Biggest and Best

"Okay," said Sonny, "I can arrange that by sundown today. Do you have any idea who she might be seeing? That could give us a start on the rest."

"I know the general area of town that she was in when she should have been elsewhere. And I've got some names that come to mind based on what I've heard in passing conversations over the years and from what I have seen and heard at parties and other gatherings. The men who match those names all live in that part of town.

"I've also done a thumb-through of her high school senior yearbook -- boy; that was enlightening, I'll tell you; at least based on what they wrote by the pictures and in the pages in the back," I said.

Several entries handwritten in her yearbook referred to 'The Quarry' and vague references to 'the Friday before Memorial Day.' I only knew of one rock quarry in the area -- now abandoned -- and I could surmise, from the entries written in her yearbook, that some major incident had occurred there about fifteen years ago -- sometime around the end of May, Memorial Day Weekend -- and it had been significant not only for Claire, but for several other people in her high school class, most of them boys -- now men, quite a few of whom still lived here in town.

I gave Sonny the men's and women's names that I suspected as possibly being part of her old high school rowdy crowd, along with addresses for them that I had gathered from the local phone directory.

"You know, Wade, you are going to need to keep tabs of her phone conversations as well. I got a guy that I use who can put a wireless bug in each extension of your land line phone tied to a recorder right there in your home. He can even plant a tiny device in your wife's cell phone. Does she have a plastic protector for her cell phone?" Sonny asked.

"Yeah," I replied. I gave him the brand of cell phone she used with our wireless service.

"Good, good," he replied. "My guy can put a wafer-thin pickup between the body of the phone and the plastic case. She won't even be able to feel the difference. You just have to get the phone to him; he can even drop by your house tonight or tomorrow and you can slip out back with the cell phone and he can hook it up in about three or four minutes.

"And the neat thing is that it is powered by her cell phone battery. As long as she keeps the phone charged, the bug is active and ready. And what it picks up will transmit over your cell phone carrier's network specifically to another digital recorder at your house."

I could hear the pride in his voice and I had to admit that I was surprised at just how sophisticated his electronic surveillance methods were proving to be. I guess it made sense in the world in which he had grown up to keep close tabs on certain people. Trust, but verify, indeed.

"Please try to keep this as inexpensive as possible, Sonny," I said. "I don't want to have to come up with a lot of money beyond what we have in our checking and savings. Claire does not know about my other assets, and I sort of want to keep it that way until I can be absolutely sure about her. In fact, I still want to keep that knowledge of our true financial picture from her even later on, just on general principles, especially if she proves to be unfaithful to me."

"Don't you worry about anything, my friend," assured Sonny, "This won't cost you a dime. After all, look at all the money you are saving us every day with the way you have set things up for us," I knew who the 'us' to whom he referred was. "And, hey, you are a friend in need of help, and I am there for you, Buddy. We'll get you the answers you need in no time at all."

That evening, after supper, I helped my daughter, Mindy, with her arithmetic -- basically adding and subtracting was all she was doing in the second grade at this time -- and her word list, explaining what the words meant and helping her learn how to spell them. Claire straightened up the kitchen and played with little Paul, who was still getting used to kindergarten.

"I'm trying to do what you tell me, Daddy," said my seven-year-old daughter, "I'm trying to be the biggest and the best in school. I'm going to be the biggest winner when they give out the awards at the end of the year and I'm the best speller in second grade."

I had been encouraging Mindy -- ever since she had been able to understand -- to be competitive; to be the biggest and best at whatever she tried to do, but not pushy or arrogant. That included her approach to school work as well as any sports or other activities she tried to undertake. That positive attitude of setting goals and seeking to achieve them, coupled with learning humility and sportsmanship, would serve her well as she grew into adulthood.

At nine o'clock, Claire and I put both the kids to bed. Then we sat together on the sofa in the den, sharing some wine and a tender moment of soft conversation and gentle touching.

"Claire," I said softly, "I probably don't tell you often enough these days, but," I lifted her chin and looked straight into her eyes, "I love you more now than I did when we were first married, and that love keeps on growing the longer we're together."

Her eyes widened in delight at my statement. She put her wineglass down and reached behind my neck to pull my head down to her as she pasted a very firm and active kiss on my lips. Finally pulling back, she said, "Oh, Wade, I love you, too; so much." We finished the wine and put the glasses back in the kitchen before retiring to the bedroom.

For the next hour-and-a-half, Claire tried to kill me with sex. What a way to go!

As usual since we had married, she denied me nothing and offered me everything. She sucked my cock to completion and swallowed, causing my vision to dim and sparkle with purple flashes. All the while, she was maintaining loving eye contact with me. Then she continued to suck, all the while licking it with her velvety tongue, it until I was hard again.

She pushed me back and mounted me from above, riding me for a good while, rocking her majestic body over me and bringing me off again after experiencing her own orgasms, at least twice in a major way, and once with a tense shiver and moan. After a period of resting in each other's arms, caressing and kissing, she sucked me to hardness yet again -- a feat I had thought impossible -- and I mounted her in classic missionary position, but with her legs propped in my biceps, opening her body to me as fully and completely as she possibly could. I rocked gently in and out, ensuring that I brushed against her clit with my pubic bone on the down strokes.

She approached orgasm after about ten minutes of this movement, but she just could not go over. I felt like I was not going to cum again, but I was just luxuriating in the intimate contact of our sex organs and the loving motion and eye contact we were making; not to mention the joy we both derived from my kissing and licking of her nipples and her lips while we rocked in love's ideal wave motion. Finally, we realized that we had made it as far as we were going to go for the evening sexually and just relaxed in a tender mutual embrace.

Afterward, we used the bathroom and cleaned up a bit before getting into bed and into each other's arms. We remained naked, planning to sleep that way. Ever since Paul had turned four, we had no longer feared his coming in to ask to sleep with us. He had outgrown most of his nighttime fears and thus had allowed us to go back to sleeping naked, as we had done for the years before he had become a toddler.

"Wade; what you told me downstairs earlier ... about our love growing ..." Claire had tears in her eyes now. "I want you to know that I feel the same way, Baby. And I just hope ..." She suddenly looked away and the tears that had formed began to trickle down her cheeks.

"Hope what, Sweetie?" I asked as I kissed the tears away from her cheeks.

She took a breath. "I just hope that you never stop loving me, even if ... well ... no matter what happens."

Something was bothering her, I could tell. "Even if what, Sweetie? What do you mean, 'no matter what happens,' ... what could happen?" I was watching her face and saw a touch of sadness there.

Finally, she sighed and said, "Oh, we can't predict what might happen sometimes. I just don't want anything to come between us; be it money, jobs ..." here she paused and looked away as she continued, "people ... or strange circumstances."

"What strange circumstances are you anticipating, Honey?" I asked. I was focused on her every nuance at that point, watching for the details, her 'tells'.

She sighed again and smiled at me before kissing me on the lips and saying, "Oh, I don't know. Anyway, it's getting late and we both need to be alert for work tomorrow. Just hold me now and let's get to sleep."

I did not press her, but turned her so that her gorgeous naked ass was spooned against my spent and now flaccid cock. I held her right breast gently cupped in my right hand as she turned out the light and we went to sleep.

I am usually up about an hour before Claire, so that I can go for a run in the neighborhood before having breakfast and getting ready for work. As I prepared coffee before my run the next morning, I was startled by a soft knock against my glass patio door.

I looked around suddenly to see a man standing there in the dimness of the early morning smiling and waving with a friendly demeanor so as not to cause me discomfort. It did not work as he thought; because his at-least-six-foot-three-two-hundred-fifty-pound body and countenance were scary, no matter how friendly he tried to make his smile, especially in the dim light of early morning. I glanced at the stairs and listened for any sign that Claire might be awake. There was only silence and stillness.

Cautiously, I approached the patio door and braced as I opened it, in case this was not Sonny's guy after all. I relaxed when the man said in a surprisingly soft and higher-than-I-expected voice, "Can you get me the cell phone? I just need a couple of minutes." I beckoned him to come on in, but he declined, choosing to remain outside, where he could make a quick withdrawal from the scene if necessary.

I retrieved Claire's cell phone from her purse in the kitchen and brought it out to him. He examined it for a couple of seconds under a small Maglite and went to work on it. True to his word, he had the purple plastic back cover off the case, the battery compartment open, the attachment in place, the wafer-thin receiver stuck on, and the phone with cover back to what looked like its original condition in under five minutes. I was impressed.

"That ought to do it. For what it's worth, I hope that this is all wasted time and effort. I always hate it when Sonny's friends and associates get involved in the ugliness of cheating and divorce," he said, offering me his hand to shake.

"Oh, do you have a key so that I can get in the house later to put the bugs on the phones after you folks leave the house?" I got a spare from our key rack in the kitchen and returned and handed it to him. I told him to leave it under the steps of the back deck when he finished in the house and locked up afterward, and I would find it.

After I closed the patio door, I looked again and he had simply vanished as if he had never been there. I returned Claire's cell phone to her purse and went about my routine as I usually did every morning, starting with my run. Starting today, my daily routine would be anything but usual until I could figure out what Claire was up to.

Chapter 2

A package arrived by UPS in mid-morning on Wednesday. When I opened it, I found what looked like a typical GPS device like the one I kept in my Toyota 4Runner. The note in the package, from Sonny, indicated that this particular GPS was not used to show my location or direction of travel. It was to show me the location of Claire's car -- the tracker had been planted under the body of her car and I could see where she was -- if she was in her car -- any time I turned on the device.

My receiver could be powered by the car power adapter when I was on the road or by the USB connector to my computers at work or home so that I could monitor her location while at my desk or in my den. This was way cool; I felt kinda like Daniel Craig in one of the new James Bond movies -- or, as the British entertainment media called him, 'James Blonde.'

Sonny's note also included a recommendation that I should check my email a couple of times a day for electronic records of her travels. Twice daily, the logs from the GPS device would be downloaded to a server somewhere out there in the world and the listings would be sent to me as an attachment to an email at work disguised as a legitimate marketing message supposedly offering me special discounts to fly with Delta Airlines. I just needed to make sure that my email client was set so that it did not screen these out as spam.

Now, I simply had to watch and wait. God, I hate that! I am just not the patient type. I need action rather than idle waiting.

With that, I called in my Administrative Assistant, Grace, and we went over the list of clients who were most in need of being scheduled for a meeting with me for an annual financial review.

That evening, the routine was just that -- routine. We had supper and helped the kids with homework and enjoyed some family time. When the kids went down, I told Claire that I needed to check email and that I wanted to read a bit from an eBook that I downloaded from one of my favorite online eBook sites -- David Baldacci had a new suspense thriller out that looked promising.

Retiring to the den, I woke the computer and went quickly through the home emails. Only a couple of them were of interest. They were from mutual friends of Claire and me, and they informed us of plans for upcoming end-of-school-year parties and kids' activities being planned. We were now in the middle of May and school was scheduled to end on the fifth of June -- shortly after Memorial Day. There were also early notices for Claire's upcoming Fifteen-Year reunion of her graduating class, scheduled for the last week in June.

I had closed the den door -- Claire was watching television in the family room -- but the computer desk was situated so that I could face the door. I activated a file transfer software application on the computer and plugged the USB cables from the two remote phone recorders in my desk drawer to the USB hub sitting beside the computer. I wanted to transfer copies of all the recordings from her cell phone and the land line phone here at the house to the computer so that I could burn copies of anything significant to DVD-R or CD-R if needed.

Once the transfer was complete, I checked to see that the memory cards for the two digital recorders still had sufficient available space for recording a couple of more days of telephone traffic. Then, I disconnected them and put them back into stand-by mode and began to listen to the collection of audio gleaned from the land line phones at the house and from Claire's cell phone. I used my ear buds, so that the sound would be limited to my ears only as I listened and watched the door.

It dawned on me that I might need to get with Sonny later about some way to capture any message traffic that might occur when Claire used the texting feature on her phone. I sent myself an email to my work address to remind me to call in the morning, and then I cleared out the 'Sent' copy to keep Claire from seeing it if she checked the email.

The home phone traffic was limited only to a couple of solicitor calls that went directly to voice mail. Sometimes I wondered why we even kept land line phones anymore, since most of our communication in today's world was done on mobile devices. The traffic on Claire's cell phone today did not pick up until she turned the phone on as she was leaving work, and the only call recorded was her calling her stylist for a hair appointment for the upcoming Saturday morning.

Ah, well. So far, so good, I guess. It was only the first day, after all. I would just need to persevere for a while and see where this was all going to lead -- if anywhere.

The week continued with nothing uneventful on the personal or electronic front. We both went to work and sent the kids off to, and picked them up from, the schools they attended. Nothing even remotely questionable came up from the recordings or the travel logs for the tracker on Claire's car for the next few days. Claire had her hair appointment on Saturday for a cut and wash and I did some work around the house and we made love passionately and vigorously on Saturday night for about two hours.

Finally, Sunday afternoon, there was one call of interest to the house land line. I listened to it with interest on Sunday night just before bed. I was using my ear buds, as usual, to keep the listening to myself without fear of anyone else hearing.

[Claire] "Hello?"

[Female voice] "Hey, Claire Bear, how are you?"

[Clair, with an audible sigh] "Hello, Gay. What's on your little mind?" Claire did not sound enthusiastic at all. In fact, she sounded a bit irritable. I remembered that Gay was one of the old A-crowd that Claire had been keeping at a social distance.

[Gay, evidently] "Now, Claire, you know that we are all excited about your upcoming return engagement. The last one was so exciting and the sex was just so hot!" She actually giggled when she finished saying this.

[Claire] "Look, Gay, I can't talk about that now ... here on the home phone. Wade might hear. He can never find out about that other time. I just don't think he could stand to keep me around if he found out."

[Gay] "Well, he doesn't have to find out if you stay calm. Look, Dwight, Harvey, and Tim each want to have a solo hook-up with you before the big Memorial Day bash -- you know, to knock off the edge, so to speak. They all still think that sex with you is the best thing since Graham Crackers. I know that Tim has been drooling over the video that he keeps on our computer. He has watched it almost every night this week. Then, after he watches it, he gives me a hell of a ride after seeing you in action; it gets him all worked up."

[Gay continues] "They worked out a schedule for this coming week with Harvey on Tuesday, Tim and me on Wednesday, and Dwight on Thursday; Harvey and Dwight will arrange for their families to be out of the house on the nights of your expected visits. Then they will all three be there, of course, for the main event at the quarry on Friday."

[Claire, following a moment of silence] "I wish there were some other way. It would kill Wade if he were to find out about this ... or about the other time. I can't lose him, Gay; I just can't."

I could hear emotion in her voice and detected that she was probably on the verge of crying as she said it. Maybe she was experiencing some remorse for having already cheated on me and for the plans -- which they were discussing -- to continue doing so.

[Gay] "Now, Honey, if you are careful, he won't find out. After all, it will all be over after Friday, and we can simply keep those sexy memories for the rest of our lives and then be able to start up a program of making a lot of new memories, if you are game." Gay giggled again.

[Claire, after a moment's hesitation] "We'll see if it actually works out like you think it will. I just need to be as discreet as possible for now. Nothing about this must surface, or else my marriage and my life as I know it will be very much in danger."

[Gay, with irritation now in her voice] "You worry too much. Just make plans for your visits to see the guys individually and be sure that you are careful. We don't want poor Wade to get all upset at this point, now do we? Anyway, I gotta go. I'll call you later in the week to see how things went; and, of course, I'll be there Friday for the big event; just like last time. Bye."