A. Rich - The Hand That Feeds You

The hacker was going to break into Bennett’s account. Maybe I was better off not knowing all that he had been capable of. It would surely be a trade-off: information versus further humiliation. Was one’s capacity for it endless? But the information — if I could shut down my personal response to it — would be valuable for my thesis. I would see firsthand the mind that conjures such behavior — I would see the predator as he moved in on his prey. The sociopath and his victim: me.

I probably still had a couple of hours until I could expect to hear back from the hacker. I needed to steel myself for whatever was coming. I had only four.25 mg Xanax left, but I had one more refill on the prescription Cilla had written for me. I left for Napolitano at the corner of Graham and Metropolitan. At this old-fashioned Italian pharmacy they knew you by name. The owner, with her red hair and perpetually white roots, greeted me warmly. Everyone in the neighborhood had heard what I’d been through. When I handed her the vial of remaining Xanax, she looked at the label and said, “You only have one more refill.” Apparently, I looked as though I needed more.

I checked my phone for texts, even though my phone hadn’t buzzed. I said I would wait for them to fill the scrip. I pictured someone with a mortar and pestle in the back. I handled the Italian soaps that you wouldn’t find at other pharmacies. I felt at peace, relatively, knowing that I was getting tranquilizers. What if I found out that Bennett had never loved me? That suggested, of course, that I still thought he had once loved me. But I had never driven past an accident on the road without looking at the injured.

I paid for the refill. Just before I got home, hackyou texted me: I’m in .

I could have taken one of the new pills, but decided instead to ride the excitement of the discovery, whatever it would bring. When I got back to the store, hackyou was with another customer, a nun. Whom was the nun hacking?

“With you in a minute,” the hacker called to me.

The nun was holding a small statue of the Virgin. The hacker told the nun to come back in a week, the repair would be completed by then. So the store wasn’t a front.

“Come around the counter,” the hacker said. “We can talk in the back.”

I followed her and sat in the folding chair she indicated.

“Unless Samantha is a pro, she didn’t send herself the e-mails.” The hacker handed me a yellow Post-it and a pen. She told me to write down the password that she dictated to me. Not wanting to leave evidence of her own hand, I guessed.

“How much do I owe you?” I had brought cash as instructed.

McKenzie was right: I paid more for three months of Internet.

The password was evenwhenusleep.

I thought of the wall. His making me sleep against the wall.

I felt as though I was about to be served a poisoned feast. I was starving, and I would be made to poison myself. Maybe if I ate something first — a piece of dry toast — it would line my stomach so that the poison would not kill me.

Nothing was remarkable about these e-mails other than that a dead man wrote them. Just the ordinary reassurances that Samantha was on his mind and he couldn’t wait to see her (though wait he would). I had expected to linger over every word and try to suss out not just the meaning but the nuance. Instead, the messages were so banal that I grew impatient. Same thing, seven times over. But in the next one, he tells Samantha that a crazy ex-girlfriend killed herself, and for some reason the police are looking at him for it. If he needed her for an alibi, he wrote, could he count on her?

Samantha would not have written to herself asking to be her own alibi.

I took off my pullover sweater. The apartment wasn’t warm, but I was sweating.

The next message from Bennett answered a panicked question from Samantha: I was home alone all day, but that won’t hold up as an alibi.

The day he claimed to be alone, he was driving to meet me in Maine.

I read a dozen more. Whoever was writing to Samantha claimed to be hiding in Canada, but I already knew that — Samantha had told me. I kept on, looking for something I did not already know. And there it was. “Bennett” had asked Samantha to meet him in Toronto, and they would go from there. And as I had just learned, she would be paying for this pleasure ( Did you get to the bank? ). The first e-mail mentioning the trip — or honeymoon? — appeared the day after Pat’s murder. My stomach plunged. Should I notify the police? Which police? I had illegally broken into the e-mail that contained the information. Would I tell them that a dead man was planning to meet his fiancée in Toronto after he, the dead man, killed an ex-lover?

My stomach growled, but I couldn’t eat anything. Instead, I poured a double shot of Stoli.

I typed in Susan Rorke , searching for the last e-mail Bennett had sent her, the day before her death. Now I was reading something he had actually written; I downed the rest of my drink.

Not going to be able to meet you, babe. Have meetings all weekend. Will make it up to you.

I scrolled down to see what he was replying to. Susan Rorke had invited him to Boston for the weekend.

Just because he told her he couldn’t spend the weekend didn’t mean he wasn’t there, I reasoned, the alcohol weirdly bringing out my rational side. Instead of slowing me down, the Stoli acted as a stimulant.

I scrolled down farther. I began reading the responses of “Bennett” with an eye toward the linguistics, the syntax. I tend to go cold and analytical when I feel most vulnerable. I noticed two hallmarks of the sociopath in written communication: he repeatedly used the words so and because , indicating his view of the causes and effects of his actions. And he frequently adverted to money, to financial concerns. Though wasn’t everyone concerned with money? So maybe scratch that last. Still, it was hard to ignore a line like Needed you to pay deposit for wedding caterer so I could afford to get the tuxedo you liked. And this one: Because you didn’t give them the right credit card number, we just lost the honeymoon suite. I saw that he gave her a chance to make it right by giving the correct credit card number to a more expensive hotel for their honeymoon suite.

He had offered to let me pay for the wedding cake while he ostensibly bought a tuxedo.

He continued to write to Susan Rorke for two days after her death. Not hearing back from her, he changed his tone, was solicitous, asking where she was, asking her to write him. Then his tone changed again. The last message he sent to Susan Rorke was short and to the point, but not original. He fell back on the words of countless angry, rejected lovers: Are you happy now?

As sick as all of this made me feel, I was also relieved to know that I had not almost married a murderer. I served myself seconds of the poisoned feast. I looked for clusters of e-mails sent to addresses I did not recognize. Looking for still more women. Still more rendezvous.

On the plus side, I had not been in love with a murderer. However, I had been taken in by a womanizing sociopath who had lumped me in with the rest of his harem.

Libertine635 came up, and came up, and kept coming up. The word would not have had the effect on me that it did had I not just read of the libertines Valmont and the Marquise. I supposed that I would now see the word everywhere. The number 635 told me how many other libertines were out there online.

I checked the date of Libertine’s last message to Bennett; it was the day of his death. I scrolled back to the beginning of their correspondence. I scrolled back years, back to the night they met in the casino.