My eyes flew open to the completely befuddling image of Cooper laying inert on the ground and Liss standing over her, the rake now in
her
hands with the flat of the iron tines pressed against Cooper’s throat.
“Maggie, dear, why don’t you call Officer Fielding while I keep an eye on things here
,
hm?”
Yeah. I think I could do that.
It was all over before we knew it.
The details came out so quickly. While Liss was saving the day in pure John Wayne fashion, the officers Tom had sent over to the New Heritage apartment complex were discovering a few things of their own in Ms. Cooper’s apartment. Things like an envelope full of glossy photos of herself. And then there was the laptop on her dining room table, which coincidentally enough still happened to be opened to an Internet search on how to permanently destroy the data on a hard drive. The girl was set. Or she would have been if the cameras hadn’t caught her in the act.
The only problem was, the girl . . . wasn’t.
A girl, I mean.
Oh, I know. I had no idea. I’m not sure how any of us were supposed to have known, or even could have known.
Even worse, no one found out until Tom took her down to the police station to question her.
Him.
Whichever.
It kind of all came out from there, though. She wouldn’t answer their questions at first, but sometimes nature has a way of ensuring justice will be served. Or maybe it was just the caffeine in the coffee. It’s really hard to keep up the pretense of living as a woman when you aren’t allowed to use the ladies’ room without a witness and you still have all your male parts. And with Alexandra, it was all just that. A pretense. A life lived as a lie because of the lie that was her life. A life that insisted that she had been born male, when she had felt female from her earliest memories of existence.
We didn’t have all of the pieces when we found Alexandra’s image on the video camera. We only knew that she had, for reasons known only to her, overheard Tom making arrangements with Marcus to access the hard drive, and she must have stalked us back to the bungalow from there. Stalked us, staked us out, and when the coast was clear and we were both out of her way, she made her move.
His move.
Is there a guide to political correctness these days? Because this day-to-day change stuff is crazy-making. Who keeps track of these things?
It was self-preservation, you see. Because she had no idea what was on that drive. She had no idea it even existed. She had thought that, by destroying the computer in Locke’s office, she would be wiping out the very existence of any and all remaining evidence he might have had that he had been holding over her head.
Locke knew about her, you see.
Oh, not when he first offered her the lease. He had no idea who she was. But she knew him. They had gone to the same high school, lived in the same neighborhood in nearby Fort Wayne. She had heard of his history for the distribution of child pornography and had heard that he had “turned over a new leaf,” at least according to his family. Not that that meant anything. But he didn’t recognize her—mostly because she had gone to great lengths to perfect her appearance and gestures and body language in order to live life as a woman rather than as the male she had been born, to forge a new life for herself, filled with people who didn’t know her. People who would accept her for who she really was. People for whom the old adage “What you see is what you get” is accepted as universal law.
Small-town folk.
Stony Mill kind of peeps.
Here no one questioned that she might not actually be everything she said she was. She grew out her hair into a thick mane of which any woman would be proud, changed her name from Alexander to Alexandra, assiduously removed body hair on a daily basis, and was never seen without sturdy foundation garments and a face full of makeup so carefully and skillfully applied that no one could tell where the makeup ended and the skin began. And she became . . . female. For all intents and purposes. Like an actor deeply immersed in his craft, she lived as a female every day of her life, without fail. Everything was perfect.
Until Locke started up his old tricks again.
At least it wasn’t with underage girls this time. He did have that going for him. Or maybe he’d just decided it was too big a risk. Locke was the one who insisted there be no children under the age of eighteen in the complex. But then, he knew he had had “security” cameras installed with the renovations. No one seems to know when the idea struck him, but strike him it did. He handpicked his tenants carefully, enticed them with special rent deals subsidized (knowingly or unknowingly—that is still up for debate at this telling) by Harding Enterprises through ownership of the property itself. And with his ties to an organization the men in his family had belonged to for years, he found a ready supply of customers for his . . . entrepreneurial vision.
The women he rented apartments to were none the wiser.
Not until Abbie and her mother broke the rules. And not until Abbie broke the mirror.
Abbie was the one who first seemed to notice something amiss. Whether it was intuition that made her veer away from the mildly creepy manager or whether it was the sounds in their apartment and the personal items that moved around with no explanation, the suspicion was raised in her mind. Breaking the mirror, finding the camera . . . that was just the nail in the coffin.
But by that time, Alexandra Cooper had moved into the apartment upstairs and had recognized Abbie, her unappreciative student from the high school. A chance mention to Locke—was it intentional, as Abbie seemed to think, or was it completely innocent as Alexandra Cooper had suggested ?—had landed Abbie and her mother out on the streets, their lease revoked. Maybe it didn’t really matter in the end. Maybe what really mattered was that Abbie was safe from Locke’s secret vice. There were no pictures of Abbie Cornwall found on Locke’s thumb drive or his hard drive.
But Alexandra’s problems were only beginning.
Because Alexandra’s secret that she worked so carefully to conceal was all too soon discovered. And Locke was not a man who could be trusted with anything.
For him, what had started with simple candid-camera nude shots through the windows had morphed into filming young women with their partners du jour through remote control cameras secreted in their bedrooms behind “built-in” mirrors. But Alexandra . . . it soon became all too obvious that Alexandra was different. Very different.
She was not what she appeared to be.
And what she appeared in no way to be was really the story, as far as Locke was concerned.
An entrepreneur ’til the bitter end—literally—Locke decided a schoolteacher like “Alexandra” might be willing to pay him to keep her secret. At least as much as his male customers did for access to the special “art” he was more than happy to provide.
That’s where several brothers from his lodge came into play. There were plenty of them with money to burn. They didn’t know where he got his artwork from. They didn’t care. If it even occurred to them to ask, they wouldn’t have. They were buying a service. Who knows what young Austin Poindexter thought when he found erotic photos of one of his teachers on his father’s home computer. He was an eighth-grade boy. Thinking is not one of their fortes. All he knew was that he had come across something that was going to make him top dog in school among the other boys his age. That was his goal in sharing the pics that nearly got Angela Miller fired, and it had worked . . . until the principal started asking questions.
All Alexandra—Alex—wanted was to preserve the first time in her—his—life when she’d ever been happy. When she’d ever felt free to be herself. Without judgment. Without fear of reprisals or exposure. She had begun to equate Stony Mill in her mind with her home, her safe place. For her, it was worth fighting to save.
She paid him for a while. She was even relieved when he kept the payments “affordable.” But that changed, eventually. Locke got greedy. Most blackmailers do, eventually. And when he threatened to send her pictures to her principal, the school board, and even expose her to the Stony Mill Gazette, she knew she had to do something drastic, or the perfect little home she had created for herself would be burned to the ground in the flames of righteous horror and recrimination. She’d be labeled a pervert. A sexual deviant. She’d never be allowed to teach again.
Locke had sealed his own fate. Alexandra Cooper had made sure of that.
Don’t we all? With each and every decision we make throughout a given day, however small, however far-reaching, we bring something into our life. If Locke had realized the enormous consequences of his actions, would he have chosen differently? Maybe so. Maybe so.
Alexandra Cooper, on the other hand, had never felt she was given a choice. And because she felt betrayed by her own body, perhaps she never truly had been. Her only choice was to try to be the person she felt she was within the deepest, innermost parts of herself, and her misguided decision was made to protect that choice at whatever cost. And through protecting her own fate, she assisted Locke with his.
I didn’t know what was going to happen to her when she was sent to prison for her crime. To me it seemed unthinkably cruel to send her to a prison full of the worst kind of males in existence, to suffer whatever indignities may come to a “man” like her. It seemed a fate even worse than a death sentence. But justice must be served, and crimes must not go unpunished. Especially the high crime of murder.
Angela Miller was exonerated by the quiet word that Tom chose to have in private with the middle school principal. Although he couldn’t go into specifics due to the sensitivity of the evidence, he was able to reassure him that she was a victim of a crime and not the perpetrator of some sordid deed. At the same time, the student body rallied behind her, with a combined strength that surprised all. They had arranged a silent sit-in to demonstrate their support of her, and then steadfastly followed through. Students showed up bright and early on a Saturday, and filled the halls, in complete and utter silence; it was the quietest the school had ever been with that many people in the building, and the effort was noticed. Enough that, had Tom not stepped up, it would have given the principal pause. A glimmer of light in a dark situation. A sign of hope, that there was still humanity and dignity all around us, if we but opened our eyes and
see
.
Lou decided he’d had enough of the lodge brotherhood. There were too many questions, too much less-than-savory behind-the-scenes activity that had come up through recent revelations. Not everyone in the organization was in the know—case in point—but it was all too much for Lou. As he told Marcus, “It was the thought that anyone might think that I was in some way involved, too. The town is going through some tough times right now, and it’s pitting people against each other, making them suspect family, friends. I suppose it’s only natural . . . but it is sad. I don’t need or want to play into that.” It made me sad, too, because I myself hadn’t known quite what to think about his membership in the group when the details started filtering out. At least at first. But Lou’s character shone through in the end, thank goodness. I would hate it if the experience had tarnished his reputation in any way, and in a town like this, you never know.
And so it was with great relief that Marcus and I settled into our last utterly free weekend together without the cloud of the town’s latest scandal to mar the sunny skies. So much had happened in the last week, it was enough to take your breath away. But the weekend was a time to recoup, to regroup, to recover, and to gird our loins before forging a plan for the coming months.
“It’s going to be busy,” Marcus warned me as we lay, lazily entwined, on a woven hammock in the backyard beneath the spread of the old oak. We had just gotten back from lunch with his Uncle Lou and Aunt Molly and were enjoying what was left of the afternoon before Marcus needed to get ready for his evening gig. “Classes. Homework. Jobs on the side.”
“I know,” I said, pressing my lips to the strong, corded muscles in his neck.
“You’ll have your work, too.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“And the N.I.G.H.T.S. We’ve not been as active through the summer, with people constantly on the run, but that will change as the wheel turns and we move into fall. The thinning of the veil means lots more activity, and that always brings opportunities to explore, investigate, and understand.”
“And I’ll have my cast off, so I’ll be able to participate.” Glory be, hallelujah, soon, soon, soon.
He slid his hand down my thigh, curling a moment behind my raised knee and then resting it on the hard, nubby surface of the bedazzled cast. He chuckled. “I would say I’m going to miss it . . . but it will be nice to have a night that doesn’t include hard knocks. My shins may never be the same.”
The vixen in me dictated that a comment like that deserved retribution of the swiftest kind—like rolling him to his back and having my way with him. All in the name of demanding spoils and booty from the defeated. Most definitely the booty. But the success of such activities in a hammock were questionable. It might even be dangerous.
I mollified myself with a kiss and a sigh.
“We’ll make it through, though.”
“With a little luck,” I added, laughing.
“Who needs luck when you have a witch in the house?” he countered.
“Or even two.” Except that brought up the subject of my living arrangements again. Once Marcus was attending classes and my cast came off, there really was no reason for me and Minnie not to return to my apartment on Willow Street. Even though Steff wouldn’t be there for much longer. Maybe I could still search for an improved living situation. One that didn’t include living in a slightly eerie basement apartment without even the solace of my best friend living two floors above.