CHAPTER 34
T
he plan worked, but it wasn’t the least bit pleasant seeing it to fruition. After the switch was made, Ruby and I sat next to each other on the edge of the king-size bed in room 325, waiting. We stayed in that room until it was over. The walls were thin enough so we could hear everything. We listened to Jenna seductively moan and coo in ecstasy. Her cries of pleasure turned louder as the passion progressed.
As soon as I heard her, I worried Uretsky would find it odd that Ruby took so much pleasure from the act. I couldn’t very well have instructed Jenna to behave as an unwilling partner. Such direction would have seemed contradictory to the fantasy Jenna believed she was creating for our benefit. If pressed, I would tell Uretsky that Ruby didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing her suffer. That could not have been further from the truth. Each time Jenna cried out in pleasure, Ruby cringed in pain. We sat in silence while Drunk Drew had sex with a woman he thought was my wife, but was too intoxicated to notice the switch.
When I tried to hold Ruby’s hand, she pulled away.
“I don’t want to be touched,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry for everything.”
Ruby looked at me and fought back tears. “I want you to know that I’m never going to stop loving you, John.” She spoke in a whispered voice, as though Jenna and Drunk Drew might overhear us talking.
I didn’t say anything. A good husband knows when it’s time to just listen. Meanwhile, Jenna’s moans of ecstasy, faked or not, grew louder and more intense.
“I didn’t appreciate the motto ‘Live for today’ before I had cancer,” Ruby continued. “Every day I’ve lived with this disease, I’ve felt tainted by its presence. It’s as though somebody took a gigantic eraser to the best parts of my life and wiped them away with a quick sweep of the hand. It didn’t matter how great my yesterdays were, because I’d have to live through this today, knowing that my body was working hard to kill me.”
“I understand,” I said.
“No, I don’t think you do,” Ruby said. “Because the situation we’re in right now feels a thousand times worse.”
I kept my eyes fixed on Ruby, but words failed me. I looked away, only to have Ruby grab my chin and force me to reconnect.
“You begged me to go along with your identity theft plan. I didn’t want to do this, but you made me. You begged me. That’s what I want you to really understand.”
Jenna cried out again, and I could tell it was the finale. Ruby and I didn’t speak until ten minutes later, when Jenna entered room 325 through the unlocked interior door, counting her money from Drunk Drew. Including what I owed her, Jenna’s jubilant expression implied that she had had one of the best workdays in her life.
She looked Ruby and me over and smiled. “You guys are my freakin’ favorite couple ever,” she said. The word came out sounding like “ev-ah.”
“Is Andrew gone?” I asked Jenna.
“Yeah, he’s out of there. I’d hang around and chat, but I’m dying for a smoke.”
I paid Jenna while Ruby snuck back into room 324. If Uretsky was watching us, we wanted him to see Ruby leave that hotel room, not her body double.
“Thanks for everything,” I said.
“No. Thank you,” Jenna said.
I thought that would be the last time I’d ever hear Jenna’s voice.
I was wrong.
We got back to the Harvard Avenue apartment shortly after one o’clock in the morning. I tried to get in touch with Uretsky to tell him we’d completed his task and he should let Winnie go, but I didn’t have a phone number for him. I sent an e-mail through the
One World
game instead. No response. I text messaged him by replying to one of his earlier texts. He’d used a bunch of different numbers to contact me, so I sent a bunch of different texts.
Again, no response.
Ruby sank to the floor, her head buried in her hands. Ginger sauntered over and rubbed her furry little body against Ruby.
“I can’t take this anymore,” Ruby said. “It’s too much. . . . It’s too much for me.”
I knelt beside her.
What could I say to make it better? What could I do?
Nothing.
“It’s going to be all right,” I said, stroking her hair. “I promise. Everything is going to be all right.”
That would be the second thing that night about which I was wrong.
The apartment phone rang and woke us at seven o’clock the next morning. We had passed out—not fallen asleep—on the hardwood floor. Ruby, who lay huddled in a fetal position, rolled over onto her back and jumped to her feet before the second chime sounded. She rose too quickly, so I gripped her shoulders to steady her. My fingers felt her bones. The fragility of her body reminded me of a robin’s egg in the springtime.
“I don’t feel well,” Ruby said.
She didn’t look well, either.
Her sallow skin and sunken eyes suggested that she had greatly downplayed her current condition. Cancer? Uretsky? Which poison was killing her fastest? It didn’t much matter. My wife, my beautiful wife, the love of my every single waking moment, was dying before my eyes.
“Just sit down,” I said. “I’ll get the phone.”
I led Ruby over to the kitchen stool and helped get her settled. My stomach tightened as I reached for the phone that kept ringing. I suspected it was Uretsky calling, but Henry Dobson, the UniSol investigator, had this number as well. Maybe he was calling with a paperwork issue, or perhaps it was a wrong number. Those were just thoughts of the wishful thinking variety. I knew the truth. I looked over at Ruby as I picked up the phone. Her hands covered her mouth. Her nervousness and apprehension seemed to equal my own.
“Hello, John,” Uretsky said. “We need to talk.” He spoke in a voice that reminded me of an upset parent’s disappointment with an unruly offspring.
“We did what you wanted,” I said.
“I sent you an e-mail, but you didn’t respond,” Uretsky said. “I figured you might have fallen asleep, so I called to wake you. Ruby must be tired. Emotional strain extracts a heavy physical toll on the body, you know.”
“Let Winnie go,” I said. “Do it now. We did what you wanted. The game is over.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” Uretsky said.
“We did what you asked. You know it, too,” I said, my voice rising in pitch, pushed up by a stab of anger.
“How do you know I know it?” Uretsky asked.
I saw no reason to lie. “I found the video camera,” I said.
“You checked the room?”
“That wasn’t against your rules.”
The ensuing pause made me shudder.
“You’re right, John. That wasn’t in violation.”
It wasn’t much of a gamble telling Uretsky about the camera. I knew he operated with certain rules in place, and somehow, God help me, I was able to determine what constituted an infringement of his twisted thinking. I’d come to some other understandings about Uretsky as well. This wasn’t about revenge for my stealing his identity, and it sure as hell wasn’t about teaching me to become a real criminal. That was just an excuse for him to play his evil game.
Uretsky was a master manipulator who, for whatever reason, wanted to use and control me. He got off on terrorizing us. This was all just a game to him—a living, breathing game without any pixels or reboots or cheat codes. Our terror wasn’t manufactured by lines of code, but rather by our deeds, and he loved every single authentic minute of it. Uretsky had forced us into the ultimate test of good versus evil for the simple curiosity of seeing how far he could bend us before we broke. His game play aside, Uretsky had proven one thing for certain: we all possessed a capacity to commit acts we wouldn’t dream of.
“I sent you an e-mail,” Uretsky said. “I’d like you to watch something with me.”
With the phone pressed between my ear and shoulder, I motioned for Ruby to hand me my laptop.
“Is my mom all right?” Ruby asked me. “Is she?”
“Oh, yes, Mother is doing just fine,” Uretsky said into my ear. “But we’ve got another problem.”
“He said she’s fine,” I whispered to Ruby, covering the receiver with my hand. “But something is wrong.”
“I want to see her!” Ruby demanded. “I want to see her right now.”
“That’s an impossibility,” Uretsky said. “Tell her that, John.”
I told her. Ruby responded by shutting her eyes tightly.
I powered up my laptop, opened my e-mail, and saw a message from Uretsky time-stamped fifteen minutes earlier. The message contained a link. The link opened a Web page that contained an embedded video file, like a YouTube page.
“I’d like to watch this video with you, if you don’t mind,” Uretsky said.
“Of course I mind,” I said. “Do I have a choice?”
“For Winnie’s sake, I’m going to answer that in the negative. The link you clicked has given me control over your computer, so I’ll go ahead and press play.”
My chest tightened the moment the first frames flickered on the screen. The video, taken from inside hotel room 324, showed Ruby cajoling Drunk Drew into taking a shower.
“What is this, Uretsky?” I said. My voice came out singed with ire. “You want me to watch my wife having sex with another man?”
“I want you to watch,” was all Uretsky said.
A chill ripped up my spine.
Could he know?
The video quality looked surprisingly good—not grainy or jerky. I watched Drew stumble and trip while unbuttoning his pants on his way to the shower. The video captured Ruby closing the bathroom door and turning off the room lights, just as we had planned. Although the camera lacked motion capability, it was in fact low-light sensitive, such that I could make out the floral pattern on the bed covering before Andrew emerged from the bathroom, dressed only in a towel.
“Why are you making me watch this?” I asked, making sure I sounded shaky and wounded.
A figure stepped into the camera’s view. She wore a sheath dress from the Gap and did a perfect job keeping her back to the camera. I studied the footage closely. In the limited lighting Ruby and Jenna were virtually indistinguishable. I watched Jenna take a drink of water from a bottle set atop the night table, and then the video stopped playing.
“I hit pause, in case you were wondering,” Uretsky said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Just remember that moment,” Uretsky said. “Let’s continue.” The video playback resumed. I watched Andrew and Jenna kissing, my pulse pounding with what proved to be unwarranted anxiety that Jenna had shown her face to the camera. Andrew’s hands fumbled greedily all over Jenna’s body. Inevitably, those same hands slid up and underneath Jenna’s dress. He probed Jenna’s flesh in all the places that would have driven me to rage had he been touching my wife instead of a professional. Jenna didn’t speak as she maneuvered Andrew over to the bed. Andrew let his towel drop from his waist, flashing the camera with a full frontal assault of his fleshy midsection and tumescent penis. He got himself prone on the bed. Jenna took another sip of water, hiked her dress up waist high, and straddled Andrew’s back.
Uretsky paused the playback once again.
“Did you see that?” he asked. “Are you with me, John?”
“I see that my wife is about to give a strange man a massage,” I said.
Uretsky sighed, as if disappointed. “Let’s keep watching.”
The video resumed. The bathroom door opened a bit on its own, exposing a wider sliver of light that better lit the room. The light provided a clearer view of the action as well. I didn’t time it with a stopwatch, but if pressed, I’d guess the massage lasted around five seconds at most. Andrew flipped over onto his back. Jenna reached across the bed and took another drink of water while Andrew fumbled to put on a condom. Jenna lowered herself down onto Andrew with her dress and heels still on. I heard a soft moan escape from her throat. She arched her back when his thrusting began.
The video stopped playing.
“Did you see it?” Uretsky asked.
“See what?”
“She took three drinks from that water bottle. Three times she reached for the bottle and drank. Three.”
“So? My wife was thirsty.”
“Your wife is right handed,” Uretsky said. “Maybe if she drank with her left hand once, I would have believed it. But three times? No, that’s not what right-handed people do. They drink with their right hands.”
An intense wave of apprehension swept through me, as though I’d been caught in a sudden and raging blizzard, trapped on the side of a mountain. My breathing tightened. My hammering heart thundered in my ears. Ruby reached out to steady me, but her eyes were affright as well.
“I figured out what you’d done, and I followed that whore you hired to her home. Too bad for her she lives alone.”
“What have you done?” I said. My dark voice came out just above a whisper.
“I’ll show you,” Uretsky said. “Watch your laptop.”
Uretsky, who still had control over my computer, loaded up a new Web page in the browser window. The page was blank except for the words “Now I know everything.”
“Ready?” Uretsky said. “Keep watching. It’s a slide show of sorts.” An image faded into view beneath those words. It showed Jenna lying on her back on a beige-colored carpet, her face frozen in a silent scream. Ruby screamed, too. A feeling of nausea overcame me as the room began to spin. The image of Jenna faded—one picture blending into another—and up came an image of Uretsky’s bloody pruning shears.
“No. No. No,” I said, hiding my face in my hands.
I looked up just in time to see the picture of the pruning shears dissolve slowly away. In its place came another string of words, which I managed to read even though my whole body was shaking with the intensity of a seizure. The words I read were “See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil.”
I positioned myself to block Ruby’s view of the laptop’s display screen. In my heart I knew what was coming next. A picture materialized on screen in the same manner as the others, fading into view beneath a grim headline.