Obsessed With You (18 page)

Over his mother’s head, Aaron
spotted the water from the little lake. He had spent many hours of
his childhood here, fishing for bream and catfish, or just lying back
in the rowboat daydreaming. The woods were thick all around the lake,
and only during a certain part of the day, the sun shone down full
force onto the water. Aaron saw the sun through the tall trees and
knew that the time for that had already passed. It was dark and
quiet, very unlike the day he had brought Cathy here.

That day had been in the summer,
right after they got engaged. Everything was green and the sun shone
brightly on the lake. He had taken her for a leisurely ride in the
rowboat, traversing the middle, then coming back around along the
edges. His mother had packed a picnic lunch for them, and they ate
the sandwiches and brownies on a blanket spread out on the lakeshore.
His heart caught in his throat as he remembered that day with Cathy.

And here he was in the same spot,
without her.

When they got back to the house,
his father was sitting on the porch. His hunting dog, Handy, long
since retired and now living the dog’s life, came down the front
steps to greet them. His father wasn’t far behind.

“
Hey, son,” he said holding
out his hand. Aaron shook it and then his father gave him a brief
hug, a man’s hug.

“
I see you’ve decided to join
the beard team,” his father said, rubbing his own neatly trimmed
beard.

Aaron laughed. “I got tired of
shaving,” he said, and that was the honest truth. He’d been too
obsessed with Cathy to deal with the tedious chore of shaving every
day. His beard was thick, and he had usually shaved before bed so his
heavy bristle at the end of the day wouldn’t scratch Cathy.

Unlike his mother, his father
didn’t ask him any pointed questions or even bring up the subject
of Cathy. They spent the evening playing checkers before his mother’s
fried chicken dinner with mashed potatoes and gravy, Aaron’s
favorite. She knew what he needed.

While Aaron was eating his second
plate of food, his mother said, “Oh, how is that secretary of
yours? I can’t remember her name. She called here.”

“
She called here?” Aaron said
putting his chicken leg on his plate.

“
Yes, it was about two weeks
ago. She wondered if I knew where you were. Said she’d been trying
to get in touch with you.”

“
What did you tell her?”
Aaron asked, wondering why Marsha would call his parents when she
knew how to contact him.

“
I told her that I didn’t
know where you were at the moment, but that she could reach you on
your cell. I was sure she had that number. Was that okay?”

“
Yes, that was fine,” Aaron
said. “She wanted me to do a reference letter for her and I forgot
to. I guess she was trying to light a fire under my. . . . um, butt.”

“
Did you ever talk to her?”
his mother asked.

“
Yes. I went to see her today
and did the letter like she needed. It’s all fine.”

After watching two episodes of
“CSI” back to back, with Handy at his feet the whole time, Aaron
went to bed. Whenever he and Cathy had visited, which had been often,
she stayed in the guest bedroom and he stayed in his boyhood room,
out of deference for his mother. She knew they lived together and had
never said a thing about that. But Cathy felt more comfortable
staying in a separate room, and he thought his mother did, too. That
didn’t stop him from sneaking across the hall after he was sure his
parents were asleep to spend the night with her.

Aaron crawled into his boyhood
bed and checked his messages. There was nothing important and he
turned out the light. Sleep did not come easily to him as he tossed
and turned fitfully. He woke up several times, wondering where he was
before he got his bearings. The moon cast an eerie light in the room,
a light that had scared him when he was smaller. Now, he just wanted
to get some sleep.

He finally dozed off into a
series of dreams that felt not quite like nightmares, but close to
it. Throughout his floating around in the dreams, he felt a sense of
doom, of evil. It felt that way as he walked through the empty
Buckhead house, his footsteps echoing hauntingly. He felt it in his
old office staring at the tie that was somehow on his desk. He felt
it in his first office, then at Deccio’s. At least he assumed it
was Deccio’s in the dream. His old coworkers were laughing around
the table, but there was no sound. He looked around at their faces
and they grinned at him maniacally, holding their drinks up in a last
toast. He looked around at their faces and he knew them, except for
one. She was grinning crazily like the rest of them, but he couldn’t
remember who she was.

Aaron struggled out of his sleep,
his heart racing. The sunlight was pouring through his window,
slanting its rays across the floor. The dreams came back to him in
that state of half sleep, half awake.

And then he shot out of bed.

His mother had coffee and
breakfast waiting in the kitchen. His father had just finished his
breakfast and was reading the paper. During the growing season, he
would be long gone by then. Aaron sat down across from his father,
and his mother poured him a cup of coffee.

“
What’s got you so excited?”
his mother asked. “You look like you’re about to jump out of your
skin.”

“
I remembered something that
might be important in all this mess,” he said. His father put the
paper down and looked at him.

“
What?” he said.

“
Somebody I knew in my first
office,” he said. “I don’t know how important it is, but I had
forgotten it and now I remember it.”

“
Be careful, son,” his father
said. His mother gave him his breakfast and put her hand on his
shoulder.

“
Just like I said,” she
whispered.

After breakfast, Aaron brushed
his teeth and packed his bag. He hugged his parents hurriedly, then
flew out the door. He was going back to Atlanta, back to Randy. He
drove a little too fast and somewhat recklessly to the city.

Randy looked up at him when he
came through the door. The sunlight was streaming through, showing
every bit of dust in its rays.

“
I thought you fired me,”
Randy said.

“
I remembered something,”
Aaron said ignoring Randy’s comment.

“
What’s that?”

“
When I was at my first firm,
there was this woman who had only been working there about a week. I
didn’t know her well at all.”

“
Was she attractive?” Randy
asked.

“
Yes, she was very attractive,
as I remember. But I didn’t really know her. And I was leaving the
firm. But she was there at the bar that last night, when my coworkers
took me out. She was there. And I think I slept with her.”

“
Thought you didn’t do
one-night-stands,” Randy said.

“
I don’t. I didn’t. It was
an unusual night. I was young and had too much to drink. I ended up
going to a hotel down the street with her.”

“
What else?” Randy asked,
giving Aaron his full attention.

“
I think we must’ve had sex.
I remember being in the room with her and she took off my clothes and
her clothes.”

“
What did she look like?”

Aaron tried to bring the faint
memories into his brain. He envisioned the woman at the table in the
bar, the same one as in his dream. She had shoulder-length brown hair
and he recalled her as being thin. She had a wide grin and a little
mole on her upper right forehead. The dream had brought that little
detail back to him. He couldn’t recall her eye color, if he’d
even been able to determine it in the hazy light of the bar.

“
Did you ever see her again?”
Randy asked.

“
No, but she called me on my
cell phone. She must’ve gotten my number that night in the hotel
room.”

“
What did she want when she
called?” Randy asked, already knowing the answer.

“
She wanted to see me again,
but I told her I wasn’t interested. When she called a couple of
more times, I changed my number!” Aaron felt triumphant at having
remembered all of that. He had completely put the woman out of his
mind.

“
What was her name?” Randy
asked.

Aaron wracked his brain for the
hundredth time since his dream, trying to remember her name. He
couldn’t grasp it.

“
I don’t remember,” he
said. “I want to say something like Marilyn or Martha. I don’t
know why I think that.”

“
How about Marsha?” Randy
said.

Aaron felt like a brick hit him
in the face.

“
Why do you say that?” Aaron
asked. “How could you think that?”

“
What if I put a last name on
it?” Randy said. “Marsha Dillinger. Ring any bells?”

His last week at work and his
party at the bar swam through his mind. Dillinger, like the
gunslinger. Had he joked with her at the table that night about her
name? It was sounding so familiar. He tried to grab the memory, but
it eluded him. The harder he tried, the more it slipped from his
grasp.

“
That sounds kind of familiar,”
Aaron said. “How do you know that?”

Randy turned to his computer.
“Even though you fired me, I kept doing some research. I know you
were pissed, but I wanted to get to the bottom of it; take your
fiancé out of the loop of suspicion. Call it worker’s pride. I
found out that your secretary was married very briefly to a man named
Gardner several years back. Her maiden name was Dillinger.”

Aaron stared at Randy at a loss
for words.

“
I had suspicions about her,
but couldn’t get anything to stick,” Randy said. “When you
mentioned that mole just now, that was it. Look at this.”

Aaron peered over at Randy’s
screen, onto Marsha’s Facebook site. Her chubby face looked out at
him, her dog up next to her cheek.

“
See that mole,” Randy said,
pointing his finger at one of the photos. “Could this be the same
woman?”

Aaron stared at the photos.
Marsha definitely had that same wide smile, but her face was so fat
it was hard to find a thin person in there.

“
Marsha’s hair is blonde, not
brown,” Aaron said. “And she’s fat.”

“
Hair can be dyed, my friend.
People gain weight. She’s got the mole. She probably knew you
wouldn’t recognize her like that. I’m guessing you’ve got
something of a fatal attraction on your hands here.”

“
I don’t know,” Aaron said
studying the photos.

“
Who can you call to verify?”
Randy asked. “Anyone?”

“
There’s a guy who worked
there during that time. He’s still there, as a matter of fact. I
see him every now and then at conferences and stuff. I saw him a few
months ago at a restaurant with his new wife.”

“
Was he at your party?”

“
Yes,” Aaron said. “I’ll
call him. Can you get me the number of Beacon and Marks?”

Randy found the number in an
instant and called it out. With shaking hands, Aaron punched in the
number. He stared at Randy while the phone rang.

“
David Winston,” he said into
the phone.

“
Mr. Winston is out of town,”
the secretary told him. “Can I take a message?”

“
I’m a colleague of Mr.
Winston’s and I need to speak with him,” Aaron said. “Could you
possibly call him on his cell and ask him to give me a call. It’s
an important matter.”

Aaron set his phone on Randy’s
desk. “Now I’ve got to wait to hear back from him,” he said. “I
don’t know who else I can call.”

“
I’ll order some sandwiches,”
Randy said picking up his phone. “You’re paying.” He winked at
Aaron.

During the wait, Aaron began to
regroup. If it turned out to be Marsha, his devoted secretary, who
had done this to him, she was going to pay. He wasn’t sure what the
laws were about it, but he was going to find out.

Randy broke into his angry
thoughts. “Did you tell Marsha about your sister?” Randy asked.

“
Yes,” Aaron said. “I told
her one day when the power had gone out and we were just sitting
around waiting for it to come back on. She started asking me about
where I grew up and I ended up telling her about Allison. I trusted
her. She was my secretary, dammit!” Aaron slammed his fist onto
Randy’s desk.

Randy ignored his burst of rage.
“Now that you think back, did Marsha ever behave in a way that
maybe wasn’t appropriate? Or maybe was suspicious?”

Everything Marsha had ever done
was suspect to Aaron now.

“
She was always hovering over
me, wanting to touch me. Like straightening my tie before a meeting
or. . . .” He trailed off, thinking. “She was always touching me,
on my arm when we were talking or on my back as I went out the door.
But touching me.”

“
Hmmm,” Randy said.

“
My mother told me she called
her a couple of weeks ago to ask where I was,” Aaron said. “That
was strange.”