Wedding Cake

by Josi S. Kilpack

  Sadie suddenly wondered why she hadn’t thought this out before making the call. What questions should she ask? What questions shouldn’t she ask? Where did she start and how would she be interpreted? “Um, maybe you could tell me when you last saw your daughter.”

  “Why are you calling me?”

  “Because I . . . think your daughter might be in trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “I think . . . she’s stalking a friend of mine.”

  “Then it’s your friend who’s in trouble.”

  Sadie opened her mouth when the silence changed from him being quiet on the other end of the line to there being nothing there at all.

  “Hello?” she asked to make sure he wasn’t there. No answer.

  Was it a bad connection? Sadie hung up and considered whether to call back or not. The fact that she didn’t want to was what convinced her to do it—she couldn’t let fear rule her. She called the number again and braced herself. On the second ring, Mr. Smith answered.

  “Not my problem,” he said as gruff as ever. He hung up again.

  This time her hesitation to call back was permanent. Perhaps it would be better if the police followed up with him.

  Her eyes moved to the second number on the Post-it Note and her stomach tightened again. Would she get the same reaction from this woman? It seemed that she’d been a victim, just like Sadie, but would she be just as unwilling to talk as Jane’s father was?

  Sadie inhaled, committed to maintain her power regardless of this woman’s reaction toward her, and blew it out in one quick breath as she dialed the number. The call went to voice mail after four rings.

  “Leave a message,” a woman’s voice said, followed by a beep.

  No name introducing herself? No greeting at all?

  Sadie had only an instant to wonder how to address this woman before realizing that she should call her Professor Pruitt. She left as detailed a message as she could in the short period of time afforded her, then hung up with a new kind of anxiety. What if she didn’t get to talk to Professor Pruitt? What if the professor didn’t check her messages in time and Sadie didn’t get the insight this woman could give her?

  She was trying to determine if calling again might help her situation when her phone rang. The caller ID showed that the call was from the same number she’d just dialed. Professor Pruitt must have listened to the message immediately. Thank goodness!

  “This is Sadie,” she said into the phone.

  “This is Natalie Pruitt.”

  Sadie waited for her to expand. When she didn’t, Sadie spoke instead, “Thank you so much for calling me back. If you listened to the message then you understand my situation.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Colorado, a little city in the northern region called Garrison.”

  “How do I know you’re who you say you are?”

  This woman’s history with Jane gave her reason to be suspect. “I don’t know how to prove to you who I am,” Sadie said, thinking fast, “but we have a Facebook page about what we’re dealing with and an article on a local news site.” She actually didn’t know if Lori had posted the write-up yet; with her e-mail frozen and her laptop destroyed, she hadn’t been able to follow up on Shawn’s contact with her. She made a mental note to give Lori a call after she finished talking to the professor.

  “What are the links?”

  It took Sadie a minute to give the professor the information, after which she said she would call Sadie back if everything checked out. Sadie thanked her, hung up, and then waited nervously. It was eight minutes before her phone rang again, showing the professor’s number. Sadie had managed to finish cleaning the kitchen and reorganize two drawers while she waited.

  “Hello?” Sadie asked. “Professor Pruitt, did you read the information?”

  “I did,” she said, her voice softer than it had been during the first conversation, which gave Sadie hope that they were on the same team. “I’m very sorry that you’re having to deal with her. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

  “Neither would I,” Sadie said. “I’m sorry that you have had to deal with her as well.”

  “What do you know about my situation?” the professor asked, her voice tight again. “And how do you know it?”

  Sadie relayed Shawn’s background check that revealed the restraining order and told her about the call to Jane’s father.

  “He’s useless,” the professor confirmed. “I tried to get his help, too, but he wouldn’t involve himself.”

  “He seemed to believe me, though,” Sadie said. “When I told him what Jane was up to, he didn’t try to defend her or anything.”

  “Jane?”

  “I’m sorry, I mean Valerie. She was using a different name when I met her.”

  “I see,” the professor said. “Her father knows what she is and claims to have washed his hands of her a long time ago—before I met her.”

  “He isn’t a part of her life? What about her mother?”

  “Her mother?” Professor Pruitt repeated. “She didn’t tell you about her mother? I thought she used that on everyone.”

  Everyone? Who was everyone? “I don’t know anything about her real life,” Sadie said.

  The professor was quiet for several seconds, then said with an air of caution, “Valerie drastically changed my life. I don’t know you, and I don’t speak of her lightly. If not for the precarious situation you find yourself in, I would probably insist that we talk face to face about this.”

  “I understand.” Did she ever. “If not for my precarious situation, I would try for that as well. Seeing as I don’t have time to come to you, I would very much appreciate any insight you can share with me.”

  “Are you a teacher?”

  “Well, actually, yes. I mean, I was.” Sadie was surprised to hear this question. “But not when I met Jane. I was retired by then.”

  “Three of the rest of us are teachers. The fourth was a neighbor.”

  A cold shiver ran down her spine. “Us?” she repeated.

  “Five, including you. It’s not a club any of us wanted to be a part of, but Valerie’s particular attention put us there anyway.”

  Sadie was too surprised to respond.

  “Ms. Hoffmiller?”

  “I’m sorry,” Sadie said, shaking herself. “I hadn’t considered that she had a pattern. Well I thought so when I learned about your restraining order, I guess. But five women? Teachers? I-I don’t know what to make of that.”

  “What you can make of it is that Valerie Smith is scary. My husband is a psychology professor, and we have spent a great deal of time trying to make sense of Valerie. What we have concluded is that she’s a sociopath who targets motherly type women, usually teachers, and tries to create a version of a perfect mother-daughter relationship. Yet even while she longs for that connection, she is incapable of sustaining it.”

  It was a lot of information to take in at once, especially since Sadie was still trying to catch up to the idea of five women experiencing Jane the way she had. “I had no idea.”

  Professor Pruitt went on to tell Sadie of her history with Valerie. She had been Valerie’s mentor at the University of Iowa and learned about her history before she became a target. Valerie’s mother had been sixteen years old when Valerie was born—a girl unprepared to be a mother. She would leave Valerie alone for long periods of time, or drop her off with family or friends for days on end. Drugs, alcohol, and men had taken their toll until Valerie’s mother overdosed when Valerie was seven years old. At that point Valerie was transferred to the care of her father, who was almost as broken as her mother had been.

  “Valerie described him as an empty man,” the professor said. “He provided for her, but only just. She did not feel that he wanted her—that anyone ever had—which of course is part of why I, and the others, were so sympathetic toward her when we learned of her history. She came across to each of us as very bright with a lot of potential and capability, i
f she only had someone to help her.” She let out a humorless laugh, and her voice dropped when she spoke again. “She knew exactly how to play us, and every one of us fell for it.”

  “Teachers,” Sadie said. It made more sense now. “Nurturers seeing a student in need of a little extra love.” She’d had several students just like that over the years.

  “Exactly,” Professor Pruitt said. She went on to tell Sadie of Valerie’s sixth-grade teacher, who ended up moving to another city after years of Valerie coming to her school and home, breaking windows and pulling up flowerbeds when the teacher would not respond to her.

  The next teacher was a junior high home economics teacher, who ended up with a vandalized office and slashed tires after she reported Valerie’s obsessive behavior to the principal.

  When Valerie’s father moved out of state a few months before the end of her senior year of high school, she moved in with a neighbor. The neighbor felt sorry for Valerie having to finish high school in a new place and agreed to let her stay, only to have Valerie attempt a complete takeover of her life. Only when the woman’s adult children intervened—nearly six months after Valerie graduated—did Valerie move to Iowa, where she took one of Professor Pruitt’s classes and found her newest target.

  “Over the next two years, she took every class I offered each semester,” Professor Pruitt explained. “After things went bad, I came to realize that she probably did poorly in my classes to justify retaking them. I took her on as a student assistant in my office, and we became friends until it started getting weird the same way it had with the others: spending too much time at the school, pushing into my personal life, coming up with excuses when she crossed a line.

  “When the semester ended, I didn’t rehire her as my assistant, and she was very upset. She took all my classes again and would ask questions incessantly, stay after class, or wait for me in the parking lot. I reported it to my department head, and Valerie was told to keep her distance. That’s when she started sending letters to the university alleging inappropriate behavior on my part. I also endured the smashed windows, flat tires, and calls made to my home phone number over and over and over again. She would fill up the voice mail on my office phone almost every weekend, playing the radio until the message time ran out.”

  “That’s when you filed a restraining order against her?”

  “On the advice of the campus police, yes. She didn’t show up for the court date so the order was automatically granted, and it seemed to work. I’ve only seen her a handful of times since then—across a parking lot, or at my son’s soccer game. She showed up at a university social last fall. Campus security took her outside and let her know in no uncertain terms that if they saw her again, she would be arrested. I haven’t seen her since, but I’m always looking over my shoulder.”

  “You’ll never be free of me,” Sadie said out loud.

  “Yes, that’s exactly what she said the last time I saw her. How did you know that?”

  “Because she said the same thing to me two years ago,” Sadie said. “I’m terrified about how far she’ll go now that she’s back.”

  “Maybe she’s just showing up, like she did with me,” the professor said. “I think she takes great satisfaction in knowing I’m afraid of her. My husband thinks she comes back when she’s feeling a loss of control in her regular life and needs a reminder of the power she still has over me. I don’t handle it well when she shows up; she knows it upsets me.”

  “I want to hope she’s just here to upset me too,” Sadie said. “But she’s targeting my son and my fiancé. She’s broken into my house twice and attempted to interfere with my wedding in more ways than one.”

  “I wish I knew what to tell you,” the professor said. “In talking to the other women—my husband thought it would be therapeutic for me and it was—it doesn’t seem that her behavior escalated much between each of us. We all had the same type of treatment from her, though she became a little more sophisticated as she grew older, which is to be expected.”

  “She never physically injured any of you?”

  “No,” the professor said. “But she threatened to.”

  Sadie thought about Boston and told the professor about Mrs. Wapple, her sister, and Sadie’s own experience in the trunk of the car. When she finished the professor was quiet for several beats.

  “She never did anything like that with the rest of us,” she said, a note of fear in her voice. “But then she was Valerie Smith with us, not Jane Seeley. Your situation has many new factors none of us faced, and I don’t know how to process that. My husband would say it’s a bad sign, though, that she’s targeting you differently. It puts you in a more precarious situation.”

  They were both quiet for several seconds. Sadie tried to think of what else to ask but sensed she had what she needed to know. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your help, Professor. You’ve given me so much insight. Can I call if any other questions come up?”

  “Certainly,” the professor said. “I don’t answer my phone anymore. Valerie gave me an obsessive need to screen my calls, even if I know the number. Leave a message, and I’ll call you back, though. And good luck with your wedding. For your sake I hope she disappears the way she eventually did for the rest of us.”

  Sadie thanked her and ended the call. She took a few minutes to write out her thoughts about what she’d learned, uncomfortably surprised to feel sympathy for Jane. She was still angry and embarrassed and frustrated, but she felt she better understood Jane’s motivations, which gave her the chance to better preempt whatever might be coming next. At her core, Jane wanted a mother. How could Sadie not be sympathetic toward that?

  She went into the dining room and discussed things with Shawn, who found it interesting but held tight to his belief that Jane was bent on hurting people.

  Sadie’s phone chimed with a text message, and she hurried to retrieve it from the kitchen counter, realizing en route that she hadn’t heard from Jane in a few hours. Not since the media blitz had begun. Was this incoming text from her? Sadie braced herself, but the text was from her nephew, Ji, sharing his regrets that they wouldn’t be able to attend—up until that morning he’d thought it was a possibility. He wished her luck and said he would look forward to seeing her when she and Pete came to San Francisco.

  While Sadie was disappointed, she wasn’t surprised Ji couldn’t come and was even a little relieved that there were fewer people she would have to worry about. She thanked Ji via text message, then sent Pete a text even though she knew he wouldn’t have his phone with him at the police station. The longer she went without talking to him, the more anxious she became imagining what might be happening. She imagined him being thrown in jail with real criminals, having to surrender his weapon, or post bond. Surely he would know she was worried and update her as soon as he could.

  Breanna and Liam returned home after talking to the police who were doing a diagnostic on the alarm system. Miles showed up with a truck, and they helped load the tables for the party. Liam followed the truck to help unload, while Breanna helped her mom with more decorative aspects. Maggie was on her way. She’d called Shawn to confirm which exit to take off the main interstate.

  Sadie continued with preparations and pushed away her fears in order to try to keep a brave face as Pete’s children arrived to get started with the cooking. Breanna was here. Shawn was here. Gayle was here. All these people who loved her were here to help her, to protect her, to make this work. Pete had said that everything would be okay; Sadie put great effort into believing that.

  Chapter 22

  The time between setup and the arrival of guests seemed to take place at warp speed. Shawn finished the profile he’d created for Valerie Smith using the forms he and Sadie had used when they ran Hoffmiller Investigations. The profile wasn’t complete, but the amount of information he’d received coupled with the background Sadie had learned from Professor Pruitt was impressive for such a short period of time. Sadie gave a quick review of
the form, complimented him again on his detail and speed, then thanked him when he offered to call the station and ask them how he should send over the information. When he was done, Sadie sent him to the store to get two bags of ice for the lemon water.

  Maggie pulled up at 6:05, and Sadie ran down the front walk to welcome the sweet girl she’d first met just two months ago. Breanna and Liam said hello to her, and they were still in the front yard when Shawn arrived and quickly whisked Maggie away to the backyard under the guise of helping with the tablecloths, but more likely it was to have her to himself—their relationship had become serious over the last two months and yet they’d been thousands of miles apart.

  Within minutes an unmarked SUV was in the driveway with four members of Allen Security. Sadie didn’t catch all the details of the arrangement Liam had made with them, but she was grateful not to be in charge of it. Two of the men stayed out front, the other two took positions in the backyard and inside the house. After consulting with Liam and making sure they weren’t expected to be inconspicuous, they put magnetic signs on the sides and back of their vehicle, advertising their company, which would, hopefully, help to keep Jane away.

  Pete’s children started cooking at 6:30—it smelled wonderful—and guests began arriving at 7:15. Still no word from Pete.

  Sadie pasted a polite smile on her face as she welcomed the guests. She knew many of them, but there were a few unfamiliar faces she hated receiving without Pete’s introduction. Pete’s brother—who looked nothing like him—had come up from New Mexico along with Caro and Rex—who Sadie knew and loved. Well, she loved Caro and tolerated Rex but now wasn’t the time for splitting hairs.

  Lynn, Pete’s late wife’s sister, had come down from Wyoming, and Sadie was mildly uncomfortable until Lynn wrapped her arms around Sadie and told her how happy she was for her and Pete. It was impossible to doubt Lynn’s sincerity. She pulled back and looked around. “Where’s Pete?”

  “He’s still at the police station,” Sadie said, keeping her polite smile in place even though her stomach sunk every time she had to say those words out loud. “We’re expecting him back any time.” It was a lie, but at least it was a consistent one; she’d given it half a dozen times already. She was relieved that no one seemed to be asking her a million questions. Maybe Brooke asked them not to, if so Sadie needed to thank Pete’s daughter for the foresight.