Nothing Better To Do - a novel in stories - Chapter 16

Chapter Sixteen

House was alone in his room. He took the letter from his pocket. Sitting on the edge of his bed, he read it again:

To The Editor:

I am writing to protest the reduction of Police staff assigned to patrolling the internet. From what I understand, the number of officers has been reduced from four to just one. That one officer is only at it eight hours per day, therefore there is no longer around the clock coverage, and no double coverage during those important hours immediately after the children come home from school. Furthermore, I understand that the officer who was responsible for the arrest of that child molester from Toledo has been assigned to a regular patrol.

As a Girl Scout Leader, I have recently witnessed what I maintain is the ultimate outcome of the proliferation of kiddie-porn. This past weekend, our troop was holding it's annual Halloween camp-out at the Fairgrounds, when the Scout Leaders' nightmare to end all nightmares happened. The girls were sitting around the campfire telling ghost stories. The adults on the trip had gone inside the mess tent for a cup of coffee. Suddenly, the girls started screaming. I realized, right away, that it was more than what one might expect from the scary tales. I ran outside just in time to see a tall man in a raincoat with some kind of jack-o-lantern mask covering his face. He was holding his coat open to expose his genitals. Now here's the really sick part, (I'll use a seasonal analogy here in order not to be too graphic.) his gourds were painted orange and his stem was painted green.

When he saw me, he quickly closed his coat and ran off into the woods. It is clear that it was the girls who were the target of his sick behavior. Of course, we called the police, but he was gone without a trace by the time they responded.

This is the kind of thing that happens when people are free to do whatever they want to do over the internet. If we had more people like Officer Orel Paige out there to put kibosh on this kind of sick behavior in cyberspace, then the sickos wouldn't be so emboldened as to try it in the real world. When I was a Girl Scout, we didn't have an internet and not once did we encounter degenerate behavior of this sort on any of our camping trips.

Very truly yours,

Louise Mays - Leader of Troop 103

***

House knew Mrs. Mays. He'd had a crush on her his second time through third grade. He had been eleven when she was eight. She had been Weezie Bradstone, back then. He never spoke to her because everyone thought he was just a big dummy. But he knew where she lived because he had followed her home from school one day. It wasn't far from his own house, so he often went there and watched the house in the afternoons to see if he could catch sight of her playing in the yard. When she married, she and her husband moved in with her mother. When her mother died, they continued to live in the same house. As far as he knew, they still lived there. House had it in his mind to finally talk to her. Now that he was a sort of unofficial reporter for the Banner, he had a few questions he wanted to ask her.

A girl opened the door in response to his knock. She looked like she was about twelve years old and, from the resemblance to Louise, she must have been the daughter.

"Hi, I'm Marvin Payne from the Banner. Is your mother home?"

"She's not here right now. Is this about the letter?" She smiled as if she thought she were about to become famous.

"My editor sent me over to follow up on it." House didn't really consider this to be a lie. It was merely a professional untruth, like the times he would call Gar Findaly to ask him when he was going to be officially promoted to reporter and his secretary would tell him he wasn't there.

"She didn't really see much, but I was there."

"Well, what did you see? Do you think you could recognize the man if you saw him again?"

"Not really. It was dark outside the circle of the fire. I could see that he was tall and wearing an pumpkin head mask and a rain coat. When he opened the coat, it was really too dark to see anything."

"Well, where did all that stuff about his... er... things being painted green and orange come from?"

"Oh, that was Sarah Johns. She said that was what she saw."

"Did any of the other girls see that?"

"No, I don't think so. Nobody saw much, but Sarah."

"Do you know where she lives?"

"Uh huh. She lives over on Second Street in a big ole house with her aunt and uncle, the Paiges. I don't know the number, but you can look it up, or else you can wait for my mamma to come home."

"Thanks. That's okay. I'll find it."

***

Sarah Johns moved in with her mother's sister when she was ten years old. She and her mother had been abandoned by her father when she was eight. After that, her mother had taken to hanging out in bars and leaving the child home alone. Neighbors reported it to the police and there was a hearing where it was determined that she was not a fit mother. The family had been notified and close relatives were invited to file petitions for custody. As the Paiges hadn't been able to have children, they were particularly interested in taking the girl. Orel Paige was a Police Officer and his wife, Lucy, worked in the Mayor's Office; they seemed to be the best qualified.

Some time after Sarah turned eleven, she began to sprout firm little mounds with Hershey's Kisses nipples that, like crocuses in spring, seemed to want to poke through every thing she wore. It seemed to her that her uncle had taken particular notice. She often caught him looking at her, he suddenly seemed more affectionate, and he used any excuse he could think of to put his hands on her. Having been starved for fatherly attention, she didn't mind any of this. Actually, she liked it and encouraged it by flirting. It was around this time that Orel Paige was assigned to patrol the internet. Some say he asked for it, that he actually created the job, as it hadn't existed before.

Often, when Paige would come home from work, he would continue his investigations on his home computer. He would work late into the night, hanging out in chat rooms, following hyperlinks to the kind of web sites where he could expect to find pictures. When he found photographs, he would download them onto his hard drive. When the girl would come home from school, she would go on the computer and find the pictures.

By the time she was twelve, she looked all of fifteen. The pictures her uncle was downloading aroused her curiosity. After school, she would go on line and follow the links in her uncle's bookmarks, to the chat rooms and kiddie-porn sites he was investigating. But it wasn't enough.

Early one Saturday morning, as she was passing her aunt and uncle's bedroom, she heard some noises. The door was opened a crack, so she peered in. Later in the day, when her aunt had gone out, she told her uncle, "You should close your door more tightly. As I was going by, this morning, I saw you and my aunt having sex."

"You did? How much did you see?"

"I saw everything from beginning to end." She was smiling.

"Why did you watch for so long?"

"I don't know. I guess I thought it was interesting. Lots of times, I've hidden around the house, under the bed, in the closet, and watched you naked. Lots of times I've caught you playing with your thingie and you didn't even know it."

Later, Paige would confess to the girl that the prospect of her watching had aroused him. The next time he made love to his wife, he had purposely left the door open a crack and all the while they were having sex, he intentionally imagined that she was watching. He told her that he had never come so hard as he did that time, that his wife had even remarked on the vigorousness of his love making.

It wasn't long before he was exposing himself to her. He would often try to get her to play with him, but she refused, so he took to masturbating in front of her while she was watching television or working on the computer. He must have been confused by her hot and cold behavior. One time, when he was wearing just boxers, he was standing on a chair reaching for something on a high shelf in the kitchen, she snuck up behind him and pulled his shorts down around his ankles. Laughing, he pulled his shorts up again and chased after her. She turned and playfully grabbed him by the genitals, then ran to her room, where she locked herself in.

One of the things he did to try to arouse her interest was to show her the pictures he had downloaded from the internet. He didn't know it, but she was already bored with those same pictures.

Apparently, he continued to try everything he could think of to get her to play with him, but it was still no go. Finally, just before Halloween, she was painting decorations on her face in preparation for the annual Girl Scout camp-out. Instead of uniforms, the girls were supposed to wear costumes. Later they would sit around the campfire and tell spooky stories. As she sat on the living room sofa, painting her face orange and green with the aid of a hand held mirror, Paige whipped it out and started playing with himself. It must have been then that he got the idea. He convinced her to paint his balls orange and his dick green. As she was painting on the finishing touches of green with the small camel's hair brush, he ejaculated all over her costume.

That night when her uncle exposed himself to the Girl Scout Troop at the fairgrounds, Sarah hadn't actually been able to see the decorated genitalia. She recognized her uncle from his bearing and his coat and the mask he had bought in K Mart, and she just assumed that she had seen the orange testicles and the green penis she told the others about. She was no longer curious about sex, at least as far as he was concerned. And his advances were getting more aggressive. They were starting to worry her. And she was really pissed about having had to change her costume at the last minute after he messed all over her. She was beginning to hope that he would get caught.

All this was related by the girl in a deadpan monotone on the tape House was playing in Gar Findaly's office.

"This is really something..." Gar was shaking his head. "But damn... It's her word against his."

"She says he took pictures with his digital camera."

"Can she get a copy?"

"She says she's going to look for them on his computer, but it's going to take awhile. He's got lots of disks full of stuff."

"I'm not sure what we've got here and I'm doubly unsure what to do with it," Gar Findaly said as he locked the tape into the small safe in his office. "I think we'll have to sit on it for awhile. I know one thing for sure though, that was a damn fine piece of investigation, House. For now, I'll have to ask you to keep it under your hat. I've got a feeling there's going to be a right time to release this, and I think it's going to be soon. Just call it my newspaper man's instinct."

As House was leaving the Editor's Office, Gar's secretary buzzed in on the intercom, "It's the Chief of Police."

"Tell him I'll get back to him," Gar instructed her.

"He says you still haven't gotten back to him from the last time."

"Tell him I'll see him at the poker game, tonight. I'm too busy right now." He waved to House as he went out the door, then thought better of it and waived him back in. "Be sure and let me know right away, if that girl calls to tell you she found the pictures," he told him.

House nodded and went out the door.