My Boss is a Serial Killer (20 page)

The stupid ex-husband and I moved here when
we first married because it was all we could afford—and it
continued to be all we could afford because he never kept what one
might consider a “job” or made what one might call a “steady
paycheck” or bothered to help in earning what one might call
“money,” so I was paying for the place all by myself on a not-great
secretarial salary. I had been there for almost ten years now. I
liked the place quite a bit without the stupid ex-husband in it. I
was making a much better salary now, and I could have moved, if I’d
really wished to, but I’d fixed the place up and I felt very
comfortable there. One woman certainly does not need more than six
little rooms, unless she builds cars inside or, I don’t know,
conducts exercise classes or holds candle parties. God, don’t get
me started on candle parties.

What was I saying? Oh, yes, about the
affluence. We weren’t a gated community, and our population was
diverse—retired people and young couples and slightly less young
couples with hundreds of badly behaved children that roamed all
hours of the day through the yards, doing what, I don’t know.
Hunting? Gathering? They looked about as smart as your average
chickens, scratching and pecking in the dirt. So many people came
and went that we as a neighborhood barely noticed a new face or a
different car. There was a different car every week in front of
that house where the slutty teenage twins lived.

Still, someone was being nosy in a
philanthropic way because when I returned home from the grocery
store, as I pulled into my garage, I saw ZZTop guy from across the
street hurrying toward me. I should have known this guy’s name;
we’d been neighbors for a decade, and I’m sure I’d been told his
name three or four times. It was one of those names in the category
of Bob, Rob, Tom, John, Ron, or Don that simply slide out of my
mind to be replaced by a much more descriptive name like “ZZTop
guy,” thus called because he had a beard worthy of the band and
usually wore sunglasses, probably to hide the fact that he was
always high.

I got out of my car to see what he wanted.
The last time he came over to speak to me, his son had run the car
up into my yard and torn up my grass. If he hadn’t said anything, I
might never have noticed.

“
Just thought I should let you know,”
he said, “that someone was looking around your house.”

“
Looking around?” I joined him on my
front lawn, and we looked back and forth as if whoever it was might
still be there, waiting to be caught.

“
He was out in front for a minute, and
then he moved around the side for a while. When he was done, he
walked off down the street. You should be careful. He might’ve been
looking for unlocked windows or ways he could get
inside.”

“
God.” What a thought. “Did he seem to
be doing anything besides looking?”

“
Hard to say.”

“
Did he have a camera or a notebook or
anything? Was he reading the meter? Maybe he was my insurance
agent. They assess the property every so often. What did he look
like?”

“
Eh, kind of a medium-sized fella. Had
on a baseball cap and a big jacket so I couldn’t tell how big
around he was.” Back and forth we went for a while, with ZZTop guy
giving me a completely unhelpful description that could have
described most Caucasian men and a good number of women living in
the United States. What emerged was that someone, probably a not
particularly tall man wearing jeans and a big dark jacket, and with
no features that could be discerned by a stoned ex-hippie, looked
at the front and the side of my house. Maybe he was carrying
something, or maybe he wasn’t.

“
The FBI is going to have trouble
drawing a composite on this one,” I said. For all I knew, some guy
out walking had seen a raccoon and watched it around the house,
maybe stepping up through my lawn to make sure the little devil
wasn’t going to get into my trash. Our neighborhood was like a
small-animal wildlife preserve.

“
Might be a good idea to check yer
windows and such,” remarked ZZTop guy.

“
I will. Thanks for being a good
neighbor.” And I did mean that sincerely. Most of us paid little
attention to our neighborhood surroundings. Most of us didn’t have
the kind of time that ZZTop guy seemed to have, either. He moseyed
back across the road to his house, and I took a moment to walk the
perimeter of my own, just to see what any potential spy might have
seen.

In the backyard, my chair painting project
was as I recalled having left it, except that the two brushes,
stirring stick, screwdriver and hammer had been rearranged. First,
like this: stick, brush, brush, screwdriver, hammer. They lay now
in a measured row, two inches between them, their bottoms lined
perpendicular to the edge of the newspaper. The little can of paint
was turned so its label faced forward, and it sat precisely an inch
from the tops of the two brushes.

How organized it looked! I didn’t remember
doing that. Had I done that? Heaven knew I did plenty of things in
my house, at my job, that I never precisely recalled doing, but
this really didn’t look like my handiwork. I was a stacker; I made
piles of things. Why would someone wanting to rob my house take the
time to reorganize my weekend paint project? No, this looked more
like my previous idea of someone checking on my property for me.
Some man, the insurance company’s assessor or the meter reader,
came back here and saw that I was doing a sloppy, girly,
under-sanded job of painting a chair and cleaned it up a little for
me. Because, I thought, what potential burglar would stake out my
house during a sunny, late Saturday afternoon, when anyone could
spot them doing it?

This looked more like something Bill Nestor
would do, I thought. Perhaps he had looked through the research I
gave him and decided, as I had in the back of my mind, that it
could cause trouble, so he had come over to tell me that. I don’t
know why he’d bother to walk around my yard, or why he wouldn’t
have called first, but this straightened-up project was precisely
what he would have done, assuming the other things had happened,
too.

Or, I thought, maybe he came over here to
kill me because, as they say in the spy shows, I “knew too much.”
Spared the trouble of killing me because I wasn’t home, he decided
to tidy up instead.

No, I wouldn’t believe it. That is, I
believed he would tidy up. I did not believe he would wish me harm
or wish anyone else harm.

Then I saw that my back door was open. Spring
air rushed into my kitchen. I did not remember if I had left the
door open, but I suppose I could have. Except that I didn’t leave
doors open because I don’t like bugs. Bugs are awful, and I didn’t
have a man around to kill them for me anymore.

I made myself be calm. I checked through my
house. Nothing was out of place; nothing was missing; nothing was
disturbed in any way that I could see. Not like I was an immaculate
housekeeper, though. A football team could have charged through
there, and their presence would not have been detectable in the
aftermath. For a minute I thought about calling Gus, or at least
just calling the police, but what would I say? “My back door was
open, and somebody might have straightened up my paint supplies for
me.” With my luck, they’d just scold me for not sanding my chairs
well enough.

I don’t have a dark side. I’m not nearly
interesting enough. Not that I wouldn’t enjoy having a secret life
only hinted at by the barest of clues hovering about me, like if I
spent the weekends as a hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold. I spend most
of my spare time watching television. I know television gets a bad
reputation for promoting violence and all that, but I believe that
in many cases it keeps people at home and out of trouble. But
anyway, no secret life for Carol.

Nevertheless, a lot of people do have
secrets. Secretaries have a reputation for gossiping, and we
pretend to love knowing what skeletons lurk in the closets of
others. Still, honestly, there’s a limit to what you really care to
know. For example, it was funny that Terry Bronk got sanctioned by
the Federal Court the year before, even though that was supposed to
be a secret. When jerks get in trouble for things at which they
profess to be awesomely capable, that results in a humorous
situation that everyone can enjoy. Everyone except Terry Bronk, I
guess, because one didn’t go around mentioning this event unless
one was looking to get booted out the door of MBS&K. Okay, so
that’s one side of the coin. The other side is knowing something
really unhappy or even distasteful about a person you have to see
every day, and that’s not fun for anybody. Gossip is an unstoppable
force of nature, though.

Everybody at MBS&K somehow knew about
Aven Fisher’s wife. Charlene’s boss Aven, the guy who would only
represent women in divorce cases, lost his own wife years before.
She drove her car into a concrete embankment, or so the story goes,
and apparently the guilt over this tragedy was the reason he was
such a staunch supporter of women’s rights in divorce cases. I
liked to see the wry side of things, but even I couldn’t find
anything funny about that, and I didn’t like knowing it about him.
I’m not even sure how I learned this ugly story or when it came up.
The sordid tale was simply knowledge that came after an allotted
amount of time at MBS&K: after one year, you were eligible for
the 401k, and after eighteen months, you knew the story of Aven
Fisher’s dead wife.

Even Charlene, who seemed to have no life
outside the office and not even a single vice, had a dirty secret
that I wished I didn’t know. She was the food bandit. Charlene was
the backbone of the office, yet I knew that every month or so she
went into the kitchen and stole three or four lunches out of the
fridge. This infuriated people, as you might expect. The thefts
caused endless speculation, too, as no one else seemed to have
figured out who was doing it. Those who “lost their lunch,” as it
were, were different each time. There seemed to be no pattern to
who got robbed. The food never turned up in any trash can; the
storage containers vanished from the office; and the thefts took
place at such varied times of the day that no one had been able to
pin them to a specific schedule.

I figured it out only because I’m such a
life-voyeur. On one day of food-thievery, I saw Charlene take a
knobby sack into the elevator, saying she was going to her car for
something. On another occasion, she seemed to know about the theft
before she logically should have known. And finally, my own lunch,
which I stored in my
Avengers
lunch box (a replica, not an
original, or I’d never have brought it to work), had never been
taken. You may not think that these sparse little tidbits of
information would be sufficient to convince me that Charlene was
the food bandit, particularly in light of what a straight arrow she
was in every other aspect. But I knew I was right; call it women’s
intuition or a little bit of sixth sense. A couple weeks before,
when she’d joked about Gus Haglund finding our food bandit, I’d
almost choked. Sometimes I forgot that my knowledge was my own
little dark secret.

I wished I hadn’t known, but due to
friendship blinders, I elected simply to ignore this ugly habit of
hers. First off, MBS&K would have fired her for it, if they’d
found out. Stealing from your coworkers is grounds for dismissal,
even when it’s just a tuna fish sandwich in a baggy. Secondly, I
didn’t want to confront her. The only thing worse than knowing the
truth was coming out with it to her, embarrassing her into knowing
what I knew. I’m not a chicken, but I’m sensitive about the people
that I like—and I did like her. That was the third reason. I was
attempting to be sympathetic about this weird glitch in the
otherwise perfectly functioning system that was Charlene
Templeton.

We all needed our outlets, especially those
of us too wrapped up in work to have a real life. If engaging in
petty theft once a month kept my friend from going bonkers, I was
willing to let it slide. Sure, it was rough on the folks who lost
lunches, but I think people rather enjoyed the drama of it all. A
disappearance of lunches was really the highlight of the entire
week. Given a choice, most everyone would rather continue being
outraged by the food bandit than put a name to this villain.

So what is the point of this essay on dark
secrets? Just that anyone can have one, obviously. If that wasn’t
the case, then they would not be secrets and they would not be
dark. They’d just be things you know about somebody, and it
wouldn’t be uncomfortable. Like, hey, someone I know likes to do
crossword puzzles. That’s not disconcerting. Or hey, someone I know
has a bunch of pennies in a jar. That’s just peachy. But not, hey,
someone I know might have cased my house today, to see how easy it
would be to get inside. For some reason. And I did not like knowing
that.

There was no one there any more, though.

The remainder of the weekend was uneventful.
I finished painting the second and third chairs. And
Wire in the
Blood
is a really good show.

I got some news on Monday morning. As I came
through the front door, Lucille, perpetual font of knowledge, said
to me, “Guess who’s quitting.”

I guessed a few names. You always know the
ones who aren’t going to last. They have a look about them, either
unhappy or far too happy, and they don’t fit in. I was wrong on all
counts.

“
Suzanne Far-kan-sha,” said Lucille,
leaving a couple of useless syllables out of the last name. “She
turned in her two-week notice this morning.”