The Housekeeper - Chapter 59 Part 1 of 2

The Housekeeper

By Karen Singer

Chapter 59 Part 1 of 2

Janice felt a keen sense of accomplishment as she stared at the stack of neatly folded quilts against the wall that was now nearly waist high.  Each quilt contained a hidden fortune.  She was reminded though that she needed to make a number of quilts with no money inside as well.  But for now, she was far happier making them with the money in them.  She had run her hands carefully over every single quilt as she made them.  She could feel nothing out of the ordinary about them at all.  They were each… perfect!

With Candy out of the house most of the time, she was able to get a lot more done than when he was around.  Which reminded her of his latest request, he wanted to go on… a picnic trip with his doctor and her family next week.  He claimed the trip was to teach her son how to fish!  Ha!  She couldn’t care less about the doctor’s son.  He was just another stupid male that the planet would be better off without! 

But a picnic?  Candy had also said he wanted to ask his friends Stan and Jennifer to go along as well… making a party of it.  But the part that had ticked Janice off, was that he specifically requested that she and Carol not go because of the doctor.  Okay, in a way, Janice guessed she couldn’t blame the doctor for not wanting to be anywhere near her… after what she had done to her.  But as far as she was concerned, the stupid doctor should be nothing but grateful to her.  Not only did she not burden her with the things she did to most of her other victims, but she had made a major effort to keep the doctor away from the gambling tables for the rest of her life! 

She had done the doctor a big favor and consequently, the stupid doctor should be totally grateful to her for that!  And if she was too stupid to stay away from the gambling after what she had been through for the last few weeks, then she deserved whatever other punishment she got.  And as far as Janice was concerned, if she ever learned that the stupid woman had gambled again, then she would definitely put her through another major brainwashing session and wipe her brain clean!  Let her start all over again from scratch!  Maybe then she’d do a bit better.  Maybe!

As she cut out more squares to make more quilts, Janice briefly toyed with telling Candy to set up his… her picnic… and then show up anyway – despite telling them that she wouldn’t be there.  But no, if she said she would or wouldn’t do something, then she wouldn’t!  She was a woman!  It was a matter of honor! 

So should she let Candy go… have his fun picnic with his friends?  Or should she keep him home and let him finally start fixing up the outside of the house?  As nice as she had fixed up the inside of the house now, the place still looked like a dump when you drove up to it.  She should have kept him home today after church instead of letting him run off to go fishing again with his friend Stan. 

She finished cutting her square and glanced over at her stack of finished quilts.  Right now she didn’t want to let Candy see how she was hiding the money inside of them.  Keeping him away from home would give her more time to keep making the quilts.  And she needed to make a lot of quilts.  Lots and lots of quilts.  Tons of quilts!  She had planned for both her and Carol to be spending most of the summer doing just that.  Well, she would include her daughter just as soon as Carol stopped spending so much time with her friends.  But school was nearly done with now.  Her daughter had reportedly done quite well on all her exams.  Let her have a little fun with her friends.  She deserved it!

So what should she do about Candy and the picnic?  The question was still on her mind as she saw the mail truck pull up and drop off the mail.  A moment later, it was gone.  She put down her work and headed out to the mailbox to see what had arrived today.  More bills most likely.

She opened the mailbox and got a bit of a surprise.  There was a small box sitting on top of the rest of the mail.  She grabbed it and pulled it out to see what it was… Candy’s new business cards!  Grabbing the rest of the mail, she carried it all back into the house. 

She quickly attacked the wrappings on the business card box and opened it.  The box was stuffed full of cards.  She had to struggle a bit to get one out.  She looked at the card carefully, her face lighting up in a smile.  The cards had come out looking better than she had hoped.  They were… perfect!  She couldn’t wait to show them to Candy.  She had no doubt that he… she would love them.

She set the box of cards aside and went back to her quilt making.  So what should she do about Candy and the picnic?  She glanced at the stack of quilts that she had finished, and she thought about all the money that still needed to be hidden.  Like it or not, it was probably better to keep him away from home as much as possible for now.  So she supposed she would let him have his little picnic… but she was going to demand something else from him in return!

Roger felt elated… and completely horrified.  Janice had told him he could arrange his fishing trip with Doctor Parker and her family.  He could even invite Stan and Jennifer to go as well.  And Janice had promised that she and Carol would stay out of it.  That part was just fine.  It was the other things that Janice had told him that now had him sunk into a major depression and fighting a losing battle against crying.  And the things that Janice had demanded, in reality, had nothing to do with the fishing trip.

As he sat on the floor in his room, he stared at one of his new business cards that Janice had created for him.  Just staring at the thing made him lose his crying battle and he broke down in tears… the tears fuzzed his vision a bit, but the images on the cards were already firmly burned into his mind.  “Candy Girl the Handy Girl.”  That part was really no surprise.  He wasn’t all that fond of the bold pink script font that had been used for it though.  The pink script stood out all too prominently and looked all too feminine.  His name of course was listed on the card as Candy Brinkley, but seeing it there was like putting another nail in his coffin.  Every single day now he was moving faster and faster towards no longer being Roger, and becoming Candy instead.  Every single day!  He hated waking up in the mornings now and checking his face and body for changes.  He was more than sure now that the very contours of his face were starting to change.  And that didn’t even count the other little changes in his body.

He stared at the little logo picture that Janice had created for the cards.  It was both ingenious… and humiliating at the same time.  She had somehow drawn a picture of a hammer… and morphed the handle of it into a high heeled boot!  Ingenious… and humiliating… and oddly, he couldn’t help but kind of like it.  But then he was noticing lately that he was starting to look at many things differently now.

The entire business card looked like something for a woman.  And yet his business was in reality something associated with men.  As Jessica had told him, conflicting images.  Something he knew he needed to work on – like it or not.  Which would be yet another of many nails in Roger’s coffin. 

He needed to work on his feminine image, and as part of that he was now looking for someplace to do laser hair removal, not just from his face, but from his whole body as well.  That was something else that Janice had demanded just a little while ago.  As far as Janice was concerned, the laser treatments were a necessity, but they were also a medical procedure that Doctor Jessica should pay for.  He didn’t know how well Jessica was going to receive that bit of news.

But the laser treatments and needing to do more feminine things to help bolster his new image were seemingly small things considering the other demand that Janice had just made of him.  That demand was almost as big as everything else he had been doing to become Candy.  Since school was nearly out, Janice had demanded that he legally change his name from Roger to Candy.  And as much as he didn’t want to do it, the impossible grey wall that removed his ability to not do it was more firmly intact than ever.  Since it was Janice’s will, then he had no other choice but to do it.  As soon as he finished talking with Jessica in a few minutes, he was going to have to start researching how to legally change his name from Roger to Candy.

Just thinking about it caused him to break down again in an even stronger bout of sobbing.

The tip came into the Atlanta police department early Monday afternoon.  One of the drug pushers that they had picked up more than a few times in the past had just made a major buy.  They wouldn’t have cared so much if it had been a smaller amount, but an entire kilo of heroin was too big to ignore.  It took them three hours to find the pusher and arrest him.  The pusher started yelling for his lawyer the moment they arrested him.  And this time, he was demanding to call his own lawyer.  He completely refused to answer any questions at all until his lawyer showed up so he was sent back to wait in one of their cells. 

The police were more than a bit surprised at how fast the lawyer responded to the case.  They knew him somewhat from other cases.  He was a fairly high profile lawyer of Chinese decent with a very good win record in court.  His suit alone marked him as – expensive! 

The lawyer was allowed to talk with the pusher for a few minutes… a remarkably few minutes for the seriousness of the crime.  Then the bargaining began.  The lawyer offered full disclosure of the drug deal in return for the pusher being let go.  The District Attorney’s office refused to go for it.  The bargaining didn’t end until the following morning.  In the end, the police would get everything the pusher knew about who he got the drugs from, and the pusher would get a minimal three month prison sentence.  In reality, the pusher was thrilled.  The Chinese men who had offered him the deal to do this had said that he would most likely only get six months.  That alone was a small price to pay for the money they were offering.

With the lawyer present, the police interview with the pusher finally started.  The police flat out asked him where he got the drugs from.  The pusher told them he was approached by a man who had them and wanted to sell them.  The police asked him how much he paid for the drugs.  The pusher told them a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.  The police asked if he knew the man’s name.  The pusher said he didn’t, but he had done business with him once before.  The lawyer intervened a moment and suggested that in the spirit of full cooperation, the pusher might want to convey what else he knew about the man he had bought the drugs from. 

The police detectives waited expectantly.  The pusher looked at the lawyer uncertainly.  Then he turned to the police.  “He’s a cop!” he stated.  The shocked reaction of the detectives was evident.  “At least I think he’s a cop,” the pusher continued.  “I saw a badge attached to his belt when his jacket came open.  The gun on the other side wasn’t hard to miss either, but then most guys selling drugs carry guns.  They just don’t usually carry badges too.”

“You’re sure you saw a badge?” one of the police detectives asked, trying to make sure the pusher was certain about it. 

“Yeah,” the pusher replied.  “And besides, his car had government plates on it too. You want the plate number?”

The jaw dropping reaction of the detectives was almost comical.  A moment later, the pusher perfectly “remembered” Ted Jacobs license tag number and had relayed it to the waiting police.  After that, he was more than glad to not only verbally describe Ted Jacobs, but he did his best to sit through a session with another policeman where they came up with a composite drawing of the man the pusher had bought the drugs from.  The fact that the pusher had never met or seen Ted Jacobs in his life didn’t matter.  The pictures the Chinese men had shown him had more than sufficed. 

Even with the license number and the composite drawing, it still took the police over an hour to verify that the man the pusher had bought the drugs from had to be none other than FBI agent Ted Jacobs.  All too many things matched perfectly!

Doctor Jessica Parker couldn’t get Candy Brinkley off her mind as she drove from her office to her home.  At least she wouldn’t be dropping back into baby mode the moment she got there anymore.  She hadn’t been overjoyed about Candy telling her that Janice… aka her torturer… had demanded that she pay for all of his laser treatments.  She was tempted to tell Candy that he was just making that up to get her to pay for them, but the truth was that the logic was all too true.  The treatments were somewhat of a medical procedure… whether they were carried out by a doctor or not, and she did feel obligated to pay for them.  She vaguely remembered some of her other patients mentioning “package deals” on the laser treatments.  She decided it would be worth looking into. 

But the real reason she couldn’t get Candy off her mind, was the picnic / fishing trip he wanted to take next weekend with her and her kids.  He had guaranteed that Janice would not be there at all!  Yeah right!  Did she dare believe him?  He was also inviting some of his other friends along too.  She wasn’t too sure about them either.  It would be good for someone to show Jimmy how to fish, but was it worth the risk?  So far, the cons were outweighing the pros. 

But the bigger problem was that she really wanted to get together with Candy again for personal reasons.  So any opportunity at all was something she was ready to practically jump at.  Even with him becoming a woman, she was having a hard time getting “him” out of her mind.  And if she didn’t try to get him into bed very soon, it was going to be completely out of the question!  Even now, the hormones he was taking were probably taking their toll on his libido.  But it was still early enough that she didn’t think it would affect his performance that much.

How would that body of his feel in bed?  The hormones would be starting to make his skin softer now.  Just thinking about the feel of his naked skin rubbing all over her naked body made her mentally start panting. 

She blinked as she realized she was turning into her driveway.  What had happened to the rest of the drive?  She didn’t remember any of it?  She only remembered… thinking about how Candy might be in bed. 

Yeah, there was no doubt she would go on that picnic with him… friends or no friends.  In fact, from the way she was starting to get worked up over him, with her kids there too, maybe it would be better if his friends were along as well.  She would just have to find some other way to get him alone again… and very, very soon!

“Mr. Brinkley, you look weird!”

Roger stared at his student in shock… and fear.  “I do?” he asked uncertainly.

“Yeah,” the boy replied.  “Kind of… different.”

It was Friday afternoon and almost the last week of school.  In fact, next week school would end on Wednesday.  Would he make it that long?  Roger looked down at his clothes.  As far as he could tell, he looked just fine.  Or was the boy referring to something else?  “Is there something wrong with my clothes?” he asked.  “I always dress this way.”

“No,” the boy replied.  “It’s just…  I don’t know.  You look different.”

“Yeah,” one of the girls in the class agreed.  “But I think it’s your face that looks different.  You look… I don’t know.  Nicer.”

That surprised Roger.  “Nicer?”

“Yeah,” she replied.  “Kind of…  Sort of.”

Roger just blinked as he noticed a few other kids in the room agreeing.  He did his best to not show how frightened he was.  He had no doubt that his face was probably very red.  “Maybe I’m just happy that school will be out soon,” he tried.

His effort brought laughs from the kids.  He breathed a small sigh of relief.  It’s a good thing school would be over soon for the year, the changes were already getting difficult to hide.