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He paused. “It made me sad. My idea of a marriage is what I’d had with my first wife: love and affection and great heaps of delicious food. But it was okay with Janet. It wasn’t bad, just sort of nothing.”
He paused. “But then, a few months after the wedding, one of the women in the office, Elaine, brought me brownies. I took them home to share with my wife. I was shocked when Janet became furious. She didn’t yell, just looked at me with hate in her eyes, then dropped the brownies into the garbage disposal.
“The next day Janet came to the office. She was so smiling and happy that I thought everything was fine. But two hours later, Elaine was rushed to the hospital. She had to have her stomach pumped. She nearly died.
“At the time I didn’t connect it all. I never thought anyone would poison a person over some brownies.” A machine he was attached to started loudly beeping and Carl took a moment to calm his breathing. Talking was depleting him.
“When did you realize the truth?” Sara asked.
“There wasn’t any one moment. It was a hundred things. Objects in my house began to disappear. If it had a hint of my first wife, it would go missing. If I asked Janet about it she’d get angry—and her anger was out of proportion to what I was asking. I began to keep my mouth shut.”
“You got so you did anything to avoid the rages,” Sara said.
“That’s exactly right. It was better to keep the calm. I’m not sure when I started being afraid of her. Maybe it was when I went to a sales conference three states away. I was at dinner with potential buyers, all men, and I looked across the room and there was Janet. She didn’t wave or say a word. She was just there. Staring at me. It creeped me out. One of the men asked me a question and when I looked back, Janet was gone. I told myself it was probably someone who looked like her.”
“Did you ask her about it?”
“Oh no,” Carl said. “By then I’d learned—no! I’d been taught to ask no questions about her personal life.” He took a breath and smiled. “But then, I fell in love.”
“Elaine,” Sara said.
He chuckled. “I’ve read some of your books. You’re good at romance.”
“Thank you.”
“Yes, Elaine. We were very discreet, but she made me remember what I was missing. I sat down with Janet and said that our marriage wasn’t making either of us happy so we should get a divorce.”
“But that would make her a loser,” Jack said.
“That’s the way she saw it too. I denied that there was another person involved. I thought it was going to be okay, but then, bad things began happening to me. Car trouble. Credit cards canceled. Two big clients left. I slipped on marbles and broke my foot. It was something every day.
“I knew it was Janet, but I was determined to leave. We went to mediation, and in front of the counselor, she cried. I’d never seen her cry before. She got a lot of sympathy.
“Janet must have found out the truth because things began happening to Elaine. Someone smashed her car. Her purse was stolen. It was nothing big, just annoying. But one day her ten-year-old son didn’t come home from school. Elaine panicked. By that time she knew it was Janet. She told me she loved me but her fear of Janet was stronger than her love—and she had to protect her son. She wrote Janet a formal note saying You win. I concede. She quit her job and left the state.
“After that, I began throwing money at Janet to make her sign the divorce papers. When I sold my company that seemed to satisfy her and she signed.”
“But that wasn’t the end of it, was it?” Sara asked.
“No. She found me wherever I went. If I made friends they soon looked at me with fear, so I knew Janet had found them and lied to them about me.”
He paused, getting his breath. “Seven months ago, I was told that I had no more than six months to live. The doctor said that if I had anything I really wanted to do, now was the time. I had some money that I’d been able to hide from Janet and I thought about traveling. Go see the Taj.”
“But you wanted something more than that,” Sara said.
“Yes,” Carl said. “I wanted to see Janet. I’m not sure why. Maybe I wanted to reassure myself that she had only taken her anger out on me. I knew she was living in Lachlan, Florida, so I flew here. On the first day I was sitting in an outdoor restaurant reading a local brochure and telling myself I was stupid. I should book a cruise. Then I saw Janet sitting at another table, her face hidden inside one of Sylvia’s books. My hair stood on end and I expected her to plop down in front of me, but she didn’t.
“It took me a while to realize that she didn’t recognize me. I’d lost a lot of weight and I had a small beard.”
Carl closed his eyes for a moment. “I watched Janet staring at three pretty women who were laughing. She went to them and said hello. But they didn’t invite her to join them. I knew that would set her off.” He shook his head. “I saw Janet drop a pill into the drink of one of the women. Ten minutes later she grabbed her stomach and ran to the restroom. It was Janet who called for an ambulance. The next day I heard what a hero she was.
“I knew then what my bucket list was. I wanted to expose her. Maybe put her in jail. I rented a house through Tayla. I hired Dora to clean my apartment. She’s a great gossip. She loved Sylvia and never believed she committed suicide. I studied social media sites. It’s amazing what people tell online. I saw that no one connected the bad with the good. If they did something bad to Janet, bad happened to them, then Janet showed up to be the hero. It was a pattern, but I seemed to be the only one who saw it.”
He paused. “Or was I? When Dora told me that Janet and Tayla argued, I pursued that. I got Tayla to tell me about Gil and how he might lose his son.”
“We met Zelly,” Kate said.
“Ghastly, isn’t she?”
