Are You Tiffani Caine? Ch. 03

Amy nodded. "Yeah it is. But Sara, I mean...you acted in self-defense. You didn't ask for the coverup, didn't start the coverup, you did what you were told by police and then by someone from the church, a person whose opinion you trusted. You did what you did that night, and you may never know exactly what that was, but I think we all know you well enough to know that you didn't try for any of this." Emma agreed vigorously, and even Kait seemed to have no reservations about concurring.

"OK, so, blackmail," Emma said. "Who do we think is behind it?"

"The couple, Ernesto and Connie, they seem like the logical ones," Kait mused.

"No, if it gets out it hurts them as much as it does Sara," Emma pointed out.

"And it can't be them," Sara said. "They both died four years ago - they were driving in the mountains in Georgia at night during an ice storm, and they went down an embankment and into a reservoir. Like seven people died on the roads that night, and they were among them. I had a Google alert set for their names."

"OK, so whoever inherited their stuff, like their kids?" Amy suggested. "Or the mob, or even the cops. I guess we can't really know."

"It doesn't matter anyway, except maybe to help figure out the why," Kait shrugged. "From Sara's end, it all looks the same."

"I still don't understand this whole process," Emma said, getting up and talking as she headed to the kitchen to refill her water glass. "Somebody goes to all the trouble to do this big elaborate song-and-dance, just to make Sara buy some underwear and give some blowjobs? I mean even her night with whatshername, Rachel, wasn't mandatory, it just happened. None of this makes sense."

"There's one other thing," Sara said, and related the new command about her "date" with a strange man.

"So whoever is holding your leash wants you at a party on Saturday night," Kait said. "And you don't know why."

"Not yet. He said he'd give me more information later. But that's not what has me worried. I can't get past this...date."

"It did sound like he expected you to...well..." Amy trailed off.

"Yeah. It did," Sara nodded glumly. "And I don't think I can do that to Isaac. He doesn't deserve that."

Her three friends exchanged looks suggesting that they and Sara might disagree on what Isaac deserved, but it was Kait who spoke. "I think until you have a better handle on this situation you need to...well..."

"Keep an open mind," Emma finished for her.

"Yeah, that," Kait nodded. "And I think you need to find out what this clown actually has on you. You need to demand to see what he's blackmailing you with."

"He did say he would show it to me if I asked," Sara admitted. "But seeing those things...I don't know if I'm ready for that."

"Sara honey, whoever this is may just have heard two people talking," Kait insisted. "He might not have anything at all. The more you do for him, the more blackmail material you're giving him, and that's real material, not something he just claims to have. Want to or not, you need to see it."

Sara wanted to argue but there was no counterpoint to make. "I guess you're right."

"Can you contact him?" Amy asked.

"No, his calls come in as an unknown number, but...wait, I have an email for him," Sara said. "On the day this all started he emailed me photos from a Gmail address. I was afraid to erase the message so I stuck it in a folder and forgot about it."

"Find it," Amy said, and the girls all gathered around her and watched her dig through her work email for the message in question. A quick search turned it up; it had been sent from a Gmail address that was just a random string of numbers and letters, and the name it came in under was J. Smith. "OK, now forward that to your personal email and then reply asking to see what he has."

Sara needed several deep breaths before she could start typing, but what she ended up sending was: I don't even know if you still have this address but if what you say is true I need to see the evidence. She hit send.

As they waited, Kait said, "Listen Sara, all this really came out of the blue and knocked me on my butt. I wouldn't have expected it of you, but, well, I wouldn't have expected it of anyone I know. I'm shocked and stunned and it's going to take me a while to get used to this idea. But regardless of what happened, regardless of how it went down, I know you now. I know you're a good person. I'm still here for you, ride or die."

"Ride or die," Amy nodded.

"Fuckin' A," Emma put in.

Sara wanted to thank her friends for that, wanted to tell them that without them she had no chance, that their support meant everything, but when she opened her mouth to speak all that came out was a sob, then another, then kind of a breakdown where all she could do is cry and the three girls surrounded her and hugged her. Nothing was said as she cried, but after a few minutes her phone pinged with an email alert.

"Let me look," Amy said gently, taking Sara's phone away and walking to the far side of the room by the windows. Facing the city, back to her friends, she opened the email and spent almost five eternal minutes going through attachments. When she was done she deleted the message and turned back to the group, stone-faced as she handed Sara back her phone. "They have enough."

Sara had always assumed they did. She took the phone and tucked it away without a word. It was Kait who asked, "What did they have?"

"Stills and video from the boat and the dock," Amy said, sitting down a bit stiffly. "Nothing showing it happening, but there were pictures showing...Adam, after. Video from another part of the boat and the dock showing the body being removed. Pictures and video of Sara after. What looked like a transcript of some kind of interview of both Ernesto and Connie where they gave their sides of it. Nothing contradicted what Sara said - it really does seem like self-defense, her neck was purple and her eyes were swelling shut from the bruises. She looked like she'd been beaten four-fifths to death. If this is all a prosecutor had, I doubt they'd be able to prove intentional murder."

"Manslaughter is bad enough," Emma said. "And with the drugs and the coverup...well, felony for sure."

"Yeah," Amy nodded, reaching for her water glass. "Absolutely."

"Thank you for looking," Sara said. Amy just nodded, still looking rattled.

Sara's phone beeped again. She hesitated a moment before taking it out and looking at the new email message: I hope that satisfies your curiosity. She deleted it without answering.

There were a couple minutes of silence before Emma asked, "So. What's next?"

"I guess I have to go buy a couple of dresses and make a salon appointment," Sara said quietly.

"You'll never get in in time now at a decent place," Amy said. "I'll see if I can set you up with my salon. Give me a minute." She pulled out her phone and went into the next room, where the girls could hear her trying to finagle an emergency appointment.

"OK, so if you do get into Amy's girl for Wednesday, are you going to be able to repeat it all for Saturday? By yourself?" Kait asked.

"Well...the makeup, yes," Sara said slowly. "I still wear it, it's just what I wear now is really modest. I'll have to go a little more obvious for the date, but I still remember how to do that. But the hair...I mean I can buy a curling iron and some product, but I was never very good at hair and I've just been letting it hang for the last seven years. Now it's so long that I almost feel trapped by it."

She got sympathetic looks from both Emma and Kait; as with so much of the Pentecostal culture, at Holy Light women were expected to wear their hair long. Older, married women - and especially widows - had some leeway to wear shorter styles, but a young woman was expected to wear hers long and natural, preferences of the young women be damned. It was Emma who finally said, "I guess you need more tips on handling than a cut, right?"

"Well you could get it cut if you wanted," Kait ventured. "Messy bobs are super fashionable and they look great. It take me like two minutes in the morning to get my hair ready."

"It takes me that to brush, like, one brush-width!" Sara laughed. "But I can't get it cut short, Isaac would lose his mind. He loves my hair."

Amy reappeared looking triumphant. "You're in with my girl Leah at 11:00 on Wednesday morning. She's the best, you'll love her."

Sara nodded, relieved that one piece of her ordeal was sorted out. "Now I guess I just need the dresses. He said sexy and classy. I don't know how to do that."

Emma and Kait turned their heads to stare at Amy. Amy would have objected, but Kait wore bluntly utilitarian clothes while Emma dressed in the sort of boho chic that meant she spent a ton of money to look like she bought her clothes at a thrift store. Sara's fashion sense was hopelessly atrophied, of course. Amy was always the one with the sense of style. "OK, well, fine," Amy said. "Let's go down to the Mall of America - Nordstrom first."

After a lengthy round of goodbyes, hugs, tears, hugs, admonitions to stay strong, and hugs, Kait and Emma gave Sara one last round of hugs and left. A couple minutes later, Sara was riding in the passenger seat of Amy's brand new Mercedes GLS. After all the heaviness, Amy did her best to keep conversation light and off of any topic that might trouble her friend, so they ended up talking about dogs, outdoor activities, Sailor Moon (Sara used to watch her share of shoujo before she was saved), and other such things. Sara didn't cry once on the way to the Mall.

The Mall was a damned zoo like it always was on a Saturday afternoon - people flew in from all over the world just to shop there and go home, which was confusing to Sara - but they had parked on the Nordstrom end so they were in the store immediately and heading for the women's clothing region.

"Sexy but classy," Amy mused as they walked. "Nothing too short and nothing too obvious. That gives us a lot of leeway. We shouldn't have a problem finding a couple of dresses and accessories for you."

"How much is this going to set me back?"

"Well not as much as your lingerie did!" Amy laughed. "You could easily spend $5,000 doing this, but you're not going to. If we shop smart and look for discounts, each dress will be no more than $150. Shoes, purses, jewelry - I'm not going to lie, this is all going to hit your pocket book a lot harder than a Walmart trip. But my job today is to get you into some awesome clothes and out the door for less than $500."

"I need a little makeup too."

"OK, less than $600."

"Ugh."

"Hey, you don't want to go cheap on makeup. It goes on your skin, remember. And expensive stuff just looks better."

Soon they were walking past racks of clothes that Sara thought would look lovely on anyone but her. She mused, "When I used to come here before I was saved I would just wander around and touch the fabrics. I couldn't afford to actually buy anything. Speaking of which, there are cheaper stores."

"There's a method to my madness," Amy told her. "You might be having dinner with some trucker who can't tell quality women's fashions from his sister's armpit, or you might be with a rich guy who knows what to look for. You can't show up in a $25 dress and cheap shoes. Besides, if you buy quality it will last for a long time, and if you buy smart you can get stuff that will stay in style for years. I've got LBDs in my closet that I bought in college that I still wear. So that's where we're going to start."

"Hopefully more BD than L," Sara said.

"Yeah, so about that," Amy said. "The guy said 'sexy and classy?' right?"

"I think those were his exact words, yeah."

"Alright, so how do you want it to be sexy? I mean, he wasn't telling you to buy a dress that covers everything."

"Well...no, I guess not."

"So you're going to have to show some skin. What do you want to show, legs or cleavage?"

"...neither?"

"I think we both know that won't work. Which of those is better on you? I mean which do you feel more confident in, boobs or legs?"

Sara frowned. "I wish it were my legs, but they're short."

"I think your legs are proportional to the rest of you, but we'll work with your preference. We're looking for a high-waisted black cocktail dress that goes to your knees or below and shows cleavage, and that won't break the bank."

"I don't want my...chest hanging out," Sara said.

"It won't be. This is a cocktail dress, not a club dress. We want to tease, not advertise."

Sara definitely didn't want to tease a strange man she was forced to see, but Amy was right. And besides, Amy was approaching this all neutrally, as a task that needed to be done, and her brisk efficiency somehow made it easier to handle. There was no point in moaning about it, so Sara just did her best to keep up.

Amy was a past master at finding clothes to suit the occasion, but it still took almost an hour and the help of a surprisingly cheerful young sales assistant (whom Sara thought was darling, and thought it in an explicit and non-hetero way that shocked her) to come up with an appropriate selection of little black dresses for Sara to try on. Of them all, there was one that came out the clear winner: armless, cinched just below the breasts but still hugging Sara's form as it fell to mid-calf, with a decolletage that made her double-Ds really pop. It was very sexy and immodest and immoral and not at all what a good Christian woman ought to even think about wearing, but when it came down to it, it didn't show all that much that she wanted to keep hidden. And she had to accept the verdict of her friend and the saleswoman that she looked great in it.

The second dress was easier to find: a vibrant forest green number that only came down to the just above the knee but was fitted with a chiffon skirt that came down almost to the ankle, it had the same high waist as her black dress and even narrower shoulders so that it was almost-but-not-quite strapless. It had a triangular cleavage that plunged deeper but somehow showed less than the other. Sara reproached herself for it, but she kind of loved the dress. And she looked devastating in it. Best of all, it was on clearance for just fifty bucks, which at Nordstrom practically meant they were throwing it at you for free.

They paused to buy a couple of wraps, one to match the black dress and one to match the green. April could be very chilly in Minnesota and she couldn't exactly wear a parka, but hopefully she wouldn't have to spend much time outside anyway.

There were still shoes and accessories to buy, but there were other places for that. Amy guided her like a missile through the crowds to little stories and kiosks where she purchased a simple but elegant silver necklace with a heart charm to go with the green dress and an indecent black lace choker for the black dress, a couple inexpensive but surprisingly tasteful bracelets, and an adorable little black clutch purse that looked much more spendy than it was. The earrings were the most expensive part, but the cheap ones just looked tacky so Amy talked her into spending more to make a good impression.

As expected, the shoes were the biggest problem. Sara felt like she was going to pitch on her face with every step in 3" heels. She lost count of how many pairs she tried until, quite unexpectedly, she ran into a particular brand and style of open-toed sandals that she could manage without much difficulty. She was surprised that they were a towering 3.75 inches, but she wasn't going to look a gift shoe in the tongue...or something. She bought one pair in black and a second in silver.

Shopping done for an amount of financial trauma Sara was willing to accept under the circumstances, the two stopped at Ichiddo Ramen for some noodles, then headed out.

Amy's manner was still as matter-of-fact as could be as they climbed into her car, saying, "I know you like the green dress better, but wear the black one on Wednesday - black cocktail dresses are almost like a uniform to guys, they're so ubiquitous that they almost don't notice what you're wearing, but that green one is memorable. Wear the green one on Saturday, but if you end up having to do a third date you can just wear the black dress again and get a new necklace or something to go with it. You'll save the price of a new dress that way."

"That makes sense," Sara nodded, then asked, "Do you think there will be a third date?"

"How can either of us know? But if you do it this way, at least you're prepared."

"Yeah." Pause. "I'm not prepared though."

"It's a shitty situation," Amy agreed. "How did you handle the first things you had to do? The...oral stuff?"

"Oh, well...the first time was just out of the blue, I didn't have time to think about it or prepare. It was just dropped on me and I was kind of just...stunned. I puked afterward. The second time was the worst by far, it just took forever and it was awful and I kept crying."

"How did that one happen? I mean, how did it start?"

"I was at church. I was waiting for Isaac so we could go to the food kitchen, and I got a call telling me to leave right then and race to another place. We did it in a car."

"So you had to decide whether or not to do it. The first time you just went along, but the second time you had to make the decision yourself knowing what was going to happen. Why did you decide what you decided?"

"I mean...I'd already done it once. It just didn't seem worth the cost of saying no to avoid something I'd done just a couple days before. It was, like, the same sin, the same degradation."

"And the third time? Emma coached you?"

"On the mechanics of it, and she made me think about it in a different way. I knew I wasn't going to be good enough to satisfy Man-Bun so she said I should pretend I loved doing it to him. It worked. It's weird but it didn't bother me as much the third time. It was like I was acting. All I had to do was play a role until it was over."

Amy was quiet for a moment as she navigated her way through the frenzy of cars to the parking lot exit. "How are you going to handle it this time? I know that just going on a date with this guy is going to be a problem for you."

"Yeah. I guess that's what I have to do. But...I mean...if it comes to that, anything more than oral, I don't know if I can handle it. I might lose it."

They ended up talking around that point until they were almost back at Sara's apartment, but Sara's essential, paralyzing uncertainty remained. At last, as they were pulling up to a red light, Amy asked, "Feel free to say no, but do you want some advice?"

Sara wasn't sure how useful Amy's advice could be, seeing as how she wasn't in Sara's situation or mindset, but she nodded. "Sure."

"It's just, I think we can assume that whoever is blackmailing you are not nice people. They're probably some flavor of organized crime, but they might be corrupt cops or something else just as bad that we aren't thinking of. I worry about what would happen if you showed up for one of these 'events' and then tried to back out halfway through. You could be putting yourself in serious danger by doing that, I mean maybe the kind of danger you don't walk away from."

"So what do you suggest?"

"This is easy for me to say, but if I were in your position I'd make a decision before I ever went to one of these things. You did it with the first guy the second and third time out: you went to meet him having already decided to do what you suspected you'd have to do, and I think it was that decision that let you keep your head together enough to get it done. I would approach this next thing the same way."

"But I don't know what's the guy is going to want to me to do."

"No you don't, but you kind of do. The first thing you had to do involved sex with the skeezy guy, and the second thing you had to do involved sex with...Rachel was her name?"