“Yes, I was,” the saleslady backpedals. “But the man came in right after you left, and he made a very convincing plea as to why I should let him buy the dress. He said he knew you had your heart set on that dress, and he told me he was going to buy it for you and give it to you immediately. I was nervous letting him take it because I had promised you that I would hold it. So the only way that I ended up letting him buy it was if he agreed to let me have it delivered right to your address. That way I knew he wasn’t just some guy trying to buy the dress out from under you and give it to his own fiancé or something. He paid for it and left, leaving me to arrange the delivery of the dress to your house.”
“Do you remember what the man looked like?” Trevor presses.
The woman is starting to look nervous as if she’s going to get in trouble for having done something wrong.
“Is the man a criminal or something?” she asks. “Should I be worried?”
Well, he is in fact a criminal, I think to myself. But he isn’t after this lady.
“No, you have nothing to be worried about; we’re just trying to figure out if it was an acquaintance of ours who bought the dress so we know who to thank,” I answer.
Even I can hear the contrived mistruth in that. But the woman still goes on to describe him for us. And the description exactly matches Max.
“Actually,” she says as if she’s just remembered something. “Instead of describing the man, I canshowyou. I have a security camera in the corner of the shop. Let’s go look at the footage in my office.”
When we watch the footage and see Max clearly come into the store, I look over at Ava and all the blood has drained from her face. She looks like she’s going to be sick.
“Is that the man you thought it was?” the woman asks me before looking over at Ava. “Oh dear, are you feeling okay?”
“Yeah,” Ava lies. “I’m fine. Thank you for all of your help.”
The saleslady walks us back out to the front of the store and apologizes for any confusion or inconvenience that the sale of the dress may have caused. She then refunds Ava her deposit and apologizes again as she hands Ava back her cash. When we leave the store, there is no doubt that Max had been here, and he had been watching Ava.
“What are we going to do?” she asks as we get into my truck.
She is nearly to the point of tears.
“This has to stop,” I say. “This guy can’t keep continuing to terrorize you.”
I start driving, but not in the direction of the house.
“Where are we going?” she asks.
“To the police.”
“You know they’re just going to tell us that there’s nothing they can do.”
“Yeah, I know,” I say in frustration. “But we need to tell them anyways. Maybe we can file some sort of report, and maybe all of these incidences that Max keeps appearing in will start to add up to something large enough for the cops to finally get involved.”
But I should have known better because the only thing that we get told at the police station is that Max technically hasn’t broken any laws so there isn’t anything they can do.
“Come on,” I say to the cop I went to high school with. “You know this guy is harassing Ava. Can’t you at least bring him in on stalking or something?”
“I wish I could,” he says. “But going to a store and buying a dress doesn’t violate any type of stalking statutes. And since he didn’t go on your property or attempt to deliver the dress to her himself, then he really hasn’t broken any laws. If anything, a judge would just see it as him trying to do something nice for a past employee and he would order us to release him. I’m not sure that aggravating the guy with a night or two in jail is worth setting him off even more, is it?”
“I would love to set him off enough that he slips up and does something stupid that I could either catch him or kill him on,” I mumble under my breath.
“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” the cop says. “Only because we’re friends. But if this guy shows up dead, you better have a great alibi.”
When we leave the precinct, Ava is right back to being panicked again, and this time I don’t know how to calm her down. Because this time, I am pretty sure that I agree with her. This guy is watching our every move.
7
Ava
Iknow that Trevor wasn’t serious when he made the joke about killing Max, but heisserious about it being time to take matters into our own hands, and I agree. Something needs to stop Max, and if the police can’t do anything about it, then maybe we need to. It’s just too stressful sitting by and watching Max play the system and get away it while we’re constantly waiting for whatever it is that he’s going to do next. If the cops can’t help us, and Max won’t stop targeting us, then we’re just going to need to stop him ourselves.
We decide to use me as bait. We’ll lure Max back to the house by pretending to have an argument in public. Trevor and I will make it look very believable and very public. Since we know Max is watching us like a creepy stalker, he’ll take the bait. We decide on a very public park in downtown Fairport, the one with the half-shell dome that has the outdoor spring concert series.
