Paisley King - A Tale by Elspeth Ellington

I Will to Fix You - November 25, 2018 10am

November 25, 2018 10am

"I just can't believe he would do this! Alright so...the other day I was writing an office cheque for the kitchen supplies and there are all of these cheques written to Madeline for thousands of dollars! I asked him why the hell the cleaner is getting paid thousands of dollars a month for 10 hours of work a week! I suggested he give me the cleaning job instead of the office job and he refused! I can't believe how livid I am about this! All this time he has been telling me he can't afford to give me more than 3 days a week in the office because money is tight with him having to pay his father so much every month, meanwhile he is paying the cleaner as though she's working 120 hours a month instead of 40! And...I have to clean every day when I arrive because it's obvious she hasn't done a thing the night before! I mean...what else is he hiding? We argued about it for at least an hour last night and he told me Madeline has been getting extra training doing pap smears and all kinds of exams in the evenings so he has to pay her the going rate! How does someone go from cleaning the washrooms to doing medical exams?? Why don't any of the patients think this is odd? What if this is just the tip of the iceberg? I mean...what if he gets caught...if we all get caught!?". Amelia stopped pacing and waving her arms long enough to throw herself onto the leather couch, put her face into her hands, and screamed, "FUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!"

Madeline, the woman James had recently hired to clean the office for two hours every night after hours hadn't even graduated high school and had bounced around for the last 15 years sweeping floors in salons, packing groceries, babysitting, and tending bar at the strip joint in the next town over between having a baby every two years. She was married to local police officer Shane Adams, a long time friend of James. On the surface it looked like he was doing his friends a favour giving Madeline a job she could do in the evenings after her kids were in bed. But Paisley knew there was always more to the story when James is in the middle of it. She wondered if Shane knew what was going on and the serious trouble his wife could end up in if what James had told Amelia is true. Of course it couldn't possibly be true, it would be yet another one of James' lies in a desperate attempt to keep all of the women in his web under control. He must be running out of lies because this one was more preposterous than the usual pack of falsities she had heard from clients over the years.

"I suspect it likely is just the tip", Paisley knew he believed he could do something just as unethical as this and get away with it. No one ever saw James for what he was - he was that good at grooming the women he preyed upon, an expert at grooming everyone around them, and spent his life grooming people himself. She had lost count of the number of women who had sat in her office over the years, all with the same relationship issue...they were romantically involved with Doctor James Rose. Amelia had been seeing Paisley for just over a year and their conversations always centred on James, her working for James, why he seemed incapable of a normal relationship, and all of the other women who seemed to flock to him, though he always told Amelia they were just friends.

Paisley waited quietly, knowing there was so much to this story but needed to let Amelia tell it from her own seat of power. The only sounds were the dull splashes of cars making their way through the snowy streets and the slight crackling of the Christmas scented candle that was burning cheerfully on the coffee table. The little flame performed an ancient tribal dance, flickering to a drum beat no one could hear. She stared at it for a few moments while Amelia took some deep breaths and collected herself.

The silence in Paisley's office was thick as the pea soup she had grown up on, and if she focused, she could almost hear the Christmas music softly seeping in from the street, and the tick tick tick of her watch, sounds she only ever noticed when the atmosphere in the room was heaviest.

Paisley couldn't quite figure out what it was about him that got women interested in James...but she certainly knew how he kept them. Charm, or what was called love bombing when it came to describing the romantic gestures of the common narcissist in the wild.