Read Murder Takes a Dare: The First Marisa Adair Mystery Adventure (Marisa Adair Mysteries Book 1) for Free Online Page B

entire beauty counter.
    “As I am sure you have noticed, I’ve gone to the other extreme in my dress.” Her thick brown hair pulled back into a neat French braid, oval face free of make-up, slightly too wide mouth innocent of lipstick, Marisa was demurely dressed in a calf length skirt and boxy jacket.
    “Has it made a difference in my interactions with people? The answer is yes, not only how they interact with me, but how I interact with them. Well,” Marisa qualified, as her mind skipped to her morning meeting with Brad Jacobs, “maybe the answer is not always ‘yes,’ but sometimes it makes a difference. I feel as if I am treated as a human being, with thoughts and feelings and emotions, as opposed to simply ‘perky breasts’ or ‘cute legs,’ much more often than I have been in the past.” Marisa’s brow puckered as she thought about it. “It challenges me to interact with people on a more meaningful level, not a superficial one based upon personal appearance.”
    “Hello, I’m Chase, and I’m an addict.” With his iron gray hair, sheared military short, pugnacious jaw, and his sharply tailored pants, Chase looked like a retired Army drill sergeant. “Another stereotype is the middle-aged man hiding in his basement, caught in the glow of the computer, eagerly viewing and downloading pornographic images. His wife catches him, and is appalled by his weakness. She may also feel threatened by his propensity to want to look at younger and more beautiful women. People see him as dirty, disgusting, as a pervert. Who wants to shake his hand, good heavens, who knows where THAT’S been, let alone reach out to him.”
    Chase’s smile was crookedly self-deprecating. “When I was twenty years old and at the top of my class in college, I never imagined ending up as a fifty-year-old man searching for and looking at images of men and women and animals, wasting hour after hour at work and at home.
    “I got caught at work by the little snot-nosed techie geek, half my age. I still remember the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach when the school superintendent confronted me with the audit trails of the sites I’d visited. Literally, an entire ream of paper, covered in hard, black, uncompromising print. I got fired from my job as the school principal.
    “Now, here I am, out of a job. Every morning, I get on my computer at home, fully intending to post my resume online, hunt down prospects, network with people. And then what do I do? My wife is at work. There are no geeks looking over my shoulder. I think to myself, I will just cruise the porn sites for a few minutes, just while I drink my coffee, to search out the images, download and save the ones that appeal to me. What better defense against the realities of a ruined career at fifty, overdue house payments, and a wife screeching at me every night?
    “The time drinking my coffee stretches into lunch, and then into the afternoon. I know my life is in tatters, yet I am savagely happy to not have my porn time interrupted by work. I keep waiting, and I think on some level hoping, my wife will get fed up and leave. I am the stereotype to life, in an endless nested loop of turning on my computer, visiting the same sites, looking at the same pictures, over and over and over.” He buried his face in his hands.
    “I am Maurice, and I am an addict.” His smooth face dark and his ageless eyes the color of rich coffee, Maurice spoke in his soft French accent. “You lost your job, when, three months ago? You come into this room, and you cry and you whine and you say, ‘I cannot find a job. I am too busy looking at porn.’”
    Gasps of shock went around the room. Maurice ignored them, as well as his neighbor’s restraining hand on his arm. “Many of us addicts try to overcome our addictions alone. Yet, why do we come here? Supposedly, we are looking for help and support. But if we come here, rail against our lives, and do not take the help that is offered, what does it