“I still can’t get over how stupid I was! If only I’d driven by his alleged home in Dublin, or at least checked to see if he really was a member of that neighborhood church. Then I would’ve known that something was wrong and…”
Sam cut her off, “Ann, dear, listen to me. Don’t blame yourself for what you could have done. Remember that first of all, you had no reason to suspect Jerry Rankin of anything. He was just some good looking guy who happened to meet you at the supermarket and then one thing led to another until you eventually went out with him. Stanley knew that the church story and his falsified residence in Dublin was a gamble, but he was banking on the hunch that you wouldn’t check up on him in the time it would take him to accomplish what he’d set out to do.”
Ann sighed. “I guess you’re right. But how come I never once noticed that he’d been in the house, or that he’d bugged the phones? How in the hell could he get away with all of that and neither Amy nor I notice anything?”
Sam lit up a cigarette and replied, “The guy was a fucking master sleuth-that’s all I can say. Roger learned that Stanley had always been a spy freak-read every secret agent book he could get his hands on when he was a kid. Used to read them late at night while his parents were asleep. His parents are yet another story altogether, by the way. It’s little wonder why Stanley ended up being so psychotic and fucked up. Anyway, James Bond was his hero and by the time Stanley was thirteen or so, he’d become obsessed with agent 007 and started fantasizing about being a spy. He used to sneak out of his house at night and go peep-tomming all over town. Got pretty good at it apparently-he never once got caught. Had he gotten caught, his mother probably would have murdered him. He spent a great deal of time casing you out back then, by the way.”
“I know, he told me,” Ann moaned.
“Anyway, he told Roger that this Larry Underwood kid peeping at Amy just about blew his cover. Apparently, Stanley had been in the back of the house one night screwing around with the telephone wires when he heard the Underwood kid climbing over the fence. Stanley ran around the side of the house just in time and hid in the bushes. Then he watched the kid as he proceeded to peep into the bathroom window presumably at Amy as she showered. Stanley realized that the boy could eventually pose a problem for his own agenda but he wasn’t quite sure how to deal with him. He couldn’t bust the kid, not then, anyway, because the kid would most likely wonder what in the hell Stanley was doing there in the backyard. So Stanley started keeping a keen eye on the Underwood kid as he spied on Amy over the next couple of weeks, trying to determine his routine. Then, once Rankin had “accidentally” met you and became a legitimate presence in your life, he struck. He had a hunch that Larry Underwood would come around on the night of Amy’s homecoming dance so when he did, Stanley was ready for him. Roger said that Stanley had wanted to, quote, ‘murder the fucking amateur,’ but opted instead to merely rough the boy up a bit.”
“This is incredible!” Ann shuddered, imagining two different deranged nut cases invading her property.
“Scary, isn’t it? The Underwood kid may become another Stanley Jenkins some day, for all we know. I’d be sure to tell Amy to keep a very close eye on that one!”
“God, Sam. What is the world coming to?”
“I don’t know, babe. I’m starting to think that the parents are to blame for a lot of the insanity that goes on anymore. Like I was saying before, parents can push their kids too far and you end up with a case like Stanley Jenkins. His parents, particularly his mother, apparently never gave him any breathing room. They demanded too much of him and wouldn’t let him have any kind of normal social life. Stanley retaliated, became a total sociopath lost in his own little world of perverse espionage. And the older he got, the more dangerous he became.”
“What’s to become of him, you think?”
“Roger thinks he’ll plead insanity. Probably spend the rest of his life in an institution. He’s got to face charges in New York and Colorado, too, keep in mind. They’ll put him away for good, one way or another, you can rest assured.”
“No chance of the death penalty?”
“Nope, I don’t think so. The guy’s a nut and they won’t hang a nut.”
“God help us all if he escapes!” Ann exclaimed.
“Tell me about it.”
“One thing has really been bothering me,” Ann said. “And that’s why Marsha never told me about her and Sara’s little scheme at the basketball game. I remember telling her about Stanley asking me out at the time and she just chuckled and never said any more about it. That wasn’t like her, to keep something from me like that.”
Sam heaved a sigh. “Do you suppose that Sara Hunt may have had something to do with that? I mean, you and Sara never got along and Marsha was hanging out with Sara around that time. Maybe Marsha felt a little ashamed at herself having been a part of the scheme and was simply too embarrassed to fess up to it.”
“You may be right, come to think about it. I can see Marsha reacting that way.”
“At any rate, It was a deadly mistake on her part, in retrospect,” Sam added grimly.
“I know.”
“I have a confession to make,” Sam announced. “I wasn’t going to tell you this, but I’ve just decided to tell you after all. It might make you feel a little better.”
“What is it?” Ann asked suspiciously.
“You weren’t the only one suckered by Stanley Jenkins. I was, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“The night that Shelley Hatcher came to see me was the first time I’d seen her since our divorce. It was really late at night-about 2:00 A.M.-and I wondered at the time why in the hell she’d come out of the clear blue like that after all of this time. When I asked her about it, she told me that she wanted me to see her photo portfolio so I could give her my assessment of it. It had been pouring rain to beat the band that night and she had traveled all the way from Kentucky just to show me her fucking portfolio? Well, I was skeptical, to say the least.
“Anyway, I looked it over-it was okay but not that great-and I started thinking that she had really come over to get some romantic thing going. Well, one thing led to another and we ended up sleeping together that night. Of course, I figured that my hunch was right-“
“Why are you telling me this, Sam?” Ann interrupted, angry and hurt.
“Hold on, sweetie-there’s more.”
“I don’t want to hear it!”
“Yes, you do. Hear me out, okay? I promise you that you’ll want to hear this.”
“Okay, if you insist,” Ann replied irritably.
“It turns out that Shelley had truly come to show me her portfolio. Earlier that day, Shelley had been at a McDonald’s having lunch-she works at a jewelry store in Ashland-and she just so happened to have taken her portfolio with her. A man sitting at her table saw her looking through her pictures and asked if he could take a look at them. Shelley said sure, so the guy checked out her photos. When he was through, he told her that they were excellent, adding that he of course wasn’t a photo critic by any stretch of the imagination.
“He then asked Shelley if she had shown her portfolio to someone in the business recently-to get an honest professional opinion. She mentioned that the only pro she could think of offhand was her old mentor at the newspaper she had used to work at, which of course happens to be yours truly. The stranger insisted that she should by all means look me up and show me her work as soon as possible; that, for all she knew I could line her up with some work. This got her wheels turning and the seed was planted for her to pay me a visit. Now, would you like to take a stab at who this stranger was?”
“Stanley?” Ann replied, incredulous.
“Right, it was our boy.”
“But why?”
“Don’t you get it? Stanley wanted to assure his success with you so he was determined to do anything he could to achieve that goal. He knew that if he could somehow get Shelley and me back together, even if it was only for a chat, there was the slim chance that it would somehow get back to you. That would of course caused more dissension between us, which we know it did, and as a result would sort of help clear the way for him to get you to fall for him that much easier.”