Chapter Seven

“What… what…” was all Maddie could manage to say as she moved faster and faster, looking at page after page. “Oh…oh, no….”

She looked up at her parents and at Kathy.

“Look… look at all this…,” her voice trailed off, and she thrust the pages toward them.

Chase reached out and took some from her.

“These… are these bank records?”

Her mother said, “Oh, my word… Kathy, look at these. What is this?”

Kathy scanned the twelve pages Maddie’s mother had handed her.

“Wow,” Kathy muttered, turning red. “Um… Deborah, those are screenshots of… um…some pretty explicit conversations in an …um… alternative lifestyle chat room.”

“And these pages,” Maddie managed, “are filled with very disturbing and bigoted remarks…”

At the very last page of the stack, Maddie paused, then flinched as if she’d been struck.

“What, honey?” her father asked.

She held out the last page to him.

“Dear Madeleine,” Chase began to read aloud, “I know you didn’t know that your husband was into any of this, and I felt you deserved to know who and what he really was. Here’s all his logins and passwords, if you would rather check it out for yourself. I know seeing all this hurts you, and I’m sorry for that. But you needed to know just how big a lie Eric Nibless was living.”

“We need to get the police over here,” Kathy piped up. “They need to see all this, take it into evidence, maybe. I’d say chances are pretty damn good it’s related to his death.”

“I’ll go get the detective’s card,” Deborah said, and moved toward the kitchen counter where she’d seen it last.

Maddie nodded dully as her brain tried desperately to process everything she’d just seen.

Some of the most horrible, hateful things I’ve ever read…. and chatting with strange men to arrange hookups?

From the corner of her eye she saw her father’s face turning crimson with rage.

“These pages here are only partly bank records. Some of these pages are screenshots of my company’s accounting system. And they show money flowing out of my company and into an overseas account that I have no knowledge of,” he thundered. “It sure as hell looks like Eric was stealing from me.”

Maddie rose from the couch.

“I don’t feel well, I’m going to go lie down,” she murmured.

She managed to take seven steps before the room began to spin and close in on her, then she lost consciousness and crumpled in a heap to the floor.

Both the police and an ambulance were summoned to Maddie’s home.

“I’m all right,” Maddie protested weakly. “I just… got overwhelmed, is all.”

“You went down hard, Mad,” Kathy retorted. “Please cooperate, let them check you out. Okay?”

“Okay,” Maddie whispered.

The emergency tech taking her vitals chimed in.

“You have a pretty nasty bump on your head, ma’am. It wouldn’t surprise me if you have a concussion.”

***

“I have some news,” Mason said through clenched teeth as his project team and upper management waited expectantly.

“Some of you may have noticed that the server seems to be acting up. Can’t access project files this afternoon that you could this morning, right?”

Several team members nodded.

“That’s because they’re gone,” Mason announced solemnly. “All of them. Wiped clean. And Toby Mitting is MIA.”

“That son of a bitch,” Allen, Mason’s business partner and VP of Operations, muttered loudly, then said, “Sorry, Mason.”

“Don’t be,” came Mason’s answer. “Because right now, I feel exactly the same way.”

“What do we do now?” one team member asked.

“I’ve got some older copies of all those files on my home unit,” Mason revealed. “But they’re two weeks out of date, at least, and as we all know, the last twenty or so days we’ve really been moving and shaking on this thing. Tons of new stuff, good stuff, that we need is now history.”

His accounting manager raised her hand.

“Mason,” Jennifer said. “I know it may not help very much, but we recently enabled server backups to the Cloud, remember? So hopefully, at least part of what’s missing is still intact out there. And, we also have coverage for this type of activity in our insurance policy. I think it would be a good idea to make some calls, file a claim.”

“You’re right, Jennifer, I’d forgotten about all that. Yes, let’s get together right after this.” He cleared his throat.

“Okay, so, if any of you have any file copies saved somewhere other than the main server – like your desktop – then I need to know as soon as possible. If you do, we might be able to salvage at least part of all this.”

***

Meanwhile, at the Nibless residence, Detective Kenney was pulling on gloves before he picked up any of the pages Maddie had received in the mail. A member of Flower Mound’s crime scene processing team was already sliding the manila envelope into an evidence bag.

“Pictures of each page, then bag them, please,” Kenney directed, and the tech nodded.

Kenney stepped over to Chase and Deborah.

“Walk me through it,” he said simply.

“There’s not much to tell, really. We came back from the funeral home, and Kathy went and brought the mail in,” Chase told him. “Maddie opened the package, turned white as a sheet and showed us the pages, and we called you.”

“All right. We’ll need fingerprint samples from each of you, to compare against any on the pages,” Kenney told him, “so that we can eliminate them. Hopefully, there will be at least one good print somewhere in all those that won’t match any of yours, and we’ll have something to go on.”

When the tech had bagged the last page, Kenney nodded. “I’ll be in touch.”

***

Maddie did indeed have a mild concussion, as it turned out. On the emergency room doctor’s orders, she took it easy the next few days.

But in the middle of it all was the day of the funeral, which taxed her to her very limits.

She followed Mr. Gates as he led the family procession into the chapel where Eric’s casket was on display. Closed, of course. Whoever had taken his life had done so much damage that Mr. Gates had gently told Maddie, “You really need to have a closed casket service, dear, trust me on this.”

As she sat in the front row, staring listlessly at the flower arrangements, Maddie listened to the pastor talk about her husband’s life, and it was all she could do not to laugh out loud.

If you only knew, Preacher, she scoffed internally. He was a complete fraud! Managed to fool every single person he ever met. I wonder if there was ever anything real about him at all.

She closed her emotions off to keep herself from screaming them out at the top of her lungs and derailing the entire service.

Cause boy howdy, wouldn’t that just make old Caroline’s day?

With effort, she stifled the giggle that thought summoned.

Keep it together, Mad. Keep it together. Fall apart when you get home, honey. You can do this.

She almost broke when the mourners in attendance began to file past the family and lie after lie of ‘he was a great man’ was heaped on her psyche like so many cement blocks.

The single thing that kept her from coming completely undone was the realization that all these people didn’t know the truths about Eric that she did.

Only blessing in all this, really, is that at least the rest of the world doesn’t know what he really was.

She managed to get through the rest of the service, and the graveside ceremony, and the house full of well-wishers.

At long last, the crowd dissipated, and she was finally among the ones she knew she could completely trust – Kathy, and her parents.

They all offered to stay overnight with her, but she declined politely.

“I love you, and I know you’re worried about me,” she told them. “But right now, I just want to soak in the tub with a glass or two of wine, then go to bed. I’m all right, I promise.”

“At least come over for breakfast tomorrow,” Deborah stressed.

“I will, Mom.”

Maddie saw them out, grabbed a glass and the bottle of wine, and headed upstairs to her garden tub. She dropped a lavender bath bomb into the steaming water as the tub filled, then climbed in and poured herself a glass of sangria.

Fifteen years, she reflected as she drank. Not just gone, like I thought when I realized I was going to get divorced. Nope. Gone was an understatement. A complete fabrication, is what they were…

My whole existence all that time was built on lies.

The tears ran unchecked down her face and swirled unnoticed into the fragrant water.