Terror, Part 2

And at work, the stress was even worse. I could tell no difference in the attitude of the two women toward me! They acted as friendly as always. That rattled me. I would look at them and wonder what was going through their minds. Maybe they were on drugs? Did they have a ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ personality? What? Were they crazy? If not crazy, then how could they be such hypocrites, smiling so sweetly and joking with me, yet all the while planning those terrible things they were going to do to me.

I was afraid to confront them, afraid of the consequences of making a scene at the workplace, so I kept quiet but the pressure kept building up inside me. I finally reached the point when I decided I simply had to face them. The fear and anxiety was killing me and sometimes it felt like I was losing my grip on reality.

The next day, I saw an opportunity to talk to them when they were alone. When I was telling them what Freddie had told me, I tried to keep my voice from rising, but it was trembling with anger when I asked them the question that had been tormenting me. “Why would you want to do such unspeakable things to me?” I asked.

I could see by their expressions that the two women were completely taken aback. They were outraged and vigorously denied saying such things, saying they had never met my husband. One of them was so angry, she said she would be at my home the very next morning with her husband to confront Freddie. Fearing the two men might come to blows, or even worse, I told her not to come. I told her I believed her when she said she had no part in the incident and I said we should just forget the whole matter.

However, I couldn’t put it behind me because the erratic behavior of my husband was becoming even more bizarre. I won’t go into the details but his tales of strange and disturbing events happening around the house became commonplace and it wasn’t lost on me that they were always occurring when I wasn’t there. And always, day after day, there were the accusations about my ‘boyfriends.’ I was being reduced to tears on a daily basis because of his bullying and I didn’t know where to turn. It’s a long story so I won’t go into it, but he had isolated me from my family so I took refuge in my job. It was my lifeline to sanity. The lady I spoke of earlier had become my close friend and confidante and we spent hours discussing Freddie’s odd behavior.

One night, getting ready for work, I was dressing and putting on my make-up. Freddie was sitting on the bed, watching me. That extreme brightness was again in his eyes as he said, “You really do need to quit work. If you keep insisting on going, one of these days something really bad is going to happen to you. You know, traveling at night like you do, someone is going to rape you.”

I scoffed at the idea. “That's impossible,” I said, “I'm safely locked in my car, and I would stop for no one even if I had to run them down to avoid it.”

“But there are ways to force you to stop,” he insisted.