[ - ]
Table of Contents [Report This]
Printer Chapter or Story Microsoft Word Chapter or Story
- Text Size +
Ronni paced the floor and thought about a plan.  She mulled things over.  She had to get Nick to Chicago, of course.  There’s no way she could go to where he was.  But if she could get him here…  She smiled to herself and sat back down at the computer.  In the meantime…

The first thing Ronni needed was some new email addresses.  She spent a few minutes wandering around Mapquest and ended up with legitimate addresses and zip codes in five cities around the country.  Then she went to five different free email providers and set up accounts under fictitious names.  She wrote it all down in her address book, making it look like real people.  Not that James would ever look there, but still, caution was a good thing.  She used the same password on all the accounts …revenge.

Armed with her different identities, she hit the message boards.  She signed onto four of them.  It was a tedious process and took her nearly the entire morning, but by the end of it she had accomplished it.  She had made each of the personas have a different ‘favorite Boy’.  She thought that might make it easier to keep them straight.

She met Clarice, Susie and Maggie for lunch.  All they could talk about was Abigail and Nick.  Wasn’t it amazing?  They had never really believed she could do it, but well, there were the pictures!  They wondered if they’d get to meet him when he came to Chicago.

“I’ve already met him,” said Ronni, in a bored voice.  She’d been thinking about something else and not paying full attention to the conversation.  “At the engagement party,” she said into the stunned silence.

“Is he as good looking up close and personal?” Maggie wanted to know.

Ronni grinned.  Maggie had no idea just how up close and personal Ronni and Nick had been.  She was tempted to tell them…to show them that she had been there before Abigail, that Abigail only had him because Ronni had rejected him for someone else…but she thought maybe discretion was the better part of valor at this point.  “Yeah, he’s cute,” she said.  Then, she added, “What about that guy that she was going out with before?  Was he cute?  What was his name…Paul or Philip or…?”

“Oh, that’s right,” said Clarice, “you missed Philip Randall.  You were out in California then.  It was really odd.  He was a bit older than her, not like her parents’ age or anything, but mid-thirties at least.  He was some business pal of her dad’s.  And they just started seeing each other…I saw them at the tennis club a couple of times.”

“Yeah,” continued Susie, “and then they were…like, a couple…going out together and stuff…and then…”

“Poof!” said Maggie.

“Poof?” asked Ronni.

“Yeah, poof,” replied Clarice.  “One day he was there and the next he was gone.  I mean, literally…gone from Chicago.”

“I think he was from Pittsburgh or something,” put in Susie.

“Philadelphia,” corrected Maggie.  “He moved here from Philadelphia to do business with John Fremont and then when it didn’t work out with him and Abigail, he disappeared…back to Philadelphia, I guess.”

“So who ended it?” Ronni wanted to know.

The other three women exchanged questioning glances.  “Hard to say,” said Clarice, who had gotten all this from her mother, who played bridge with a friend of Sharon Fremont’s.  “The Fremonts put it out there that Abigail had ended it, but…come on, you’ve seen the girl…”

“She looks better now,” said Maggie.

“Yeah, after her Backstreet transformation,” said Susie spitefully.  “Omigod, can you just imagine a picture of Nick and the old Abigail.  The Internet would throw up on its shoes.”  She hunched her shoulders and bowed her head, pulling her hair down in front of her face. ‘Hi, I’m Mrs. Nick Carter,’” she said in a nasal whine.

The four women laughed.  But it made Ronni think.  There was no way…no way in the world that the old Abigail Fremont…Ducky…could have stolen Nick’s heart in a week at Brookhaven.  So how had she done it?

“I’ve gotta get going,” she said, handing two twenties to Clarice.  “Let me know if that’s not enough,” she said.  The others knew that it wouldn’t be.  They also knew that they would never ask her for more.

Driving home, Ronni turned it over in her head.  They met in the first week of June and spent a week together.  He came to Chicago in November and they got engaged.  She had to find out what they had done in the meantime.

She logged onto the first message board – backstreetmania.  She searched the archives looking for any mention of Nick.  The files only went back six months.  Ronni looked through her desk drawer until she found her datebook from the previous year.  She had torn out the first five months of it when she had married James.  But she still had what she needed. 

She clicked open references to Nick and filled in the blanks.  There was a picture of him at Halloween.  That surprised her!  His costume matched Abigail’s.  A tiny part of her thought that was kind of cute and romantic, like a little in-joke between them.  But then Ronni remembered that she had wanted to wear the French countess outfit.  She got angry all over again.  She went to the kitchen and got a glass of wine.

She only filled it three-quarters full.  She’d had two glasses at lunch with the girls and she didn’t want to be tipsy when James got home.  Although God alone knew when that would be…  Ronni knew she was drinking more than she should.  She finally admitted this to herself when they moved to the house.  At the condo, she simply took the empty wine bottles and threw them down the garbage chute.  But at the house, she had to save them up and put them out once a week.  She cursed the fact that she lived in a neighborhood that recycled, that made her put her bottles out where everyone could see, where James could see.  Ronni had taken to hiding the bottles in the basement and secreting as many as she could in the large black garbage bags that went to the curb, burying them deep in the kitchen waste.

She took a sip of the wine and went back to the computer.  She wanted to have her wits about her for this.  She moved over to the Mature Fan Club.  Ah, this was better.  They kept their postings for a year.  Ronni clicked on Show All Topics.  Holy shit!  40 pages of them…at…she counted…twenty-five per page.  That was 1000 threads!!  Well, maybe half that, since she already knew what Nick had been up to for the first half of the year.  She went to page 20 and then worked her way forward from there. 

The place went wild in the second week of June.  That’s right, she remembered.  Nick was going on to Atlanta to record after their vacation.  She remembered what a big secret that was, how often Nick told her not to tell anyone.

Ronni plodded through the threads.  She wished people would say upfront what the thing was they were going to talk about, instead of all this cutesy-pooh crap like “My Encounter with Nick” and then it turned out to be some stupid dream.  And she just wanted to shoot the ones who announced that they were a Newbie and wanted everyone to celebrate the fact.  Or to rise up and salute them for their 100th post.  Ronni shrugged.  At least, she could figure those out from the first sentence and move right on to the next thread.

From the middle of June to the middle of August, it was all rampant speculation and rumor-mongering combined with occasional glimpses of the Boys in Atlanta.  Then…okay, what was this?  There was talk about Howie doing a Lupus thing in Orlando.  Ronni backed up a page or two and reviewed.  She marked it on her calendar and got another glass of wine.  She went back and forth through a couple of pages and could pin down AJ in Seattle and Brian in Kentucky on the same weekend.  There was no mention of Kevin or Nick.

Ronni circled the weekend on her datebook and put a big question mark beside it.  After that, it was back to Atlanta with more details coming out about the album and speculation about when it would be released, if there would be a tour, blah, blah, blah…  Ronni was tempted to skip some of it, but she didn’t want to miss anything.  And she was glad she persevered when she opened a thread that said simply, “Great news!”  Cursing the poster for her lack of specificity and hoping it wasn’t another announcement of a pregnancy or a job promotion, Ronni clicked it open.  She read with delight the news that the girl had actually talked with Nick…in California.

Ronni reached for her datebook.  Okay, that was the second week of September.  She skimmed the message.  The girl ran into him at the marina and he told her that he’d been back in California for a couple of weeks and had gone out on his boat.  Then there was a bunch of crap about the album that Ronni scrolled quickly through.  Ronni wrote ‘California’ on her datebook at the beginning of September.

It wasn’t adding up.  She flipped the page back to August.  Something caught her eye.  Beside the large question mark was a notation that she had placed there many months ago.  Art Lunch with Mother.  That’s right.  That Wednesday was the luncheon where Sharon Fremont announced that Ducky was seeing Nick.

Ronni flipped the calendar back and forth from June to August.  How?  How did they hook up?  Suddenly, Ronni had a thought.  Maybe she went to Atlanta.  How could she find that out?  Break into her house and steal her calendar?  Ronni’s laugh had a touch of something to it and she decided she’d better not have any more wine for a bit.

What would be in her calendar anyway? mused Ronni.  She never did anything or went anywhere.  Except…  Ronni pulled out the phone book and traced her finger down the page.  She punched in a number.

“Hello,” she said, when she finally was directed to the right person.  “I’m looking to do some volunteer work with children and I was recommended to your hospital by my friend, Abigail Fremont…”

Ten minutes later, Ronni hung up the phone.  She sat with a smug smile on her face.  The Director of Volunteer Services had been more than happy to extol the virtues of working with children… and the virtues of Abigail Fremont.  Yes, she was so dedicated, agreed Ronni, and asked carefully crafted questions that let her find out that Abby hadn’t missed one session at the hospital since she had started volunteering there in June…except for her trip to Toronto in October…and of course…here the woman giggled like a schoolgirl…her honeymoon.

Toronto! Ronni thought triumphantly.  But no, that was too late.  It was October.  Well, maybe Sharon Fremont was just exaggerating the situation in August.  Yeah, that had to be it!  They must have just been getting to know each other.  Sharon would be so desperate to have Ducky seem like a normal woman that she would scale up any man who even spoke to her daughter as ‘Abigail’s young man’.  And if people were of the opinion that she’d been thrown over by this Philip Randall guy, then Sharon would want a replacement, so that Ducky didn’t look like such a loser.

Ronni continued to wade through the threads.  She found the one that mentioned the ‘girlfriend in Canada’.  There was a big lock on the side of the thread and when she read it, she understood why.  Man, these women could really throw shit at each other!  Ronni went back to her calendar.  Okay, so Ducky went to Toronto, but Nick didn’t.

She got up to pace a bit and think about it.  She had a fresh glass of wine in her hand when she sat back down, but didn’t seem aware of it.  She sat back in her chair and stared at her computer screen.  She moved on through the threads.  There were many mentions of Nick now, because the Boys were getting out and about, being seen, talking up the album.  Lots of mentions of Nick and all in California. 

And then suddenly, there it was.  Nick’s got a new girlfriend!  Ronni looked at the date.  October 18.  There was a link to the radio station, but the interview had been taken down long ago.   According to the posters, Nick had said he had a girlfriend in Chicago.  Ronni waded through a bunch of stuff about it.  She remembered that time.  Ducky had come back to Chicago…from Toronto, guessed Ronni now…and she’d had the big makeover.  Nick was looking better and better in the pictures too, now that Ronni thought about it.  He’d really lost weight and shaped up.  She laughed.  Maybe they were makeover buddies.

Suddenly, Ronni realized that she was having trouble reading the screen.  Uh oh!  She had concentrated so fiercely on what she was doing that she hadn’t realized how much she was drinking.  Oops!  She looked at the clock on her Toolbar.  Shit!  It was nearly five.  She tried to remember what James had said about tonight.  Was he coming home for dinner or not?  She tucked her datebook back into the drawer and shut down the computer.

Ronni staggered into the kitchen.  She rinsed the wine glass and put it back in the cupboard.  She got a full bottle from her stash in the basement and put it in the fridge, putting the now nearly-empty one downstairs in its place.  She looked around the kitchen.  Satisfied that there was no evidence that she had been drinking, she headed for the shower. 

As she stood under the water, she had a silly thought.  This was the least boring day she’d had in a long time.