Broken Serenade (12 page)

   
He paused for a couple of seconds and attempted to examine her quickly. She was such a fine and rare specimen of womanhood!
Designed for the most exciting sexual fantasies… and for love…”

   
“What size are you?” he asked softly this time.

   
The woman didn’t answer. She stared at him like from another world. Petrified.

   
His tone of voice hardened again. Apparently, it worked better with her.

   
“Answer me, woman!” he demanded.

   
“Two,” she whispered, drained of strength.

   
Her body went weak in his arms, and she appeared resigned.

   
“Please, I beg of you, let me go,” she lamented. “I wasn’t going to steal anything or hurt you. I’m really sorry I broke into your house.”

   
“Strangely, I’m not. Not at all! Or… perhaps…I disappointed you somehow in reality. Did I? Just give me the chance to rehabilitate myself in your eyes and live up to your wild expectations,” he said, lowering his hand under her pencil skirt. 

*                                  *                                  *

    His hot, unhesitant fingers were climbing slowly toward her lacy black panties. Now they had just passed the flowery edgy of her silk stockings. Vivien became rigid. An extremely painful thought threatened to make her lose consciousness: she was on the verge of being raped by the man of her dreams. And on top of all, he most likely confused her with someone else – apparently a lunatic who had sent him dirty emails.

   
“Please, don’t do it… I implore you, Tee…”

   
The man stopped instantly. He was stunned for a while, and he stared into her dark blue irises that floated in tears. He didn’t say a word. He finally let go of her, and he backed up a couple of steps.

     “Vee?” he asked
, shaking his head in disbelief.

    Vivien bent down and picked up
her keys from the floor. Then she sprang out of the bedroom at the speed of a bullet released from a gun. Timothy followed her still in shock. Too late… She had already reached the bottom stairs. From down there, full of furry and outrage, she spun on her heel and screamed to the top of her lungs:

   
“Beast!”  

   
“What?” Timothy Leigh leaned on the railings and burst into laughter. His dark brown eyes never left her. “Hey, you little pervert!
You
broke into my house. Remember?”

   
“You’re a barbarian, an animal, a brute!” she yelled.

    “Now, there’s no such
a great need for name-calling, my dear. I got the idea,” he teased her.

    “
You, mister, have deep behavioral and communicational gaps,” she snapped at him, advancing decisively toward the front exit door.

   
“I’m not the problem here. You are! It’s time for you to mature, Vivien. That’s what you used to do when you were seven or eight years old. Do you think I didn’t know that? Just watch out, young lady, a hobby like that could be fatal,” he added very seriously.

   
“That’s not your concern. I kindly invite you to go to hell!” she greeted him, preparing to slam the door behind her.

   
“See you there then!” he replied promptly. 

     His
wholehearted laughter resonated in her ears even after she had started her car. After only a few yards, Vivien parked again. She feverishly looked inside her bra. The small blonde hair was still there. She took it out and examined it in the sunlight. It shone like a thread of gold. She grabbed the plastic bag with Avon samples and emptied it nervously on the passenger seat. Then she put the hair in it and stuffed it into her purse.

   
Vivien Hopkins returned home shaking with indignation. Physically and mentally exhausted, she collapsed in the hallway and started to cry. Sobbing hysterically, she sadly entertained the thought that she was just living through the end of an important chapter in her life. Today’s events had deposed Tee of the highly-honorable place that her childhood’s mind had granted him so easily. It was particularly depressing to see her hero falling. It hurt to watch him wallow into the swamp of disgrace, no different anymore from other men, all the same, selfish, perverse, violent, and slaves of their basic instincts.

   
Her head was throbbing with pain. Finally, she got up and crawled into the kitchen. She checked the microwave watch and realized with stupor that she had only a couple of hours left until the meeting with her first piano student. She had only 120 minutes at hand to treat her headache, change her ruined outfit, redo her make-up and, not in the least, eat something. It wasn’t too late to tackle the issue of a light lunch.

   
After a cheese sandwich with vegetables and an aspirin, she retired into her bathroom. As she picked up her toothbrush, she gazed tiredly into the fancy round mirror above the sink. The woman staring back at her now was disturbingly different from the one in the morning. Vivien could have sworn that it was the image of a woman unhappily in love: her face flashed, her eyes shining wildly, her blouse torn apart, and all her crazy thoughts rushing uncontrollably toward HIM. Her mind was swirling with recent memories of him: his smoldering eyes devouring her, his scorching hot lips delicately touching her neck and face, his hands crushing her breasts…
Oh, God, I’m hopeless!
she thought, defeated.
He could’ve raped me, kill me even, and I… I am in love with him!
she admitted terrified.          

CHAPTER 8

    
  Henrico County, Richmond, Virginia

    
 
M
egan Smith concluded that she had no other solution. If she wanted to see her daughter again, she really needed to do this. She handed her written statement to the police officer at the Henrico County police station in Richmond, Virginia. She had feared that she could forget important details in a face-to-face interview, so she had decided to write down everything in the privacy of her home and go over it a few times for better assurance. Now she prayed in her head and anxiously waited for the verdict.
Oh, Mother Mary, let them believe me! I have the truth on my side. God knows it! 

   
The middle age cop started to read it right in front of her, frowning. From time to time, he just raised his blonde, thin, almost inexistent eyebrows. As he approached the end of her statement, he sent her a couple of disquietingly suspicious looks.

   
It is clear
, the young woman sighed.
He doesn’t believe me. He must imagine I am fabulating.   

   
To her utter surprise, the police officer began to ask her questions that proved the contrary. Very concentrated on her story, he took notes, names, addresses and exact dates, evidently preoccupied to solve her case. When he was through with the interrogatory, he got up and vanished in one of the adjacent offices, leaving her alone to wait.  

   
Megan could not explain how she was still able to function. It seemed a miracle considering the fact that she had not had a second of sleep in more than two days. The voice of her sweet little Tiffany had become audible inside her head. Every time she closed her eyes, she heard her daughter calling her: “Mommy! Mommy!”

   
The thought that her little girl could grow up in that sick community, being pushed to do the same mistakes she had done, terrified Megan.
Maybe the whole thing is my fault
, she reflected sadly. Maybe she should have resigned herself to her fate, like all the other girls. She had received the money for college, had slept with whom
The Queen
had ordered her to, and had given birth to the child the organization wanted – a girl. She had done everything they had asked of her. And everything would have been so simple if she had not succumbed to the pressure of her own morality. The child was hers, and she could not abandon Tiffany. Her act had been almost suicidal, but she had pulled it off – at least for a few months. She had changed her name, had crossed the country, had found a job, and had even met a wonderful man. She had lived eight months of serene happiness with Tiffany and her loving boyfriend. Now she had the strange feeling that the perfect life she had risked so much to create was only a castle of sand. Her sinful past was crashing down on her in destructive waves that left nothing but sorrow and tears behind.

   
She should have suspected the new babysitter. The young girl was speaking too much on the phone in Russian language.

   
The old guilt stung her conscience again and again, as a thorn stuck in her heart – any given thought painfully raked it up. In her mind, she saw herself once more six years ago at Wendy’s, sitting alone at one of the empty tables. She should have continued to fill out the application for the waiter position and pay no attention to the strange, ugly woman who had aggressively pushed a business card in front of her. Megan Smith had never liked women who dressed and acted like men.
Any woman should favor her femininity,
she
reflected. As Jean de la Bruyere had put it wisely,
There are no ugly women; there are only women who do not know how to look pretty.
And that woman had never had a clue about how to look pretty. To put that aside, the most important thing Megan had learned from that story it was that no one offers anything free. There is always a price – a smaller or bigger price – for any service.     

   
Megan did not dispute the fact that
The Amazons
was also a charitable organization. On the positive side, they offered shelter and financial support to so many girls on the streets. The main condition to capture
The Amazons
attention it was to be pretty. Then, if you had some brain, that pushed you up on their list. Finally, if you accepted to dye your hair blonde, you became easily one of them. This was the beginning of your relationship with
The Amazons,
and it was quite enjoyable, especially if you were young, inexperienced, and easy. The more difficult and hard-to-put-up-with conditions came afterwards.  

    Some of the services
The Amazons
asked were even fun. Megan had been delighted to gather votes for women candidates in the last years’ elections. In addition, the men they provided for the girls chosen to procreate – and she had been one of them – were some of the most handsome she had ever encountered. Not to mention that the majority of them were celebrities: actors, athletes, or politicians. Considering her sex partners from that period and the cute dimples her daughter made whenever she laughed, Megan guessed that Tiffany’s father was Senator Edward McLean. Perhaps that was the reason why her little girl was so important to
The Amazons
. They often used blackmail to obtain big donations from certain public figures that held high rank positions. To Megan’s knowledge, the victims were always men. What these chosen men never knew was that it didn’t matter how much they donated to the organization that praised itself for helping girls and young women in distress. The bottom line was all the same – in the end, they were forced to resign. A woman usually took their place.  

   
Women were rising to higher and higher positions in all fields of life.

    “
And why not? We are the solution to all problems,”
The Queen
’s voice reverberated with terrifying clarity in Megan’s head, as memories of her life
as a modern
Amazon woman
rushed to torment her.
The Queen
loved to proclaim the superiority of womankind at all the secret meetings of
The Amazons
. “The mighty testosterone has been leading the world for thousands of years now,” she had stated at Miss Smith’s last attendance. “Proud and impulsive, men are more likely to start conflicts than women are. Violence, war, death, and destruction, that is permanently on their agenda. The need to dominate and exploit is ingrained in their genes. This cancerous legacy is passed from father to son. They even play with guns and soldiers! By contrast, a woman is inclined to beautiful things and peace. A woman is reluctant to send her children, her father, or her lover to die. A woman’s love is deeper… A woman forgives easier…”

   
God, she’s right! That’s why she has so many followers
, Megan reflected. There was nothing wrong with
The Queen
’s reasoning or her goal. The avenue she had chosen was the problem. “The end justifies the means,”
The Queen
would say.
When people’s lives are crushed, you start to wonder if that end really matters or if it’s just amour propre.
 

   
The raspy, smoker’s voice of the police officer broke Megan’s chain of thought.

   
“Miss Smith! Who is the father of your child?”