A New Resolution (2 page)

“Whoa, this is a nice TV. New VCR player too, I see. Probably expensive, Darlene.” He kissed the top of Lore’s head, knowing she loved watching movies and acting them out when she was alone. She would never admit to it, though. She was fourteen and far too old for those kinds of things.

“The old one kept crackling,” Lore provided, not wanting her parents to get into a fight about spending money, one of the only things they ever fought about besides the frequent business trips he took for work. “And there were channels that had some fuzzy stuff Mom got freaked out about.”

“Fuzzy stuff? Was it mold?” he joked, wiggling his eyebrows.

“Ha, no.” Lore grinned, rolling her eyes at her dad’s silly sense of humor. “I think it was people, but I couldn’t understand what was going on through all the fuzz and static. There was a guy groaning like he was in pain; maybe it was a really gory horror movie. A few more days of watching and I could have figured it out.”

Her dad snorted into the beer bottle he’d grabbed before coming to sit down and looked over her head toward Darlene. “I think I’m on your mother’s side with this matter, pumpkin. No more moldy, fuzzy people for you.” His voice hardened. “Really, don’t watch those channels.”

Lore shrugged, not getting what the big deal was. “Okay, whatever.”

“So, have you thought about your resolution for this year?”

“No.”

“No? Why not? You know the New Year won’t come until you think of a resolution.” He pinched her arm playfully.

“Ugh, Dad, please.” Lore pinched him back. “I’m not a kid anymore. It will get here no matter what I do.”

“The year will come; yes, that’s true. But
your
New Year’s won’t come.” He tipped her chin his way and forced her gaze to his, locking their eyes and hypnotizing her with just a look. “We must always try to improve ourselves, Lore. That’s why you go to school and why you play sports or sing in the school choir. We try to make our lives as rich and saturated with actual living as possible. Take hold. Take control of your life. Making a resolution will help you mold your future into what you want it to be. It will help you achieve your goals.”

“Well, what is
your
resolution?” she asked, awed by the conviction in his words.

He tapped the edge of her nose before releasing her from his gentle grip. “I’m not telling you until you tell me yours.”

“Well…I did think of one thing…”

“What is it, pumpkin?” He wrapped his arm around her shoulders, his blue eyes twinkling down at her as if no matter what she said or did, she was his shining light. “What is your New Year’s resolution?”

“It’s—”

The door banged open again, but instead of a jovial man she knew and loved waltzing through the door with a smile on his face, there were what must have been fifteen men running in with guns and bulletproof vests, screaming at them to get down on the ground and put their hands on their heads. Lore’s scream locked in her throat as she jumped up at the sight of all the guns. She’d seen guns before; her father had a collection. But they were antiques. The kind you didn’t load, but put on display and told kids not to touch. These guns were real. They were black and heavy looking, and they were pointed at her. She wanted to scream, but she couldn’t. She was as frozen as the pointed icicles on her porch outside.

“Tell the girl to get down on the ground. Now!” A voice pierced the white noise filling her head. She came back to herself, realizing the men were all focused on her. Her parents were on the floor, their hands behind their heads. Her father was yelling at her, ordering her to get down. Lore nodded slowly, lowering herself to the ground and placing her hands in that awkward position she’d seen a thousand times on police TV shows. Was she being arrested? Was she going to jail? Why wasn’t her dad doing anything? Shouldn’t he have tried to stop them? This was a mistake. It had to be.

“Daddy?” Lore croaked out, looking on helplessly as the men wrenched her father from the ground and began to cuff him, telling him about his rights and how he could be silent. She’d heard those words on TV too. Those words always led to awful things.

“It’s okay, Lore,” he rasped, struggling in the police officers’ grips. “Just do what the officers tell you. I promise it will be okay.” The men in uniform began to drag him toward the front door and away from her.

“Daddy!” she yelled, starting to get up, needing to see where they were taking her father. “Daddy, wait! Where are you taking him?” From the corner of her eye, she could see her mother, sobbing on the floor, her wineglass in broken shards near her feet.

“Stay back.” A large hand gripped her shoulder, pulling her back into the living room and onto the couch. “Stay here, miss,” the voice said. She didn’t care that they were police officers. Her father was being carted away on their special holiday, and she needed to know why.

She did what her friends told her to do if a guy at school got overly grabby with her, and slammed her boot-covered foot into the man’s crotch, screaming for him not to touch her. She dashed through a grouping of officers, escaping out the front door. The snow was thicker now, the flurries turning into large golf-ball-sized clumps of ice, falling to the ground like orbs in a dream. This had to be a bad dream. Only in a nightmare would she be clutching the railing on her snow-covered porch, on her favorite day of the year, watching her father getting shoved into a police car.

There was more than one police car lining their small, residential street. At least six cars, all with their lights flashing like a glaring neon arrow, lured onlookers to this spectacle. Lore could see the neighbors with their doors open now, huddling together in the cold and staring as her father was so publicly humiliated, as her family was shamed. She went to school with some of the kids on this block. Everyone would know what had happened when she went back to school after winter break.

“Girl, come back inside.” There was no hand on her shoulder this time, only a deep, pitying voice. It was almost as if the officers knew she wouldn’t try to run this time, not after seeing the truth of the situation. Her father had brought this on them somehow, and those officers had the answers. Lore watched as the car carefully pulled away from the curb, her father cuffed and locked in the backseat. Once the car was out of sight, she turned and walked back into the house. An officer handed her a towel to dry herself off. She didn’t thank him, just walked back into the living room where a few men were questioning her sniffling, inconsolable mother.

“Did you know of your husband’s activities?”

“Where is the client list kept?”

“How did you think your husband made all his money?”

All through the night it went on, an endless barrage of questions Lore and her mother couldn’t answer. Her father had always been a bit mysterious about his business practices, but he’d seemed like an upstanding citizen. He preached to her about being a good person, about doing what was right, getting the best grades to go to college. Would a criminal, a criminal that required this amount of police officers to arrest him, really attempt to mold his daughter into such a decent person?

But her mind couldn’t stop flashing to the other things. Those days Lore and her father would go out, just the two of them. She always thought they were insignificant details, little criminal things like sneaking into a double feature without paying, conning a carnival man to give her a bigger prize when she hadn’t even earned the smallest. It had all just been a game. But maybe those little details lent themselves to something bigger, something she had been too blind with love for her father to see. Could her father really be a criminal?

A commotion sounded from the TV. Cheering. Singing. It was the stupid song she had joked about, the one she and her father sang every year since she was little. Would she ever get to sing it with him again?

Through the questioning and the cold wet of her clothes and the singing on the TV, all she could hear was her father’s voice.

“What is it, pumpkin? What is your New Year’s Resolution?”

Watching the celebrating people in the overcrowded streets of New York, she knew no matter what her resolution had originally been, it would never be the same again.

Chapter One

Seventeen Years Later

“C’mon, Lore, live a little,” Kathy said, her perfectly coiffed blonde hair fluttering around her face like a Playboy Mansion doll. “Undo that tight bun of chastity and put your goodies on display.” Kathy leaned against the kitchenette counter toward Lore, wiggling her eyebrows. “I bet you’ve got some decent goodies underneath your proper pantsuits.”

Lore would have liked to laugh at Kathy’s exuberant nature, but that wasn’t who she chose to be at the office. “I do not have goodies, Kathy,” she said, focusing on stirring her hot chai tea.

“Every woman has goodies.” Kathy snorted into her coffee mug. “Big or small, doesn’t matter.”

Lore put her mug down before tossing the spoon into the sink and shooting Kathy her best disdainful expression. “Whether or not I have goodies is irrelevant, as we are at work and this conversation is inappropriate. Drop it.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Kathy threw her hands up in exasperation, a gesture Lore was all too familiar with during these exchanges. “I forgot your female mind is stuck in the nineteenth century. Welcome to the modern world, Lore. Oh, and surprise, but women talk about this shit all the time. There is no more inappropriate, no more hiding behind kitchen aprons as we wait for our husbands to bring home the bacon. You really need to come out of that shell.” Kathy’s gaze passed over the door and back, switching from her outgoing nature to something meeker, something Lore had grown to pity. For all her talk of feminism and women no longer struggling under the chains of the patriarchy, they were just words. Precious ideas Kathy needed to hold on to in order to wake up each morning and come back to the office. “But you’re right; we shouldn’t have this talk at work or the
Lech
might hear and think we’re offerin’ our asses up to him. We’re either the sexually open whore or the virgin, whose body is idolized as a purely baby-producing machine and nothing else. Heaven forbid a woman have sexual desires and a brain.”

“Please don’t start talking about sexual desires,” Maggie from accounting quipped as she popped her head into the break room. “Words like ‘sexual’ are the Bat-Signal for him, drawing Mr. Tiny Prick out of the dark and calling him to rise and harass the women of the office. It is his destiny.”

Kathy laughed, adding on to the women’s ritual of making fun of their dissolute boss. “Yeah, but instead of rescuing the damsels, he makes them miserable. If I have to smell his nasty breath—”

“Kathy.”

The women froze. Mr. Tiny Prick himself, or rather their boss, Mr. Krueger, stood in the doorway watching them with a scowl. Krueger looked like an all-American good ol’ boy. The forty-year-old man was well formed, large, but in an athletically fit way. If Lore had passed him on the street, not knowing what a sick and twisted man he was, she would have thought him handsome, his dark eyes giving him an almost roguish quality that juxtaposed the all-American, football-player good looks. Now that Lore understood what he really was, his eyes appeared a beady black that reminded her of a bat in the dark.

When Lore had interviewed for her current position, Mr. Krueger had looked her over in the way all men look over a decently attractive female. She hadn’t assumed anything of the passing interest and thought him the perfect example of professionalism and courtesy throughout the interview, as a supervising manager should be. It had taken less than a week at her new job to realize the pleasant Mr. Krueger was a misogynistic asshole. The smiles, good looks, and handsomely cut suits were a facade to hide his true nature.

Lore knew men like him. The ones who treated you like a princess until you spoke your mind or disagreed with his way of doing things. To Krueger, women were ornaments to be hung where he pleased and taken down when he grew bored of them.

Today his facade consisted of a slick-cut suit and royal-blue button-down shirt. His tie was a shimmering gray that pleasantly caught the light as he turned in its direction. Lore had complete confidence in her assumption he had paid an exorbitant amount of money to have such an ensemble custom made, just as she was confident he had come to the break room to pick a target. Lore caught Maggie looking pityingly at Kathy, Krueger’s favorite victim, and her gut churned for the poor woman.

It never made sense to Lore why good-looking and wealthy men like Krueger felt the need to control those beneath them, especially the ones they thought were members of the weaker sex. During the course of his life, someone had taught Krueger to treat women like objects. In doing so he had become the scum of the earth. Now, more and more, whenever Lore happened on him objectifying a female coworker, she not only felt the unwelcome burn of rage but the need to do something about it.

“Yes, Mr. Krueger?” Kathy asked after taking a moment to stall and sip her coffee.

“I believe your lunch hour ended ten minutes ago.” His gaze didn’t scan a watch or clock to emphasize the point, just began its well-worn path of roving up and down poor Kathy’s body. The woman could annoy the hell out of Lore with her probing questions and suggestions on how she should live her life, but Lore would never have wished the unwanted attention of that slimeball on any woman.

“I’m just cleaning up, Mr. Krueger.”

“Well,” he said, adjusting his pants with a grunt. “Wash all the other stuff in the sink while you’re there, then come see me in my office. The employees in this office are pigs.” He turned to leave, but stopped as Kathy took a step forward, her hands tight around her coffee mug.

“I have a busy agenda the rest of the day, sir. Can we reschedule?”

Mr. Krueger leaned his body forward, a forbidding look accompanying his reddening cheeks. “That wasn’t a suggestion.” With that final edict and a disgusting-sounding sniffle, he turned and walked out of the break room.

Once Lore knew he was out of earshot, she turned to Kathy, unable to stay silent any longer. She usually didn’t get in the middle of the other women’s troubles, but enough was enough. “Kathy, don’t go in there. Do you want me to tell the bastard you went home for the day?”