“That man didn’t threaten you, did he?”
Alyssa had almost never tried to lie to her. And on those rare occasions when she did, she had never been a very convincing liar.
Donna was discovering that the truth had to be extracted from her daughter in bits and pieces. Only a few nights ago, Alyssa had revealed that Shawn Myers had nearly touched her another time. But this time he had been interrupted by another UP&S employee. According to Alyssa, this man had grabbed Shawn and thrown up him against the wall.
What had that man seen? And why hadn’t Alyssa told her about this incident the night it occurred? Had she known, she could have taken action sooner.
Donna stopped the van and pulled over to the edge of the road. There was the sound of a horn blaring, then a pair of headlights sped past them.
“Is there something that you haven’t told me? Anything else?”
Alyssa was staring out the window, deliberately looking away from her.
She thought about Todd, Alyssa’s absentee father, and her anger flared. Lately, after several stern letters from her attorney, Todd had become more regular about sending his court-mandated child support checks. But where was he at times like this, when Alyssa was hurting, and she didn’t know what to do about it? It wasn't fair—to either of them.
“Alyssa. Tell me the truth.”
Alyssa whirled on her. There were tears in her eyes. “Mom, would please just drop it!”
She burst into tears. Another car slowed down and laid on the horn. The cleaning van was partially blocking one lane of the highway.
“There is nothing else to tell you!” Alyssa shouted through her tears. “Nothing else at all. I just don't want to do this anymore. Why won’t you let me move on? Why won’t you move on?”
Donna put the van back in gear, checked her rearview mirror, and eased back into the flow of traffic. She decided not to press Alyssa any further. Not tonight. However mature the Long Island Lolita might have been at seventeen, Donna knew that her own fifteen year-old daughter was still very young, still naïve and inexperienced in the ways of the world. Alyssa was certainly no match for Shawn Myers. That much was certain.
And another thing was certain as well: Donna had seen the truth in her daughter’s face, heard the truth in her voice—when she claimed that there nothing more to tell.
Alyssa had been lying.
Chapter 44
She was waiting for me by my car one evening, out in the parking lot of UP&S: the cleaning woman, the mother of the teenaged girl whom Shawn Myers had harassed in the hallway that night.
I had known, of course, that the matter wouldn’t have ended right there in the hallway of UP&S. You don’t slam a man up against a wall without consequences. There is always another shoe that has to drop.
For days, I had been waiting for Shawn Myers to drop that other shoe. I was anticipating some sort of a retaliatory gesture. I had even begun to prepare a contract cancellation invoice. This is an invoice that a vendor issues to assess the charges owed when a customer breaks an existing contract. I was certain that TP Automotive was going to fire me any day.
But I never had to issue a contract cancellation invoice—because my contract was never cancelled. Since I had physically confronted Shawn, my routine at UP&S had proceeded as normal, as if I had never laid my hands on a member of the client’s management team. Beth, Bernie and Kurt had continued to treat me as they always had. Shawn had avoided me, of course; but he had taken no overt steps to extract revenge.
For a brief span of a few days, I allowed myself to believe that it was over.
Then there was the second incident with the teenaged girl—and all of its aftermath. Shawn was arrested for sexual assault and subsequently released. I figured that Shawn now had other things on his mind—bigger fish to fry than yours truly.
But like I said, there is always another shoe that has to drop. How does the old saw go? “No good deed ever goes unpunished.” Therefore, I wasn’t completely surprised to see Donna Chalmers waiting for me when I walked out to my car.
She looked nervous as I approached, apparently uncertain about the outcome of her decided course of action. Beneath that surface tension, though, I thought I detected a steely resolve. This was a woman whose daughter had been wronged. As a mother, she had been wronged herself—and she was determined to set matters straight, to defend what was left of her family.
Watching her there, bundling herself against a stiff early December wind as I walked toward her car, I saw a version of femininity that was mostly absent from the circles in which I ordinarily moved. Donna was not the most beautiful woman that I had ever seen—not by a long shot. Compared to Claire, she was no stunner. Walking through the local mall or a bar, she wouldn’t have occasioned jaw-dropping stares from every man within shouting distance—which I always saw when Claire accompanied me out in public.
What was it, then? I looked at Donna Chalmers and saw a wiry, thirty-something woman who was willing to fight for herself and her daughter, but who lacked the mercenary hard edges of a Claire Turner.
She smiled tentatively when I reached my car. She wasn’t comfortable with this situation at all, and neither was I. I realized, though, that I was going to hear her out, even though I wanted no further involvement in the sordid personal and sexual dramas unfolding inside UP&S.
“Craig Parker?” she asked. She had parked her cleaning van directly beside my Toyota. It was an aging Ford Econoline with the words “Chalmers Cleaning Service” stenciled on the side.
“The same,” I said. I looked at the van. “And I’m going to take a wild guess and assume that you’re Mrs. Chalmers.”
“Ms. Chalmers,” she corrected. So this woman was single. And a single mother at that. “Please call me Donna.”
“Glad to meet you, Donna.” We shook hands. Her grip was stronger than that of most women. “I’m going to take another wild guess and assume that you want to talk to me about your daughter’s run-in with Shawn Myers.”
She nodded. “First, I want to thank you for what you did,” she said. “I know you put yourself out on a limb for my daughter’s sake.”
“You’re welcome,” I said. “Think nothing of it.”
She smiled and nodded, her gesture conveying the obvious: There was no way that she could think nothing of it.
“And I suppose you’ve heard about what happened after that.”
“I may have heard a rumor or two,” I allowed, remaining as noncommittal as possible. “Something about Shawn Myers being arrested.”
“Not arrested,” she corrected. “Only questioned. You probably also know that he’s free, walking around and going about his business as if none of this had ever happened. And here’s something you definitely don’t know: My daughter is refusing to testify against him. That means that he will probably be able to completely avoid any responsibility for what he’s done. So it’s only my word against the word of Shawn Myers: the classic he-said, she-said.”
“Wait a minute,” I interjected. “Why wouldn't your daughter testify against Shawn, after what he did to her?”
“My daughter is a very private person,” Donna said. “She is also more—fragile—than other girls her age, I believe. She didn’t even tell me about the incident you were involved in until much later, after Shawn Myers stepped over the line and laid his hands on her.”
“Okay,” I said. “But it still doesn't make sense. Everyone knows about it now. The secret is out of the bag. Why wouldn't your daughter speak up for herself?”
“I suspect that Shawn Myers has gotten to her somehow.”
“Gotten to her?” I asked. “You don’t mean—”
“No. Not that. At least I don’t think so. But Alyssa has suddenly refused to testify. From a legal perspective, that’s almost the same as changing her story about what happened. And without any physical evidence to the contrary, Shawn Myers will get off scot-free. And that will mean that Shawn Myers will be around to go after her again. And the next time
, he’ll probably pick a time and place where no one will be around to intervene.”
I knew that she wasn’t telling me this simply because she wanted to confide in someone. I was a stranger to her, for all practical purposes. There was another reason. She thought that I could somehow make this right for her and her daughter. She believed that I could defang Shawn Myers.
“I would love to be able to help you,” I said. “If it were in my power, I would fire Shawn Myers in a heartbeat. But there is no way that I can do that. I’m just a lowly schmuck on the UP&S org chart. I’m not even in the first tier of management here.”
For some reason that I could not define at the time, I had a sense that Donna knew that I was lying. Not that she’d figured out the whole story, of course—but she had definitely perceived that I was not exactly what I claimed to be.
And this was more or less the suspicion that I had experienced during my interactions with Alan—that he saw through my charade.
“Are you so low on the totem pole that Shawn Myers would confuse you with someone else?” she asked. “Alyssa told me that Shawn called you by another name that night. Walker, not Parker. And it also occurred to me that if you were really so low on the org chart, you would have been fired for what you did.”
I forced a laugh and shook my head. “Shawn Myers is lucky to remember his name,” I said. “Much less mine. And he probably put up with my laying hands on him because he knew that he had done wrong.”
She folded her arms and looked away from me, in the direction of the gleaming windows of the UP&S factory. I recalled that Ernest Hemingway short story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” In this case, the clean, well-lighted office was a place of monsters, not safety and solace.
She turned back to me: “You see, I know this is asking a lot; but I sort of thought that you would be able to help us.”
“Why me?” I asked.
“For two reasons,” she said. “First of all, because I know that you know the truth about Shawn Myers. What he’s capable of.”
“And what’s the second reason?” I asked.
“Because you tried to help my daughter. No—you did help her. You kept her safe from that man, and you risked your job and maybe more to do it.”
These are the sorts of words designed to bring out the best in a man, even when that man has reason to question if he still has a reserve of “best” to give. Donna didn’t cap this off with a melodramatic flourish like You’re my hero. She might have grasped the power of understatement.
Nevertheless, the implication was clear: She admired me for having helped her daughter, for having put myself on the line, so to speak. She believed that there might be more where that had come from.
I knew damn well that I was no hero. It had been years since I had even aspired to anything approaching nobility or self-sacrifice. Had you asked most people who actually knew me, they would have laughed at the very idea that there might be anything heroic in Craig Walker. Except maybe for Laurie and my parents. I did make a habit of doing right by them.
But where everyone else was concerned, it had been pretty much a matter of cold, cynical barter, or calculated exploitation. I didn't like to admit that to myself—but it was the truth.
I examined the worn lines in Donna’s face. She was getting old before her time, just like my father had done. The life of a single mother on the economic fringe will do that to any woman. I tried to imagine a conversation between Donna and Claire. The two of them finding common ground about anything. The very idea was laughable. Donna and Claire might as well have been members of two different species.
“Don’t make too much of what I did,” I told Donna. I didn’t want her to get her expectations up.
“Is that your way of saying that you don’t want to get involved?”
“It’s my way of saying that I don’t know how much I can help you—as much as I would like to.”
Most people would take that as a signal to end the conversation. Or they would become indignant. Donna was doing neither.
“I’m not going to beg you,” she said. “And I’m not going to try to put you through a guilt trip. A guilt trip wouldn't work on you, would it?”
For a moment I didn't answer. I wondered—in a completely disinterested and objective manner—if Donna was unattached. Was there a man in her life? No—there probably wasn’t. Single mothers in their thirties and beyond had notoriously difficult social lives. They had to spend all of their time working and scrimping, trying to pick up the economic slack left by the husbands or significant others who were absent.
“You don’t need to put me through a guilt trip,” I finally said. “Give me a little while to think about this. I’ll see what I can do.”
Chapter 45
I spent the better part of the night wondering what I was going to do—and wondering about my own motivations.
I had come to United Press & Stamping to accomplish a narrow set of objectives. This was supposed to be a job like any other. Thus far, the TP Automotive management team had indicated that they were satisfied with my work. (I was, of course, excluding Shawn Myers from consideration in this evaluation, for obvious reasons.) And I knew that––despite certain misgivings––I would be able to successfully fulfill my professional duties at UP&S.
Or would I? Shawn Myers’s erratic conduct had already drawn me into a conflict for which I was ill-prepared. I done jobs before at companies where there were sexual harassment issues, certainly—but I had never had to confront a grown man who was forcing himself on a teenaged girl. That sort of moral hazard wasn't part of my experience.
I had to walk a fine line here. The wrong move could destroy my business—everything that I had worked so hard for. That would have repercussions beyond my own life. It would mean the end of the legitimately good things that I wanted to accomplish with my money: A new house for my parents, additional care and resources for Laurie.
On the other side of that scale were the concerns of a woman and her daughter—two people whom I barely knew. I had to confront the knowledge that I might be the only one capable of helping them find justice.
If only I had gone home early that night, and someone else had been there to intervene between Shawn Myers and Alyssa Chalmers. Someone with a purer heart—someone with less to lose.
What the hell was I going to do?
Suddenly, I had my answer. I sat down at the little mini-desk in my hotel room and booted up my laptop. I opened a new Microsoft Word file and composed a narrative of what I had seen in the hallway that night, when Shawn Myers tried to force himself on the girl. I spared no detail, including my own assault on the girl’s tormenter.
Next I found the New Hastings municipal website on the Internet. A few levels down from the home page, there was an email address for Dave Bruner, Chief of Police.
I accessed one of my anonymous email accounts and created a new message addressed to Dave Bruner. I copied and pasted the text from the Word file into the body of the message. I did not sign my name, of course—that was the whole idea. I wanted no credit for this, and none of the fallout that would likely come with it.
It was the perfect solution: I would send an anonymous email, telling Dave Bruner what I had seen. This would set the record straight. I would do right by the cleaning woman and her daughter. And I would avoid any personal entanglement in this mess.
I was about to push the send button. And then I stopped.
I was kidding myself. I believed—hoped—that there would be a way to tell my story to Dave Bruner in a sanitized, anonymous way. I had it all wrong, though. My anonymous email would mean nothing. Bruner might even dismiss it as a ploy on Donna’s part. After all, anyone could set up a fake email account. If I followed this route, my efforts might actually work against her.
No—I would have to put myself on the line, even though many in corporate circles would interpret my next steps as a severe breach of client-consultant trust. But Shawn Myers should not have laid his hands on the gi
rl. He had forced me into this position.
I killed the email. I cursed Shawn Myers, and I felt more than a little annoyed with Donna Chalmers. I had wanted no part of any of this. I had not asked to be anyone’s savior.
Chapter 46
I paid a visit to Dave Bruner during my lunch hour the next day. The police chief's office was located only a short distance from the factory, within the town proper of New Hastings. I decided that I could discreetly stop by, make my statement to Chief Bruner, and get back to business.
That would be the end of it, if I was lucky.
Stepping inside the police station, I saw that Dave Bruner was in his private office—a glass enclosure that was situated behind a partition. I was about to walk back and tap on the door of the little mini-office when a voice halted me.
“Can I help you, sir?”
Things were set up to channel me through a gatekeeper, naturally. There was a dispatch officer at the front desk––a young man with a prominent Adam's apple. He had seemingly appeared out of nowhere.
As soon as I asked to see Chief Bruner, the officer pulled out a notepad and began firing questions at me. He was determined to elicit my entire spiel prior to any audience that I might have with the chief.
“How can we help you, sir? Are you here to file a complaint or report a crime?” The young man’s Adam’s apple bobbed with each syllable.
This was not what I wanted. If I had any hope of keeping this conversation confidential, I would need to talk to Chief Bruner—and Chief Bruner only. I couldn't announce to every municipal employee in New Hastings that I was turning whistleblower.
But I was more than prepared for this. The corporate world is full of gatekeepers––administrative assistants, right-hand men and women, and other officious underlings. No matter what their title, the job of all such gatekeepers is to make sure that the boss’s time isn't wasted––and to make sure that the boss is protected from uncomfortable or embarrassing questions.
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