Chapter 7

The antiseptic smell of the hospital filtered through Margie's nostrils for the last time as Ben led her out the front door and to his car. Ten days before, Gary had taken her to City General and left her with a nurse, telling the women that she had been raped. She had remained half-conscious for two days, before realizing where she was.

During the remaining week she recuperated in the sterilized bed, relieved that there were no men around except a few doctors and Ben during one painful visit each day. A police lieutenant had come to see her one afternoon a few hours after Gary had called her and whispered that Jamie had been taken care of. The lieutenant asked her a few questions about her assailant, then showed her a mug photo of Jamie Barth, whom she identified as her attacker just as Gary had told her to.

"It's too bad he can't be punished," the lieutenant said. "Somebody pushed him in front of a car yesterday and he died in the emergency room downstairs last night." Margie showed no feeling when the lieutenant told her what had happened. She answered as many of his questions as she could, not telling him that she knew Jamie Barth.

Now, after a long week of rest and self examination she was leaving the hospital to return to the home that she never wanted to see again.

"I've got a surprise for you," Ben told her with a sly grin as they drove home. "I hope you'll be pleased."

"I hope so too," she replied. "Just about anything would be good news to me now."

But Margie knew she was lying. Nothing could be good news for her after the last two weeks, she thought as she looked at her husband's grinning face. There was no more soreness between her thighs, but there was a terrible guilty ache in her heart. Implanted at the back of her mind in indelible vivid colors were the fragmented images of more than a dozen men who had violated her innocent body and left unerasable scars on her memory. She was a different woman now, she thought, knowledgable in the horrors of life's gutters. She had killed an innocent child, gone through a hideous infidelity to recover the incriminating evidence, and finally been the cause of Jamie Barth's death.

There was nothing to remove her guilt for any of the crimes. She had asked Gary to get rid of Jamie and he had taken her at her word, making sure that the deranged young mechanic met his end under the wheels of an unsuspecting automobile. It was a terrible way to die. Margie thought, but almost fitting for Jamie Barth, the man who had turned her from a dissatisfied housewife into a raving nymphomaniac, until she had almost completely disintegrated into a babbling moron.

Something had saved her from destruction, but she didn't really know what. Perhaps it was the inherited strength of her forefathers: perhaps just the knowledge that somehow she had to come out of all of her trials, no matter what.

A few minutes later they were home and Margie immediately went to the bathroom and started running the water for a nice long hot bath. She wanted to cry with relief, knowing that Jamie was out of her life forever, but she couldn't. There was still the terrible knowledge of her hit and run accident, not to mention her feelings toward her husband.

She could no longer feel any real love for this man who had come to her hospital bed every day trying to be cheerful and help her come back to reality. He was sweet, she thought but it's too late. Ben Carney, in his wife's eyes, was a sad and lonely man. She knew she could never love him again, not like she had when she was an arm waving, yelling cheerleader in high school. He was no longer the man who inspired that kind of love, and she was no longer the woman who could give it.

With a soft sigh she slowly lowered herself into the almost steaming hot water when the door creaked open and Ben poked his head in the door.

"I've got something to tell you," he said. "Do you mind if I come in?"

"No, of course not," she answered. Why should she mind now. Her husband had never really seen her nude, she thought, even though more than a dozen other men had glared at her sweating, writhing nakedness in the last two weeks. I suppose it's time he got a good look too, she thought wryly.

Ben sat himself on the side of the tub, picked up the washrag and began scrubbing wife's back.

"My promotion came through this morning," he told her.

Promotion? she thought. Why the promotion?

"I cracked the hit and run case last night and first thing this morning I found a note on my desk telling me to call a sign painter and have him put my name on the door as a full partner."

Margie let a relieved sigh pass through her lips. So Ben had found out after all, she thought. But why is he so cheerful when he knows I'll be going to jail? Damn! I never understand men.

"The whole thing was a terrible mistake to begin with," he said, softly rubbing the soapy cloth over her back. She could feel the gentleness of his touch on her skin, but wondered why he was taking so long. Was he enjoying this torture? Why didn't he just come out and accuse her so she could confess and get it all over with.

"I finally discovered that the witness had been wrong. She hadn't seen a convertible at all. It was a white Ford hardtop, the same year as your car."

"No! Impossible, it couldn't have been a hardtop, Margie thought frantically. I did it! I had to ... otherwise all this ugly nightmare was for nothing....

"It's kind of funny," Ben ssaid with a sheepish grin. "When the first clues started coming in, I thought it might have been you driving the car, but when the witness decided she made a mistake, I knew that you could have had nothing to do with it."

Oh God. But I did! I Did!

"After that, though, it was only a matter of time until I tracked the girl down. The tailpipe was the only thing holding me back, but it turned out that the pipe had come off of some other car a few minutes before. One of the customers who was coming out of the corner bar at Ninth and Harrison, saw it fall off the back of an old convertible just before the accident."

No! No! she thought, wanting to break into sobs. It wasn't me. It really wasn't me!

"I finally caught up with the woman last night,'" he continued. "She was a nervous wreck and I almost felt sorry for her, until I remembered the little girl who died. Anyway. the woman confessed and I took her downtown. It's in all the morning papers, but I wanted to be the one to tell you. That's why you didn't get a paper this morning."

Margie suddenly slumped forward in the tub, feeling like she had just been hit by a truck. Everything had been for nothing! She had gone through a week of terror and humiliation for nothing; a week of degradation that had changed from a quiet young housewife into a near psychotic, and all for nothing.

"Honey, are you alright?" Ben asked, afraid that she might be having a relapse.

"No," ' she whispered, her lips just above the water. "I'm fine."

"Would you," he asked uncertainly. "Would you like to go to bed?"

"Alright," came her almost silent answer.

With an almost father grin, Ben lifted her out of the tub and carried her naked to the bedroom. A new, soft blue light bulb shown from beside their new double bed, but somehow it didn't make any difference. Margie knew that their lovemaking would still be the same, as she felt herself slowly lowered onto the satin cover. The new bed felt softer than the others, and Ben's touch was much softer than ever before. His fingers traced quick darting paths over her skin, stopping finally at the soft silken mound at the juncture of her thighs.

But as she felt Ben lift his body over hers and slide his rigid penis between her thighs just as he had always done, could sense none of the ecstatic tingling that all those other men had forced to course through her loins. She tried, she thought, she really tried, but it was no use. Her husband just couldn't turn her own, and as he rolled off of her, perspiring and panting with the exhaustion of satisfied sex, she stifled a choking sob and turned away, begging for sleep and know that all the time a thousand Jamie Barths roamed the streets of the world ... , and waited ... waited for her again ... and ... sooner or later ... sooner or later she would go ...