Forester had done the same thing. She, too, had made marital promises that she had been unwilling or unable to keep. And now the young wife and mother was every bit as dead as Paul Grayson.
Ali went to bed a short time after that, but it took hours before she fell asleep. Awakening the next morning to the sound of Chris’s car pulling out of the driveway, she wandered out to the kitchen and poured herself a cup of coffee.
While she had been lying awake, she’d kept going back to Morgan Forester’s involvement with the Internet dating site Singleatheart.com. What had compelled a supposedly happily married woman to sign up for something like that? And what kind of people had she hoped to meet there?
Other cheaters, no doubt, Ali thought. Other people whose word couldn’t be trusted. So why had Morgan thought one of them would have more to offer than her hardworking husband, Bryan?
Without necessarily making a conscious decision, Ali retrieved her computer and dragged it over to the dining room table. Within a matter of minutes, she had surfed over to the Singleatheart website. At least she had arrived at the welcome page. In order to see more than that, she would have to register. To simply surf through the site or post a profile would cost a hundred dollars. To make a connection with one of the profiled parties was an additional four hundred.
Ali hesitated. She had no interest in posting a profile, but she wanted to know more about the people who had. She waffled briefly, but before long, her natural curiosity won out. In order to register, she had to provide both her name and a screen name. Fortunately, Babe, her Cutloose handle, worked very nicely. Her names, along with a working credit-card number and billing address, allowed her to log on.
Her browser was set to limit pop-up ads, but once Ali was inside Singleatheart, her computer screen was immediately besieged by a cascade of competing images. Unremittingly explicit sexual scenes sprang to life on either side of her screen. As a news broadcaster, Ali had done two separate news stories related to commercial porn sites. She had expected a dating site to be somewhat less graphic, but it wasn’t. There were ads for sex toys that came in more varieties, shapes, colors, and sizes than she ever could have imagined. The lingerie for sale was outrageous, and the ads promoting it were even more so. This was a long, long way from eHarmony!
The middle of the screen contained an old-fashioned Mercator projection of the world with an arrow and a guide that advised visitors to click on a particular location in order to narrow their search. By the time she landed on the map for Arizona, she was told that the section contained 2,364 profiles. That many? she thought. Just in Arizona?
Ali whistled aloud. At a hundred or five hundred bucks a pop? You didn’t have to be a math whiz to realize that Singleatheart meant big business. Even if you disregarded the lower-priced subscribers who were website visitors only, the people who ran Singleatheart were raking in piles of Internet dough.
Ali poured herself another cup of coffee and prepared for what she thought would be a long search, but she found what she was looking for almost immediately among the list of Arizona-based female profiles: the screen name Morgan le Fay.
From Camelot, Ali thought, drawing on her knowledge of Aunt Evie’s extensive collection of musical comedies. Like the fairy princess who caused all the trouble by packing off Merlin.
It took some time for her air card to download the profile, which consisted of several paragraphs of printed bio-style material along with a video clip. When that one finally opened, Ali saw a young woman sitting in a wooden swing, probably on the very porch where Morgan Forester had been murdered. She was a blond beauty with fine features, a winning smile, and an air of absolute innocence. Had Ali not heard what Billy Barnes had told Dave Holman about Morgan, Ali might have believed that look. Instead, she hit the play button, and the taped image of Morgan Forester began to speak:
“My grandmother loved records. Not CDs, but the old-fashioned black vinyl ones that played on phonographs. One of her favorites-one she listened to when she was washing dishes or doing the ironing-was done by a woman named Peggy Lee. I came into the house one time and found my grandmother sitting on the sofa crying with a record playing in the background. I asked her what was wrong, and she told me, ‘Oh, honey, it’s just so sad.’ ‘What’s so sad?’ I asked her. ‘This lady and her song,’ she said. ‘She’s singing about her life.’ “I loved my grandmother to pieces. It worried me that something could make her that upset, so I made it my business to find out which song it was that bothered her so much. ‘Is That All There Is?’ Eventually, my grandmother divorced my grandfather and came to live with us. She brought her records with her. I still have that one by Peggy Lee, and now I understand it. Too well. I’m living that same kind of life. “If you asked any of my friends, they’d be surprised. They all think I have the perfect life, and maybe I do. I have a nice house, a nice car, good kids, and a nice husband, but it seems like nice is not enough. I keep asking myself the same question: Is this all there is? “My husband and I started dating while we were still in high school. From the time I first knew him, he dreamed of having his own business. At first he worked construction for other people. When he was able to go off on his own, we both thought his dream-our dream-had come true. Now that he’s successful, it’s more like a nightmare. That’s all he thinks about all day long-his business. He lives, eats, and breathes his job. Yes, I’ll admit he brings in good money, but what good is money if we never do anything together or if we never have any fun? “As far as I can see, I’m nothing more to him than a live-in cook and babysitter. Don’t get me wrong. I love my two girls. And I guess I even still love him a little. But I’m looking for something more. I want someone who will look at me and value me for the person I am. Someone who will see that I’m more than an attractive doormat in a very nice house. I don’t want to go to my grave still asking Peggy Lee’s old question, because I believe with all my heart that there is something more out there for me. Something better.”
For a long time after the clip ended, Ali sat staring at Morgan Forester’s features, slightly distorted but frozen in place on the computer screen. The whole thing left Ali feeling incredibly sad. The vital and attractive young woman who had filmed that clip was no more. The life she’d had-with her boring but hardworking husband and challenging seven-year-old daughters-really was all there was or ever would be, just like in the song. It sounded like Morgan had fallen out of love with her husband and was looking for more than a quick roll in the hay.
Whatever Morgan had wanted, or however much she had cheated on her husband, it seemed clear that she had cheated herself even more. Her craving for temporary excitement had robbed her of a lifetime of joy-of watching her children grow up and become adults themselves; of watching them marry and have children of their own. The real tragedy of Morgan Forester’s life was that she had missed it.
How could a few tawdry sexual encounters have been worth all that? Ali wondered, although Morgan couldn’t have known that she was putting her entire existence at risk.
When Ali had watched the tape of Dave’s interview with Billy Barnes, it had struck her as odd that Billy would have such intimate knowledge about Bryan and Morgan Forester’s private lives. Some men might go around pounding each other on the back and bragging about their various sexual exploits, but Ali couldn’t see Bryan admitting to anyone-especially one of his employees-that his marriage was going south and that his wife was screwing around on him. If Bryan hadn’t admitted any of that to Billy, how did Billy know so much? And why was the man so outspoken in his antipathy toward his boss’s dead wife? And why had he taken it all so personally?
Ali had been about to exit the website. Now, though, working on a hunch, she clicked back to the navigation page and pulled up the list of Arizona would-be bachelors, the men who were stalking the Internet in hopes of hooking up with like-minded women, sexual partners who were willing to play around with no strings attached.
This time the search took slightly longer, but as soon as she saw the screen name Billy Boy, she knew she was on the right track. After a few more clicks, there he was-Billy Barnes himself. His run-of-the-mill profile contained no film clip, just a still photo and a laudatory bio that made Billy sound like a well-to-do contractor in his own right rather than a guy working for someone else. Ali also remembered noticing that Billy wore a wedding ring, but that was hardly a surprise. After all, this site was a place for people who were single at heart as opposed to being single really.
Was it possible that Morgan and Billy had hooked up and had a fling? If so, it would have been a stunning double betrayal-an unfaithful wife deliberately carrying on an affair with a man who was both her husband’s friend and his employee. If it had happened, and if Bryan had somehow caught wind of it, would that-along with the missing cabinet deposits-have been enough to push him over the edge and set off a murderous rage?
But did it really happen? Ali wondered. Am I leaping to conclusions here?
The fact that both Billy and Morgan were members of Singleatheart didn’t necessarily mean that they’d been involved. But still, it was possible, and it meant that if nothing else, Billy knew about Morgan’s posting.
