Thirty-One
The following Monday evening the group from the Scarlet Society was silent and somber as they gathered in my office. It was our second meeting and I still didn’t have a handle on them.
“Did you see the newspapers on Friday and over the weekend about Timothy Wheaton?” Shelby asked me even before everyone was seated.
I nodded.
“He was someone else we knew. From the society.”
“Really? That’s very disturbing. And probably very frightening for you.” I had guessed at what she was telling me but acted as if I didn’t. How could I explain prior knowledge? “I’m very sorry about Timothy. About your loss,” I said, addressing the whole group.
Shelby nodded, accepting the condolences.
“Should we get started?”
No one said anything for a few seconds. They looked at one another. Anne spoke. “There’s no way that this could be a coincidence.” Once again she was all in black and wearing the oversize sunglasses that hid so much of her face.
“How does that make you feel?”
Ellen answered with a hostility that surprised me. She wore a forest-green suit that looked like Chanel, and a large emerald ring gleamed on her left hand. “How are we supposed to feel? We knew these men. Intimately. For years we shared something private with them. Something that was special. And amazing.”
“In the paper, the police said that they haven’t yet discovered where their bodies are,” Davina said. Her voice was not as robust as I remembered it from the week before.
“That’s just a matter of time,” said Liz, who once again was wearing jeans, a button-down shirt, soft brown suede blazer and boots. Her briefcase was in her lap and her elbows rested on it.
Bethany, who had been mostly silent throughout the first session, spoke up. She had a slight southern accent and looked familiar to me from the tape now that I had seen it more than once. “You just don’t have any emotional attachment to this.”
Several of the other women sat up straighter in their chairs. Davina leaned forward. Ginny uncrossed her arms. They were preparing, but for what?
“Exactly what is that supposed to mean?” Liz asked in a voice laced with acid.
“That you don’t care about any of this the way the rest of us do. You were angry with them all, anyway. You’ve been complaining for months,” Bethany explained.
“Angry?” Liz laughed.
I didn’t interrupt. This interaction was important-not just for them, but for me. I needed to have them act out their relationships so that I could learn how they related to one another.
“You told me you were,” Bethany said.
“That was a private conversation.”
“It might help if you talked about it with all of us, Liz,” I suggested.
She didn’t say anything.
“Why were you angry at Timothy and Philip?”
Liz remained quiet.
Ellen started to speak, “I think that what Liz means-”
“I think it would be better for Liz to explain herself,” I interrupted, then refocused my gaze on Liz. “Now that we know you were angry, why don’t you tell us why? I know it’s very difficult to be angry with someone only to have them suddenly die. We’re left with feelings that we don’t know how to process. Regrets and guilt are difficult to deal with on your own.”
“Regrets?” Liz’s high-pitched laugh verged on hysteria. “Everything is fine with the whole concept of the Scarlet Society as long as the men want you. But when they don’t, all the same old shitty problems of being a woman are right there, waiting for you, taunting you. It’s no different than in society at large.”
No one said anything for a minute.
“What are you talking about?” Anne finally asked in an empathetic voice.
Liz crossed her arms over her chest as if she was going into hibernation and didn’t answer. I let a full thirty seconds pass.
“What if someone is stalking the men from our group?” Shelby asked, directing her question at me.
“Why are you changing the subject?”
“I think we need to talk about this.”
“Why, Shelby? Do you think that’s what is happening?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that Liz sat immobile, her face rigid with anger.
“Well, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that two of the men who are part of our organization have been killed in the same way, do you?” Shelby asked.
“On more than one level, no. I don’t believe in coincidences.”
“And other than members of the society, no one knows who we are,” Martha said. “Hell, we don’t even know who one another is. Not really.” She wore tinted glasses that evening, not dark enough to hide her eyes, but blue and large enough that they altered her appearance. She was dressed casually in black jeans, a pale blue sweater and a herringbone jacket. “How could someone figure out who the men were, short of them having revealed it?”
“Philip wouldn’t have told anyone,” Anne said. “He had a wife and children and a public life that mattered to him. He wouldn’t have told anyone. The only way he could have both us and his career was to keep our secret.”
“We all feel that,” Davina said.
“All of us,” Ginny echoed.
The room lapsed into a moment of silence.
“What are we supposed to do now, though?” Anne asked. “Should we keep going to meetings? Should we close the society?”
“No.” Shelby was adamant, and shook her head as she spoke. “No.”
Around the room others nodded, agreeing with her.
“You seem so certain,” I said.
“We have to trust one another,” Shelby continued. “Everything about the Scarlet Society is based on trust. We are stronger than any outside force. What we do is our right. No one can scare us into giving up those rights.”
When she made statements like that, I could feel the collective body sway in her direction. They didn’t look at her with blind devotion. Shelby was not a guru to them, but she was their chieftain. And they-women who were stronger than most in their hunger and their need for power-yielded to her.
“The newspaper didn’t say anything about them belonging to the group,” Liz said grudgingly. “How do we know that their deaths are connected through us? Isn’t it possible for two men to have been killed in Manhattan without it being a conspiracy?”
“It might be helpful to talk about your individual feelings for Philip and Timothy instead of trying to figure out who perpetrated the crimes,” I said, addressing the group. For one thing, I wanted to get them back on track. The purpose of our sessions was to help the women involved deal with their emotions over the deaths. Feelings that they had no other outlet for except in this room.
They waited, all of them, for someone to go first. And I waited with them. Finally, Martha spoke.
“I don’t know how to do this.”
“Just talk about them. About what was special about them. What you remember.”
She stared at me for a time. “Philip could-” She broke off.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Whatever I say, it’s all going to be about sex. About how he was so happy when you told him what to do, when you pushed him to hold off on coming, the longer you forced him-see? It’s wrong. We can’t talk about them like that, about what they were like to fuck.”
“Why?”
“Because…” But she didn’t have a reason.
Next, Shelby tried. “Timothy had very strong arms. He worked out. He could lift you up and keep you in the air and while he was doing that he would be high up inside you.” She shook her head. “This is more complicated than I thought it would be.”
“Why do you feel that it’s wrong to talk about these men the way you knew them best? You had sex with them. Did you know them any other way?”
“I talked to them-both of them,” Anne said. “Often. About what they liked, about why they liked it. That’s part of how I was with them. To hear them talk about what it felt like to be powerless. To have me be the one in charge. But how do you talk about a lover after he’s died when he wasn’t in any other part of your life?”