4th Musketelle

10. Sepulchral Home

  By the time she got back home, Laila was thinking more clearly. The radical ideas she’d churned over while she’d been driving retreated before the soothing ministrations of a cocktail. Things started to take on a more balanced perspective. After all, what could it matter how Frank arranged his business affairs? There was always his personal fortune that she was entitled to, right?

  Unless divorce came into the picture – unless Frank felt he had good cause to cast her aside as Keith had done. Laila would never initiate one herself. Prenuptial agreement aside, she simply didn’t believe in it. The evils of divorce had been pounded into her head from an early age by her religious fanatic mother, and she couldn’t escape a terrifying sense that she’d be damned to eternal hell if she ever tried it.

  Her cocktail was becoming much less soothing than it had been, and she mixed another, more powerful one.

  She was facing a night alone in the house for the first time in months. The prospect was rather daunting, but attractive at the same time. Frank limited his business travel these days, preferring video conferencing to personal appearances. He’d never been one for travel of any kind.

  And he’d never been one for chasing women, either. Laila did not doubt Frank’s reputation as a total ‘straight arrow’ when it came to fidelity. And his straight arrow performed regularly in their massive, temperature controlled bed.

  That was the best part of their relationship, along with the money, of course. Despite the nearly bottomless pool of interested men, Laila had always been sexually conservative. Her only lover prior to Frank had been Keith, who’d swept her off her 17-year-old feet straight into bed and then to the altar.

  The sex had been amazing! Only after the stars finally dimmed in her eyes did she realize what a dog Keith actually was – the verbal abuse, his constant womanizing, the alcohol and recreational drugs. Still, the marriage had limped on for nearly two years before he decided to bail out.

  Keith was an immature punk, when you came right down to it. Or at least he had been.

  Imagine, she’d actually bumped into him a few weeks earlier at the mall. He was all cleaned up now, well dressed and employed in the white collar world. The drugs and booze had been rehabbed out of his life and he was flying straight, he said. She was so astonished at the transformation that she’d actually allowed him to buy her lunch during which they’d chewed over a few old times.

  He was still something of a jerk under it all, she’d decided, but it was still good to attain some closure with him. She’d even started to forgive him for his abandonment.

  Frank was a completely different type of person. Much older than Laila and a strong, confident man of the world. He’d fought his way up from humble beginnings to attain wealth and power. This was reflected in his sexual performance, which was also powerful – not in the wild, abandoned manner of Keith, but in a steady, driving way that had brought her innumerable orgasms over the years. Bringing her to climax was one of the ways Frank exercised his mastery over the world and those around him.

  And she’d loved him, but his constant domination had become unbearable. It had left her will little sense of self worth, rung out like a rag doll. Laila would have almost welcomed Frank having an extramarital affair so as to redirect some of the pressure of his overbearing personality. Laila had never been ‘at home’ in her life with Frank; she was the outsider with a pretty face who didn’t really belong at the country club.

  Frank’s inscrutable aloofness left her feeling very insecure. On the one hand, he seemed proud to have her accompany him in public. On the other, he seemed almost ashamed of her intellectual limitations. In his presence, she felt more like a bauble than a rational human being.

  But everything, good and bad, was endangered now. Frank’s kids planned to drive her away. They’d always hated her. They’d put their ‘abandoned’ mother up on a pedestal and never forgiven Laila for displacing her. And the fact that Laila stood first in line for Frank’s riches galled them beyond enduring. They meant to impoverish her again ... just like in the old days.

  How did a man as formidable as Frank end up with two such kids? Henry, weak and sleazy, making up for his inadequacies with underhandedness. Patricia, too wrapped up in lesbian affairs to give much thought to advancing herself beyond the role of rich man’s spoiled daughter. Maybe she had so many affairs because she simply wore her partners out.

  Frank loved his kids, though, despite his acute annoyance with them. And, as Patricia said, “Blood is thicker than water.”

  Of the two, Patricia was potentially the greater threat. If she ever gathered her forces to pursue a single goal, she could be very formidable.

  Laila jerked upright in her chair. “Of course!”

  Now she realized what was behind her “chance” encounter with Keith.

  $$$

  She went to the mall that day for some comfort shopping after a particularly ego bruising episode with Frank during which he’d laid down the law about some interior decorating she wanted to have done at the house. He said that the decor she selected was tricked out in “fag colors,” and was, therefore, unacceptable. That was the “end of the discussion,” a phrase that he often used with her.

  She was still in a state of agitation when the beardless, well-groomed man dressed in a business suit approached her. At first, she had no idea who he was. He recognized her, though.

  “How have you been, Laila?” he asked. “You look great!”

  “Excuse me, do I know you?” she replied.

  “I think so.”

  He smiled then, the same boyish, dimpled smile that had won her over so many years before, and she knew who it was. She could have been knocked over with a feather. Keith wasted no time in starting a charm offensive.

  He was very sorry for deserting her, he said, but that was the old him. He’d straightened himself out now. He was delighted to see that Laila was doing so well. He hadn’t realized what a “gem” he’d had in her; he was just a “stupid kid” back then, etc. etc.

  He told her a lot of this over lunch at the hotel coffee shop adjacent to the mall. Why did she agreed to that?

  Because she was lonely and bored; because she was amazed. And because Keith was still a hunk, despite his comfortable looking belly. The juices were undeniably starting to flow. She couldn’t help but recall the sexual fireworks of years gone by. Frank was slowing down a bit with the advent of his heart problems, and the recollections of younger, wilder days were alluring for a while.

  Laila even suffered some undeserved guilt. Could she have been a better wife to Keith, helped him more with his addiction problems? What did she do to drive him away?

  But this was all just b.s. She slammed the door closed on such idiotic notions. Beneath the polite manners and fancy clothes, she detected the same shifty, insubstantial Keith of old – a blast from the past that needed to blow itself out. So, she thanked him for the lunch and said a final good-bye, chalking up the experience to the vagaries of life.

  $$$

  But there had been more to it than that: the rather ominous looking man reading a newspaper at a nearby table who glanced their way now and then, an incongruous van parked across from the hotel entrance when they were leaving. A subtle feeling of being watched which she’d dismissed as being part of the emotional roller coaster she was on that day.

  If anyone had photographed her encounter with Keith, a damaging story, totally unrelated to the truth, could be constructed from the pictures. And why the hotel? They could have gone to one of the eateries inside the mall, but since Keith insisted on picking up the tab, she’d followed him to the hotel cafe when he’d suggested it. Why not? It was a very nice place, and suitably casual for the occasion.

  She’d been observed and photographed at a hotel with her ex! A still attractive man many years younger than her current husband. Why hadn’t she seen through the skunk’s act?

  Because she was a fundamentally honest person who didn’t think in terms
of deception – that’s why. Never could she have dreamed up trickery like that.

  Only Patricia was clever enough to engineer such a diabolical thing.

  Laila realized that a double-barreled assault was underway against her. The ‘rightful heirs’ were coming at her from different directions, like sharks in the water that smelled blood. One way or another, they would turn Frank against her, and when they did ...

  She had to do something to prevent it!

  Something drastic.