“I haven’t heard from him since last week when I told him that I live with Sara and don’t have a house of my own.” Dorothy shakes her head. “He actually told me off for not sharing that information sooner.”
“This guy’s got a lot going on.” Once again, the twins’ fingers are on the move. Photos of a third man appear beneath the others. He has close-cropped brown hair and eyes that are partly hidden by narrow black-rimmed glasses, a stubbled face, and a chin with a cleft that is beginning to look very familiar. His name is Howard Franklin.
“Oh no,” Annell breathes. “That’s Howie.”
“Are these really all the same person?” Sara asks.
“The facial structure and the chin are identical. He’s using colored contacts and glasses and wigs and hair dye . . . but it’s the same man,” Wesley says.
With a stroke, Phoebe pulls up the three men’s bios. Once again, she places them next to one another. “They all have very impressive backgrounds. Harvard. Yale. Big-name firms. Most of which seem unlikely to hold up to fact-checking.”
“Did ‘Howie’ ask you about your living situation?” Chaz asks Annell.
“Not exactly.” Annell can’t seem to drag her eyes away from the growing number of images. “But he seemed intrigued by the fact that the store was in a historic home. He said he’d like to come over and look at the carriage house and especially the garden. He sounded so sincere . . .”
“He is sincerely pretending to be at least three different people,” Jazmine observes.
“And he’s sincerely looking for a relationship. As long as she’s willing, has a home of her own, and no one else is there to object to him moving in,” Nancy posits.
Dorothy’s shock has not faded from her face, but she’s fallen quiet.
“I don’t know what else he might have on his mind, but three different identities on three different dating sites? Frank/Dean/Howard is making an extremely calculated effort,” Chaz points out.
“He used ‘Frank’ in some form in all three profiles. Do you think it could be his real name?” Angela asks as Wesley and Phoebe continue to tap away on their keyboards.
“His name is Frank all right. Frank Anderson,” Phoebe says, pulling up a shot of the same man taken at some sort of charity fundraiser. The face is the same, only his hair and eyebrows are white and he’s not wearing glasses of any kind. His eyes are a bluish gray.
“Why is that name familiar?” Angela asks.
“Because he was a well-known money manager and an Atlanta A-lister who married into a prominent family,” Meena says. “I used to see photos of him and his wife in the newspaper.”
“That’s right.” I peer at the photo. “Nate met him once or twice at charity golf tournaments. I think he ran for a state seat a couple years ago.”
“Yep.” Wesley opens another file. “Apparently, his wife divorced him. The money was hers. It looks like he’s still trying to act like he’s big league, but . . . that doesn’t exactly jibe with his actions.”
“What about his children?” Dorothy asks. “What does it say about them?”
More keystrokes. “Frank Anderson and his wife never had children,” Phoebe says.
Dorothy inhales sharply.
I look around me, my stomach churning. The world is such a different place than it was when I was last single. How could someone treat these women, my friends, this way? And what if we’d never had this conversation? Would one of them have ended up saddled with this man? Would he have stolen their possessions and their self-respect? “What can we do about this?”
“Can we at least report him to the authorities?” Sara asks.
“You can report him to the dating sites, but he hasn’t harmed anyone that we know of, at least not physically. And if he hasn’t stolen from any of the women he dates, it’s not illegal,” Wesley says.
“Well, he’s stolen people’s trust,” Annell says. “We can’t let him continue to get away with lying to and manipulating people.”
“That is for damned sure! We need to teach this creep a lesson.” Carlotta stamps her foot. “Anybody got any ideas?”
“I read about a woman in India who strangled her husband and buried his body in the kitchen and then built a mud stove over it,” Nancy Flaherty says.
“If only we had dirt floors here,” Jazmine says dryly.
“There’s plenty of dirt in the garden,” Nancy replies. “We could bury him there and then . . .” A smile spreads over her face. “I know! We could camouflage his grave with a putting green.”
We all blink at her in surprise. I’m not entirely sure she’s joking.
“I just finished reading a book about black widow spiders,” Angela says. “They eat their partner after sex. They don’t even need dirt.”
“Yeah, that’s why women who kill their husbands or lovers are called black widows,” Carlotta, who is wearing all black and looks gorgeously dangerous, points out.
“I read about those black widows, too. Apparently, women tend to prefer antifreeze followed by dismemberment,” Angela adds. Her eyes get big. “One woman fed the remains of her lover to neighbors at a barbecue.”
“I’m starting to feel like I should call Perley and warn him about your reading material,” Jazmine says with a teasing glint.
“Dismemberment would be too good for this guy,” Meena pronounces. “Running around trying to find women to live off.”
“Did you guys see the episode of Good Girls where they hog-tie Boomer, the attempted rapist, and stash him in the kids’ tree house in the backyard?” Erin asks. “I bet we could stash Frank in the garden shed—or in the storage room—and no one would ever know.”
Chaz folds his arms over his chest. “I’m all for teaching this guy a lesson, but we are not going to break the law. There will be no tarring and feathering or tearing from limb to limb, which I believe qualifies as dismembering,” he says. “I think we should just scare the crap out of the man, expose his bad behavior and true identity, and prevent him from targeting other women.”
“I don’t know.” Dorothy is our lone dissenter. “Maybe we should consider ourselves lucky that none of us fell all the way for it and let it be?”
“Hell, no,” Meena says. “I say we at least have to out him like Chaz said.”
I look at the angry and determined faces around the circle. We are smart, and we are here for one another. “I agree with Meena,” I say. “I don’t think we should just let him walk away.”