TABOO TALES(erotica)

“From what you have told me the police have nothing except some anonymous note,” he said carefully, “and they are not sure what credibility to put on that.”

She nodded, her eyes very big in the pale oval of her face.

“And unless they obtain further information, or proof, there is nothing they can do about it.” Ben continued. “So the question for me is who told them about us, and what proof do they have?”

She smiled at him, a small upturning of her lips. “That’s two questions, Ben.”

He ignored the interruption. “Let’s think about the first question then, Chelsea. Who would hate us enough to tell the police about it?”

Chelsea thought for a moment. “How about we each write a list of everyone we know, and then go through it and decide if any of them are suspects?”

Ben fetched a few of pages of paper and they bent over the dining room table, writing. He finished first and sat watching her write. Her face was screwed up in concentration, and she was chewing the end of the pencil, her grey eyes on some distant horizon as she thought. He could hear the clock ticking in the kitchen, and the occasional sound of a car in the street outside. He watched her hands, the long slender fingers grasping the pencil, her wrists slim. Her hair swung forward over her face as she bent forward to write, a golden curtain that hid the strong, square line of her jaw and the soft curve of her lips, and he felt his heart twist with love. No matter what came of this crisis, the thought, I will be by her side. I would rather die than be without her.

At last she set the pencil down and sat back. “That’s all I can think of.”

Ben looked at her list. “How come you know so many more people than me?” he asked.

She smiled at him. “Because I’m a much nicer person than you.”

He laughed. “Right. How silly of me.” He gathered up the pages. “How do you want to do this?”

“Let’s just go through them and put a line through names we are sure wouldn’t do this.”Upstodatee from Novel(D)ra/m/a.O(r)g

“OK.” He picked up the pencil. “We need to be tough, though. If you have any inkling of doubt, even the tiniest one, then we keep them open.” She nodded and he read though the names, his fingers busy as they drew a line though each one, until the light faded from the day and the job was done.

Chelsea leaned forward. “So how did we do?”

“There are four names still on the list.”

She brightened. “That’s not so many… we can deal with that.”

“It could be someone we have forgotten, Chel.”

She shook her head. “I bet we’ve got ninety percent of the people we know on that list, Ben. We can add others as we think of them.”

“How about people we don’t know? It could be a complete stranger.”

“Don’t be so bloody negative! Why in the hell would a perfect stranger pick our names from the twenty million others in this country?

“Just a thought.” He smiled. “OK, you’re right… it’s someone we know, then. Our number one suspect is our dear half-brother, William. We know that he knows about us and we know that he hates us both.” He looked up at her, but she said nothing. “Then there’s our new sister-in-law, Cielle, and her brother Dirk, and there’s Phil Saunders… who’s he?”

“He’s my boss. He’s been trying to get into my pants for months, and he’s a vindictive bastard. I wouldn’t put it past him to try and get us to split from each other. Maybe he thinks that if I live on my own he’s got a better chance of getting his end away.”

“Would he know about us?”

“Not specifically, Ben, but he knows that you and I are close because I often use you as an excuse to get out of his sleazy invitations.”

“OK.” He thought for a moment. “Gut feel, Chel,” he said. “Which one of them is it?”

“William.”

He nodded. “I agree. What about the others?”

“Not Cielle,” she said with certainty. “Dirk… no, I don’t think so. He seemed very nice when I met him… although there’s something heavy going down between him and his sister.”

“Sex?”

She shook her head. “I’m not sure, Ben. She seemed to be treading on eggs around him… like she was terrified of upsetting him.”

“OK.” He thought for a moment, then changed tack suddenly. “If you wanted evidence that someone was diddling his sister, how would you get it?”

“I hate you using words like that.”

“Sorry…. but how do you think someone would get proof?”

Chelsea thought for a moment. “I’d use a Private Eye.”

“Expensive, and it might not work… unless he could see into the house.”

“So he’d plant a bug, or something.”

Ben nodded. “Whereabouts in the house?”

“The bedroom, obviously. Maybe the lounge or bathroom as well.”

Ben nodded again. “Maybe I’m being paranoid, Sis, but it might be worth a look just to see that someone hasn’t.”

Chelsea stared at him. “Ben, this is Australia, not some third world dictatorship. You’ve been watching too many spy movies.”

Ben downed the last of his drink. “Yeah, I know – it seems silly, and it probably is, Chel. But spending half an hour looking around won’t hurt, will it?” He got to his feet. “Come on. Now that the idea is in my head, I couldn’t sleep tonight unless I checked it out.”

They went into the bedroom. “What does it look like?” Chelsea asked.

Ben was on his hands and knees peering under the bed. “Shit, I don’t know.” His voice was muffled. “A little stud, I suppose, like a button or something. I don’t think it would be in the bathroom because of the sound of the shower… I guess it would have to be close to the bed.”

They went around the bed, feeling under the frame and around the bedside cabinets. Chelsea giggled and Ben looked up. “What’s so funny?”

“I was just thinking that they don’t need a bug to check us out. All they have to do is stand in the street and listen to me cumming.”

Ben smiled. “That’s right. They could hear you in New Zealand.”

“So why are we bothering to do this?”

He looked at her with growing excitement. “You’ve got it, Chelsea! Don’t you see? If there was a bug they would hear us making love, but they wouldn’t know who was fucking who… it might be me and the maid, for all they knew.”

“Are you fucking the maid?”

“You won’t let me have one, Chel,” he reminded her, “and if we did you’d probably choose one as ugly as sin. Seriously, though, if someone wanted proof of our relationship, they must know it’s you and me doing it – not someone else. They must get a visual.”

“A camera, you mean?”

He nodded. “If I wanted evidence, I’d want pictures – preferably video.”

Chelsea laughed. “That’s ridiculous, Ben! Are you saying someone’s hidden a video camera in our bedroom?” She moved quickly over to the wardrobe and opened the door and spoke in a high sing-song voice. “Hello? Are you in there? Come out because you’ve been discovered!” She turned back to him and laughed again. “Get real, Ben, where in the hell would they put it?”

Ben looked around. The windows occupied one side of the room and the built-in wardrobes the other. There was only the wall opposite the bed, punctuated by the door into the bedroom. He regarded the heavy dressing table, the only furniture against it, and shrugged his shoulders. “Somewhere in there, perhaps.”

She laughed again. “Not unless they brought a carpenter’s shop with them… come on, Ben, we’re wasting our time.”

Ben’s eyes fell on the air conditioning vent near the ceiling architrave. “How about up there?”

“Come on! I’m not wasting another second on this.”

Ben looked up at the vent again. It was the only place that it could be, but he knew the stupidity of his argument. Still, it would only take a second. He turned to his sister. “I’ll only be a minute, Chel.”

She made a noise of dismissal and Ben turned back to his task, moving aside some of the bric-a-brac on top of the dresser to clamber onto its worn polished surface. He peered into the vent, but it was too dark to see anything inside it. He could see that it had been disturbed, though, with the plaster around its edges broken and smudges of dirt on the adjacent paintwork. He climbed down and fetched a screwdriver and with a growing sense of excitement he removed the two screws, carefully lifting away the grille, observing with a sense of disbelief the lens of the camera staring down into the room. His movement had triggered its mechanism, and he could see the lens’s bezel turning as it attempted to focus on his face. He lifted it out carefully and carried it through to the lounge.