"Are you okay, hon?" Jake asked as he saw that Helen's trembling was getting worse.
"I'm... I'm gonna be sick," she said, dropping the letter to the floor. She scrambled into the bathroom and Jake heard violent retching coming from within. She was in there for more than five minutes. Finally, the water ran as she brushed her teeth and she emerged, still looking a little pale and ill.
"Are you okay?" he asked her.
"Jesus Christ, Jake," she said. "You could've warned me."
"Sorry," he said. "I wanted you to see that this woman is dangerous."
"She's a fuckin' psycho!" Helen yelled. "Holy shit! I need to call the cops!"
"I already did," Jake said.
"You did? What did they say? Are they going to arrest her?"
"There's nothing they can do," he said. "I called the LAPD, who I don't really have a great relationship with, and they basically told me to go pound sand. They say there's no crime until she actually attempts to assault you or me."
"Wonderful," Helen said.
"I also called the Ventura Sheriff's Department. They were, at least, a little friendlier with me, if not very helpful. They said the same thing LAPD did, that there's nothing they can do until she actually makes some sort of move on you. They said if you see her creeping around near your house, that, coupled with the letters she's written, might be enough to get you a temporary restraining order against her."
"Which is nothing but a piece of paper," Helen said.
"Correct," Jake agreed. "They did also promise to send patrol cars by your house a few times a day and at night, just to check on things. Very nice of them, I will agree, but not very helpful in the great scheme of things."
Helen slumped down on the bed. Her shirt had ridden up, displaying her nude crotch to his view, but somehow, the sight was not as sexy as it had been a few minutes before. He took a sip of his wine and then lay down next to her. He brushed the hair from her eyes and kissed her on the nose. "I'm sorry about all this, babe," he told her. "I really didn't want to spring this on you the night before we go to Martha's Vineyard, but I thought you would want to know about this."
"It's okay," she said, taking his hand in hers and squeezing it. "I just need to figure out what I'm going to do about this."
"You know what I'm going to suggest," he said.
She nodded. "I know," she said. "Come move in here with you."
"You'll be much safer," Jake said. "My house is pretty secure, there's always someone here, and if we need the cops, they get here a lot faster."
"And I'll be forty miles from where I work," Helen said, "and I'll be moving in with you because of security, not because I think it's time for us to move in together."
"I know," Jake said, "but under the circumstances, don't you think..."
She was shaking her head. "No, Jake," she said. "And not just for those two reasons either. I'm not going to let this psycho bitch chase me out of my house. I love my house. I worked hard and saved for years in order to buy it and I'm not going to run away from it just because some whack-job is obsessed with my famous boyfriend. Do you understand where I'm coming from?"
"Yeah," he said with a sigh. "I do."
They lay there together in silence for a few minutes, staring at the ceiling fan spinning above them. Jake had a few sips of his wine. Helen left hers untouched.
"If you're not going to move out," Jake finally said, "will you at least let me make your house a little more secure?"
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"Alarm system, motion detectors, automatic security lighting out in front and back. The same stuff I have here."
"Jake, that'll cost a fortune," she said.
"I have a fortune," he told her. "Let me get someone working on it tomorrow and it'll be done by the time we get back from the wedding."
She wanted to say no. Jake could tell just by looking at her face. Helen was incredibly proud and incredibly stubborn. She couldn't quite bring herself to reject his offer, however. "Okay," she said. "That sounds like a good idea. But I'm going to pay you back."
"Don't worry about it," Jake said. "It won't be that much money."
"With interest," she added.
"Okay," he said, giving in. "You'll pay me back with interest."
"You're just jerking me off," she accused. "You have no intention of taking my money, do you?"
"Are you kidding?" he asked her. "Of course I'm gonna take your money. And if you're late with a single fucking payment, I'm gonna send some people over to your pad to thump on you a little."
She smiled, the first she'd offered since reading the letter. "You're an asshole," she said.
"True," he agreed. "And that's why you love me, isn't it?"
"No," she said. "I don't love you at all. This was all an elaborate scheme to score myself a new security system."
He chuckled. "Still want to score something else as well?" he asked.
"I might be persuaded," she said.
"You might be?"
"I might be," she confirmed.
As it turned out, she didn't require all that much persuasion.
Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts
June 14th, 1989
The wedding rehearsal took several hours to complete, as all members of the wedding ceremony ran through their respective roles over and over at the direction of a flamboyantly gay wedding planner named Irving Grand. Irving became a little peeved with Jake when Jake refused to perform the actual song he would be singing at the ceremony.
"You have to practice it here, Jake," he'd cried dramatically on several occasions. "You, as a musical performer, must realize the importance of careful rehearsal prior to performance."
"I rehearsed it enough before I left," Jake said. "I won't screw it up when the time comes to play it. I'm a professional."
"But we must know the timing of the piece," Irving said. "We must know how it fits in with the ambience of the ceremony so we may adjust the events that occur after it accordingly!"
"It's two minutes and thirty-four seconds in length," Jake told him. "And it's a mellow love song that will fit in perfectly with a wedding ceremony."
"But..."
"No buts," Jake said. "Not a single person on Earth has heard this song yet except me. I haven't even run it by Helen. And the first time it is heard by ears other than mine will be during the ceremony it was specifically written for. If it'll make you feel better, I'll throw down another two-minute and thirty something second tune during the rehearsal to fill in the space."
Irving didn't like this, but eventually accepted that it was the best he was going to get. He agreed, and Jake performed an acoustic guitar version of Molly Malone, the Irish folk ballad, timing it to make it last two and a half minutes. During the first run-through the other members of the wedding party clapped and sang along, further irritating Irving.
"Interesting choice of replacement tune," said Celia, who had been one of the ones clapping along. "A song about a girl who dies young."
"I've always liked that song," Jake said. "My mom used to sing it when I was a kid. And, since it was written sometime in the 1800s, no one holds the copyright on it. No one can take legal action against me for doing a public access tune."
"I guess not," Celia agreed.
In addition to rehearsing the ceremony, Jake and Helen were introduced to Celia's parents, who had been flown to Martha's Vineyard from Barquisimeto, Venezuela on a private Learjet chartered by Greg Oldfellow. Roberto Valdez was a tall, balding man of fifty-six, very foreboding looking although this impression quickly disappeared when you started talking to him. Maria Valdez was fifty-one and the resemblance to Celia was almost startling. She was tall, large bosomed, and had a thick mane of rich brunette hair. The aging process had been kind to her and she could have passed for Celia's older sister instead of her mother. Maria's command of the English language was spotty at best. She understood everything that was said to her but sometimes lapsed into Spanish when replying. She, like her husband, was very pleasant but seemed overwhelmed at the grandeur in which she found herself.