Our Love Saga

According to Frank, no suicide note was found and the railing of the balcony showed no damage or defects to indicate that someone leaning against it might have fallen accidentally. They knew of no motives, but foul play was suspected. The only lead that they had was a grainy video from one of the hotel stairways that showed three large African-American males exiting the hotel through a side door around midnight. Hooded sweatshirts and dark sunglasses worn by all three had obscured most of their facial features, so identifying them would be a challenge. The police were able to determine that they were not registered guests at the hotel, but not much else.

I joined Samantha in the kitchen and took a seat at the counter. While she prepared our dinner, I filled her in on what I had learned from Frank.

"Do they know if anything was missing from Kurt's room?" Samantha asked. "I mean, could it have been a robbery gone bad or something like that?"

I knew that her real concern was whether the police might have found the boudoir picture of her that Kurt had taken from my office, and how she would be able to explain him having it.

"I'm sure that they are considering that," I said, "but Frank never mentioned it. You need to consider what you will tell the police if they ever get around to questioning you."

"Why would the police want to speak with me?"

"Seriously?" I asked in amazement. "You think that your relationship with the guy won't come up at some point? Hell, he had a near-naked photo of you and you spent hours with him last Saturday. You don't think that someone who saw you two together won't mention that to the police? I guarantee that if the police learn of the pressure that he was putting on you, they will immediately place you on a 'person of interest' list, and I'll probably wind up there right below your name."

Samantha turned from the stove to face me. I could tell that she was contemplating what I had just told her. She finally asked, "Do you think that we should speak with a lawyer?"

I said, "Let's give it a day or two and see what happens. Just be prepared to tell the truth if and when the police want to talk to you."

~~~

"Janson Consulting, Allen Janson speaking," I said, answering my office phone.

"Hi, Sweetie. I just wanted to let you know that a couple of San Antonio detectives just left my office."

"How did it go?" I asked.

"They started out rather brusque but became much nicer and more professional when I mentioned to them that Frank Finley was our neighbor. I simply answered their questions and didn't offer anything further. They knew that I had visited him at his hotel, but seemed to accept my explanation that we met so that he could give me the certifications. Apparently, they have video from the hotel lobby that shows Kurt and I meeting there, him handing me some papers, and me never going to his room, so they accept that there was nothing personal going on between us. I don't think that they found the picture of me, but I can't imagine Kurt not having it in his hotel room. He bragged about looking at it all the time while fantasizing about being with me."

"Did you get a sense for which direction their investigation is going? I mean, did their questions lead you to think that they were investigating it as murder versus an accident..."

Samantha was silent for a moment before saying, "Not really. The questions that they asked me were pretty general and not like 'Do I know anyone who might want to harm him', or 'Did he seem depressed' type questions."

"Okay," I said. "I was just curious. Did they say anything about wanting to talk to me?"

"No, and I can't imagine from their questions what would make them even consider talking to you. They seem satisfied that Kurt and I were only working together and nothing more was going on between us. Why would they even think that you knew who Kurt was?"

"I don't suppose they would unless Frank mentioned something to them about my interest, but he probably assumes that it was your interest I was calling about rather than mine."

"That makes sense. Anyway, I'm going to be leaving here in fifteen minutes so I'll see you in about an hour. Will you be able to come out of your office and play with me for a while?"

"I'll be counting the minutes," I said. "Drive safe."

~~~

"Who do you know in Compton?" Samantha asked as she laid the plain manilla envelope on my desk. She always stopped and collected the mail from the box along the street when she came home from work.

I picked up the envelope and examined it. My name and address were handwritten in blue ink, but there was no return address provided.

"How do you know it's from someone in Compton?" I asked. "There's no return address."

Samantha point at the postmark and said, "It's postmarked as being mailed from Compton. Who would go to Compton to mail something unless they lived there? I know that I wouldn't."

"Good point," I said. "Let's see what it is."

I used a letter opener and then looked inside the envelope. There were two pieces of thin cardboard with a picture sandwiched between them. I separated the pieces of cardboard and pulled out the picture. Looking at it, I smiled and said, "Ah, my collection is once again complete."

Samantha gasped when she saw the picture, "That's the picture that Kurt stole from your desk. How did someone in Compton get it, and how did they know to send it to you?"

When I didn't answer, she picked up the envelope and studied it. Her eyes were wider than I had ever seen them when she said, "It's postmarked last Wednesday. Can you explain that?"

I shook my head and said, "No, I can't. The postal service delivering a piece of first-class mail in only two days defies explanation."

"Very funny," Samantha said. "You know what I'm asking, AJ. What did you do, or what did you have somebody else do?"

I scooted my chair back from the desk and pulled Samantha onto my lap. "Don't let your imagination run wild," I told her. "Someone who had been tormenting you met a justifiable fate and I got my picture back. Drop it."

Samantha buried her face against my neck and said, "He didn't deserve to die."

"Change roles," I said. "If some woman was tormenting me similar to how Halstrom was tormenting you and you had the means to make her stop..."

Surprisingly fast, Samantha replied with a simple, "Okay."

She then brought her lips to mine and kissed me with a sense of desperation. Her passion and love for me, for us, fueled her actions as she tried to undress both of us while I was carrying her to our bedroom.

Chapter Eleven

It's probably hard for some to imagine, but after only a few years in our house on three acres, we started feeling crowded by our neighbors.

It happened gradually as more people started building on their lots, but the biggest challenge came when the young couple who owned the lot to the left of ours started staking out the location for where they were planning to build their house.

One of the first things that I had done after our house was built was to construct a huge deck along the back. It stretched from one side of our house to the other and went out into the backyard more than forty feet on multiple levels. The clearance under the deck closer to the house provided an ideal place for the dogs to find shelter from the elements if they chose to stay outside rather than come into the garage or the house.

Since we had moved in, Samantha had used the deck whenever the weather was agreeable to lie out and sunbathe in her bikini. When she realized that the neighbors were staking out the location for their house so that their front yard would extend well into where our backyard was, she felt that the privacy she had enjoyed would soon disappear.

We had quite a bit of equity in the house, due to a general increase in home prices in the area, the numerous improvements that we had made in our house since moving in, and us having doubled-down on most of our mortgage payments. Samantha thought that we should try to find a larger lot in the area and build another house there. After all, being close to her parents was no longer a consideration for us.

We had seen signs advertising a new development about ten miles away, so we decided to check out what they had available. Surprisingly, lots there were selling for the same five-thousand dollars an acre as our first lot. Unlike our first lot, these were all derived from a former cattle ranch so the land was covered with coastal alfalfa with very few trees.

There were two adjoining five-acre lots at the top of a rise, providing a breathtaking view of the northern horizon, including the skyline of San Antonio in the distance. Samantha and I walked around both lots for several hours checking out the view and falling in love with the location. We decided to buy both of the lots, fence them in as one property, but we would keep them deeded as separate parcels.

There would be very little work required to get the lots ready to build on, so we returned to our previous builder and selected a much larger floorplan. At almost thirty-three hundred square feet, the house would be larger than we needed, but we felt that anything smaller would look minuscule on the land.

As we suspected it would, our current house sold almost immediately for more than we were asking. The buyers needed to move in as soon as the transaction was complete, so I talked to a retired neighbor couple and convinced them to let us rent their fifth-wheel trailer to be parked on our new property until the house was built. At what we were offering to pay them, they readily agreed.

The utilities were already run to the property along the street, so I had temporary meters installed. When the septic system was installed, I had a dump pipe run to the driveway so that we could connect the trailer to it. Within a week, we had water, electricity, and telephone service to the trailer, and we were ready to move in. All of our furniture went into storage, along with most of our clothes, but I made certain that Samantha could get to anything of hers that she might want easily enough.

The weekend after Houdini had been put to sleep, Samantha and I had gone to several pet stores looking for another companion for Snapper. Samantha wanted to try and find another Sheltie, but we weren't having much luck. Our final stop was at a small, family-owned pet store in Alamo Heights.

While Samantha was watching a couple playing with a puppy on the floor, I spotted what I thought was the largest Sheltie puppy I had ever seen. Samantha overheard me ask one of the store employees why the Sheltie puppy was so large and came over just as it was explained to me that the reason that Sheltie puppy was so large was that it wasn't a Sheltie. It was a Collie puppy.

Samantha squealed with excitement and asked to see it. The little girl did look like a bigger version of Snapper when she was a puppy, and she immediately stole Samantha's heart. Troop, as she was named, had been part of our family ever since.

Our lots backed up to a working cattle ranch, and there was field fencing between it and us that the dogs could not get through. However, the rest of the property only had ranch fencing around it, which consisted of white wooden posts with three horizontal wood rails between them. The lowest rail was about fifteen inches off the ground, more than enough space for Snapper and Troop to get under.

I knew that at some point I would need to run field fencing around the inside of all the ranch fence so that the dogs couldn't get out, but in the meantime, I just used the back fence as one side of the huge pen that I threw up to keep the dogs secure, yet away from where any actual construction would be taking place.

We lived in the trailer for a little over four months as the house was built. Samantha and I used our weekends to dig more holes and set posts to realign the ranch fencing and put in gates so that the back of our lot and all of the adjoining five acres would be available for the dogs, but the yard in front of the house would be open.

The only significant inconveniences for us during our time in the trailer were having to go to a laundromat to wash clothes, the bed wasn't as comfortable as ours, and Samantha's biggest gripe, the shower wasn't large enough for her and me to shower together.

With the house projected to be complete before Thanksgiving, Samantha invited Marlene and Steve to drive down and spend the holiday with us. Unfortunately, Marlene was managing a grocery store and she couldn't get anything other than Thanksgiving Day off. Fortunately, Dora and Keith decided to celebrate the holiday at their house in Florida rather than go to her parent's house in New York, so they insisted that Samantha and I join them.

Samantha's only stipulation to us spending Thanksgiving with Dora and Keith was that she and I would be staying in a nearby hotel. Dora laughed, fully aware of why Samantha would want us to have our privacy while visiting. I don't know if the guests in rooms near ours thought that it was as funny as Dora did.

~~~

Saturn Systems always used their company Christmas party for the presentation of yearly awards and bonuses. Samantha was expected to win 'Employee of the Year' for the third year in a row, so naturally, I was proud to once again accompany her to the event.

Through her intrinsic beauty and grace, Samantha was frequently perceived as being coquettish, but she didn't have a flirtatious cell in her body for anyone but me. At non-work social gatherings, Samantha was constantly by my side, on my lap, or finding some other way to physically demonstrate to everyone that she and I were an inseparable couple.

At work-related gatherings, such as her company's Christmas party, where she felt an obligation to mingle and associate with coworkers, her devotion to me was not demonstrated through blatant physical acts, but rather through more abstract means, such as refusing to dance with anyone but me or quickly introducing me to anyone who I hadn't met before.

As proud as I was of my wife for her accomplishments at work, and everything else about her, I knew that she was equally proud of me. She understood that she could leave me to my own devices at her company's events and that I would mingle and converse with people who I had known there for years. I would see her smile and point in my direction when someone she was speaking with asked her where her husband was. If the people didn't know of me, or knew little about me, they would frequently be surprised to see me associating happily with the leadership team at Saturn Systems; people that I had been consulting for free of charge over the entire time of Samantha's employment there. Samantha took great pride in her coworkers recognizing the deference and respect that their leaders demonstrated towards her husband.

As dinner was preparing to be served, Samantha broke away from her coworkers and came over to retrieve me so that we could find our assigned table. Each table sat four people, and I could see that Samantha was leading us to a table that already had another couple sitting at it. As I held her chair for her, Samantha introduced everyone.

"AJ, I think you probably remember Scott Palmer."

I shook the hand of the handsome early thirty-something account representative that I had met previously and said, "Of course. It's good to see you again, Scott."

"Good to see you again, Mr. Barrett."

I ignored the obvious dig, but Samantha didn't.

"Do we have to find another table, Scott?" she asked with barely controlled disdain in her tone.

Scott blanched at Samantha's rebuff, and said, "No, no, I'm sorry. It's just uncommon for husbands and wives to have different last names and your's is the one I am most familiar with."

"And this is his wife, Monica," added Samantha politely. "Monica, this is my husband, Allen Janson."

Monica was a slender, willowy vision, with a killer smile beneath her deep brown eyes. She reminded me of a high-fashion runway model. She exuded an effervescence that was enchanting. I shook her hand and said, "It's a pleasure to meet you."

After we were all seated, Samantha went on to explain, "I don't know if you remember, AJ, but Scott works with our financial market group out of New York. He's up for an award tonight, so we're glad that Monica was able to fly in and join us to celebrate Scott's achievement."

Monica laughed and said, "It's me who is celebrating. This is the first night out that Scott and I have had alone since our youngest was born three and a half years ago. I couldn't talk my neighbors into watching all our kids overnight until they were all out of diapers. Anyway, it's great to finally meet you, Samantha. Scott raves about all that you do to help him with his accounts and credits you with his success. Thanks for everything you have done for him, and for us."

Over dinner, Scott Palmer and I said quietly as our two wives shared stories about how each of us had met and gotten together. Monica and Scott had been high school sweethearts on Long Island, toughed out lengthy separations as they both went to different colleges, yet remained committed to each other. Scott had started working for Saturn Systems shortly after graduating. He and Monica had married shortly after that and didn't hesitate to start on their family. I guess that they were both slightly older than they looked, since they now had an eleven-year-old daughter and two sons, eight and three and a half.

Even before Scott Palmer began trying to impress us with his high school and college athletic accomplishments, I had determined that he strove to be the Alpha Male in any social situation. He focused his attention solely on the two wives as he spoke, and smirked at me every time either wife expressed even the slightest hint of being impressed by his tales. To me, Alpha Males were like pesky house flies. You had to be careful when you swatted them to ensure that they didn't fall into your drink or onto your plate.

During the awards portion, several promotions were announced, including Scott Palmer being named to one of several new Region Account Manager positions that had been created. He had just returned to our table to be congratulated by Monica when Samantha was announced as the Employee of the Year and rose to go accept her award. Scott made a move to give a congratulatory hug to my wife, but she side-stepped his approach and moved into my arms.

"Congratulations, Babe," I whispered in her ear.

She gave me a quick kiss and headed to the podium. Scott and I watched her walk away and he said, "No one deserves it more than her."

"No need to tell me," I said. "No one knows how passionate Samantha is about her role at Saturn Systems than me."

A smirk returned to Scott's face as he said, "I'm just glad that I earn enough so that Monica doesn't have to work. What is it they say, 'Them who can do; them who can't consult'?"

"Gee," I said. "I've never heard that before."

I ignored him as Samantha returned to our table with a plaque and the envelope containing her award bonus. We kissed quickly before I held her chair to allow her to resume her seat. Since her award was the last, the leadership team for Saturn Systems began touring the room, stopping at various tables to congratulate the award winners further.

When Bruce Winters, Vice President of Sales approached our table, Scott began 'fluffing his feathers' in anticipation. Bruce would be Scott's immediate boss in his new role, so he assumed that he was going to be the focus of Bruce's attention once he reached our table, and stood to meet him.

Bruce patted Scott on the shoulder as he stepped past him to address my wife. "What is this now Samantha, three years in a row?"