The Replacement Wife: A Psychological Thriller Read online

  “You are not the first person to make such a suggestion.”

  Mark’s mouth fell open. His eyes were wide. He ran his fingers through his hair. He started pacing again, and I have to admit it feels rather nice when your potential is fully recognized. “You’re exactly right,” he said. “We have to present this as an issue of evolution versus one of morals. That’s the only way we can win.”

  “But June will never go for me having another wife. And I don’t want a divorce.”

  “Those are just details,” he assured me. Then he smiled. “Details, my friend, which can be worked out.”

  Chapter Five

  Melanie

  In every seduction, romantic or otherwise, there are two elements one must evaluate and understand: first, yourself and what is seductive about you; and second, your mark and what it will take to penetrate their defenses and create surrender. I learned this by watching my father.

  Of course, I took his methods and refined them. There’s nothing sexy about being a copycat.

  For starters, if you never let anyone close, they’ll have a harder time finding flaws.

  People will follow a thing all the way through so long as there is a question they haven’t yet answered.

  Why am I so attracted to this person?

  What was his motive?

  What will she do next?

  If he meant this, why did he say that?

  But sometimes distance is impossible, and in this case, I have questions. Also, I’m dealing with the likes of Beth Jones. The leader of New Hope’s wife, the real church founder, that’s what Josie had said. Beth has just called to say she’s popping by for a visit tomorrow. Apparently, according to Tom, and well, just about everyone, Beth is not the kind of woman to be refused.

  I have to say, this intrigues me.

  I need to see what I’m up against. I need an opponent worth playing.

  The truth is, I’ve been feeling itchy lately, so I liked that her visit wasn’t a question. I appreciate the way they say, with her, everything is a statement.

  This should be fun.

  I’ve done my homework. God knows, there’s nothing else going on around here. Tom has promised he’ll get me a car, but he says he wants to wait for the morning sickness to pass first. Unfortunately, I’d already played that card, and it wasn’t the kind I could take back right away.

  So, to say that I welcome the distraction, the opportunity for mental stimulation Beth’s visit will provide, would be an understatement.

  Already, I’ve learned a few things. Things I plan to use to my advantage. One, this meeting is important to Tom. I haven’t quite figured out why, but he really seems to want these people to like him. Obviously, at least temporarily, I want what Tom wants.

  Two, I’m young and pliable. This makes me attractive. Just ask Tom.

  Three, for reasons I haven’t yet figured out, Beth needs me more than she wants me to think she does. That’s the variable. I have to find out what she wants.

  Going in, I knew about Tom’s affiliation with the church. He explained it in only a way Tom can, methodically and at length. To tell you the truth, details I don’t care about bore me, so I tuned him out. I wasn’t interested in Tom’s perspective on religion, or why he was involved. I was interested in Tom. I was interested in having a place to live. Most of all, I was interested in someone footing the bill.

  I do recall him explaining that new members are assigned a sponsor.

  “What, like A.A.?” I’d asked.

  “I don’t know that acronym.”

  “Alcoholics Anonymous.”

  He apprised me carefully, his green eyes on fire with concern. “You’re not one of those, are you?”

  “No,” I said with the flick of my wrist. “I hardly drink.” Keyword being hardly.

  “I don’t know what they do at A.A. I can only explain the church.”

  I shrugged. He’d pretty much lost me there, but he went on. “We have rules. Sponsors help us adhere to those rules.”

  “Who wants that kind of life?”

  “I do.”

  “Oh,” I smiled. “Then it can’t be that bad.”

  He didn’t respond.

  The first time I see Mark Jones, he is wearing a robe. A long, red, velvety-looking robe. He enters the church, hands folded neatly in prayer, tucked under his chin, the widest grin you’ve ever seen. There is a processional of people behind him. My job is to take up the collection of cell phones at the door. Most people leave them at home; they are forbidden during service, Tom informs me. But sometimes members forget, and my husband assures me this assignment will serve me well. “You’ll get to know everyone this way.”

  “Melanie,” they each say, greeting me, taking my free hand into theirs. It’s like they’ve known me all my life. I don’t know what to say, so I plaster a smile on my face and freeze it there. At one point, I have to massage my jaw. I’m afraid it might be permanently stuck there.

  “You must be Melanie,” a couple says, holding me hostage. Service is about to start. Or at least I assume so because the music has changed, and my eyes have locked on to Mark Jones. Same as everyone else. “Who is that?” I ask as the woman shakes my hand vigorously. She refuses to let go. But eventually, she turns her head. “Oh, that, dear, is our fearless leader. That is Mr. Jones.”

  He stares so deeply into my eyes it feels like he’s x-raying my soul.

  “We’re so glad to finally meet you,” the woman tells me. “We’d better take our seat.”

  This feels like a lie because the wives were not so happy to meet me, not at first.

  Here, in the church, everyone is happy. It’s like a coliseum more than a church, I tell Tom later. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. In the few times I’ve ever attended church, either for a wedding, or a funeral, or just to pretend when my father’s parents were in town, it wasn’t like this. In my experience with organized religion, people wore fake smiles they stretched across their face. They had to grin and bear it, but they were glad when it was over so they could get back to their judging and their sinning. So long as you made it right on Sunday, you were allowed your indiscretions on the other days of the week.

  Here it is clear from the beginning: it is not that way.

  I listen to Mark as he speaks, and I am fascinated. I don’t fall asleep like I’d planned. Mark is too animated, too over the top, too…interesting. He is a white flag on a mountaintop, showing us we too can be saved. He also happens to speak on a topic I find fascinating. He explains DISC theory, a topic I am quite familiar with.

  “People are happiest when they are submissive to a loving authority,” he tells the congregation, and it is like he is speaking directly into my soul. “Compliance,” he says, “only leads to resentment. Submission,” he assures me and everyone, “is key.”

  He goes on to explain inducement. He doesn’t have to tell me. I already know. Inducement is the act of seducing someone into your way of thinking and dominating them so completely that what you want is what they want. Inducement is making the other person, or other people, depending on the context, happy to give it to you. That is the secret to life, to marriage, to everything, he says.

  But it’s what he doesn’t say that interests me most.

  Women are far better at inducement than men.

  “His psychology is a bit outdated,” I say to Tom in the parking lot. “But it wasn’t as bad as I’d expected.”

  He doesn’t respond.

  “What did you think?”

  “Typical service.”

  “Do they always worship him like that?” It was strange. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen the way people could worship other people. My father’s women, the popular girls in school, my mother with my sister. But until then, I don’t think I’d ever witnessed it on such a large scale. I’d never seen it like that. “How do you get that many people to just do whatever you want when you just give them the answer?”

&nb
sp; “The answer?”

  I shake my head. It’s like he wasn’t listening at all. “Inducement.”

  He keeps walking.

  “It’s like he’s God himself or something. He’s so good.”

  Tom halts rather abruptly. “It isn’t bad or good, Melanie. There’s no point in analyzing it.” His expression hardens. “It just is.”

  “It’s all very interesting, if you ask me.”

  Tom’s grip on my hand loosens, until he drops it all together. There’s a look in his eyes that I’d deleted from memory. “Well, I didn’t,” he says and he pulls his hand away.

  It’s hard to believe I hadn’t known before Tom brought me here that this place existed. Upton Village. But then, why would I? You don’t get into a place like this without an invitation and like most of the finer things in life, it’s more about who you know than what you know. In this case, it’s better not to know too much. They say it takes a village, and that’s what they’ve created—an exclusive gated community just a few miles south of Austin

  The church bought out the neighborhood eventually, save for a few holdouts. Gawkers, Tom called them. He said the church did things to try and force them out. Mostly it worked. He said it takes a special kind of person to stay where you’re not wanted.

  It seems like more of a commune to me, but instead of residents who look like hippies, the people of Upton are perfect, beautiful. Picturesque. Unmistakable.

  Our street in particular is a carefully crafted, immaculately maintained mishmash of Victorians, Craftsman, and Colonials which are made to look old but actually aren’t.

  The streets are tree lined, mostly oaks, and I don’t know how else to describe my new living quarters other than to say, it is quite literally like stepping back in time. The sun is bright, the shadows dance between the mixture of light and shade that hardly has time to blanket the ground given the cool canopy of trees. The breeze always seems to carry with it the scent of barbecue smoke and homemade bread. Things here have an exact nature, even the flowerbeds are laid out in military precision.

  Here the women don’t rattle on about schools, they’ve created their own. “They seem so insular,” I told Tom after I first moved in. “All anyone wants to talk about is some new cleaning product they tried, the latest extracurricular for little Johnny, or where they plan to ‘summer.’

  That, he reminds me, is the opposite of insular.

  One afternoon, the first week after he’d moved me in, Tom drove me around to show me what I had to look forward to when the baby came. He pointed out the baseball field, soccer fields, at least a handful of tennis courts, and the Olympic-sized swimming pool complete with three water slides. He told me not to worry about the pool being “small” as most people had their own. The playground alone was otherworldly. Swings, seesaws and slides, climbing walls, and a ropes course. All you need is a grocery store, and you’d never have to leave, I remarked.

  Tom smiled and said, “That’s why they have delivery, dear.”

  Speaking of delivery, that same week, most of the women who live in The Village (this is its nickname, I’m told) delivered what my husband called meals.

  “We like to take care of our own,” each of the wives say, as though it has been scripted. Like the women, the meals, they’re all the same flavor. When I mention this to Tom, he says they’re casseroles. What did I expect?

  He has a point. Like the women here, I found them to be very unoriginal.

  They probably share recipes, he told me. I thought he was joking.

  This was before I realized he wasn’t.

  I felt terror rising. I felt like maybe I have judged things all wrong. “They don’t have cooks?”

  “Some of them do,” he said. “But women in The Village take pride in caring for their families. Especially those who’ve been around a while.”

  I felt my stomach drop.

  Tom studied me for a second. “Don’t worry,” he promised. “It takes some getting used to. Human beings are selfish by nature. But…I’m sure you’ll fit in in no time.”

  It felt like a dig.

  “I don’t know what to do with myself,” I tell Tom one evening when I find myself waiting at the door for him to come home. “It just feels so remote living out here. Maybe we should get an apartment in the city. Start over.”

  “Why would we do that?” he asked. His hand reached for my belly. “With the baby coming.”

  “Your kids are grown and away at school. Babies don’t need this much space. It would be good to downsize.”

  He looked at me like I was crazy. “Everyone wants to live here. It’s quite pricey, you know.”

  My husband doesn’t use words like pricey. I realized he was patronizing me.

  I’d come up with a solution. In the meantime, I let it be. I cross my arms and remind myself I have secured a position in what most people would consider paradise. Never mind that I had to bargain with the devil. I have arrived. I am here.

  “Remember Beth is coming by tomorrow,” Tom reminds me as I stand at the sink applying mascara. It’s Thursday, and in Tom’s world, Thursday evenings are reserved for dinner club. Each week a different member of New Hope’s leadership team hosts in their home. Not exactly how I want to spend my night but I guess it beats sitting around here watching Tom work. “She’ll be here at 10:00 a.m.”

  “That should be fun,” I say, eyeing him sideways. He’s staring at the makeup bottles and tubes splayed out on the counter. He picks them up one by one and moves them back to my side.

  “Did you really need all of this? I didn’t think you wore that much makeup.”

  “Yes,” I assure him. Best to keep it short and sweet, I’m learning, and then to change the subject, I say, “What if I have plans tomorrow?”

  “I checked your calendar.”

  “You know I don’t use that thing.” I point to my head and tap my temple. “I keep everything up here.”

  I watch as he picks up the towel I’ve discarded on the floor and sets it back in its rightful place. “I thought you said you suffered from OCD.”

  I shrug, taking him in slowly. Meticulously. He looks good for almost fifty.

  “You know for forty-eight…” I say, making sure he sees that I’m giving him the once-over. “You’re surprisingly fit for someone nearly eligible for AARP.”

  He’s changing out of the suit he wore to work into something only slightly less formal. He mumbles something that sounds like that’s nice, but I don’t think he’s even listening to me. I could go on, but I can see he isn’t in the mood to chat, so I stare at his abs instead. He may be twice my age, and while he’s not quite youthful, he’s not exactly grandpa material either. Daddy issues, they say. Something about that makes me want to reach out and place my hands on his wide shoulders. I want to look into his eyes and say something that’ll make him pay attention. I want to feel his narrow hips digging into me. I want to feel something. All in time.

  Instead, I slide up next to him and pout. “I don’t think Beth likes me,” I whine. We’ve only met a few times, briefly. Mostly, I want to find out if she’ll be there tonight.

  He fake smiles and answers my question. “You’ll have a chance to show her your charm tomorrow. At 10:00 a.m.”

  I hold up my latest online purchase. “How’s this dress?”

  “Fine.” He can’t be bothered to look. He’s too busy putting the cap back on the toothpaste and fuming inside about my incompetence. Tom likes to use that word when people don’t perform in the way he expects. He nods. “Would you mind?”

  “Sorry,” I shrug. We’re learning so much about each other. That’s what happens with a shotgun wedding. Me, I’m shocked. I had no idea a person could be this clean or this boring. Not to mention this cheap. The dress I’m wearing tonight cost me my whole allowance that isn’t an allowance but is instead a “budget.” I don’t want to start a fight so I keep this bit to myself.

  “Can’t I have Josie back?”

  He turns and whe
n he does he finally notices the dress. By the way he studies my face, I think he only sees dollar signs. “Josie left the church.”

  I know this, of course. But I like to hear him say it. Also, it takes the attention off of my perceived inadequacies. My husband is charming. He thinks I don’t know what he’s thinking. But Tom isn’t good at hiding what few emotions he has. I can see that he’s wondering why I’m bringing this up, why now. Josie was my sponsor until Josie’s husband was shot dead by his mistress, and Josie could no longer stomach the church. I have to admit, at first I thought this whole thing with ‘the church’ was a bit over the top. More and more though, I’m finding it’s good entertainment. The only entertainment around here, to tell the truth.

  On the bright side, I get to go to parties. Like tonight, even if it is just dinner club. I’m not worried; I’ll liven things up. I get nice clothes even if it means spending my whole allowance. Even if they’re meant to impress people I have no interest in impressing, my husband is right—I should probably be a little more grateful. I’m working on it. It isn’t easy all this make-believe. I was supposed to marry up. But I took what I could get, I had short notice after all.

  Thankfully, with any luck, there’s a vacation in my future. I know because that’s all the other wives seem to drone on about. Well, this and yoga and pilates, and oh yeah, let’s not forget about brunch. I’m twenty-two years old. My body doesn’t need these things like theirs do. To me, brunch is just another meal. It’s not a luxury. And vacations aren’t vacations, they’re a way of life. These women, they’re all so bogged down with fake responsibility, and children, things they put upon themselves, that they can’t see it my way. So, in time, I have to learn to love the things they love. And in the meantime, so what if there are a few “rules” I’m supposed to put up with. Big deal.

  I can always find a workaround.

  It’s better than getting a job.