Fool Me Once

Her shouts created a disturbance in the dorm. There was a restless stirring. A number of the women got up to use the restroom and a guard came to Carrie's room. Carrie was warned. She would be punished. Would she like being transferred to a higher security institution?

It took her forever to get back to sleep. She wondered if her attorney would come up to Bryan if Carrie called and asked for an immediate meeting. She was excited for the first time in a long while.

********

Her optimistic mood didn't survive the first bright flash of sunlight the next morning. A feeling of impotent hopelessness came over her as she washed up. She'd heard Sean's accusation hadn't gone anywhere. This wouldn't either.

Carrie knew her husband...her ex-husband. He would never have mentioned his new wife's name if he'd thought something might come of it. He'd done it deliberately, knowing she'd make the connection eventually. Ryan was smart enough to have already made sure his tracks were covered. No one would be able to figure out how he and Consuela had managed this...no one would be able toprove it anyway.

She grimaced. Ryan had said the divorce was not punishment for cheating on him. It was just an administrative detail. That's what he said. The humiliation the night the TV show's lights and cameras had caught her and Ryan...that was just another detail. She saw that clearly.

No, this was her punishment. Along with spending a year in prison, she'd have to live with the knowledge he'd known all along about her cheating, that he'd somehow set her and Sean up,and she couldn't do one...damn...thing about it.

Biting her lips, Carrie made herself get up and walk to the dining facility. She would be on yard detail today and she needed the calories. They would be digging three new vegetable gardens and one flower garden in front of the main building.

This evening after dinner, she would permit herself to put a big black 'X' through today's date on her calendar. Three hundred and nineteen more days to go.

Epilogue

In accordance with Texas law, thirty-one days after Ryan's divorce was finalized, he and Consuela were married in the little town where Consuela had been born. Most of the town's residents attended the reception that immediately followed in the VFW hall down the road.

A few hours after he proposed, it had occurred to Ryan to askwhen they would be married. What did they need to do to start planning the whole thing? Consuela told him her mother and she had already done most of that already. All they had really needed was a date. Smiling at the shock on his face, she assured Ryan she and her mother, and most of her other relatives, had known he was going to propose a long time ago. It had only been a matter of when.

Stunned, Ryan had begun to glimpse what he was getting into. After a while, it didn't bother him. Consuela loved him, he loved her, and they both loved Belinda. That was enough for any man. He did rent a copy of "Steel Magnolias" from the local video store though. He needed to know where to set his boundaries.

Three weeks after the wedding, Ryan and Consuela took the official copy of their marriage certificate to an attorney specializing in such things and Ryan began the process of adopting Belinda. The little girl's birth father was located easily enough near Santa Fe, NM. He'd fallen on hard times, as the saying went, and he was happy enough to sign the adoption papers for fifty dollars and two bottles of cheap Mogen David wine. Neither the money nor the wine appeared in the videotape the private investigators took the precaution of making of the event.

Belinda's biological father was found three years later, face down in a dry arroyo that had run brimful a week earlier with runoff from a heavy thunderstorm. His passing generated only a two-line obituary in the local newspaper.

Belinda adjusted easily to having two parents. Ryan and Consuela had worried for a while because the little girl had spent her entire life up to this point with only her mother around. While she couldn't articulate any such feelings...she was only five-years-old, after all...she obviously considered it an opportunity to be loved by two people rather than having two people around who were there to discipline her. She took full advantage of the situation.

After a year of Belinda having her new father all to herself...Consuela thought her daughter deserved that much time to "catch up," as it were...Consuela got pregnant with the first of three more children. Jeanette, Rosita, and Roberto were born fourteen to sixteen months apart from each other.

Belinda, instead of resenting them, considered them additions to the family as a whole. She told Trish at the café that "we" were pregnant again when Consuela started showing with Roberto. Trish blinked in surprise, then grinned delightedly.

Carrie Gilchrist served the rest of her time quietly at the confinement facility. Her sentence was too short to qualify for a furlough to a halfway house at the end, so she spent the entire 365-day sentence in FPC Bryan, TX.

When she got out, she found Ryan had been more than generous with her. Half of the proceeds from the sale of their house, its furnishings, along with some other property and vehicles was waiting for her in an interest bearing account. She took the money, bought a beauty salon in Fort Worth, and threw herself enthusiastically into a new career. The felony conviction on her record prohibited her from resuming her profession in the banking industry but in truth, she didn't miss it much.

Without completely understanding why, Carrie never mentioned her suspicions about Consuela. Many years later, she decided it had been a part of her atonement for the way she'd lived her previous life.

Sean Michaels didn't take well to prison life and he had a rough time of it at first. He didn't like the staff at the prison, particularly the management, and he treated the guards with ill-concealed contempt. After a few months in a medium security facility, and left unprotected from the general population by those guards a number of times, Michaels changed his tune and became a model prisoner.

He was transferred to a low security prison, and then a minimum-security institution where he spent the last sixteen years of his confinement. He found he enjoyed teaching other inmates such things as mathematics, along with reading and writing skills. Having found something more rewarding than anything he'd ever known before, he became an advocate for inmate rights.

Sharon Michaels stayed with her husband, primarily for appearance's sake, all the way through the trial. Once the sentence was imposed, however, she divorced him and moved back home to Colorado to be close to her parents.

A few years later, she met a Colorado State Patrol lieutenant and, after a lengthy courtship, married him. She made sure her new husband agreed with a number of limits in their marriage before she accepted his proposal. Specifically, she told the man if heever strayed, she was going to do a "Lorena Bobbitt" on him...only no one would ever find the offending organ to sew it back on. It was unnecessary. He couldn't imagine cheating on her and never did.

Special Agent, later Special-Agent-In-Charge, Stan Williams never quite lost the itch at the edge of his consciousness that told him there was something about Ryan Gilchrist and the bank fraud that hadn't yet come to light. Even after being transferred to Bureau offices in other cities, he kept himself apprised of developments, of which there were few. None of them, even Ryan's marriage to Consuela, were sufficient to reopen the case. He eventually retired from the FBI and founded a small security firm in up state New York.

Consuela's Great-Uncle Roberto found out his niece and Ryan had named their youngest child after the old man and he was profoundly touched. He came north from Mexico City on every occasion he could to see the baby. He doted on the young boy and, indeed, formed tight bonds with Ryan and the other children too.

The bank never recovered any part of the nine million dollars that had flown from the bank's accounts to offshore accounts all over the Caribbean. Eventually they wrote it off and got on with the business of making more money. Administrative changes were made in the organizational structure of the San Antonio regional headquarters. Two years after the incident, none of the bank officers who'd been at the bank when the theft occurred remained in any level of management. Parker Winston became the Chief Financial Officer when the incumbent retired and he served in that capacity until he retired to the Bahamas.

The seven million dollars, give or take, that Great-Uncle Roberto collected in accounts he controlled in Mexico City never came north of the border. With the settlements from the bank, Ryan and Consuela didn't need the money and didn't want it. The retribution against the bank and the adulterers had been completed long since. Wanting to know what to do with it, Roberto had taken a number of suggestions from the Gilchrists and used it to promote some of Roberto's most ardent causes.

Three years after the case was closed in the United States, a tramp freighter crept close to the Venezuelan coast. Lighters unloaded a multi-million dollar cargo of modern arms and gear to equip a small, but growing, guerilla unit fighting the communist dictator's army. A few months later, the guerillas took a provincial capitol and began consolidating their gains. At last word, things looked very hopeful for them. The CIA and other intelligence agencies never discovered who funded the delivery of weapons. Of course, they didn't try that hard either.

Consuela's second cousin Richard had joined Ryan in cheerfully destroyed the laptop they'd left with him. The two men used the hard drive as a target, pulverizing it with rounds from three high-powered rifles. They buried the leftover bits of smashed metal at the bottom of an old mine and, using a few sticks of dynamite Richard had, caved the whole thing in on itself. They did that just for fun and because Richard wanted to get rid of the old explosive.

Ryan and Consuela were never quite able to feel guilty about having stolen the money. They'd done it more to get their revenge for wrongs committed upon them and they always believed they'd been completely justified. Just getting the pair fired when the TV show aired wouldn't have been enough. It was the prison sentences that were the important things and the bank fraud had been key in sending Sean and Carrie down that path.

That the two adulterers survived at all was a blessing, Ryan and Consuela decided...something the pair of cheaters should have been grateful for. The prison sentences were much easier to bear than what would have happened to adulterous couples a hundred years earlier in this same town. Ryan commented on a number of occasions that in an earlier day, he would have been expected to shoot both Sean Michaels and Carrie Gilchrist dead in the marital bed they'd profaned. The harsh retribution against the adulterers had been necessary for both Ryan and Consuela and now they could get on with their lives. All the accounts had been settled.

When the first baby arrived, Ryan and Consuela bought out one of the local ranchers and moved their family a few miles out of town. Ryan's little construction company leveled the existing buildings and built their first full structure, a rambling ranch style home designed by an architect Consuela hired and worked closely with until he had everything exactly the way she wanted it.

Once the children were old enough, the family began to spend some of their summer vacations camping in the most remote parts of the Llano Estacado where Ryan showed them the secret places his grandfather had shown him. Belinda came to love the high desert so much she studied archeology in college, specializing in old American Indian lore. She married another student in the same discipline a few years after they graduated and they spent much of their time in complete isolation up on the big plain.

Though he often got choked up when he saw how much his oldest daughter loved him, Belinda only made Ryan cry twice in her life. The first was when Belinda began introducing him to her kindergarten class as her daddy. That time, he managed to hold back well enough so only the closest of observers were able to detect the moistness in his eyes. On the second occasion, tears flowed down his cheeks when Belinda invited him into her hospital room to introduce the newborn child in her arms, a boy she said she was naming Ryan.