Read Chump Change for Free Online Page A

everybody, until damn near every night somebody or other was having some kind of shindig, and a whole collection of disparate souls who normally kept to themselves were suddenly thrown together.
    We were a week into the rolling party scene when Gordy first showed up.
    He’d rented the house next door to the Morrisons’, and came wandering into the light of the bonfire one night, tentatively, like the new kid in town.
    He seemed harmless enough. A big doughy guy, with a smile and a story. Seems he’d won the Washington state lottery a few months back. Lived all of his life over in some minuscule town on the other side of the state. Way out there in wheat country. About fifteen seconds after receiving his first disbursement check, Gordy decided it was time to flee the fescue and check out life in the big city.
    Rather than throw himself directly into the belly of the beast and rent an apartment in downtown Seattle, he’d wisely decided to spend a couple of months making day trips into the city, from the other side of the Sound. He’d figured the somewhat slower pace of peninsula life would help ease him more gracefully into full-scale urban chaos. Probably turned out to be the worst decision of his life.
    If I had to choose a word for Gord, I guess it would be sweet . A big corn-fed mama’s boy bachelor with a smile on his face and a dimple in his chin. A bit of an oaf, I suppose, but a genuinely nice guy. Not necessarily the sharpest tool in the shed, but not, by any means, stupid either. Always showed up with a couple of bottles of wine. Always stayed around to help clean up when the party was over. First one to volunteer when a store run was needed. Generous, but careful with his money. The kind of guy you’d enjoy having for a neighbor. Within a week or so, Gord had become an integral part of the perpetual party.
    And then . . . then she showed up. I’d like to think that, had I not been quite so distracted by the gravitational throes of lust, I might have been the one to take him aside and warn him that maybe he was getting in a bit over his head here. That maybe this particular pretty package would be better left unopened. But who knows? Maybe that’s just my usual dose of self-serving tripe.
    She showed up one night just about at dark. As Jill Crowley was putting the flame to the barbecue, Missy Allen came stumbling into the scene, panting like a terrier, her blouse ripped nearly in two and her face streaked with tears. Talk about an entrance.
    Needless to say, everybody dropped what they were doing and rushed to her aid.
    Blankets were found, brandy was poured. We waited with bated ear.
    Punctuated with bouts of sobbing, the story eventually emerged. She told us she was Canadian, from the suburbs of Windsor, Ontario, where she’d spent the last nine years nursing a dying mother. After Mom passed, and the bank took the house, finding herself without prospects, she’d accepted a job offer from a family friend. An older man from the U.S. she’d always thought of as an uncle. Some sort of an au pair position, looking after the guy’s adolescent children, taking care of the house, a small salary and a roof, that sort of thing. They’d flown back to the States on a private jet, and settled into a somewhat stilted version of domestic bliss. Briefly, anyway.
    Turned out a maid wasn’t what this guy really wanted. What he wanted was into Missy Allen’s knickers. At first, it was just an occasional misplaced hand, a tweak here, a fondle there. Destitute in a foreign country, Missy pretended not to notice. Two weeks into Missy’s domestic tenure, however, the children were sent to visit their birth mother in New York, and the situation promptly went to hell in a handbasket. Touchy-feely quickly evolved into a series of perverse sexual demands so repulsive and shameful she couldn’t bring herself to describe them in any real detail.
    Things had come to a head earlier today, when he’d quite literally tried to