“I listened to your phone messages.”
“You what?”
“You heard me. You’re having a-I don’t even know what to call it-Is it called an affair if it’s with a child?”
His heart seemed to him to have stopped, but then he felt it begin to pound. He could barely breathe. “What on earth would make you say that?”
“Jesus, Ted! I heard her message. I asked Maria’s daughter if she knew her from school, and she did. The girl is barely fourteen, Teda child. You’ve been sleeping with a child.” She couldn’t say it without having her mouth contort so her face became a mask of horror and despair. “There’s a doctor, a psychiatrist, who specializes in this kind of thing. Diane Bidwell’s cousin Burt was seeing him, and she thinks he saved his life. It was completely confidential.”
“Until Diane found out.”
“I remember the doctor’s name, so we don’t have to ask some other doctor for a referral or something. It can be completely-“
“Stop right there,” he said. “Don’t even finish. The answer is no.”
“It’s not that simple. This problem isn’t going away. You can’t have sex with children. If anyone finds out, you’ll go to prison. And if this Kylie Miller is leaving messages like that on your voice mail, how long will it take? Her parents, her teachers, her friends, somebody, will find out.”
Ted Forrest snorted. “This is actually pretty funny. You’re completely wrong. She’s just a kid who wants a summer job in the Forrest Enterprises office. She went in and talked to Denise, and Denise has been trying to set up an interview. That’s all.” He was aware that his voice was too flat, but he hoped she hadn’t noticed.
“Denise gives out your personal phone number to job applicants?”
“Sometimes. Why not? This is a high school girl, not a stalker.”
“Ted, this isn’t a game. It isn’t just the usual infidelity. I’m used to that. When you first stopped wanting me, I knew you had to be having sex with someone, and for a few years I tried to always know who. I found out about your friends’ wives because I confronted one of them and she told me. I knew about the ones in your office because of the way they treated me. I knew there must be others because I saw receipts for hotel rooms in San Francisco and Sacramento that you had to have used in the daytime. I always blamed myself for not being attractive enough or fun enough or something, and kept quiet. Not this time. We’ve got to get you into therapy now.”
“I know, inpatient therapy. Then, while I’m in some hospital so doped up I can’t walk out the door, you can be out here spending my money, right?”
“I’m trying to save you.”
“From what?”
“She’s a child.”
“She’s a couple of years younger than you were when I met you.”
“That whole period seems a lot different to me now than it did when I was seventeen and you were thirty. People talked, and now I know they were right to. You’ve got a problem, and you’ve got to admit it to yourself and see a doctor.”
“You’re a jealous woman who wants to lock me up. What sort of therapy do you recommend-chemical castration? This is the perfect revenge fantasy.”
“My fantasies aren’t that way, Ted. I dream about having a decent, normal life.”
“Great! Have one. Go behave the way you would have if you had never met me. Have a decent, normal life. I’ll pay you a salary. Find a nice guy. I’ll pay him a salary, too.”
“Are you so deluded you don’t see? You’re in trouble. If you’re already in voluntary therapy before anyone knows, we might be able to keep you out of jail. We might even be able to settle the lawsuit her parents file when they find out. And make no mistake, they will. She has no sense of propriety.”
He paced the foyer for a moment, then stopped in front of Caroline. “Listen carefully. You’re wrong about Kylie, and you’re wrong about me. You listened to a phone message in which a young local girl I don’t even know called for an interview appointment. Your imagination and your bitterness toward me magnified it into a big story. It isn’t.”
“I didn’t hear anything like that.” Caroline looked amazed, then confused. “You don’t seem to-” She stopped. “Didn’t you hear it? Oh, my God. I guess you didn’t. She called on the line in your office. I saved it after I heard it so I could hear the others.” She stepped across the foyer to the small door beside the library, went inside, and returned with the wireless telephone from his desk, punching the buttons for the messages. She stopped a few feet from him and handed it to him.
He took the telephone and turned away from her. “You have no new messages, and four saved messages. To hear your-” He pressed the one key and heard “Hi, Ted.” It was Kylie’s voice. “I called your cell phone, but it must have been off, so I figured I’d try your private line. I missed you tonight. I was hoping that I would be in bed right now. Not alone. With you, silly. Instead, I ended up at a stupid party with Tina. I couldn’t stand it, so I came home early and now I’m just lying here thinking about you.” He had heard enough. He pressed the three key and heard, “Message erased.”
He could think of nothing to say. Caroline knew who Kylie was and had found out how old she was. He was suddenly exhausted, his body stiff from sitting in the car, and his mind seemed to be racing, but nothing came to him. He walked to the staircase, set the phone on the step, picked up his suitcase, and prepared to climb.
“Ted?” She said it quietly at first, then, “Ted!”
“I don’t want to talk about it now.”
“You have no choice.”
“I have nothing to say to you.” He took the first step, and from the silence he knew she was following.
Her voice came from behind him. “You have one chance, Ted. One, and then it’s over. You can help me try to fix this-break it off with the girl, pay her off if necessary, get into therapy-or I’ll have to call the police.”
He spun around to look down at her. He felt his neck and temples pulsing. Caroline looked as though she were wreathed in a red haze. He saw her step backward, and her expression of alarm seemed to tell him what to do. She pivoted and leaned forward as though she was going to run.
In a second, he was on her. His arm shot out and hooked around her waist and swung her off her feet, and then he was half-carrying, half-dragging her across the foyer.
She shrieked, “You’re hurting me!”
He kept his arm around her waist and pulled her into the corridor that led toward the kitchen. He opened the door beside the pantry, held her at the top of the stairs to the basement, and turned on the light. She began to scream and struggle as though she thought he was going to throw her down the stairs, but he closed the door behind him, tightened his grip, and carried her down. She stopped screaming. Now she was just breathing hard from struggling against a bigger, stronger opponent.
Ted Forrest pulled her into the wine-tasting room with the theatrical-looking stone walls and false ceiling Caroline’s decorators had added, past the long table surrounded by leather chairs and the glass-fronted cabinets of glassware to the end of the room. He opened the heavy oak door to the wine cellar and turned on the light. As he pulled her inside the long, narrow room lined with wine racks that reached the edge of the arched ceiling and shut the door behind them, she began to scream again. “Shut up!” he said. “Nobody can hear you.”
She was wide-eyed and disheveled. “What are you doing? Are you crazy?”
“We’ve already had this conversation. No, I’m not crazy. I’m just giving you a chance to sit quietly for a while and think before you do something stupid that you can’t undo when you cool off. I want you to step back and consider the fact that you’re angry now because I’ve been seeing a younger woman.”