Childs' Proof: Victoria Childs Series, #1

CHAPTER ONE

I sat in my bouncy, maroon office chair twiddling my pen. Then I flipped it up in the air and caught it, twirling it around my fingers as my dad taught me to do when I was little. The thought of my dad made me smile. He had been gone for nearly two decades, but I still missed him from time to time. He had this way of making everyone laugh and people were immediately at ease with him. My mom always told me that I had inherited those qualities from him. The Childs’ Humor she called it. Some days I didn’t see it. Lately I didn’t see it at all.

I signed my name to the letter I had been working on for most of the afternoon. I am a genius when it comes to dragging my tasks out and looking busy when I really don’t want to do anything. Actually, rather than signing the letter myself, I had to sign my boss’s name with my name under it as Deputy Clerk of Brenton County, Illinois. The title sounded more important than it actually was. There were about ten Deputy Clerks on my floor alone, and ten more on the floor below us. Sometimes I shortened it to Victoria Childs, Deputy, thinking it made me sound tough. Normally, I was not tough. Mostly, I was a tiny, wimpy girl. And since this letter was to an inmate at a correctional facility, I decided to just put my initials. This inmate was in prison for raping and murdering his brother’s wife. He didn’t need to know my name. Names lead to addresses, and addresses lead to phone numbers, which can lead to collect calls from horny prisoners desperate to hear a female voice. I found that out the hard way. I was still having flash-backs.

I yawned and rummaged through my purse for some change to buy a Diet Dr. Pepper. I never seemed to have enough change to feed my addiction to the beverage. At first I drank it because it was high in caffeine, which was the last drug I allowed myself aside from the occasional beer. But I grew to enjoy the flavor immensely. It almost became a comfort for me, a reminder that there was a whole world outside my cubicle walls that had nothing to do with my own working prison. If there were other people drinking Diet Dr. Peppers in other buildings all over the country, there was a world out there. Right?

God, I hope so!

I got up from my desk and looked around. No one was looking, and the only sounds were a few phones ringing and some good natured chatter between employees in the accounting department. The accountants always seemed to be babbling about something. Particularly one of them, who had recently become a grandmother, and had to tell everyone when the child ate, slept, pooped, yanked fur out of the cat. Then there were the pictures of the poor kitty with a bald butt and the baby who had a scratch across his right cheek. They were looking for a new home for the dangerous cat. If it was me, I’d be looking for a new home for the psychotic, kitty-torturing child!

Maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, the coast was officially clear at the moment for my thirtieth soda run of the day. I jogged through the office, out the security gate and glass doors, and down the hall to the vending machines. As I inserted my coins, the last quarter fell into nothingness and did not register on the machine’s face. I hit the coin return, but nothing happened. I hit the coin return again and I swear I heard the machine chuckle, insult my intelligence, and call me a very obscene name!

Damn it!

That was all the change I had! Now I’d have to go begging for change before someone gets my soda for a quarter! Or maybe a good swift kick would do it. I punched the machine once before and actually got several free sodas out of the deal. Then they just kept on coming, shooting out like bullets from a gun. And it was, of course, in the middle of a very busy day in the courtroom next door. I stood there trying to catch the flying soda cans without being noticed, and then tried to get them back to the office nonchalantly. Kicking the same machine probably wasn’t the best idea. It could explode, or worse! How the heck would I explain how a soda can got imbedded in my forehead? I don’t think you can get into heaven if you are killed by a carbonated beverage. Iced tea maybe, but definitely not anything with aspartame.

Eh, screw it, I need my soda!

I looked around, saw no one, and kicked.

Down twenty-five cents, limping and soda-less, I decided to have a nice glass of water. Water was better for me anyway, right?

Have you ever had one of those moments when you wondered what it would feel like to actually kill someone?

I gimped my way back into the office and looked around for a body to give me a quarter. Luckily Berta was standing at the public counter doing some filing.

Victoria, what is wrong with you? she grunted, straightening her back as I proceeded with difficulty through the door. You got jock itch or something?

Her abrasive personality could be very lovable at times. This was one of those times actually. She had a tendency to say exactly what she was thinking and it was usually what I was thinking. However, I was trying for a John Wayne limp, not a professional athlete limp. I just wished she would call me Vicki or Vic like everyone else. Victoria was too formal, and I was anything but formal. I couldn’t remember the last time I had even looked at a dress. And heels? I once tripped over a lettuce leaf and hit the floor like a ton of bricks while wearing my favorite pair of sneakers! So, heels were definitely off the menu for me! God knows what I would trip over in a set of stilettos!

I don’t wear a jock. The straps make my butt look big, I told Berta. Do you have a quarter I could borrow? The machine ate my money again.

And I’ll bet you kicked it, she said with her lilting laugh. Her laugh didn’t fit her looks at all. It was like a cheerful piece of music, which was rather surprising since she looked like a sixty-year-old, gray-haired, English Bulldog with an attitude problem. But she and I were alike within our smartassed attitude and I thought she was the greatest. I’m pretty sure the feeling was mutual. Either that or she just laughed at me a lot.

She handed me a quarter and I limped back to the machine, only to find a random punk with an excessively gelled faux-hawk walking away from it, soda in hand, on his cell phone.

Dude! I got a bottle of pop for a quarter!

A sigh mixed with a growl escaped my lips and I rolled my eyes to the heavens. Or at least the part of the heavens I could imagine through the stucco above me.

At times I wished I could get some sort of debilitating but not at all unpleasant disease. Maybe something that would require lots of Vicodin. I wasn’t a drug addict in any sense, but once when I hurt my back tripping over a lettuce leaf, my doctor gave me some Vicodin and I was pleased with the result. Really pleased. Excessively pleased! I could get in trouble with Vicodin. I would, however, settle for a case of temporary Tourette’s syndrome. Then I could tell my boss to fuck off and get away with it.

"Oops, sorry! Illness! Can’t fire me though! American’s With Disabilities act! WWW.ADA.GOV! Look it up, bitch! Oops! Sorry again!"

But that probably wouldn’t work when all I had was a caffeine jones and a broken toe.

I shook off the toe thing and reentered the office putting on my best nobody-mess-with-me face. Berta laughed again as I handed the quarter back to her.

You trying to look mean? she prodded. I saw that guy get your soda. You should have grabbed it and beat him with it.

While I’m not in the best of moods, I don’t really have a death wish today, I told her. At least not until Carnie goes on another rampage.

Carnie O’Leary was my aforementioned boss, who had become the source of my slight mood and occasional intestinal disorder. Secretly I liked to call her Carnage O’Murder, because if I hadn’t had certain prescribed medication at various points in my life, that’s what she would have caused. I was generally a happy person until she arrived in the morning and began barking orders at me in her voice that could pierce the Earth’s atmosphere. I seriously thought her voice was one of the causes of global warming. Maybe I should have called Al Gore.

I was honestly not sure what I was thinking when I accepted the job as her assistant. I guess I thought I was walking into a cake job with really good pay. That’s how her last assistant made it appear. She sat at her desk and read books all day, mostly about horses like National Velvet or Seabiscuit. After I took the job, however, things were rearranged. Carnie was apparently afraid of her last assistant for some reason. Maybe it had something to do with the horse books. I had met my predecessor. Very sturdy woman! I could actually picture her mule-kicking someone’s teeth out with her back leg. Suddenly I ended up doing twice the work of National Velvet and Carnie did a quarter of the work she did before I took over the position. She apparently decided that one of her jobs as boss over the entire office was to distract and annoy employees and that this particular activity should take up seventy-five percent of her day. I’m not sure what she did with the other twenty-five percent, but I’m sure it was something vexing to someone.

One of her favorite activities involved bounding out of her office when she saw someone she knew at the front counter.  Then she would bellow something that could be construed as mildly amusing in some circles. She then laughed hysterically at her own joke, took a flying lunge, and put her hands all over the nearest employee. It was rather disconcerting. Disconcerting, hell, it was downright disgusting, especially when she would drool as she did it. However, since she was a woman, and there were nothing but women in the office, what could we do? She claimed to be straight, but was never married. I wouldn’t call her attractive, but she wasn’t unattractive. She had white, china-doll skin and pretty blue eyes. But she kept her thick blonde hair very short so it looked like a fuzzy, yellow hedgehog on her head. And while she was only around fifty, she wasn’t aging well, she was developing some kind senior acne, and her behavior was enough to put anyone off. She lived with her sister Debbie in a quaint little house in the middle of town. Her using the word quaint made me want to puke! Then again, a lot of her words made me want to puke.

Could the unsolicited touching be considered sexual harassment? Would her jokes be comical harassment? Since her jokes sucked but she laughed at them and pawed all over us, could it be attempted comical and sexual harassment? I cringed every time she went off on one of her imagined humorous tirades, mainly because I knew she was going to rub all over me. And I also knew for a fact she didn’t wash her hands after using the bathroom. She said the soap in the office made her hands too dry. Then she’d come back from the bathroom and want to use my phone, or touch something on my desk and I could practically see the E-coli squirming all over it when she was done. I kept a bottle of Lysol in my desk drawer next to my hand sanitizer for just such emergencies. I mean, I wasn’t a germaphobe at all, but come on! Wash your damn hands and buy some lotion!

And the woman had the hearing of a freaking elephant! She could hear a mouse fart across the room and would immediately issue a memo, for me to type of course, that the entire office should rid our desks of any food not in a thermos or a burped plastic container.

Then at certain unpredictable moments, the slightest giggle or chuckle from an employee of hers sent her into an uproar of epic proportions. KEEP YOUR VOICES DOWN!!! I’M NOT PAYING YOU TO SIT AROUND AND LAUGH ALL DAY!!! 

It was getting worse by the week.

Or maybe I was getting worse by the week.

I knew my attitude needed adjusting, but it was difficult to adjust when I had a college degree and the most interesting part of my day involved sorting the incoming mail. A chimp with communication skills could do my job if you put it in a pair of Dockers. Then it wouldn’t be any surprise when the chimp suddenly went berserk and ate Carnie’s face. While I wasn’t in to face eating, I could see myself going berserk, especially after a vending machine ate my last quarter.

I stalked back to my desk and was preparing for the next outburst when the phone rang.

Clerk’s office, Vicki speaking, how may I help you? 

Thank you for calling Hell. I’m Vicki your hostess for the evening. How may I help you serve The Mistress of all that is evil?

It had the same ring to it.

I told you to drink more water, the voice on the phone said. I looked across the room at my confidant Toni who was holding her phone and grinning.

Antoinette Markham was one of those women who was excessively beautiful, but she would fight you if you told her so. She towered over me at just over six feet tall and her hair was the color of smooth, dark chocolate like her eyes. When I went out with Toni, my Plain Jane looks were over shadowed by her exotic beauty, and I usually became invisible and ended up paying for all of my drinks. Sometimes I got a few compliments on my long, reddish-brown hair. It was very wavy and ran down to the middle of my back. Men seemed to like it. But, then they noticed Toni and I might as well have been bald. She was the closest thing I ever had to a sister though, and I loved her. She knew me better than anyone on the planet. And we had heard each other fart, the mark of true friendship. Plus I beat her by about two cup sizes in the boob department, so we both had something to flaunt. I inherited mine. She was hoping her husband would get her pregnant so she could catch up.

Water is boring and it has no bubbles, I replied.

But it’s so much better for you! And you can get water with bubbles.

Have you ever tasted that stuff?

Yes. It’s not that bad.

I’d rather drink my own urine.

Well that’s just wrong!

I agree, so I’ll just stick with soda and you can have the urine, I laughed.

Be careful, she’ll hear you, she whispered into the phone.

Right now, I don’t care, I whispered back. I just want to get the hell out of here.

Only twenty-five minutes to go. I think you’ll make it.

I don’t know, man. The urge to shove a stapler up someone’s ass is starting to overpower me. I’m beginning to tremble.

She laughed. A stapler?

Well, it was in my eye line.

I won’t bend over in front of you anymore.

But I love it when you do baby!

She laughed again. You’re too much!

Yeah, I weigh too much.

Oh please! You do not!

We both laughed and hung up. I tried to use humor periodically to get me out of my work moods. It usually worked out better for my co-workers than for me. The Tears of a Clown you know?

Or in my case, The Chainsaws of a Clown.

Yeah, I definitely needed an attitude adjustment.

Or a man. Yeah, a man would be nice.

The clock ticked. I played with my pen. The clock ticked some more. I looked at my calendar. Nothing was scheduled. I was never sure what was going to happen in April. Sometimes the Clerk’s office was busy at the beginning of spring. A lot of people wanted file for divorce, probate a will, or over-turn the Court’s decision to keep them out of the sunshine and in a nasty, old, prison cell throughout the spring. Then again, how much sunshine a body gets in April in Brenton, Illinois depended on how the weather gods felt about dumping rain on the newly planted corn.

Tick....Tick....Tick.... 

Tonight on sixty minutes, a Clerk’s secretary goes insane and staples her boss to death. Post-its were found in the throat of the decedent, and written on each one was the message You should have washed your hands, (expletive)!

I began typing the memo I had been given long before my trip to the vending machine. It was something about asking attorneys for advice and how it was frowned upon in this office. Hell, the only attorneys around here who would consider giving advice would be posing like an Egyptian hieroglyph waiting to be paid. But apparently someone got away with getting free counsel and it pissed someone else off, so rather than dealing with that person directly as a good manager should, I was typing this memo in the hopes of offending everyone equally.

Vicki! Could you come here for a minute? the global warmer called from behind me.

My spine stiffened.

What the hell did I do now?

Maybe she saw me kick the machine.

I turned around and slumped into my boss’s office. Yes?

I know you showed me how to do this before, but could you show me again how to make the little smiley face appear on emails? she asked, using her magnifying glass so she could see the screen. She had eye problems, along with her many other ailments: fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, spinal meningitis, COPD, and every now and then various forms of twenty-four-hour cancer.

Colon, right-parenthesis, I answered, turning to leave.

I tried that, it didn’t work, she moaned, holding her forehead. I think someone has been messing with my settings.

I never knew someone could get so worked up over a smiley!

Thinking how my taxes were paying for this lesson so technically I was working for free, I blew out a sigh, moved around the desk to her keyboard and typed the colon and right-parenthesis smiley she wanted.

Oh, there, it worked. I don’t know why it won’t work for me.

I stifled a snort and thought of a few reasons. 

No, Vic, just smile and back out of the room quickly before she tries to engage you in conversation, or tell you about her latest illness.

I knew more about this woman’s butt pimples and ovaries than I cared to know about anyone’s. Didn’t ask about them. I was just told in no uncertain terms about the night she sat in the bathtub and removed the bandage from her...

Ugh. I’m gonna cry!

Um, Carnie, do you care if I take off a little early? I have a chiropractor appointment.

Okay, I lied a little. I’d do anything to get out of there without committing a homicide.

You’ve been going to them a lot lately, are you having trouble? she asked with obvious fake concern. She was a good politician, I’d give her that.

Oh just some pain in my neck, I replied. I’ve had it for years.

Have I ever! Almost nine now.

Okay, well, remind Toni to lock the evidence vault before you go, would you?

In the five years she had worked in the office, Toni had forgotten to lock the evidence vault only once. I had to remind her every day since. She loved it. It gave her a reason to come to work!  And she hardly ever left bruises when she punched me for reminding her.

I quickly grabbed my jacket and headed toward Toni’s desk. Don’t forget to lock the vault slacker!

Where the hell are you going? she questioned shooting a rubber band at me.

Chiropractor. I grabbed the rubber band out of the air. Cat-like reflexes have I.

I’d be a ninja, but I don’t look good in black.

Victoria Childs, purple ninja!  Fighting evil rubber bands everywhere! HIYA!

God, you’re such a liar! Toni griped.

I grinned my most innocent grin and walked past her desk toward the front door of the office. Later Berta!

Huh? Oh, yeah! she grumbled, not moving her eyes from the computer screen.

Must have been a good email. Either that or an interesting mug shot. She knew every criminal that came into the office. She probably knew the guy who took my soda! Come to think of it, she seemed to know a little bit about everything that went on in the office, from who was getting divorced, to whose kid had gotten arrested for underage drinking.

I pushed open the double doors and walked down the hall toward freedom from the confines of the Brenton County Courthouse. I happened to catch the elevator quickly, so maybe my luck had taken a turn for the day. I hit the L button and rocked on my heels in an effort to hurry things along. The door opened on the first floor and a guy dressed in a tailored, navy blue suit ran into me.

Oh, s’cuse me, he said, stepping out of the way.

No problem.

He wasn’t much to look at, almost slimy, but his scent lingered behind him. The cologne he was wearing was a mixture of good pipe tobacco and naughty stuff, and I loitered a moment to get another look at him.

His suit didn’t jive with the rest of him and after a second look I noticed it was wrinkled all to hell. He was obviously unkempt with a three day beard, and his teeth were gray as he smiled at me. I smiled back reflexively and walked away toward the secure glass doors leading out of the building.

Jesus, I need to find a man! I muttered.

The fresh breeze hit me in the face as I made my way to my little Honda Accord, lifting my spirits considerably and helping into a weekend frame of mind.  And I smiled genuinely for the first time that day as I left the parking lot. I had no plans in particular, other than sleeping long and hard into Saturday and enjoying every second of it. I often had no plans, and just let the road carry me where it wanted me to go.

I wasn’t planning on having a life-changing experience that evening.

I mean, if I had known about it, I would have chosen a nicer outfit, or at the very least some fancier underwear.

CHAPTER TWO

After dropping off my dry cleaning, dinner was my next assignment for the evening. I wasn’t a frequent cook. I certainly had the ability to cook, but there was no sense cooking for one. I either ended up with a ton of leftovers that were ultimately thrown away because I was so sick of eating them, or just enough food to feed a gerbil. I was not a gerbil. Part German, but not gerbil. Irish-German to be exact, which is probably why every hair color I ever used ended up being reddish-brown, and no matter how long I sat in the sun my skin was either lobster-red or slightly freckled at the end of the day.

It was difficult maintaining my figure by eating fast food all the time, but the occasional skipped meal and a few jogs around the block seemed to do the trick. I mean, I wasn’t fighting off the men with a bat, but I had seen a few of them take a second look at the headlights and the caboose. I did have a fear of cholesterol tests however.

I decided KFC would do nicely for the evening, and it was on the way home. It was populated by mostly Latin folk, but they knew me by name there. VEEKEE! they said when I entered. Kind of like Norm on Cheers. I was too lazy to go in however, so I pulled up to the drive thru and twiddled my thumbs.

The only problem with KFC was that they tended to be slow.

Can I kelllp you? burst forth from the speaker next to my ear and I flinched sideways.

Damn, yell much? I barked and then regained my composure. I’m sorry, I’ll take a two piece extra crispy with double potatoes.

You don juan de slaw?

Did I freaking say I juan de slaw?

I took a cleansing breath through my clenched teeth.

No, just potatoes please.

Ho kay, pull up.

I looked down at the passenger seat next to me and reached for my bag.

Shit!

Oh come on!

Really?

In my rush to leave, I forgot my purse at the office. I fished around in my jacket pockets where I found some blue lint and a condom that had been there for about four months. It was surprising to me that it hadn’t fallen out in front of my mother. I kept forgetting to put it in the drawer with the lonely lingerie. Some may say I was in a rut. I preferred to think that I had sowed my wild oats and was waiting for the right man to come along to tame me.

Okay, I was in a rut.