The Deep End

And that was the worst of it. If she’d become the pawn of a crazy recluse for one night, there was no one to blame but herself. She’d put herself in this position. From the first quickie in the ladies’ room with that intern to the hard fuck with her Breton-Craig man the day before, she’d screwed around at the office and she had been caught.

Even if she had enjoyed herself immensely with him, this was all on her shoulders.

That it was Taureau who had done the catching was irrelevant. She had to accept responsibility and hope that Caroway was generous enough to give her a civil referral. After all, she had been one hell of an assistant when she wasn’t on her back or on her knees for someone else.

Still, she wasn’t relishing the humiliation that was coming. The thought of sitting across from Caroway, waiting for him to get through his gratitude for her years of service and waiting for the axe to fall on her career and reputation, made her sick.

Stepping off the elevator onto the thirteenth floor, Grace held her head high. She strode between the rows of cubicles and through the glass partition separating Caroway’s office from the rest of the floor. His door was closed and she could hear his voice as she booted up her computer.

Her insides were ice as she sank down. She imagined him talking to Taureau, shaking his head as he watched scene after scene of Grace’s hook-ups.

Ten minutes passed and stretched into twenty. She couldn’t concentrate beyond the murmur coming from behind that heavy door. She scrolled through every email and, when it became clear she hadn’t retained a damn word, marked them all as unread. Then she just sat there with her hands folded in front of her and waited.

At Caroway’s sudden bark of laughter she jumped, then sat back. The tension in her limbs eased a little. He wasn’t talking to Taureau. Caroway didn’t joke with Taureau. No one joked with Taureau, she’d been told.

And so what? Now you have to just keep sweating.

She dug into her bottom drawer and pulled out her Dictaphone. There was nothing on her plate now that the Breton-Craig deal was done, but she couldn’t stand not having something to concentrate on. Transcribing minutes was as mundane as you could get, but she could put all of her attention into following the conversation that flowed into her ear.

Caroway eventually emerged from his office and chirped his morning greeting. Grace tried her best to return it, but the words came out deflated. Once his back was to her, as he made his jolly morning jaunt to his scheduled meeting, she sagged in her seat and decided that she was doing sweet fuck all that day unless he dropped something urgent on her desk.

Resigned to playing the waiting game, she opened her browser and clicked in the search bar. Her fingers paused over the keyboard as the hairs on the back of her neck stood up.

As she pressed down on the ‘J’ and a list of suggestions popped up, a spark of rebellion went through her. She swept her gaze around the office.

Was he watching? If she typed in the name, would he see it? Was he monitoring her computer? Was her work area important enough to monitor? Caroway’s office, obviously, but her little nook? Was there a camera hidden in the smoke detector above her office? Was her webcam wired to secretly feed back to some command central Taureau had set up for himself?

It wasn’t a crazy notion. Big Brother had nothing on Taureau’s set-up.

‘JACQUES ALAIN TAUREAU,’ she typed, and peered at the rows and rows of results that appeared in her browser.

She clicked on the first web encyclopedia page. Nothing too salacious here, but she still read through the section of his early life with interest:

Jacques Alain Taureau was born in Ottawa, Ontario.

His father, Dominic, was the son of a lobster fisherman and a schoolteacher from Mont Carmel, New Brunswick, near Shediac. Dominic worked on the lobster boats from the time he was twelve to fifteen, at which time he left home for Moncton and then Montreal. He returned a decade later with an education and began work in Saint John for a politician, and eventually won his seat as a Liberal MP. During his time in Montreal, Dominic married socialite Theresa Werner. Dominic and Theresa had one child, Jacques.

Jacques grew up in Montreal and spent his summers in Mont Carmel, spoiled by his mother and groomed by his grandfather to take over the family airline, but when he was a teen his partying ways led him to drugs and alcohol. He barely made it through university and dropped out of grad school. Famously described by his father as a ‘disappointment’ during the 1997 Federal election, Taureau frequently made headlines due to his multiple arrests, outbursts of violence, and trips to rehab. In April 1997, Taureau was arrested in in Simcoe County, north of the Greater Toronto Area, when his vehicle was pulled over for speeding. Marijuana and heroin were discovered on his person. He was sentenced to probation and required to undergo compulsory drug testing.

There was a small photo inlaid with the text: Taureau’s mugshot.

Even wrecked, he wore a panty-creaming smirk and blue bedroom eyes. Grace conjured up what little of him she had seen the previous night, but couldn’t see that arrogant smirk on the man who had ordered her to come for him.

Throughout most of the strife, Taureau was involved with Bette (Elizabeth) Laurin, whom he met his last year of high school. She and Taureau had a toxic relationship, and her drug use reportedly eclipsed even Taureau’s. Those who knew Laurin described her as volatile when she was high, and during one of Taureau’s stays in rehab she was arrested for domestic assault on Jeffrey Brown, with whom she was having a sexual relationship in Taureau’s absence. These charges were later dropped at Brown’s request.

The next section dealt exclusively with what Taureau was most famous for: the night almost sixteen years ago when Taureau woke up to Bette Laurin sitting on his chest with a knife in her hand.

Another mug shot, this one of Bette Laurin. Grace had been a teenager when the attack happened, and she had seen photos on news shows of Laurin and Taureau together. They were Barbie and Ken on cocaine. In this picture, Bette was the aftermath of a horror movie. Mascara ran down her face and her lipstick was smeared. Her blonde hair was mussed and caked with something black that Grace guessed was dried blood. The woman wore such a look of anguish that Grace felt a pang of sympathy for her.

What would she have been if she had lived a different life? During the trial, accusations of sexual abuse as a child had been used to explain the bad turns she’d taken in her life. No one had believed her, until her mother came forward and confirmed that Bette’s father had brutalised her. It wasn’t enough to garner sympathy among the jury.

As the article confirmed, Elizabeth Laurin had been sentenced to ten years. She probably would have gotten less if it wasn’t for the furore Dominic Taureau and Shane Werner had created in the media.

With the death of Shane Werner in 2004, he inherited his grandfather’s multinational aerospace and transportation company, Werner Transport, and renamed it Taureau-Werner Inc., He operates as Chief Executive Officer from his rumored home outside of Saguenay, Quebec. In 2005, he named Hugh Caroway as Executive Vice President of Taureau-Werner. Caroway acts in Taureau’s absence when necessary.

Since the attack, Taureau has lived his life out of the public eye. It is rumored that he suffers from depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and extreme paranoia. Upon Laurin’s death in 2005 of breast cancer, Taureau refused comment (although Dominic Taureau claimed to speak for the entire family when he told a reporter, ‘good riddance’).

She next tried an image search. There weren’t even any photos of Taureau during the trial: apparently he had been let into the courtroom via a private entrance. The only thing she found was a sketch artist’s drawing, blurry and indistinct with only slashes of pink to represent his scars. Nothing after the trial, nothing in the last fifteen years. Nothing until he had showed himself to her the previous night.

Grace sat back and processed what she had read. Did this story really tell her anything about Taureau? That he’d been damaged by the attack? That he had preferred, and obviously still did prefer, his lovers with a streak of adventure?

She pulled open her top drawer and dug deep. She kept her emergency pack of cigarettes taped to the back panel, and for seven months she’d kept her hands off it, but what she wrapped her hand around wasn’t her cigarettes. It wasn’t a stapler or half a box of ballpoint pens.

She closed her fingers and electricity shot through her. She didn’t need to look to know her hand was wrapped around the smooth shaft of a vibrator.

Her temperature rising, she crooked her head and took a second sweep of the office.

An unfamiliar sound drew her attention to her computer screen where a small notification flashed before her eyes. No one in the office used the IM function of their email program any more. There had been too much abuse, and so it had been disabled.

She closed her drawer and moved her mouse to open the message from JAT.

OTHER DRAWER.

There it was, sitting in her tray on top of a mound of paper clips. It looked like a perfume roll-on, but the engraved writing on the cylinder read ‘Breathless Sensations Clitoral Gel.’ She’d read reviews of this stuff but had never taken it off her wish list.

Another line of text joined the first.

OFFICE.

She moved the cursor to the text area, but discovered that she couldn’t add her own message. It was symbolic of this whole thing: he could push her buttons from afar, but she was powerless to reciprocate.

Turning her screen off as she rose, Grace looked through the partition at the rest of the staff. Some bounced from cubicle to cubicle. Others typed furiously, earbuds drowning out the noise around them. No one paid her any attention as she took the vibrator and lube from her desk and slipped into Caroway’s office.

As soon as she had closed the door behind her, she heard the muffled ring of a telephone. She knew right where to look. There in the credenza, next to her emergency supplies, was an iPhone, face lit up with an incoming call from JAT.

She cradled the phone against her ear.

‘It’s not like you were going to do anything today, anyway,’ he murmured in that sinfully raspy voice.

Grace suppressed the shiver that danced along her spine. ‘You move fast. How did you get them into my desk so quickly? And this phone? You didn’t do it yourself.’

‘I have people who do that sort of thing for me. There’s a headset in with your stash. Put it on. I want your hands free.’

Digging into the credenza, she tingled as she thought of him the previous night, laid back in his chair looking at her like she was dinner. Her fingers trembled as she worked the earpiece in. She loathed wearing a headset, ever since her first job working at a call centre selling newspaper subscriptions, and preferred a crick in the neck over mobility, but, as soon as static crackled in her hear and she heard Taureau breathing, her heart beat faster at the thought of him giving those orders practically in her brain.

‘There, that’s better,’ he went on with laughter on his voice. ‘Now take your clothes off.’

She thought back to that mugshot she’d seen only moments ago, and couldn’t put that tweaked-out young man together with the voice in her head.