Grace

It all came to a head on Christmas Eve. It was the custom of her company to close up the shop around 1 o'clock in the afternoon on Christmas Eve and invite all of the employees to a big party in their warehouse.

I figured that Elise would party for a couple of hours, then come home so we could do some last-minute shopping, then get the Santa Claus stuff ready for the kids, so it would be waiting when they got up at the crack of dawn on Christmas.

But 6 o'clock came and went, and no Elise. Then 9 o'clock passed with no sign of her. I started calling everywhere I could think of -- Glenda (who was also out of pocket), the jails, hospitals -- and she was nowhere to be found.

I was livid. She didn't even have the decency to curb her antics on Christmas Eve? I was still up waiting for her around 10:30 when I heard a car door slam and I saw my wife stumbling up the walk to the house.

She saw me standing there, and I was shocked. Her face just fell, and she tried to push past me, but I caught her and I was overwhelmed by the smell. She reeked of sweat and semen; hell, she even had some dried cum in her hair, and her eyes were completely unfocused, like she'd spent a hard day getting high.

I stared at her, and she averted her gaze, then something inside me just collapsed. At that moment, I was just too tired to fight her.

Besides, I would soon have a video record of her entire day, because I'd had a feeling she'd do something like that, so I had Lillie set up surveillance.

By then, Lillie had discovered that Elise had been identified as a woman who frequented a seedy motel on the rough side of town in the company of some rough-looking characters.

Lillie had bribed a clerk at the motel, and she had been allowed to plant a hidden camera in one of the rooms, with the understanding that if Elise showed up, she and whoever she was with would be steered to that room.

Elise and I spent a tense Christmas Day circling each other while I waited for the shit to hit the fan. It was the calm before the storm. I knew Elise was off work for the next week; they always closed up for the week between Christmas and New Year's, so I wasn't as worried about what she'd be doing.

The day after Christmas, Lillie called me at the store and her voice sounded urgent.

"You need to come see the tape from the other day," she said.

"How bad is it?" I said.

"Worse than anything you can imagine," she said.

Now I figured Elise had a boyfriend, maybe two, but I was not prepared at all for what I saw on Lillie's surveillance tape.

Lillie had me sit down in the empty office of one of her associates, plugged the tape into the VCR and left me alone to digest what was on the tape.

Before she started the tape, she handed me a surveillance report chronicling Elise's behavior before she arrived at the motel. That really was all the evidence I needed, because it was pretty graphic in itself.

I don't know how Lillie did it, but she had somehow gotten her associate into the company's party, and he had eyewitness accounts of what went on.

It started off as a conventional party, lots of drinking with some smooching under the mistletoe. Nothing too dramatic. After an hour, though, the Christmas carols that had been on the boom box were changed to dance music, and Elise was seen dirty dancing with several people, including her friend Glenda.

According to the report, Elise and Glenda had all but had sex in the middle of the room while the men in attendance surrounded them and cheered them on.

Then it hit the fan.

Elise was seen headed out to the parking lot in the company of some guy. The PI set up a post where he could see what they were doing. First, they lit up a joint, and while they were smoking it, he pulled out a vial and they shared several spoons of cocaine.

When they were finished, he saw Elise's head drop into the man's lap, and he could see the man's head thrown back, a look of pleasure on his face. After a few minutes, Elise's head popped back up and she was wiping something off her mouth as she smiled wickedly. Then they returned to the party.

About 5 o'clock, the party broke up, but instead of driving home, Elise followed several pickup trucks to the motel where she had been seen before, and that's where the tape started.

My wife -- my soon-to-be ex-wife -- entered the room in the company of four guys whom I'd describe as hard-looking. They were all around six feet and well built, and a couple of them were even fairly good looking, if you like men who are a little rough-edged.

Three joints were fired up and started making the rounds while one of the men sat at a table and began drawing out several fat lines of coke. As the room filled with smoke, everybody, including Elise, took a line up each nostril, and she giggled seductively when she had done hers.

Then they got down to business. Elise was quickly stripped naked and pushed onto her knees, where four equally naked men surrounded her with their hard cocks.

They were all pretty well hung, though not excessively so, and while a couple of them did have me beaten in that department, I would have fit right in with them, size-wise. No, it wasn't for want of a big cock that Elise was fucking around on me.

I watched as Elise eagerly took turns sucking those cocks into hard missiles of lust. Then the biggest guy in the room, the one who appeared to be calling the shots, pulled her up, positioned her on her back on the bed, got on his knees between her legs and shoved his big cock up her wide-spread pussy.

I just stared at the TV screen as Elise writhed on the bed underneath this prick, her face registering her lust. I guess I should have been glad there was no sound on the tape, but it was pretty clear that she was vocalizing her pleasure in a most heated manner.

After the first guy finished -- shooting his load in her cunt -- the second guy got on and he humped her until he came. Then she did something the turned my blood cold.

It hadn't bothered me much to read about or to see her giving out blowjobs, even though that wasn't something she'd done for me very often. I was shocked that she was involved in a gangbang, but that seemed to fall in with the degradation that I now understood she'd come to want.

But when she rolled onto her knees, reached back and grabbed her butt cheeks, offering her backside to Guy No. 3, who gleefully pushed his cock in her ass, I felt the cold blade of fury up slither up my spine.

Earlier in our marriage, I'd made a few attempts to play with Elise's anus and I'd been shot down in quite angry terms. I hadn't even really been at her to fuck her ass; I was just playing around with my fingers, but she'd all but thrown me out of the bed.

So to see her so obviously giving some asshole a butt-fuck, to see her so obviously enjoying it and to realize that this wasn't nearly the first time someone had fucked her back there just filled me with rage and loathing.

I stood up and paced the little office as one guy fucked her ass, while the fourth guy fucked her face, until they blew their loads almost at the same time.

I'd seen enough, but I did fast-forward through the tape just to get set in my mind how bad it had gotten, and it did get worse. By then, though, I was numb to any further shock, so when she took on all four of them at once, it just didn't really register.

I guess the look on my face spoke volumes, because Lillie had her associate, the one who'd tailed Elise at the party, take me to a nearby bar for a medicinal drink. After a couple of beers with Burl -- short for Burlington -- I felt a little better.

We talked about what I planned to do, and he agreed to help me when it came time to serve Elise with divorce papers. He was a big muscular fellow who turned out to be a softy inside, and he empathized with me.

Burl had been through much the same thing as I had, and he understood what I was going through.

It was all I could do to be civil to Elise that night when I went home. Luckily, I guess, she made it easy for me be getting dressed up and going out that night with "her friends." I didn't even bother to watch her leave. I was playing with Allison in the den when she left.

The next morning, I went to my lawyer and told him I was ready to file the papers. I wanted them ready for New Year's Eve, and I wanted Burl to be the one to serve her. I had a New Year's surprise for my whore wife.

For New Year's Eve, I told Elise that I was going to have to work until closing at 9 p.m., and that I'd rather just spend a quiet night at home.

I begged her to stay home with me, knowing full well that she'd do nothing of the sort, which I had planned on. As always, she was planning on going to Glenda and Mitch's year-end party and she just sort of laughed at what she thought was my pathetic attempt to guilt her into staying home.

"If you want to be a stick in the mud, go right ahead," she said. "But I'm ready to par-tay."

"Can't you at least stay long enough to keep the kids until I get home from work?" I said.

"Why?" she sneered. "Why should I let the little rugrats cut into my fun time? I'll get a sitter, if you can't tear yourself away from that store in time to keep your precious little babies."

I was stunned. I knew she'd lost interest in parenting, but the cold way she talked about the children just floored me. It would make what subsequently happened hard to fathom.

"That's quite all right, Elise," I said slowly. "I'll make the arrangements. You don't have to turn your hands for your children one little bit."

I called the neighbor's teenage daughter, who was the kids' regular sitter, and asked her to keep the kids for about an hour. She agreed, and I told her to call the store as soon as Elise left the house.

A little after 6:30, the girl called and I turned over the store to my assistant. I called my brother, who had agreed to meet me at the house to help pack up Elise's things. His wife drove him over and left with my children, who were told they were going to spend the night with their grandparents.

We got all of Elise's belongings packed up and moved in my pickup truck to a storage facility, then drove to Mitch and Glenda's a little after 10 o'clock. Burl was sitting in his car, in a secure location, watching the house.

"She hasn't left," Burl said. "It's a pretty safe bet she's there for the night."

"Good," I said, as he poured me a cup of coffee from a thermos he had with him.

We watched the house as several people came and went, until the stroke of midnight. As the sounds of fireworks and other revelry erupted all around us, the three of us got out and approached the house.

At first, no one answered the door, probably because they couldn't hear over the din. But Burl pounded on the door, and finally someone I didn't know opened the door.

"Elise Moreland?" he boomed, as we stepped into the foyer.

It took a few minutes before someone could fetch her to the door, and she looked awfully wasted when she showed up.

"Yeah, what..." she began, then she saw me and my brother standing on either side of Burl, and I think our faces told her we weren't there to join the party.

"What are you..." she began again, but Burl cut her off.

"Elise Moreland," he said as he slapped one of the letters he had with him into her hand. "You are served. This is a petition filed in civil court by Mr. Steve Moreland seeking divorce on the grounds of adultery and mental cruelty. And this is an injunction from the court preventing you from coming within 1,500 feet of the domicile formerly occupied by you and said husband. And this envelope contains the key and the address to a storage facility where your belongings have been moved."

"You sorry son of a bitch," Elise sputtered, and I could see Mitch, Glenda and all of their friends starting to amass behind her.

"I gave you a chance, Elise," I said evenly. "I gave you the opportunity to clean up your act, and you chose to shit on me. You've made your bed, now lie in it."

We heard a cacophony of outrage building, so Burl opened his jacket, revealing the pistol in his belt. He put his hand on the handle and stared down the crowd, then we turned and strode purposefully out of the house, as the door slammed shut behind us.

I doubt that Burl would have used his pistol, but it had made for a very effective peacemaker.

Then I went to my folks to spend what was left of New Year's Eve and gird my loins for the battle to come. It wasn't long in coming.

Truth is, Elise started stepping in her own shit right from the get-go, and it was the beginning of the year from hell.

While we had been packing up her things, I'd hired a locksmith to come to our house and change the locks, but that didn't stop Elise. While we were spending New Year's Day at my parents' house, she broke a window in the kitchen door to get into the house, and apparently ransacked our bedroom.

Perhaps she was looking for something; I'm not sure. It didn't matter. I called the police and had her charged with breaking and entering. Because it was her first arrest, and because it was done in conjunction with my serving her the night before, her lawyer managed to get the charges dropped.

A week later, I got my blood work back from the doctor, and breathed a sigh of relief when everything came up negative. I added those documents to my growing evidence file, then got more good news the following week.

The DNA results revealed that all three of the kids were indeed mine. Whatever Elise had done behind my back, she'd started doing after the babies were born. That made my strategy easy. I was going for full custody, and I was only going to allow Elise supervised visitation.

To my bafflement, she fought everything tooth and nail. I'd have thought the way she'd been acting, that she'd be glad to have her freedom, that she'd welcome not having a husband and family holding her back from doing what she wanted.

But I reckoned without the demons that my father had seen lurking in her heart all those years earlier. Once I established myself as the enemy in her eyes, she wasn't about to let me win anything without a fight.

Yet, it seemed like the more she tried to fight me, the worse things got for her, and the more infuriated she got with me. That included another arrest for possession of marijuana, which resulted in a hefty fine and got her driver's license suspended for six months.

It took until midsummer, but I finally got the divorce I'd been seeking, then we went to family court on the custody issue, and she brought out what she thought was her heavy artillery, the fact that I'd been the person who'd turned her on to drugs.

But my lawyer brought out my evidence that I was drug-free, and had been for the better part of a year. It looked like I was going to get full custody, when Elise finally went too far.

It was a hot night in September and I was just leaving the store. The only warning I got was a sudden shuffling of several pairs of feet, then I felt something, a large stick or maybe a baseball bat, hit me hard right in my ribs.

I just managed to roll away from a blow aimed at my head, which glanced off my shoulder. I managed to get up on my knees and defend myself, and I saw I was beset by three attackers, two of whom I recognized from the tape of Elise's Christmas Eve gangbang.

I was able to engage the guy who was wielding the cudgel so that he couldn't get a real blow in on me, and I managed to land some hard blows to the guy's midsection. But the flip side was that I was left open to attack from the fists and feet of the other two.

I don't know if they'd have killed me or not, but I vaguely heard voices coming from down the street and I was left in a painful heap. The last thing I remember was some black kid hovering over me asking me if I was all right, then calling for someone to go get help.

Literally, the next thing I saw was a face, the face of a woman. At first, it was kind of vague, but as my head began to clear I saw that she was a nurse, and a very pretty one at that. She had a fairly thin face, but she smiled when she saw I was coming around, and when she did, her whole face lit up.

That was my introduction to Grace Pauling.

I was in the hospital for three weeks, during which time I got to know Grace very well. She was quite simply the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen. She was very aptly named, because she just had a graceful way about her, an elegance that comes from an inner peace.

She was a little taller than average and quite slender, with soft blonde hair cut fashionably just short of her shoulders. She was all but flat-chested, but if that bothered her at all, she didn't show it, and it sure never bothered me.

From the beginning, I felt there was something there, and we'd talk while she busied herself caring for me. I found her to be a terrific listener and someone who was wise beyond her years.

She was a year or so older than me, but she'd never been married, never really been close to it. She told me she'd had a few boyfriends, but none that had set her heart aflutter. Then she smiled that megawatt smile and winked at me.

While I was in the hospital, I met several times with the police, and it became pretty clear that I'd been attacked at the behest of my ex-wife for reasons that I just couldn't understand. She and her friends were arrested and charged with attempted murder.

I let her sweat until the beginning of the next year, then I met her to make a deal. If she relinquished all custody claims, I would see about getting the charges reduced to aggravated assault.

"Why should I help you?" she snarled.

"Because I really don't think you want to spend the next 15 years in prison," I said. "I'm giving you the choice between three to six years, and the possibility of occasionally seeing your children, as opposed to 15 to life and never seeing them again. Don't be as stupid as you were when you rejected my offer to save our marriage. Remember? I'd have overlooked all of the stuff you'd done up to that point, if you'd done what I asked. If you'd quit that job, gone into rehab, been serious about counseling, none of this would have happened. But you declined, and where did it get you? You're unemployed, you're still a junkie whore and now you're about to become a convicted felon."

"You haven't got shit on me," she said.

"Oh?" I said, and this time I sneered at her. I was through being Elise's doormat.

"You should hear the story your 'friends' are telling," I said. "They're saying you hired them to beat me up. They're telling the cops that you wanted me dead. They're rolling over on you, Elise, and the only chance you have is to cut a deal."

I could see her shoulders slump at that. In the end, she gave it up, and did make a deal with the DA to plead guilty to aggravated assault. She went off for a term of three to six years, and I was finally rid of her, for all intents and purposes.

But it had left me financially drained and emotionally wasted. I was forced to sell the house, and moved back to my parents' home with the three kids. My mom was a godsend, helping take care of the children and trying her best to ease their fears.

After getting out of the hospital, I had another two months of rehab during which time I couldn't work. I was on company insurance, plus I got worker's comp, but the Christmas season was approaching and they needed a store manager on site.

Compared to the fiasco of the previous year, Christmas in 1991 was significantly better, and yet it drove home for me just how lonely I was. The woman I'd thought I'd loved -- the mother of my children -- had become a sworn enemy, and had made a complete wreck of her life. Money was tight, so I wasn't really able to do for the kids like I wanted. I was still in some pain and sinking into depression over the way things had gone the previous 18 months.