Chapter Eighty
Eighty
It had been three and a half months since Mary had called Denise with the green light for her to start implementing the ‘mistress’ side of their con.
To keep things as real as possible, Mary and Denise would always keep their communications down to a minimum.
Messages were only exchanged if truly necessary, so the last message between them had been the one that Mary had left Denise with: Quaddra’s LA travelling schedule for that particular month.
In real life, a mistress wouldn’t message her lover’s wife to update her on how the affair was going, so why would they do it?
Keep it simple… keep it real.
That tactic also played a huge part in the surprise effect at the end of their con.
In several months’ time, when Denise had to walk into that court of law, as a last-minute witness for the prosecution, Mary wouldn’t have seen her for well over a year.
Denise would certainly look different… very different in fact, and that would reflexively trigger a realistic surprise reaction from Mary – the kind of reaction that is very hard to fake.
But the fact that there had been no more exchanges between Mary and Denise was a message in itself.
No news was good news. It meant that Denise had encountered no problems in moving ahead with her role in the con, which, in turn, would mean that her affair with Quaddra was well under way.
Their plan was working, just like it always did…
so why did Mary feel so low and betrayed?
Why did she have to fight a panic attack every time that Quaddra mentioned that he was flying back to LA again?
Why did she feel like crying, and fighting, and screaming blue murder until he held her tight in his arms to calm her down like he always did when she felt anxious about anything?
Why did she miss him so much every time he was away?
Mary hated the way that she was feeling inside because she had never experienced anything like that before.
Love, or at least ‘real love’, had never been part of her vocabulary.
She hated the anxiety that woke her up in the middle of the night every time Quaddra was away…
because she knew that instead of sleeping by her side, he was probably inside Denise.
Jealousy, it seemed, was a monster that Mary had no idea how to tame, so she did the next best thing, which was to stick to the plan.
Since her wedding, Mary’s visits to her therapist, Dr. Lillian Fox, had increased to two a week, but every few weeks, she would cancel a session or two, only to turn up at the next session with a larger, perhaps more severe bruise.
The bruises didn’t go unnoticed by Dr. Fox, and neither did the fact that Mary seemed to have become a little ‘clumsier’ after the wedding.
Quaddra, on the other hand, barely noticed any of them, but that was because the majority of Mary’s bruises weren’t real. They were applied using professional stage makeup.
Over the years, Mary had become somewhat of an expert in creating fake bruises.
She’d watched countless videos on YouTube and spent hours upon hours practicing, copying the exact tones from real battery bruises from photos that were easily found on the Internet.
Even from just a short distance, it was almost impossible to tell that the bruises were fake.
But for the Polaroid photos that Mary would take every now and then as a record, and for the final act – the night that she would finally call 911 – Mary would give herself real bruises, real cuts, and real hematomas…
the kind that would cause outrage in a court of law. But she wasn’t quite there yet.
Mary and Quaddra were actually just about to celebrate their first wedding anniversary, and Quaddra had suggested that they went back to Salzburg… to the bridge where he’d proposed… to the padlock that they had left there as a symbol of their everlasting love.
When Quaddra first mentioned his idea, Mary felt something knot somewhere between her heart and her throat.
What she really felt like doing was slapping him across the face and asking – ‘what everlasting love, you cheating sonofabitch? Why don’t you ask your lover to go with you?
’ – but that would’ve been gold coming from a woman whose only reason for being in that relationship was to run a con that would end up destroying Quaddra’s life.
Mary couldn’t lose sight of that, so instead of screaming and fighting, she hooked her arms around his neck, kissed him with the same passion that she’d always had, and told him that she just couldn’t wait to be in Salzburg with him again.