Termination Man: a novel (31 page)

Nor could Alyssa’s attacker make any claim to abject loneliness or sexual deprivation. (
Not that either of these would have been valid excuses, anyway
.) Myers was a reasonably good-looking man of roughly thirty-five. He had a high-paying job, an Audi that drew stares from a mile away. How much trouble would a man like that have in attracting legitimate female company?

Donna knew that Shawn would have plenty of takers in the dating pool. And it caused her no small amount of anguish to admit that superficially, at least, she had initially seen Shawn Myers as the sort of man she might like to meet herself—a rich, young savior who could take her away from cleaning factory facilities late at night. A man who could rescue her from the month-to-month struggle to balance the household budget, to figure out the bookkeeping entries for the cleaning business. A man who would make sure that she would never again be alone.

Not that a man who drove an Audi would be interested in an early middle-aged single mother who drove a chemical-smelling van. Those initial thoughts about Shawn Myers had occurred before she realized that he was a creep, a pervert, and possibly a psychopath. The fact that she had been so easily fooled by his external appearance made her even angrier. Had she really become that desperate since her husband had left her?

Walking into the bathroom, she looked at her face in the mirror, at the frown lines that had recently furrowed their way into the skin of her forehead.

What is going to become of us
, Donna wondered.
How am I going to handle this by myself?

She had never felt so completely alone.

Alyssa hoped desperately that her mother would not hear her crying. As soon as Donna closed the bedroom door behind her, Alyssa put down the novel she had been reading—or rather pretending to read.

The tears came quickly, unexpectedly, a sudden break in the tension that had nearly overwhelmed her as she smiled and reassured her mother that yes, everything was all right—that what had happened in the hallway at UP&S had been no big deal. The fact was that it had been a
very
big deal.

Her skin still burned and crawled in the places where Shawn Myers had touched her against her will. He had groped her—suddenly and without any attempt to gain her consent, not that she would have granted it. No boy had ever touched her in those places. How could Shawn Myers have assumed that right unto himself?

She had been feeling more than a little vulnerable anyway, over the past year. Her father’s departure had finally sunk in. His absence was bad enough by itself; but it also meant that she and her mother were alone in the world.
Alone.
This had forced all sorts of new responsibilities onto Donna. Some of these Alyssa could not fully understand—but she could sense that her mother was in over her head.

And then there was the unfriendly environment of New Hastings High School, a place divided into a few reigning cliques, none of which Alyssa was likely to fit into. New Hastings High School was like a foreign country for her, an environment where she had to maintain her guard and keep others at a distance.

There was one boy at school whom she sort of liked: a tall, dark-haired boy named Noah. She and Noah were in three of the same classes. On several occasions she had caught Noah looking at her, sneaking glances during Mr. Markley’s biology class. She noticed that Noah often made excuses to talk to her. He was shy; and he would usually resort to some pretext, like asking her for a confirmation of the due date of a class assignment. These pretexts were transparent, and they delighted her despite their fundamental lameness. She had been wondering when Noah was going to make his move and actually ask her out.

Although Noah was attractive (at least in Alyssa’s opinion), he seemed to exist on the fringes of the main factions that dominated the social life at New Hastings High School. He was smart; he read books. Alyssa had figured that this factor might contribute to making them a good pair.

She would have been more than willing to let Noah kiss her. Yes, definitely. And as for anything else—well, they could take that as it came.

But even that much seemed to be in doubt now. The idea of someday kissing Noah had once been a pleasant daydream for her. Now when she thought about Noah, his face seemed to merge with that of Shawn Myers. After all, Noah might be her own age, but he was nearly a man; and at least one man had already violated her in a deep and personal way.

What did all of this mean?
Would she ever be able to let her guard down? Would she ever be able to trust a boy?
Trust Noah?

Alyssa plunged her face into her pillow, still feeling Shawn Myers’s handprints on the most intimate spots of her body.

After slamming Shawn Myers against the wall that night, I had assumed that he would leave the cleaning woman’s daughter alone. Well, it turned out that I had been wrong about that—as I was wrong about a lot of things.

I knew something was up when I saw the police car pull into the front parking lot of the UP&S facility. It isn’t everyday that the police visit a private company. When they do, it generates a great deal of buzz in the workplace.

“Here comes a cop car,” someone in accounting said. Those five words caused about half of the office staff to turn away from their work and await the imminent spectacle. A few people even stood up from their desks and craned their necks in the direction of Route 128, the rural two-lane highway that ran in front of UP&S.

Lucy was seated in the desk adjacent to me, Alan’s empty desk forming a vast no-man’s land between us. Lucy was still inconsolable in the wake of Alan Ferguson’s sudden departure. Beth Fisk had told me about the awkward meeting she had held with Lucy on the day of the forced resignation. Beth informed me that Lucy took the news poorly—and her subsequent mood had corroborated Beth’s claim in this regard: The cop car was the sort of thing that would have sent Lucy into fits of speculation in the past. Now she simply glanced out the window, glanced back at me, and shrugged. She had completely retreated into her shell.

I knew that Lucy was still talking to Claire, though. That was more than a little ironic, considering the role that Claire had played in Alan’s termination. Lucy still trusted Claire, then. This also told me that Alan had not violated the terms of his separation agreement. If Lucy had attempted to contact him, her calls and emails had gone unanswered. Perhaps this was the primary reason for her moroseness: She felt that Alan had abandoned her.

“Well, anyway,” I said. “Something’s got to be up, if the police are coming.”

“Maybe,” Lucy allowed.

I watched the New Hastings police car as it made a right turn into the UP&S parking lot. It had been approaching from the north along Route 128, and I could see it across the flat, empty field that stood between the road and the factory grounds. (When the company selected a desk for me, they at least gave me one that faced the window.)

The police cruiser did not have its lights on. This set the tone for the exchange that followed—an exchange at which I was not present, which I only later learned the details of.

The officer in the police cruiser was Dave Bruner, the police chief of New Hastings. Bruner was in his early fifties. He had a trim, compact build that suggested a certain scrappiness during his younger days. Bruner had been in his current job longer than any local employee of UP&S. He had been police chief of New Hastings for nearly twenty years.

Bruner did not walk directly into the office, as would have been his right as an officer of the law. Instead he stopped off at the guard shack, where he asked Scott Cole, the day shift security guard, if he could be connected to Kurt Myers via one of the internal company lines.

Scott Cole lifted the receiver of his own phone set and dialed Kurt Myers’s extension. “Right away, Dave.” The two men were well acquainted. Scott Cole had retired from one of the police agencies in the next county.

When Scott handed him the telephone, Dave took a deep breath before speaking. “Mr. Myers,” he said. “Police Chief Bruner here. I regret this, Mr. Myers; but I have some rather unpleasant business that I need to discuss with you this morning. I think you’d prefer that we meet privately, perhaps in one of your rear offices. Yes, Mr. Myers, I’ll be right there.”

“Thanks, Scott,” Bruner said, handing the phone back. He proceeded to walk toward the room Kurt Myers had indicated via a circuitous route, passing through the employees’ entrance and into the factory area. He had seen the office staff gawking as he approached in his cruiser; he didn't want to turn this visit into a public circus.

This wasn't a “visit,” of course. He was here on official police business. As he walked between the yellow lines that indicated the safe passageway through the front of the factory, he noted the awed stares of the helmeted and goggled production workers. The uniform and the badge still drew respect, even if you were only the law in a small town that was barely large enough to be incorporated. Bruner briefly scanned the smoking, chirring factory floor to see if he could spot his wife. He didn't see her; but he knew that she would hear about his presence here. He would be talking about it tonight over the dinner table.

When Bruner arrived at the meeting room, he was not completely surprised to be greeted by a delegation: He recognized Beth Fisk as the HR rep that TP Automotive had installed at UP&S. He assumed that the man with the beard was a lawyer of some sort. And Kurt Myers himself. Everyone, it seemed, except for the person who had brought him here: Shawn Myers.

This was technically a breach of protocol, meeting with these three like this. But the reality was that sometimes exceptions were made. In the academy, he had learned a saying which every police officer knew, although it was not written down in any rulebook or official code of conduct:
The job of law enforcement is to service the rich, protect the middle class, and police the poor.
He supposed that he was doing that by coming to Kurt Myers first, giving him a chance to explain before he hauled the younger man away. And then there were his personal stakes. UP&S was not just another local business.

They all stood when Bruner entered the room, and Kurt Myers made the introductions: “Police Chief Bruner, this is Bernie Chapman, from TP Automotive’s legal division. I believe you might already know Beth Fisk.” Each of them shook hands with Bruner.

“Mr. Myers, I believe you might know why I’m here,” he said. “The woman who owns the cleaning company that services UP&S came into my office and claimed that your son, Shawn Myers, sexually assaulted her daughter.”

“A claim which my son categorically denies,” Kurt Myers said without missing a beat. “According to Shawn, words were indeed exchanged, but he made absolutely no sexual advances toward that girl. That is a categorical falsehood. However, Shawn was assaulted by the girl’s mother.”  

Dave Bruner struggled to restrain a groan. What Shawn Myers might actually be charged with was sexual battery, which was defined as nonconsensual touching for the sake of sexual arousal. In a case like this—with no witnesses—it was extremely difficult to prove, since the crime did not leave the sort of physical evidence associated with rape.

Sexual battery was what prosecutors and criminal defense lawyers referred to as a “wobbler.” It could technically be charged as either a misdemeanor or a felony. In this case, there were more factors than usual in favor of a felony charge: Alyssa had been a quasi-employee of UP&S, which placed Shawn Myers in a position of power over her. And then there was the most significant factor of all: Alyssa Chalmers was a minor. Weighed against those factors were the he-said-she-said nature of the accusations.

“Well,” said Kurt, “When TP Automotive made the decision to invest in New Hastings, we certainly weren’t anticipating this kind of trouble.” He shook his head. “We’ve had our share of employee and contractor problems at various locations before. But we’ve never had a false accusation of this magnitude leveled at a member of our management team. No doubt this Chalmers woman smells money. And I suppose that I can’t entirely blame her for it. From what I can discern, she’s desperate: A single mother trying to operate a struggling business. And I know that the local economy has been less than stellar in recent years. Still—our intention was to give the local residents a chance to help revive the economy through productive employment—not by leveling spurious claims and engaging in character assassination.”

“We are all very grateful to TP Automotive for their acquisition of this plant,” Dave Bruner said. “As you probably know, my own wife works in your quality control department.”

“Carol Bruner,” Kurt said with a paternal smile. “I haven’t had much interaction with Mrs. Bruner, but I’ve heard nothing but good things about her.”

“Thank you for saying so, Mr. Myers.” This was Bruner’s obligatory tip of the hat to TP Automotive’s man in charge. And Bruner was indeed grateful to the company that had rescued UP&S from the brink of financial oblivion—because that move had also rescued him from the brink.

A few years ago, at the height of a nationwide bubble in home prices, Dave Bruner and his wife had purchased a large two-story home on an adjustable rate mortgage—the type that pundits now asserted people were foolish to have even considered. But the economy had been strong then, and there was no indication that his own job would ever be in jeopardy. (
He had been the New Hastings police chief for fifteen years, after all.
) And Carol’s job at the then prosperous UP&S plant had also seemed secure. Moreover, the expensive new home was an investment: Everyone had known that real estate offered the most reliable, secure returns over time.