living that good life and would keep her mouth closed and play her part. Otherwise, it would be back to the three bedroom Section 8 house with her mother and five brothers and sisters all crammed together with the roaches and mice practically sitting at the dinner table with them.

  “
Hello,” Eric said into the phone quietly.

  “Hey Eric, this is Tony. Sorry to call so early in the morning…”

  “I hope this isn’t another bullshit update, Tony. I paid you double your fee and was expecting results two days after you’d been hired. It’s been two months. Do I need to hire somebody else?” Eric said in an aggravated voice.

  “Hey now, easy tiger. No need to go off the deep end. I have something this morning,” Tony replied.

  Eric sat up in his bed. “You found her?” he asked eagerly. Clarissa stirred in the bed next to him but did not wake up.

  “Not exactly. But remember when we both said it was odd that she wasn’t contacting her mother or the friend Arianna at all?”

  “Yeah, yeah, what about it?”

  “Well, she finally made contact this morning. She called her friend Arianna. She called from some type of burner phone. No information came up on it yet, I’m still running a scan and trace to see if I can get a beat on the phone’s network. That way I can hack into the phone’s GPS. Now if the GPS was off while she made the call, I can hack into the phone’s camera and hopefully get a clear enough pic of where she was when she made the call.”

  “Okay, that’s a start. So you think it’s possible that Vanessa told Arianna where she was?” Eric asked eagerly.

  “Well, unless they were talking in codes, no. She didn’t say specifically where she was. All she said was to tell her mother that she was okay and to let her know that she was going to be a grandmother. You were right, E-money. She is pregnant and judging by the conversation, the baby is yours,” Tony confirmed.

  “What do you mean? What else did she say?”

  “Not too much. Arianna just told her congratulations and said that she was happy for her even if she was carrying the spawn of the devil… or something like that.”

  “Bitch,” Eric mumbled.

  “Say what?” Tony asked, unable to hear what Eric said.

  “Nothing, nothing. Let me ask you this, if Arianna called the number back, would you be able to trace the location that way?”