16 comments/ 89319 views/ 10 favorites Be Careful What You Confess Ch. 01 By: Stultus Synopsis: A husband discovers that his cheating wife is writing increasingly detailed confessions at an on-line site, first about her growing affair and then about her plans to murder him. Secrets can be fatal, and in very unexpected ways! A tragi-comedy of errors and a twisted tale of revenge gone terribly wrong. Sex contents: No Sex Genre: Drama Codes: MF, Cheating ******** Thanks to my usual cast and crew of Editors, especially Dragonsweb & Dowd (welcome back!) and several other Advance Readers! ******** None of this would have happened if my wife Rita wasn't one of the most paranoid and suspicious people on the entire face of this planet! Everything with her was a state secret on a need to know basis. Being merely her husband most definitely did not qualify me for need to know. I loved her dearly but it took a forty-mule team to drag out and divulge even the most trivial secret from her sealed lips. She made even a grocery store shopping list sound like a CIA list of top-secret contacts, and she protected it accordingly. Sometimes this trait of hers was amusing, but often it just dug under my skin and festered there. We were normal middle-class folks living in the big city and trying quietly to find peace and happiness together in life, and her frequent fits of security related drama sometimes just drove me absolutely nuts. Once, about fifteen years ago shortly before we were married, she had been 'victimized' in a minor stolen identity theft. Someone obtained her credit card number and sold it to some hillbilly in Tennessee who bought a motorcycle and a couple of cases of whisky before the card was cancelled. As identify theft cases go, this one was pretty minor and straight forward. They even caught the guy using the stolen card and sent him off to jail for a while. No dings on her credit history, just one of life's minor little speed bumps, right? Not to Rita. This was an action call to go to DefCom-4, and soon the steel walls started to come down and lock up tight. Years later those barriers were still shut and bolted down. Our house (in a decent neighborhood) was the only one on our block with burglar bars all the way around it. Not to mention a security system, an extra monitored alarm system, and placed on our local county constable 'Special Watch List' for good measure. This was just the physical security. The way Rita guarded her personal laptop computer made it only slightly less protected than the Crown Jewels of England. Normally I try to humor my slightly overly suspicious wife, but sometimes I have to lay down the law and hold firm to my guns, even while she is screaming something insanely paranoid me and throwing household objects at me. Sometimes, once in a very great while, I even win. The make-up sex is usually particularly good too – nothing beats a crazy woman for hot make-up sex! One of the few battles I ever won concerned the need to perform needed system maintenance and backups of her data every six month. So on the Fourth of July and New Years I get 'supervised' access to her personal computer. She used to have a desktop PC but I bought her a nice laptop for Christmas last year. She guards that baby just like the White House General with the suitcase with all of the atomic weapon launch codes. Like her purse, it never leaves her sight. I swear, I've even seen her take them both into the bathroom with her! Once, long ago she had a computer crash and lost her bookmarked web favorites, old emails and some data. It happens to everyone, and you plan accordingly… *cough* backups *cough*. But to Rita this was a crisis on a par with a natural disaster that somehow all became my fault, and for which she still has yet to forgive me. I'd apologize, but it would only serve to enable her… plus I have absolutely no clue even years later exactly what I did to make it all my fault in the first place. She never let me even touch that computer, let alone allowed me to do backups on it! So, with extreme reluctance, on these rare occasions only, I am permitted access to her most 'Holy-of-Holies' - her laptop PC. The security on this computer is excessive to say the least, I know… I installed most of it. If she could find a retina scanner or other biometric security system to block off the other 99.999999% of the human race from even seeing her Windows boot up screen, she'd make me install it. As if her current BIOS post password, and two separate O/S login screens (all with different passwords) weren't adequate enough protection already. Everything on her hard drive was compressed and encrypted with 256-bit security. Then, for added extra good measure, access to her Firefox web browser, Outlook email and MS Office apps were all additionally password protected. Naturally, all of her data files, mostly MS Word documents, had yet another layer of encryption. Forget home shopping entirely, none of her credit cards ever got listed on any store web site – ever. As she put it, "There isn't enough tea in China, or enough web security anywhere to make web shopping safe!" She's almost right about that one. Still, this level of security was wildly and insanely excessive. Rita is just a mid-level editor for the local City Style glossy magazine that is given away free as in insert in our local Sunday newspaper. They rave about art galleries, museum exhibits, trendy new clubs and who offers the best margarita or martini in town. Sometimes they'll get daring and cover hip overpriced restaurants, top notch plastic surgeons who specialized in boob jobs, and previews of what women might expect from Macy's fall designer collections. No surprise that these businesses all receiving these rave reviews were all paid advertisers! Ooooo… dangerous stuff! There wasn't one thing work related on her computer that anyone anywhere cared the slightest bit about… but try convincing her of that! As for myself, I'm an IT Manager for a small but prosperous commercial real estate company and protect some confidential data for the owner and his Chief Accounting Officer, but with nothing remotely close to this level of government spy level security. Boys and girls, it's all about 'proportion'. My darling Rita had absolutely no sense of it whatsoever! This was the cause of the tragic and unnecessary end of our relationship. ******** July 4th came around and once again it was time for the semi-annual madness of dealing with Rita's insane overprotection of her laptop data, and I was prepared. Rita truculently brought her laptop into my home office/computer room and we got down to business. After she (secretly) typed in her boot up OR boot-up BIOS password we stuttered our way though her other various login security screens. Finally, I was unenthusiastically entrusted with her greatest treasure and given the usual dire warnings about what unspeakable punishments would occur to me if the slightest file was screwed up. Castration with blunt rusty implements was just the warm-up. The real fun would start later, she assured me. In fifteen years of marriage she's somehow never gotten it into her head that I 'do this for a living'! I think it is this complete lack of trust that she has about everything that drives me nuts. Trust is really the first cornerstone of any relationship, let alone a good marriage. If your spouse doesn't trust anyone or anything, then things can get fairly shaky fast. For the first step #1, I made a Ghost backup image of the entire hard drive onto my big backup server. This would give me a snapshot of her hard drive and its heavily encrypted contents in the event anything went wrong later. In a worst-case scenario, everything could be put back exactly as it was before we started both quickly and easily. Once that was done, I archived off her email into a backup .pst file, and then make other backups of her bookmarks and her Favorites folders into her backup folder on D: drive. I quickly checked that My Documents was empty, and it was. Good girl! Anyone who stores data there on their C: operating system drive is just asking for trouble and deserves to get their data lost. Once all of the minor backups were done, I then burned a data DVD of all of her D: Data drive, which was hers to keep. The 'work' done, now it was time for system maintenance. She had most automatic updates turned off on her laptop, as she considered any and all remote access to her computer by any software vendor (including Microsoft) to be a security violation. So, with the machine in my capable hands, I began to manually install operating system, security, anti-virus, anti-spyware, MS Office and firewall updates… one at a time. It usually took hours to do this and Rita, at her best and most suspicious, invariably tried to stay present and watch me like a hawk for the entire time. Fortunately, within an hour or two, since she often had the attention span of a toddler she would get bored watching the endlessly slow 'updating' task bars and start to find excuses to leave the room for just a minute or two, eventually giving me some breathing space without her staring at me like I was a paroled felon. By the time I was nearly done with just the O/S and application updates over two hours later, she was quite distracted with a phone call from a girlfriend and left me in peace and quiet for a full fifteen minute. This was all I needed to install a 'new and improved' comprehensive security package for her that replaced her existing anti-virus, anti-spyware and Internet firewall. SecRitSqrrl is a fun little program suite that indeed replaces every other security and malware protection on your computer and does a pretty good job of it. Much better in my opinion than Norton Internet Security, which is nearly guaranteed to screw up any computer it is installed upon. I hope Peter Norton got a lot of money for selling off his company so he can sleep soundly at night; the good old days at his old company are very definitely long gone. The best feature of this program however, is that it contains a goodly amount of primo spyware integrated right into it. It's not the number one hacker tool downloaded at Pirate Bay for nothing. I liked the program enough that I even bought a legal extended feature version of it complete with some extra bells and whistles. With this program I'd be able to learn the dozens of passwords she used, and gain access to her email account in real time, invisible to her. I could even see the screens she was looking at remotely and take print screens. It was just curiosity really. She'd locked up her laptop like it was Fort Knox and the urge to see what was hidden on it was scratching me like an itch that wouldn't go away. I was sure I wouldn't find a single damn thing of interest, but I desperately wanted to be able to give her a smug superior look knowing that the biggest state secrets she was protecting was an upcoming review of the 'El Sleazo Café' and an editorial that this winter's trendy fashion color was likely to be royal blue. I wish now I hadn't done it. I can only offer for an excuse that her bizarro world infatuation with ever increasing levels of security around every part of her life was pissing me off to the extent that the 'D' word, "Divorce", was starting to enter my thoughts late at night when I couldn't sleep. Frankly I was expecting her to break out the aluminum foil any day now to make anti-mind probe shields for herself and the dog. Darn those pesky government mind control beams! I suggested over breakfast one morning that I could wire up the entire house to be a giant Faraday Cage, but she didn't get the joke… probably just as well. More than anything, I just wanted to prove to myself that the woman I had married was now quite batshit crazy and, if the marriage was to be saved at all, it was time for a really big knockdown drag-out fight. To even have a prayer of winning, I needed to have some cards to lay down on the table. You would be depressed to learn how rarely cool calm 'logic' ever wins an argument against 'crazy'. We were both just forty-two and young enough to start over again if necessary for a (hopefully) happier future. Worst case the house could be sold and the savings accounts split. We had no children and our State didn't allow for alimony, so the split shouldn't be all that painful, if necessary. I was at the crossroads looking in both directions and it was time to decide which way to go. Using my best geek-speak, I told Rita when she returned that I'd updated everything and that it was all good to go. She just about snatched the laptop out of my unclean and unworthy hands and raced to lock it back up into her ever present leather attaché case. Naturally receiving a word or two of thanks was quite out of the question, let alone the prospect of receiving a proper 'thank you' blowjob now or later. Men don't usually ask for a lot in life, and sometimes it's the simplest rewards that make us happiest. We do like to feel appreciated. Sure, blowjobs are very nice, but sometimes just a hug and a 'thank you' will do. My work done, I enjoyed the rest of the holiday grilling (burning) meat and drinking too much beer. I couldn't wait to start cracking her impregnable data fortress once she got to work on Monday morning! ******** Being the boss of a one man department, I can work my own schedule and often come in late if I know I need to work on the computer network after hours, when no users are on, but I was in bright and early that Monday. Most of my 'help!' requests always seem to occur on Mondays for some reason. The cleaners unplug cables and power cords accidentally and the gremlins have had a weekend to do their random mischief. Today's drama consisted of a major problem with our MS Exchange email server that tied up most of my day. Our ISP had changed one of their DNS settings for some random reason and never bothered to notify its users. This caused all of our email to sit unsent all weekend long. Morons! By the time I got everything fixed and every user happy, it was nearly time to go home, so I decided to let my fun wait another day. Besides, every twenty-four hours I'd receive an event log by email of everything she did on her laptop, and that was really the best place to start my investigation. The fun at work continued again on Tuesday (they'd changed the DNS back to the old one again so I had to once again reset all our email server settings!) and it was late afternoon before I could load up my own Master copy of SecRitSqrrl and start to play. The rest of the week was dead quiet when I had absolutely nothing to do, so I used the free time to very thoroughly spy on my wife's on-line activities. That's the way it goes at my office, it's either deadly dull or mass panic, with rarely anything inbetween. At first glance, everything I looked at on her laptop met my expectations. No secret emails to shadowy government agencies or malicious foreign powers. No secret calendar entries setting up secret assignations with either spymasters or lovers. No signs of an affair or plans to abscond with City Style's entire bank accounts and skip off to Latin America with Juan The Swarthy Poolboy™ or even the latest ultra-feminist potboiler from the Oprah book club. I now had a complete listing of all of her secret passwords and I had read 98% of her encrypted data files until extreme boredom set in. No, royal blue was not going to be the trendy color this winter… it was navy blue instead. Still I gave myself points for a close guess. Boots (mid calf, not ankle) were the hot footwear, and the Ming Palace upscale Chinese restaurant chain had paid for a full page ad for the next six months and wanted a top-notch review. Be still my beating heart! I wasn't sure if I could stand the strain of protecting these dire secrets! I should have quit right then, but I was bored at work and got curious to find out what dodgy websites she surfed when she felt the need to get her freak on. I needn't have bothered. The closest site to 4chan that she visited was called uConfess, a very heavy estrogen laden place for bored housewives and the soap opera crowd to 'confess' their deepest and darkest innermost secrets. Yawn! Tentacle or Yuri porn might actually have been a distinct improvement. I almost called it quits again right there… and I should have. Instead I was so bored that Friday that I reviewed all of her logs for the last week and noted that she visited uConfess a lot. Every single day in fact she usually surfed there during her lunch hour. This site was very definitely her single most favorite website to visit. Since I have a rather voyeuristic nature, which I freely admit, and I knew her username and password, I decided to give the site a very thorough read through. I especially wanted to read Rita's posts and find out what deep dark hidden secrets she wanted to confess. Did she want a lesbian lover? Better yet did she want a threesome? Or did she just want to tie up Hugh Jackman and cover his helpless quivering nude body with chocolate syrup and whipped cream and lick it all off, slowly? Enquiring minds (namely mine) were now dying to find out! Using the MoreRokoMole feature of SecRitSqrrl, I remotely connected to her laptop and used it to covertly connect to the uConfess website. Even if Rita was using her laptop right now, she wouldn't be able to detect that I was surfing the web via her computer. This let me connect to the site using her native network card (MAC) and IP address. Any tracing program would point directly at her laptop and not my computer miles away. ****** Hello, "Restless" This is your 223rd visit to uConfess You have no new private messages and 4 users have added you as a Favorite Confessor since your last login Once I was logged in to the website, it was easy to find her registered Confessor account management page and view all of her previous postings. Now I would learn all about the deep dark secrets she felt the burning need to confess! The truth was a bit more mundane, and shocked me to the core. In her dozens of postings this year she detailed the account of a growing love affair. Not with her husband… or alas, not even with a bisexual woman. Here are a few selected examples of her postings from screen shots that I took. ******* "I have a new literary agent for some articles I want to write for some of the big New York fashion and style magazines, or even a romance novel I'd like to write. He's very tall and handsome and he makes me tingle a bit when I look at him. I'm married, but restless…" Reader Comments: "Yawn" (This first posting was pretty much collectively ignored. No drama or even trolling.) ****** "Another monthly meeting with my hunky agent. I know he's interested in me too and we spend a lot of time looking into each other's eyes. He's single (divorced) and I'm oh so very restless… I've never had an affair before but I want him… bad!" Reader Comments: "You go! Girl!" "Go for it! Tell us all of the nasty details" (Etcetera… 93 other women all thought that "Restless" should cheat on her husband, only six thought it was a bad idea… but only then because she 'might get caught'. This set the tone for the rest of the messages.) ****** "He rejected me! I all but threw himself into his arms and offered myself to him and he rejected me! He won't have an affair with a married woman, he says! He was quick to point out that if I were to divorce, that would be an entirely different matter. So he loves me too, but has 'principles'. Be Careful What You Confess Ch. 01 /cries Reader Comments: "• sad face" "Drug him, kidnap him and tie him down and rape him. Once he's done the dirty you've got him. Claim rape if he won't toe the line" (WTF? No extreme is too crazy to rope and brand the lover of your dreams these days it seems for some women. Already I could tell that this board was just teeming with 'crazy'. No wonder Rita liked this site! She wasn't going to get any marriage saving advice here.) ****** "My husband won't give me a divorce! I've found the man I really and truly love and the rat bastard won't set me free to find happiness! He controls the money and if I leave him I'd never get a cent of our savings, or see our two young children again. He'd ruin me in the divorce! There has to be a way to escape!" Reader Comments: ":< angry face" "Do what ever it takes. Fight the bastard for everything, take everything he's got." "Give yourself some fake injuries and blame your husband. Get a steady stream of 'domestic assault' police calls to your house and get photos. You'll screw him for every dime he has in court!" (And so on. It just got worse and scarier. The idea of making fraudulent battered spouse claims didn't scare or deter anyone. Some of the readers even posted specific helpful advice, allegedly from experience… on how to make their claims of abuse more believable in court. Holy shit! Who were these crazy women and why was my wife now raving insanely about me blocking a divorce we had never discussed? What children? This was a whole metric crapload of insanity and it was growing worse with each post!) ****** "I've got to find a way to break free. He's watching me like a hawk, checking over everything that I do. He's even got my boss at work checking up constantly on me for him. I can't get the chance to show what an abusive manipulator he really is. Getting the police to 'catch him' is going to be hard. It might be easier to try a different plan. Things would be so much easier if I were a widow! My dear Roger would most certainly be there to comfort me!" Reader Comments: "Evil face + Smile" "Kill that abusive bastard!" "Honey, you DESERVE to be happy and don't let anyone stand in your way!" (Holy fucking crap! Did these crazy women actually advocate murdering someone's husband in order to upgrade to a better boyfriend? There weren't quite as many comments here, but there was precious little sanity. The overwhelming conclusion was very definitely that the ends justify the means.) ******* (The next half dozen postings are skipped due to insane psychodrama overload. The crazy bitches accepted it as gospel that I was a psychotic pedophile tyrant who abused and daily beat my family within an inch of their lives. Or in other words, a typical male as depicted on the Lifetime Cable TV channel. Various methods of murdering me and getting away with it were discussed until one black widow poster, again quoting from significant personal experience, suggested an overseas source for buying certain nearly untraceable poisons such as pancuronium bromide, a favorite substance of government spies and black widows everywhere. Finally, here was her last published comment posted the previous week.) ****** "I did it! I bought a $100 dollar gift credit card with cash and ordered a little bottle of my 'problem solver' over their website. It should ship from India this week and I might hopefully have it in my hands by July 4th, my very own Independence Day! I'll put it in his coffee where the sugar will cover the slight bitterness and the slight citrus tang. Hurray! Soon, my lovely Roger, soon we will be together forever! He's pushing me to hurry up and do the deed so that he can comfort this poor widow - I've already got a hot little dress in black that will do perfectly for our next meeting together!" Reader Comments: "You Go Girl!" (More homicidal craziness, Etc, ad nausium.) ******** Ok, even a dullard would get the idea by now that my loving wife was going to poison me and then run into the comforting arms of her lover. Still, as shocking as this whole thing was, it was just too crazy. I was certainly not an abusive spouse, nor did I molest our non-existent children. The minute she asked me for a divorce - it was hers… no argument. The whole situation just made no sense. I was still alive, so obviously her 'wonder drug' had not yet arrived. Just in case, I decided to skip drinking any coffee at home this weekend. The entire series of confessions just seemed too strange and bizarre to be true, but just in case I print screened the lot of them and put the printouts into a folder and locked in my desk with a note "To be opened in the event of my death". I had nothing to take to the police or even worth a phone call to one of my friends. I stewed about the situation for a good hour after I should have already left work but in the end I trotted on home like a good lamb to await my execution. Somehow, I thought, I'd either find some proof to back up this wild ass story or else it would all turn out to be massive psycho craziness. By Monday, I'd either be poisoned and dead or ready to pack up my shit and move to somewhere else less packed chock-full of crazy. Be Careful What You Confess Ch. 02 My best chance to snoop for evidence came Saturday night. We hosted a small dinner party for some work friends of Rita's and everyone (except me) had hit the wine cellar pretty heavily. My wife had consumed almost a full bottle of red wine all by herself. She's not normally much of a drinker and when she does drink it hits her hard and fast. By the end of the evening, she was hinting loudly that she'd have 'a surprise' by the end of next week but wouldn't even tell anyone (especially me) what her 'good news' was. I had watched my wine glass like a hawk in case she decided to spike it instead of my coffee, as she had publically stated. In any case, not five minutes after our guests had gone my darling bride was stumbling toward bed and was soon out like a light and snoring up a storm. This was my golden chance to snoop about in her purse and her locked attaché laptop case. Come to find out I didn't even need to try and pick that lock, the evidence I needed was right inside her purse. In a small glass vial labeled pancuronium bromide I found all of the proof I needed. I had to look the stuff up on the Internet to find out what it did but the knowledge brought me little satisfaction. It's an extremely high powered muscle relaxant that is usually too dangerous for medical use. Just a few drops will stop your heart from beating… forever. Now it was time to decide what to do about it! I had an old syringe in my bathroom closet at home left over from some vet medicine we'd given to our dog a few months ago. I cleaned it and filled it full with some of her poison, leaving the vial still mostly full. She'd never notice the missing amount. I wasn't going to simply inject her with it. No, too simple, too easy and too detectable. It was best used dilated in something and I soon decided where best to administrate it. I didn't get a moment of sleep all weekend. ********* I cannot explain why I did what I did next. If put to the question I could plead extreme sleep deprivation and temporary insanity, but in truth my heart was really far more broken than I would have expected. I had not wanted a divorce, and now it looked like there could never be one. Monday afternoon while brooding in my dark office at work, with the lights off and window shutters closed, I came to my terrible decision. I couldn't file for divorce now, it was too late and I'd still end up poisoned. I had to turn the tables somehow, even if that meant striking the first blow in self-preservation. While I was searching Rita's purse Saturday night, I had found her little portable day-timer calendar and personal scheduler. This was one of her most secretly kept items and I had long been dying for a quick delve into it. It was very educational. Apparently at the start of the relationship, Rita and Roger met monthly at a local café to discuss their business. Starting last month their meetings became weekly, every Friday afternoon at a local hotel for two hours. So much for 'business'. They reserved the room a week in advance each time and would be there again at Room #243 this coming Friday. This was where I now planned to set my trap. Getting a copy of the hotel key on Monday afternoon was simple. I requested that particular room and paid cash, and then I took the key off of its distinctive hotel chain and, on my very first try, found a dodgy locksmith willing to make a copy of the key for a hundred dollar bribe. I had a few other preparations to make that week but the hardest part was just waiting for Friday to come. Rita was starting to be suspicious that I no longer had any interest in drinking her coffee, or anything else for that matter in the morning before work. I pleaded nerves and made sure that I fixed my own drinks in the evening at home, mostly sealed bottled waters. The atmosphere at home started to become extremely strained as if both of us knew that the other was up to something. Since she never bothered to tell me her secrets, I certainly wasn't about to tell her any of mine! I gave her one last chance on late Thursday evening while we were watching TV and not even sitting very close to each other. "Rita, you've been keeping a lot of secrets from me lately, even more than usual… even for you. Marriage is supposed to be based upon love and trust and I'm not sure we have either one of those two things right now. Do you have any confessions that you want to make to me or should I find a good divorce lawyer and leave you and your paranoid world of secrets in peace?" Ok… maybe I shouldn't have stated that last little bit. In my defense I was bone weary, annoyed, angry and very tired of playing her little mind games. She screamed at me incoherently for five full minutes without a break even for air and after throwing anything and everything within arm's reach at me she stomped off angrily to bed and slammed the bedroom door. I stayed on the sofa but couldn't say that I managed to get any sleep, but I did feel a whole lot more relieved about my plans than I had all week. In the morning she stomped out the door without saying a word to me. It only made what I had to do that much easier. ********** My plan for Friday worked like fine clockwork. I arrived late at work with big black circles under my bloodshot eyes and instructed our company receptionist that I was 'in' but not to bother me unless it involved either fire or someone bleeding to death. I shut the door to my office and stayed there for the rest of the morning brooding. Just before noon I made my surreptitious escape down the service freight elevator. There is a security video camera that covers the loading dock but only where the trucks park and are unloaded. There is a side door leading to the lobby that is not covered and I took it. I had parked in my normal reserved spot in the garage that required a parking card to enter. I used mine as normal in the morning but I didn't need it to leave the garage. There were no security cameras anywhere in the garage and when I returned I would use the parking card of a former employee to get back in. It still worked. I had checked it yesterday. Security was very lax in our office building and our building management were a bunch of lazy sods that had to be reminded at least five times in order to do anything. My departure and return would not be recorded nor noted. The hotel room was near the back end of the building in a fairly remote corner, perfect for a little mid-day privacy for their dalliance. There was one security camera that covered the parking lot of the hotel near where I could walk up the outside staircase to the room without otherwise being observed. I'd already taken care of it. I'd shot it out with my .22 scoped rifle late on Wednesday night from a dark and vacant parking lot across the street. It was a very easy short range shot and I'd nailed it on the first try. It hadn't been replaced or particularly noticed. I guess security cameras break all the time around hotels as they are hotbeds for low-lives stealing luggage from travelers and auto theft. I went in and did my business and was out in less than five minutes. No panic or rush and I was, oddly, as cool as a cucumber. I still had nearly twenty-five minutes to wait for the happy couple to arrive. Rita I knew I could count on being early. She always tended to be at least five minutes early for any appointment, but I had no way of knowing how Roger's internal clock ran. I moved my car off to a remote corner of the parking lot where Rita wouldn't be able to see me when she drove up and I slunk down low to wait. I didn't have to wait long to find out that Roger's clock was running early too today since they both arrived at almost the same time in separate cars. They shared a big hug at the hotel door and went inside without any further displays. Rita wasn't much for public displays of affection and didn't normally even like me to hold her hand when out in public. Still I was a bit disappointed, I'd wanted to see a big fat sloppy kiss or her hand reach down to his crotch or something. I think I wanted my last memory of her to be something sluttish, with her doing something overtly for her lover that she never allowed her husband to do. Something definitive to hammer down that last little peg of doubt in the back corner of my mind, but I wasn't going to get it. Now I had one last piece of work to do. This morning after Rita stomped out of the house, I had taken a solid hour to pack up several of her suitcases with some of her better clothes, her best jewelry, her skimpiest lingerie and nightwear (not that there was much of it), and so on. Anything that I figured a woman would pack up on short notice for a separation, or a wild weekend with a new boyfriend. I had a set of keys for her trunk and I put her three bags inside and shut it, my work now done. Using the old employee gate access card, I returned to work and slunk back up in the freight elevator and into my office without anyone seeing even a hair of me. No messages taped to my door and no blinking red lights on my phone. I hadn't been missed. I made a token pass around the office to be seen but soon slunk back into my cave of despair to brood for the remainder of the afternoon, my nerves now totally shot and my mental batteries completely drained. Now I had nothing left to do with my life except wait… and I had to wait for quite a long time. There were no phone calls at work that afternoon and no phone calls at home later that evening. Nothing in fact happened all night long. I had a drink or two to try and settle my nerves and keep myself from pacing holes in the carpet, but it just made things worse. So I drank some more and broke open a good bottle of rum that I'd been saving for a special occasion and sipped on that in front of late night TV until nearly dawn Saturday when I finally passed out on the sofa. When I woke up mid-afternoon I started the party off again where I had left off the night before and was pretty pickled by the time a pair of police officers arrived at my door a little after 6 p.m. After a lot of preliminaries, such as establishing that Rita lived here (or used to until yesterday morning) and my name and relationship with her, we got down to some brass tacks. "Sir, do you know where your wife is?" "Don't know and can't say that I care anymore! We separated yesterday morning. She's off with her boyfriend I think… she's been having an affair with her literary agent. Go ask him. She packed her bags and everything. I'll be filing divorce papers on Monday." "She has had an accident, but we can't tell you anything more at this time." I did my best to look surprised, but was really too drunk and depressed to really much care. That settled most of their questions right off of the bat. Good, because in my current state I wasn't entirely sure what answers I was giving. It did appear that my fairly genuine performance of a cuckolded and abandoned husband was spot on the mark and didn't raise any red flags with the officers. They weren't investigators; they were just patrol cops that got the call from dispatch to notify the next of kin. I told them to look around anywhere they wanted and I went into the kitchen to wage war with Rita's sophisticated Italian coffee maker. I was a sleepy, maudlin drunk at the moment and wanted some coffee to sober up enough to become a fully wide awake drunk. I fought with the machine for nearly half an hour before admitting defeat and unplugged the bastard and offered it as a door prize to the officers. "Rita loved that damned thing… more than me apparently and I'm surprised that she didn't take it with her. It grinds, roasts, and brews everything except plain bloody coffee. She can make espressos, cappuccinos, lattes, and so forth, but the damned thing won't make a plain cup of joe!" They declined my gift so I set the machine out on the curb next to the trashcan. I noticed that it then disappeared about the exact same time the officers left. Sneaky bastards! After they left I resumed my little one person party and pretty much finished the remainder of my rum bottle before curling up on the bathroom floor in front of the toilet for a long uninterrupted sleep until Sunday morning. I showered but decided to skip the shaving part… and skipped any more alcohol as a substitute for breakfast. In fact I cooked enough for three people and ate it all. Then I spent the afternoon packing up everything of Rita's that was left in house and moved it all into the garage. By early evening I was still feeling ambitious and had started to mow the lawn when a police detective finally arrived to formally question me. Officially, I was finally notified that my wife and another man were both found dead in a hotel room under extremely odd circumstances, but more than that he wouldn't give me any additional information. Did I wish to make any statements? Sure! I told him everything I thought he needed to know. "What's so odd about it? Ask anyone who knew my wife, and I'll give you at least a dozen names if you want them, and they would all agree that she was a raving psycho. Well actually, most of her friends have better manners and would just say that she was 'excitable' and had 'numerous eccentricities'. Rita was seriously manic-depressive, just like her mother, and no one could ever get her into a doctor's office to get medicated. Last weekend she was on a manic high telling everyone that she'd have 'good news soon' but by Thursday night she was in a depressed fit about something. She loved to keep secrets and never told me any of them. Between you, me and the lamppost, I think she had plans to run off with her lover, but he might have gotten cold feet on her. She admitted Thursday night that she was having an affair and wanted out, and took some suitcases with her when she left for work Friday morning. I think her affair was with her literary agent but I can't prove it – I've never met the man." "I see." The detective said, hinting that I should continue. "Can you tell me how she died? Wait, skip that… I honestly don't really care. Since you're standing here asking me questions I have to assume its something nasty like murder-suicide… and that would fit Rita to a 'T'. I'll even bet you that there isn't even a suicide note! That would require some measure of consideration for others that she didn't have a drop of. Not even an 'I'm sorry for the inconvenience'. My guess is that she snapped when he told her that he wasn't going to run off and play house with her, and she stabbed him something like thirty or forty times before leaping to her own death upon the busiest freeway in town… probably during rush hour traffic. Just to cause the maximum amount of inconvenience for everyone! Did I nail it?" "Not quite." The detective said with a smile. "And before you ask, I do not want to go to the morgue to see or identify the body. You can call her mother for that, I'll give you the number. My interest or concern in the affairs of my wife, or rather now late-wife, ended the moment she slammed the front door with suitcases in hand. Good riddance. I don't want to see her, or her body again. I won't be going to the funeral, and I especially don't want her ashes. I'm sorry if this is callous, cold or harsh, but I'm just thanking God right now that she didn't start off her crazy spree by killing me first! All of her stuff is packed in the garage. You can look through anything you want and even take anything you might think is helpful, but unless I'm told otherwise it's all going off to Goodwill later next week." The detective took a spin around the house and asked a few more questions but nothing pointed or remotely tricksy. He shook my hand, wished me well and drove off. It was the last official time anyone involved in the investigation asked anything of me. ****** No, I didn't visit the morgue or attend the funeral. Her mother tried to sign me up for the biggest funeral package the mortuary she selected offered, but a quick phone call to the owner straightened that out. Since I was apparently going to get stuck with the cost, as the legal guardian of her estate (yes we both had wills) I demanded the cheesiest low cost cremation the funeral home offered. Her mother pitched dozens of varieties of fits but I was used to that sort of juvenile behavior from her daughter… and I didn't have to take it anymore. I told her to shut the fuck up and take the fucking urn home with her or else I would dump the contents into some roadside ditch next to a toxic waste dump. In case she didn't quite get the hint, I sent her a 'Congratulations' Hallmark card with a short personal note to lose my address and phone number and never contact me again. She never picked up the damned urn. I've still got it in a closet next to Christmas wrap and winter clothes, out of sight and very out of mind. Someday I'll find the perfect place to be rid of the last of her once and for all. ****** The investigation ran for months, but in a very low-key manner. The delay was waiting for the tox results for both victims and for an IT forensics team to repair her laptop. The first investigators that handled it tried to brute force their way in past her login screens and enabled her 'scorched earth' last measure of defense, a security applet that quickly wiped the drives with 1's and 0's, scrambling everything into permanent rubbish. Naturally this really whetted their appetite for discovering what secrets she was trying to hide from them! They sent it to two different data recovery labs to be rebuilt but they never recovered anything from what I heard. No one ever asked me if she any backups, I'd have willingly offered them! Accordingly, no one ever got to read Rita's crazed writings at uConfess, and frankly I was very disappointed since I wanted everyone to know just how crazy my former wife really was. Fortunately, the final coroner's report backed the police conclusion of murder-suicide. Her fingerprints were found on the glass vial of pancuronium bromide, a very illegal and controlled substance in non-medical hands, and a search of her locked desk drawer a work produced the original mailing label and package from India, also covered with her prints. The drug had been administered via a pitcher of water found on a table inside the hotel room that poisoned both victims. Sliced lemons and limes floating in the water had masked the taste. A grocery bag containing additional lemons and limes was found in the trunk of her car, next to her suitcases. An empty syringe containing drug residue was found on the floor next to the dresser where the water pitcher had originally been placed by housekeeping. The final police report was closed, claiming that Rita had left her husband with the expectation of eloping with her new boyfriend, who apparently chose this time to announce that he was already married and was not going to leave his wife. In a rage, Rita poisoned the pair of them. It wasn't perfect or especially neat and tidy but all of the witness interviews with Rita's friends and co-workers agreed that Rita was a bit manic-depressive and she was noted to be especially depressed on that final Friday. It fit the facts and the police stamped the case closed and moved on to other investigations without a single glance back. Roger's widow… yes, the literary agent was apparently quite happily married, always claimed that it was impossible for him to have been having an affair with Rita, but could offer no otherwise suitable excuse for why the two of them meet weekly in a hotel room. Both were still fully clothed and a large amount of literary paperwork was found on the hotel room table. It was assumed that since Roger was now trying to break off the affair he had been concentrating on 'business' this last meeting before Rita had poisoned them, her heart broken. Be Careful What You Confess Ch. 02 ******** I was more than satisfied that my vengeance had been done until about six months later when I received a phone call from a book publisher asking what the status was on the contract for 'Rita's novel'? What novel? Come to find out, Rita and her agent had been in the final contract stages of a deal to sell her first novel. The publisher had asked for some last minute changes to the manuscript and then had heard nothing about its progress since. I didn't know anything about it so I called up the police inspector who had visited me to ask him if they had found a novel manuscript anywhere in Rita's personal effects locked up in an evidence storage locker. There was, and they had also found a small USB drive stored in her laptop case that had an encrypted copy of the original manuscript. The police IT forensics team had partially broken that security enough to verify that the document was probably not related to the crime and had largely forgotten about it since. I had to sign a bunch of paperwork to claim her property from police evidence, but since the case was considered closed, they were quite glad to be rid of it all. I think they had even called me about this stuff a few months ago and I had fairly rudely told them to trash it all. Fortunately they hadn't. Her novel was very enlightening and the more I read it through the greater my doubts and concerns became. By the time I was done, I was sure that I had murdered a completely crazy, but otherwise innocent woman. Her novel was a thriller and concerned a beaten and abused housewife who turns to an Internet gossip and confession board for solace. Gradually the heroine becomes embolden to fight back against her oppressor and even, at the end learns how to obtain illegal and dangerous drugs from unregulated oversea pharmacies. She poisons her husband's coffee and escapes police justice. She lives happily with a new man, end of story. The 'facts' suddenly began to match her novel entirely too closely for comfort. Was she really crazy and writing her ideal fantasy, eventually to poison me at the end? Or was she really just an overly secretive novice writer, who relied upon real life for inspiration and tested every step her fictional murderess would take, including verifying that such a dangerous drug could be easily bought overseas and even shipped right to her workplace. Was she a batshit crazy murderess or just a crazy paranoid woman not wanting to reveal the secret of her forthcoming literary success until the final contract was signed? Or even both? I just didn't know anymore. ********* It became very tiring, over the next year, to have well meaning folks always asking me 'how I was doing'. The answer, 'fine, I guess', never satisfied anyone. In actuality, I was not doing particularly fine at all. I'd lost a lot of weight and still wasn't sleeping worth a shit anymore. I would just stay awake half of most nights reviewing everything Rita and I had ever said or done for the last year of our marriage, looking for some lost overlooked clue. I never found any. I signed the contract allowing her publisher to print her novel under an assumed name, first in a small hardback edition that was mostly presold to libraries and then a mass market paperback. I negotiated for a large up front advance with any later royalties being donated in perpetuity to a Men's Legal Advocacy center that specialized in false rape, spousal and child abuse cases. Rita would have loved the irony. I reserved all other rights and refused to provide any marketing assistance for the book. I just wanted to be done with it all. Naturally, Lifetime wanted to make a movie out of her novel, emphasizing the innate brutality of men probably, but I told them to go suck eggs. Not a chance in seven hells… I was going to take those TV and film rights unused to my grave! Even reading her published book in its final format provided me with no further clues that I'd missed early. Was I a true murderer, or had I just prevented my own death by the skin of my teeth? A year later I still had no answers, but now I had a brand new question. What to do with or tell the new woman who very much wanted to be a part of my new life? Cecilia was a bubbly short airhead of a blond in her late twenties with a failed marriage of her own behind her, and a motor mouth that was incapable of not chattering away inanely from morning until night about everything and nothing. In nearly every way she was the polar opposite of Rita… Cecilia could not keep any secret from anyone even if her life depended upon it and we quickly established trust between each other. We were still at the 'sleep-over' stage of the relationship, but the hint was there that she was ready to move her things in to stay. I was just about ready to let her. The sex was wild, uninhibited, and she was more than willing to 'reward' me with more and better sex. She was a woman who understood the small niceties about showing gratitude. Saturday was rapidly becoming a regular 'steak and blowjob' night and after I did a little computer repair fix for a friend of hers she rewarded me by offering her ass for my use that evening. She definitely had fantasies and at least a hundred different kinky things she wanted to try someday; semi-public sex, sure; nude beach; absolutely; threesome with a hot girlfriend; maybe someday . I decided that Cecilia would become my penance. I was certain to be totally deaf by the time I turned fifty, probably self-inflicted via a red-hot poker into my ears. It might take her a full hour to tell a simple story of going to the shoe store and not buying anything, but at least we'd have no secrets between us. She trusted me implicitly and I was slowly learning that I could trust her. Still, I decided that I had one last confession of my own to make. I went to our local public library and sat down at one of their computers. I then connected to a half dozen proxies to hide my IP and logged into uConfess and created a brand new account for my confession. ********** Hello, "Crossroads" This is your 1st visit to uConfess You have no new private messages and 0 users have added you as a Favorite Confessor since your last login ~ New Confession: "I have a dirty little rotten secret that I must get off my chest. One year ago I murdered my wife… and I no longer regret it. She was a batshit crazy lying bitch that couldn't trust anyone to even turn off a light switch without her guidance. The world is a less crazy place without her and I have a new very hot younger girlfriend who wants to fuck me at least twice a day. It is the estrogen deficient insane women of this board that I have to thank. Without your completely insane rabid man-hating advice that you gave, my formerly loving wife might still be alive today. Oh, we'd be divorced, but there are far worse things… like a six foot grave. Instead, you encouraged her, even demanded that she find increasingly immoral and illegal means of disposing of me, culminating in a mass orgy of psychopathic blathering that only my immediate murder could prevent global warming, solve the energy crisis, provide free government health care and education for everyone, and make the world safe for fat Dove bar oinking dingbats. You all sound fat… I can tell by all of the anti-male whining. Put down the ice cream bowl and go to the gym. On the other hand, since my late wife was a scheming and manipulative bitch, there is a pretty good chance that she was just a poser here, sounding out her wacked out theories for global domination upon her psycho peers, here at the epicenter of crazy for the Internet… or maybe this place is #2 after 4chan? Both places need lots of eye-bleach after visiting. So, either my wife, tried to murder me (with your assistance, help and considerable guidance), or else she was just a paranoid dingbat trying to be secretive, but otherwise completely innocent of obeying you nutcases. I don't know what the truth is, and I no longer care. Flip a coin… it's fifty-fifty. Either way, I blame YOU for her death. In the unlikely event you would like to confess your sins, I don't care. I've decided to live and I'll treat my hot new girlfriend far better than my late wife ever treated me. Unlike most of you in frozen Dove bar land, I'm going to be getting laid… and often. For those of you who feel no guilt in recommending my murder, I politely and sincerely wish you to take a bath with a toaster, or else go die in a fire, whichever is more convenient. Leaving the crossroads… ****** After this post I promptly deleted my account and wiped out the browser cache clean from their craziness forever. I had decided that I was going to live… and be happy!