I told you, the Internet stuff always seems so harmless.”
“Your mother’s good with computers?”
“No. You don’t have to be good with computers to work the Internet. She was just lonely, that’s all. She’d be online almost every night. I know, ‘cause I’d always get a busy signal when I tried to call. Finally, I talked her into getting a second line.”
“She spent that much time.”
“Yeah. What else did she have to do?”
“And always with Merlot?”
“Not at first. I spend my share of time on-line. I’ve got E-mail friends all over the world, so Mom and I used to jabber away to each other. For some reason… it’s hard to explain… but there are certain subjects that are easier to write about than talk about. So that’s what we’d do. Write notes back and forth about all kinds of stuff. She’d write about the way it was between her and my real dad, and I’d write about… well, private stuff, the way I felt about things.”
“So what happened?”
“What happened was she got involved with a different group of E-mail friends. I wasn’t a part of it. And I think she had an on-line crush on some guy from California. She never told me that, but if my mom mentions a guy more than twice, I know she has some feelings for him. I warned her about telling strangers too much about herself. I mean, no one really knows who anyone else is on the Internet. Right?”
I didn’t reply. I had never been on the Internet. I had a phone. Sanibel’s good little library and the post office were just down the shell road. What did I need with the Internet?
She was still talking about it. “Like the guy she was E-mailing, the guy who she said was from California. He could have been anyone. Like a ninety-year-old man from Jamaica. Or maybe not a man at all, but a woman. Or maybe some kinky teenager who lived two houses away. People can say anything about themselves. And there’s no way of knowing.”
“Did she say how Merlot found her on-line?”
“No. Just that she’d been E-mailing an old friend who’d been very kind and helpful to her. Her saying that, I think it was her way of telling me that she was going to start dating again. Mom and Frank were couples people. The only people they socialized with were married couples, so Merlot was one of the few single men in the picture. But every time I asked about him, my mom insisted that she had no romantic interest. Just that he was very kind to her, someone to talk to. So I figured, fine, that’s exactly what she needs. A friend.”
But Amanda’s opinion changed when she finally met Merlot. “I stopped by Mom’s house one afternoon. I hadn’t called ahead and he was there, the two of them sitting out by the pool. Have you ever surprised someone doing something they shouldn’t be doing? That’s the way Merlot reacted. I could see his expression change when I walked in, surprised like he was ready to jump up and hide. I couldn’t figure out why. They were both fully dressed, they weren’t even sitting that close together, but I still had the feeling I’d interrupted something. Not from my mom. She was happy to see me, perfectly at ease. But from him, he was very nervous, lots of shifting around in his chair and the kind of eye contact where someone’s searching your face for a reaction.
“He recovered pretty fast, though. After that, he was as nice and charming as he could be. He’d been saving a couple of presents for me. A hat and a T-shirt from some rock group he claimed to be associated with. And he made sure that I was the focus of conversation. But even if he’d have reacted differently when I walked in, I don’t think I’d have trusted the guy. He’s got all the social skills and he’s very, very smooth. Too smooth. He’s a hugger and a cheekkisser, one of those feel-good people who’s great at a wedding or a dinner party, but there was something odd about him. Just looking at him made me feel… dirty? No, that’s a little strong. But creepy, yeah. Something about Jackie Merlot… just wasn’t right.”
Amanda said she didn’t tell her mother about her negative reaction to Merlot because she didn’t think it was necessary. Gail Richardson insisted that Merlot just wanted to be friends and that she had absolutely no romantic interest in the man.
“I believed her. Up to that point, I don’t think she’d ever lied to me in her life. She needed friends and I wasn’t about to interfere. Besides, I never in a million years imagined that someone who looked like Merlot could get to first base with my mom. The man is more than just unattractive, he’s actually kind of disgusting.”
I said, “Oh?”
“Picture a mound of mashed potatoes or a very large marshmallow with the face of a teenage boy attached. Hairless and cheeky, that kind of face. Add one of those tiny, round mouths you sometimes see; one of those rosebud Irish mouths, then stick a blond toupee on top and razor-cut it smooth. You know, a disco haircut from the seventies. I don’t know why it’s blond, because he looks like he might have a little bit of something else in him. Asian? I don’t know, something. Eastern European maybe. But that’s Jackie Merlot. And he’s big. Huge, actually. One of those really freakish oversized men.
“But the way he moves, the way he looks, he seems far more feminine than masculine. When he walks, he takes small, quick steps, almost like he’s dancing, and he has the kind of high, gravelly voice that I associate with large women who smoke a lot or who are very overweight.” She paused for a moment, thinking about it before she added, “So make it two reasons I didn’t think Merlot had a chance with my mom. Physically, he was way too unappealing, plus I also figured he was gay. He seemed so… safe.
“Turns out,” she said, “he wasn’t.”
By the time it was obvious that Gail Calloway and Merlot were involved in a physical relationship, it was too late for Amanda to tell her mother about her gut reaction to the man. Not that she didn’t try to tell her.
She did.
But it was too late to carry much influence. Merlot had a hold on her by then.
“It’s the only way I can describe it,” Amanda told me. “He had a powerful hold on her that just kept getting stronger and stronger. When I asked her why she was interested in Merlot, her answer actually gave me chills. Her exact words were, ‘Because he thinks I’m pretty. He buys me presents and he says the nicest things to me.’
“Doc, my mother is not a shallow person. Besides, she’s a fairly wealthy woman on her own. Frank and the courts saw to that. The way she said it, ‘He buys me presents,’ her voice had this robot kind of little-girl quality that scared the hell out of me. ‘He thinks I’m pretty.’ My God, like all the confidence she’d once had had been destroyed when Frank split.
“I’m no spoiled little brat. I don’t have to approve of the man my mother dates, but there was something… weird?… yeah, something weird about this guy. It really bothered me. Another thing was, the more she saw of Merlot, the more distant she became toward me. Same with her closest women friends, and she had quite a few. We almost never heard from her. That sense that something sneaky was going on-the same thing I saw in Jackie Merlot’s face the day I surprised them-I now began to hear and see in my mother. It wasn’t like her. I knew then what I’m now positive of: Merlot had control of her and, whether she knew it or not, my mom was in trouble.”
Gail Richardson began to spend weekends at Merlot’s home. Then she spent whole weeks at a time; increasingly long periods when Gail seldom made an attempt to communicate with her daughter or her friends. Amanda had the strong impression that Merlot discouraged outside contact. She saw her mother briefly in September, then again around Halloween. More than a month of silence followed before Gail finally replied to one of Amanda’s many phone messages to Merlot’s house. A few days later, Merlot had his telephone number changed.
“It was getting pretty close to Christmas by then,” Amanda said. “I didn’t know what in the world to do, so I finally broke down, called Frank and I’d told him what was going on. What scared me most of all was the sound of Frank’s voice when I told him. He recognized Merlot’s name right away and I realized that maybe, just maybe, Merlot had been a patient of Frank’s instead of an early investor like Mom had told me.”
“You say that just because of the way your stepfather reacted?”
She was nodding, very matter-of-fact. Her expression said: You’d have to know the guy to understand. “The way Frank reacts, that’s the only way you’d ever know anything from his shrink days. He takes the ethics of his old profession very seriously. It’s the only thing that explained why he sounded so damn worried.”
“When you mentioned Jackie Merlot.”
“Exactly. When I told him, what he said was, ‘Jesus Christ, no wonder your mother didn’t tell me.’ And a little bit later, he said, ‘I thought Jackie Merlot would be in a facility by now,’ and then he clammed up quick, like it had just sort of slipped out. But he was worried enough to hire a professional to have Merlot investigated, and he also offered to go with me to Merlot’s house and insist that we be allowed to speak with Mom.”
