Susan and the other woman.

Susan and the other woman

Susan gasped in horror, she began to breathe convulsively. She couldn't believe her eyes, she couldn't believe her ears. The door of their home office was ajar, she could see the screen of the PC and the side view of her husband. She froze, and her eyes couldn't blink. On the screen was a sexy brunette woman gyrating obscenely. Her husband moaned and groaned. Then he flopped down on the chair. Susan quietly and quickly jumped into their king sized bed and pretended to sleep.

Pete went to their ensuite bathroom, flushed the toilet, brushed his teeth, and lay down his side of the bed, In no time, he was snoring away like a runaway train. Susan stared at the man who has suddenly become a stranger.

She had married him for thirteen years, with whom they had two beautiful girls, Amelia eight, and Lena five and twin boys Lenny and Johnny aged two. She thought they had a perfect marriage. They were university sweet hearts and they married as soon as they graduated. He worked in business management and her in pharmaceutical sales.


As soon as they finished their last exams, Susan suggested they got married. Pete was reluctant, it wasn't that he had a footloose and fancy lifestyle. He said, he was just too young to be tied down. He suggested they could just live together.

"I don't want any salacious gossip from my church going friends," said Susan.

Eventually Pete agreed to the wedding. He gave Susan an engagement ring with a small solitaire diamond. They went to Susan's small town of Kingsville, and her parents arranged for a small town wedding. They drove across the Niagara Falls to New York for their honeymoon. Susan enjoyed the shows at the Broadway, they took a ferry and went to the Statute of Liberty, went up the Empire State Building and walked around the Twin towers and the Times Square.

They both got jobs in Toronto. Pete in a small business firm as a trainee manager, and Susan in a pharmaceutical company. Susan was in marketing and she had to travel the whole of Canada to meet her clients of chemists and supermarkets and departmental stores. Three out of four weeks in the month, Susan was out of town. Soon she was very tired and heading for a burnt out.

After a hectic five years, Susan was ready to throw in the towel and was glad Pete got a new job as a manager of a factory that operated twenty four hours a day. With his steady income, they decided they were financially well of to start a family. Pete often had to be called away in the middle of the night if there were problems in the factory. He even had to stay over night in the factory to help fix what he said was a gigantic problem.

Amelia came, Susan and Pete decided Susan would be a stay home mum.

"I earn enough for my wife stay at home and to take care of the family."

Susan was busy with Amelia, and drinking cups of coffee with other young mums at play group. Then Lena came, and Susan started taking Amelia to a dance and movement class. Then unexpectedly, she got pregnant with the boys Lenny and Johnny. The pregnancy was arduous, Susan had high blood pressure and placenta previa. She had to be hospitalized and be in complete bed rest from the sixth months of her pregancy. Her mum Kelly came from Kingsville to help baby sit the girls. The boys were born by cesarean section and Susan took a long time to recover.

With the busyness of two toddlers and two little girls, Pete took a back seat in Susan's life including her romance life. It was too hard to get a baby sitter to come in because not many people wanted to be responsible for four little kids. So they hardly went out as a couple.

Pete went to the bar with the boys on Friday nights. Anyway, he was very busy and was always working over time. If not, he had work at home in what they called their home office.

After settling the kids to bed, Susan was usually too tired to do anything but to hit the sack by her self because Pete was busy in the office.

That fateful night, Susan woke up thinking Lenny was crying for her, but it wasn't. It was Pete's groaning noise as though he was having sex. The door was ajar, and she crept quietly. Shock! Horror! He was masturbating whilst watching his computer showing the obscene video. Susan froze for a moment. She felt sick in the stomach.

"No wonder he has not been intimate and sleeping with me," thought Susan.

He was always saying, "You are tired! Or I am tired."

Susan stayed up tossing and turning that night, wondering how long he had been doing this.

The next morning, after Pete had gone to work, and the girls to school, Susan went to their little home office. As she was not a computer savvy person, she had hardly gone to the computer. By clicking the mouse, she found hundreds of pictures and videos. Most of them were images and obscene conversation with the same woman she saw the night before. She couldn't believe the monster she had married.

Susan wondered if it was her who was partly responsible because she had been so tired with the children.

Susan didn't know how to confront Pete, so she decided she would observe Pete's pattern. It was his nightly escapade, at around ten pm, when he thought that Susan was sound asleep. He had not bother to shut the door because it was stuffy in the windowless home office which was a small space for a walk-in wardrobe.

One night, Pete had a phone call from the factory and had to leave urgently. He left the computer on, he was chatting online with a "lover". Susan found old chats of seductive chats and also obscene photos of his "lover".

This lover, Crystal was a brunette. She was the woman Susan first saw. Crystal didn't look any much better than herself. But she talked dirty and Susan was appalled by what she saw and heard.

Pete came back to find Susan sitting in front of the computer. When Susan confronted him, he denied any knowledge and said, such sites popped up when he was surfing information for work. Then Susan said, she knew everything, he got mad at her and raved and railed.

"All men watch."

"Who is the woman that you are viewing and chatting to?"

"Cyber lover, that is exactly that, cyber! There is nothing physical"

"I have talked to our pastor, such obscene pictures are bad news."

"Do you believe that?"

"Even Oprah and Dr Phil say that viewing porn is bad. You have a big problem."

"How long have you been watching?"

"From the time you were busy climbing the corporate ladder traveling the whole of Canada selling your drugs. It's all your fault, you were never there for me."

"You are a sick whacko!"

"I will delete them and not watch again."

A leopard doesn't change its spots. Pete was so addicted and he continued to have his escapades. Susan knows because he locks the office in the evening. But during the day, when Pete is away, Susan went to the community college and learnt to become computer savvy. Susan finds out Pete was still indulging in his dirty habit.

A cold war developed between Pete and Susan. When he finished his dinner, even before kissing the children good night, he hides himself in the office. He knew Susan would never leave him because of the children. Susan cried herself to bed every night. One evening, Susan over heard him talking dirty on his phone. She realised that his cyber lover was a real person.

One day, Pete left his cell phone on the Tall Boy chest of dressers in the bedroom when he went to shower. Susan was tempted to check his cell phone for text messages. She was petrified, among the usual "I luv U" texts, there was one extremely disturbing. "I luv your little girl. I can't wait to do it again."

"The bastard! How am I going to confront him?"

When Pete got out of his shower, Susan confronted Pete about the text messages.

"They are harmless, I told you before!"

"But what about the one about our little girl?"

"You are just being paranoid, it is nothing!"

"Who were you texting? Are you having an affair."

"Yes, I am having an affair. It is all your fault, you always too tired, you don't expect me to be celibate in my 30s."

Susan issued an ultimatum, "Choose your other woman or the kids and me."

Susan was at her wits end. She didn't know what to do? She rang her mum Kelly at Kingsville. When she picked Amelia and Lena back from school, after giving the children their cookies and their glass of milk, she took Lena, Lenny and Johnny to her next door neighbor, Alice. Alice had often babysat for free because she understood how hard it was for a young mother of four.

In the privacy of Amelia's room, Susan asked Amelia if anyone had touched her in a way that she didn't like.

Amelia said, "Yes, mummy, remember the day you had a bad stomach ache and Alice babysat Lena, Lenny and Johnny and Daddy took me with him to pick up your medicine?"

Susan replied, "Yes I remember."

"Well, Daddy took me to this place with a bed and got me a big ice cream cone. Then when I was eating the ice cream, a woman came with a bag of marsh marrow for me."

"What happened next?

"First they kissed, and they took off all their clothes and went to bed. They told me to watch TV."

"After that?"

"Dad said, be a good girl and join them in bed. They took off my knickers and started to touch me down there."

"Oh My God! What else?"

"They kissed me down here and touched more. The woman rather hurt me, Dad told her not too deep."

"After that, they washed me and gave me a mars bar. They told me that this was our secret."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"I wanted to tell you but when I got home, you were asleep so I didn't tell you."

"Oh my God! Oh my God!"

When the children were in bed, Susan confronted Pete about what Amelia had told her.

"She's a lying kid."

"Explain how she got to describe so vividly?

"She came into the office one day and saw me watching child pornography on the computer. I didn't realize she was there until she watched for about ten minutes."

"You sicko whacko!"

“She is so young, she won’t remember anything,”

"I am leaving you, and I will report you to the police.

"Do that, and I will kill you." Pete threatened and yelled at Susan.

Susan couldn't sleep a wink. She rung her mum Kelly and kelly told Susan to leave Pete. The next morning, Susan quickly packed her bags, and the children's clothes. She wrote a note, "You will never see us again." and left it by her dressing table. She had intended to go to her mum's and get settled before she decided what to do.

They never made it to Kingsville, not too far along the freeway, Susan's station wagon veered to the incoming lane and had a head on collision. The impact was so bad, there were a million glass crystals lying on the road. The cars were in a mangled heap. All the occupants in Susan's car were killed on the spot. The driver of the other car was killed too. Only his front passenger lived to tell the tale after she got out of the coma of how Susan's car for no rhyme or reason veered unto their lane .

The police went to Pete's office to inform Pete. Pete lying through his teeth told the police that since the birth of the twins, Susan had been suffering from post natal depression and was doing things out of character. He produced the "You will never see us again." note and the police initially took it as a suicide note and Susan had deliberately made the collision to look like an accident.

Susan's car was taken to the crimes scene unit. Detailed investigation showed that external reasons were not the responsible factors: the weather was fine, the traffic was fine that morning. There were no drugs or alcohol in both drivers' blood. The mechanics found that the braking system in her station wagon was tampered with. Some one had deliberately wanted to cause an accident that day.

The Toronto police went down to Kingsville to interview Kelly. Kelly confirmed that Susan had rang her to tell her about Pete's other woman and cyber addiction and how he had threatened to kill her. She also suspected that Pete and his lover had sexually molested her grand daughter Amelia. They confiscated Pete's personal computer. Pete thought he could fool the police and destroy all evidences of his cyber crime. Little did he know that though the images were deleted, they remained in the hard disk and could never be destroyed.

The police recognised Crystal as the other woman from the computer images. She, was arrested and in her bargain for amnesty, agreed to testify against Pete. She had been seeing Pete whenever they could, Pete would sneak to see her pretending that there were problems in the factory. Pete introduced her to hard core pornography and child pornography.

"It was Pete's idea to sexually molest his daughter Amelia. He arranged to take Amelia to the motel and I just went along. Pete is a very sick man, he got worst and worst, his cyber addiction got so bad. I am very sorry I tagged along and indirectly caused the death of five innocent lives."

When the head of the jury read his note, "GUILTY" Kelly and her husband Raymond said, "The monster should be locked in jail with the key thrown away."

Kelly and Raymond went to the city cemetery. In the snow covered grounded, five new graves stood up like sore thumbs. They were covered with fresh flowers. Friends and strangers have come to mourn for these five innocent lives, plucked away by the evilness of a man.

Kelly sobbed, "Susan, Amelia, Lena, Lenny and Johnny, if you are looking down from heaven today, you will know that though your deaths were avenged, I will never be the same again. Too many pieces of the puzzles have been snatched from me. I should be the one lying in the grave instead of you. It is not right, it is too cruel. Friends tell me they admire me for my courage and fortitude at this sad time, but what do they know? My heart is broken a million pieces, it is as if a zillion arrows are piercing into it."

"Rest in peace, my darlings. I will make sure the beast will never come out of prison." Raymond vowed.

He wiped his tears away and helped Kelly up from kneeling in front of the graves.