Prior Bad Acts

35

CAREY SAT ON the love seat in the den for a long time, doing nothing, thinking nothing, staring at nothing. The house was absolutely silent. The tension that had charged the air was gone. She felt drained, empty.

Around ten-thirty, Anka quietly came downstairs and stopped just outside the den.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Moore?”

Carey waved a hand. “No, but there’s nothing to do about it. Are you going out?”

“Only to pick a movie and get some popcorn. Can I bring something for you?”

“No. Thank you, Anka.”

The girl lingered at the doorway a moment longer, seeming like she wanted to say something more. But if she had, she thought better of it.

Carey went back to staring, feeling nothing. She wondered what she would feel the next day, and the day after that. Relief? Anxiety? And she wondered how Lucy would react to her father’s sudden absence.

David was a different person with Lucy. With their daughter, he was the man she had married-sweet, fun, brimming with promise. His relationship with Lucy was pure love, untainted by what the rest of his life had become. With Lucy he had no track record. She only cared that he was her daddy. Her expectations were simple. He had yet to disappoint her.

Carey purposely didn’t wonder what David was feeling or doing. She told herself she didn’t care. She didn’t care. What did that say about her? About their marriage?

Restless, she got up from her seat and walked around the room. She still hurt everywhere, and her head was pounding. A Vicodin and bed sounded like the best plan.

As she walked around behind David’s desk, photos of Lucy caught her eye. David’s screen saver was a slide show of their daughter dressed up in her various costumes-the princess, the fairy, the ballerina.

Carey sat down in the desk chair and watched the images float across the screen. Lucy was the spitting image of herself as a child-impish grin, bright blue eyes, an unruly mop of dark hair that had eventually given up its curls.

Oh, to be that innocent again.

The computer mouse rested on its small green pad beside the keyboard. Only vaguely curious, she moved the mouse and clicked on the AOL icon at the bottom of the screen.

What came up and filled the screen was as far removed from the innocence of a child as anything could have been.

What came on the screen was a scene of such degradation, it made Carey feel ill and dizzy, as if she’d just gotten hit in the head all over again.

A naked woman bound and gagged, hung spread-eagled from chains on her wrists and ankles, blood running down her arms. She was being raped by two men wearing leather hoods to cover their faces, one behind her, one in front of her. She appeared to be terrified.

This was what her husband had been looking at when she had come to tell him she wanted a divorce. Carey began to shake. She moved the cursor to the Web address bar and clicked on the downward arrow, bringing up a listing of every Web site David had looked at for who knew how long. Porn site after porn site.

She clicked on an arrow, and another photograph, equally violent as the first, popped up.

It took a moment for her to recover enough from the shock to process the rest of the page-the title, the graphics. It was a promotion for a movie available on DVD or VHS. The ad promised savage sadism, violent scenes of torture and rape.

The film was by David M. Greer.