Noelle’s use of the word obsessive sets my inner alarms ringing. “What do you mean by obsessive? What did he do?”
She goes silent while she takes a long sip of her juice, which I have a pretty good feeling is a delaying tactic. Finally, she puts the glass back down and says, “It all started about three months ago. I was working late at the theater, so it was just me and Ken still there. Everything was fine—well, mostly fine—until I realized I’d forgotten my phone in the prop closet and I had to go back in to get it.”
A sick feeling churns in my gut. “Did he touch you?”
She tenses. “Not like you’re thinking.”
I growl, “If he touched you at all without your permission, it’snotokay.”
“I know. I just mean… he didn’t assault me. So if you’re thinking that… it didn’t happen.”
If this fucking Ken is responsible for the video in the diner, I’d damn well consider that assault, too. But I decide to keep that thought to myself for now, instead, asking, “What did happen, then?”
Noelle shudders. “I saw him watching a video. Of me. In my office. Stretching. So my shirt was tight and my stomach… Then he made thissound…”
“Whatkindof sound?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she replies quickly. “I gasped, he heard me, and I confronted him. I knew there had to be a camera hidden in my office, and maybe… Well, I wasn’t sure back then, but I accused him of having cameras hidden around the theater.” Noelle stops before adding heavily, “In hindsight, I should have just left. Gone home and called the police before Ken had a chance to hide all the cameras.”
Bile rises in my throat. “All the cameras?”
Noelle grimaces. “Yeah. Once he started sending me photos, I realized he had hidden them everywhere. The prop closet. The costume room. The laundry…” She shakes her head. “He’d send me stills from the videos. In some of them, I was just working. Others, like the ones in my office, he’d find shots of me changing.” Defensively, she adds, “I had my own office. Sometimes I’d change my shirt at the end of the day if I got dirty. It wasn’t like I was flaunting?—”
“Of course you weren’t. Shit, Noelle. You were in your damn office. Of course you could change in there. You shouldn’t have had to think about it.”
“I know,” she replies. “I know. But sometimes, I wonder… did I do something? Somehow encourage him?”
“Fuck no!”
Noelle startles at my raised voice, which makes me feel like a total ass. “I’m sorry,” I add quickly. “I’m just… shit. I’m pissed. That’s all.”
“Me too,” Noelle says. “When I’m not totally freaked out, I’m pissed, too. Ken didn’t just violate my privacy. He screwed up my career.”
Silently reminding myself not to allow any more outbursts, no matter how angry I am, I ask in a carefully calm tone, “What did he do?”
Noelle takes another deep breath. And after a heavy exhale, she tells me the rest of it.
She tells me about how, in the beginning, Ken tried to convince her to come back. Todiscuss things, he said, because really, what she saw wasn’t a big deal.
Wasn’t abig deal.
The fucking asshole recorded Noelle without her permission, watched the videos like some sick pervert, and had the nerve to tell her itwasn’t a big deal.
But Noelle stuck to her guns, as she should have, and she called the police. Unfortunately, by the time an officer showed up to investigate, all the cameras were conveniently gone.
“I should have expected it,” Noelle says. “As soon as I refused to come back to the theater, Ken had to know I was going to do something. So, of course, he took all the cameras down. By the time the police arrived, there was nothing to see.”
“What about his computer?” I ask. “The files?”
“I don’t know. I’m guessing either they didn’t even ask, or he hid the files. Maybe he had them on a USB, so they wouldn’t have been on the computer at all. Anyway, Ken had a good story about how I was just this disgruntled employee he’d recently fired, and I was trying to get him in trouble.”
From there, I hear about piece of shit Ken, and how he had the fucking balls to ask Noelle to come back to work one more time.Don’t ruin your career over this,he told her when she finally answered one of his calls.Just come back to work, and we can forget this ever happened.
She didn’t take him up on his offer. And after that, things got even worse.
Noelle applied for at least twenty theater jobs throughout the Pacific Northwest and was rejected from all of them. Most of the employers didn’t give her a reason, save for one—an artistic director who explained when Noelle called to follow up,“I worked with Ken Donaldson for years. If he says you’re trouble, that’s all I need to know.”
And while Noelle was dealing with being effectively blackballed in an industry she’d worked in for years, she also had to put up with an onslaught of messages and photos from Ken. All from anonymous numbers, of course, because that asshole was too smart to use his own phone.
