It was a terrible time to be looking at Joe's phone. The Witching Hour, didn't they call it? The time when dark deeds were done. The time when dark thoughts entered your head. She couldn't have taken the time to do this earlier, though; not in the van with Al, because she didn't want to alert him after seeing the first images; definitely not at home while the kids were running around, because this stuff was not for their eyes.

Amazons.

That was a thing, apparently.

Two things, actually. And neither of those two things was the online retail site. Joe had not been shopping for an anniversary gift for her with that search term. Their anniversary had already passed by, anyway.

In porn parlance, it could refer to a tall, usually big-boned woman, evocative of the Amazons of Greek myth. Such women tended to dominate the men in the videos she viewed from Joe's browser history. The men were usually smaller than the women in these videos, too, but not all the time.

The other reference was to an actual sexual position, the Amazon. The man lay back with his legs in the air, and the woman mounted with her legs behind the man's. When the woman began thrusting her hips, the appearance was slightly unnerving; the woman appeared to be fucking the man, especially when she held the man's legs with her hands. It was like the missionary position, with the woman on top.

In some of the videos, both definitions featured at the same time; a larger woman had the man in that position. In some, a much smaller woman had the man in that position, and the juxtaposition was both comical and slightly arousing. Lauren was usually on top when they weren't trying other, more creative positions, but they'd never tried this before, and she didn't know if she wanted to. To be completely honest, she didn't, and she hoped he never asked her, because it was the complete opposite of what she wanted, which was to feel him on top of her, pressing her into the mattress. She couldn't imagine Joe with his legs in the air like that; she could only associate it with the image of a bull rolled onto its back. They'd probably collapse into giggles before they could even get a good rhythm going if they tried it.

The common theme of both iterations of Amazon, though, was that the men got off on being submissive, but not too submissive. It was actually a refreshing opposite to most of the porn out there, where the humiliation and near rape of women was the main event. She'd watched some seriously deranged shit in her years investigating cheaters, and as a genre this was pretty innocent.

Was this what Joe fantasized about? She could only conclude that it was, if it was in his search history. It wasn't just videos, but images too. Tall, broad, muscular women, scantily clad, posing provocatively. She had to admit some of them were very attractive, appreciating the effort it took to maintain bodies like that. She thought she had a nice body herself, with good genes that did most of the work, requiring little effort in the realm of diet and exercise to maintain it. She was lithe and taut, but definitely not tall or broad, so it looked like Joe had his own itch.

She knew that no marriage featured complete sexual devotion between partners; it was only natural to find other people attractive and fantasize every now and then. She couldn't judge. What troubled her, though, was that this new fantasy appeared to be the complete opposite of her own body type, and it made her wonder if this was a new obsession, and if it was, what had inspired it, or had she misread Joe since the very beginning. Yes, she'd claimed him at a relatively young age, and had commanded his attention to the exclusion of others. Was this what his parents meant when they said he should have played the field? Had Lauren prevented him from exploring his likes and dislikes by being so all-consuming so early? Was this the result?

She might have been able to put this away, to just accept this as a quirk and live with it along with the feeling of inadequacy it generated, if it didn't exist alongside the text exchange.

Can't wait to see you tonight.

Joe had been planning on meeting someone Sunday night, if he hadn't gone missing. That message had come in the early morning, during her and Al's blackout. Lauren knew nothing about this meeting, so she could only assume Joe had wanted it to be a secret. She could only assume this person had texted in the middle of the night for that same reason; perhaps Joe had arranged with this person to text at that hour so he could read it while Lauren was sleeping.

The other texts had been sent in the early morning as well.

Ever since I saw you at the wedding, I couldn't stop thinking about you.

Me too.

You're so... massive!

LOL

LOL? Lauren never got an LOL from Joe. He always wrote full sentences. She found it rather charming in an old world kind of way. Ever since she'd dragged him kicking and screaming into the smartphone age, and he'd had to get used to texting instead of calling because the phone plans rewarded texting over calling, he'd used perfect grammar. Who was this Joe? Some kind of midlife crisis neo-adolescent?

I remember your arms around me, squeezing me against you, the pressure on my ribcage like one of those inflatable vests they use to calm autistic people when they have panic attacks.

??? Never heard of those.

Regardless, you're super cozy.

He was. That was what she loved about him. Her big, cozy bear. And someone else wanted to be in his arms.

Someone who happened to match the images in his search history?

If I put my arms around you now, I think I'd be in real danger.

I bet you would. I also remember feeling you getting hard against my belly when you hugged me. You must also have a massive cock.

LOL

Again with the LOL?

No, really. I can't be unfaithful. I made a commitment for life.

Lauren's heart sank when she read that. Here Joe was, having his own crisis of fidelity, and doing a better job of resisting than she'd done, except...

I'm not asking you to. We could just meet sometimes, catch up with each other. Have coffee. Talk.

I don't know. Maybe. It was nice seeing you that time, it's been years, hasn't it.

Yeah. Been away for a long time. The man pool was very shallow where I was.

Too bad. Sad face emoji. Joe never used emojis.

Do you ever have time on your own?

Sometimes on Sunday evenings I hang out with my brother Johnny. I can cancel that and meet you instead.

Fantastic!

The rest of the messages were negotiations of time and place.

Lauren could choose to believe they were just going to meet to talk, but she made her living proving the opposite. It always started innocently enough, but talking led to touches on the arm, or the leg, and touching led to hugs, and then to kisses, and then they were checking into a seedy motel room.

Who was this person? She assumed it was a woman; she had to, or else she didn't know her husband at all. Then again, maybe he had secrets he kept locked deep inside, in the dark places where even his Catholic puritanism couldn't find them and drag them into the light to burn alive. If his images and videos were any indication, though, she could probably guess it was a woman taller than she was, more substantial. There would be more of her to grab onto.

There was only one way to find out. She could just call this number. But then she would hear her voice, and then this would become horribly real.

Would she even be awake this time of night? Maybe she was, on pins and needles because Joe wouldn't have shown up and she was wondering what went wrong. She'd be waiting for a text explaining that maybe the wife needed him at home tonight, or some other commitment kept him away.

Could she talk to her, though? Was this the best time, while her kids were asleep upstairs? She might start yelling, and the last thing she wanted was to wake them up in alarm.

Maybe she could just hear her voice, determine if she knew the woman, and hang up. There weren't too many it could be. It was a woman who'd been at their wedding, if she could assume that was what she'd meant when she'd said the wedding. It was someone who'd been away and come back, and at some point had run into Joe by accident, and they'd gotten to talking. Probably not some woman who worked with him, unless she was a new hire, and she hadn't heard of any new hires from Joe or Johnny. A woman at church, maybe? Joe took the kids because they were baptized, but she didn't go. Maybe he'd run into her there and felt safe talking to her? That seemed more plausible, and if it was true then that meant it was someone who'd been on Joe's side of the aisle at the wedding, because the guests on her side of the aisle weren't Catholic.

That realization was a gut punch, because it was most likely an Italian girl. Joe had always, always repeated that he'd never found the Italian girls attractive at Notre Dame High School. Maybe he'd been protesting too much? Joe's family came from Northern Italy, and a lot of Germanic and Celtic blood had seeped into the gene pool, so people from that area tended to have larger frames than their Southern cousins. Some of the women were sturdy specimens who could have probably given birth in the fields and kept on working, and Lauren thought of them resentfully as she remembered her two miscarriages. If Joe had found himself looking at these women, plenty of whom attended his church, she was sure, then he'd pulled a serious one-eighty on his sexual preferences.

She brought up the number and let her finger hover over the call button. Should she? Shouldn't she?

Just as she was about to press Call, her own phone rang, startling her so much that she almost dropped Joe's phone. She put it down and grabbed hers, and looked at the screen.

It was Al.

"Hi," she said quietly. "Any luck?"

"Hey," he said. "Well, I found the car."

"And?"

"They're not here."

"Fuck," she hissed.

"There's something more troubling," he said. "I found blood droplets on the inside front passenger window."

She gasped. "Jesus, what does that mean? Is one of them hurt?"

"I don't know. I called the police. They're here, looking it over."

"Where the hell could they be?" she asked, ashamed at the whine in her voice. "You said they were at a park. Did you look around?"

"A little, but no luck. A couple of officers are sweeping the area, just in case."

"Well, that's something, at least."

"I should also let you know that, because the car was parked in a park on the shore of a river, they've brought in a dive team to trawl the river, just in case... you know..."

She thought she might be sick. "Oh, God," she breathed. "Do they really think they might be in there?" 

"There aren't any signs that anyone went into the river, intentionally or not. If there was blood in the car, there'd be a small trail of it leading to the river, and they haven't found any yet." He paused to let that bit of hope sink in. "Look, I'm not leaving until they're sure there's no sign of them. They took samples of the blood and fingerprinted the steering wheel and inside panels, just in case they can identify anyone in their system who, heaven forbid, stole the car at some point and drove it there. They're also impounding the car to bring it back for more evidence collection. Maybe they'll find something else when they give it a good search... wait... sorry, what?!" He said this last to someone on his side of the line, a police officer maybe. "Oh! Yeah, that's it! Lauren, they found Rachel's phone under the seat."

"You're kidding!" 

"No. It's hers, I recognize the case."

"Damn it."

"What?" he asked, surprised at her change of tone.

"Nothing, I just... I wish we'd found it before they did. I want to have a look at it, see if there was anything in there that pointed to what they were doing while we were having our black out." 

She also wanted to see if there were any incriminating texts from Joe on that phone. Not that she suspected Rachel, although Rachel was also taller and more substantial than she was (she loved feeling Rachel on top of her for that reason). The text exchange kind of ruled her out, unless she'd referred to her wedding to Al when she'd said the wedding... no, the rest of the exchange suggested a more recent reunion, and they'd all been back together two years now. The number wasn't Rachel's either, unless she was using a burner. Burners were in the cheater's toolkit, but she and Rachel never used them for their own trysts, because they were hiding in plain sight. Rachel always claimed she never thought of Joe that way, anyway, but maybe she was protesting too much...

"Well... did you find any clues to that on Joe's phone?" Al asked.

"Nothing, yet."

Silence. Al knew there was something she wasn't telling him, but the something she'd found just wasn't his business. It was embarrassing, and the last thing she wanted right now was Al feeling sorry for her.

"Well, now that this is a police matter, there'll be a more coordinated search. They're checking hospitals in the area. I've given them pictures of Rachel and Joe off my phone. I played the voicemail for them, and I told them about finding Joe's phone. They're... going to want to look at it, and they're going to need samples of Joe's and Rachel's DNA, to match to the blood."

Lauren sighed. Maybe it would be better if she gave them the phone, so she would stop looking at those texts and those videos and photos. "Okay," she said. "I'm not going anywhere if they want to come by."

"I'll let them know. Have you gotten any sleep?"

"Are you kidding?"

"I know, but you're going to have to sleep sometime. I'm going to try, once I'm able to leave. We'll have to trust the police will do their jobs."

She sighed in resignation. "Yeah. I guess. Tell the police not to come by too early. I'm going to try now. Thanks for checking in."

"Of course. We'll find them, Lauren, I can feel it, we're close."

"Okay, Al. Goodnight. Or, I guess I should say good morning."

"Yeah, I guess it is. Good morning, then."

She hung up, remembering the last time she'd said good morning to him, when she'd called him lover and taken him in her hand. Had she thought she'd been talking to Joe, or had it been the last of the effects of whatever drug had been in her system? If there had been a drug in her system? They still weren't sure they'd been drugged. She hoped Al would have the police check the apartment for evidence in those glasses, because if there wasn't any drug, then she had to carefully re-examine that previous morning and think about what it meant.

Before she forgot, she texted Ralph Rose, her partner at Justiciar. Ralph, Joe is missing. I can't come in today because I need to find him. The rota will have to be adjusted. Do you know if anything happened Sat. night?

She knew he would still be asleep right now, but would find that text and call her back later. Unable to do anything more, she thought she would just lie down on the couch and rest her eyes.

She ended up sleeping until her kids woke her in a panic when they discovered she wasn't in the bed with them anymore, their cries accompanied by the ringing of both her phone and Joe's, and the nightmare began all over again as everyone wanted a piece of her at once.

Thanks for reading this far! Joe's going to have a lot of explaining to do when (if?) he turns up. Who is this person he's texting, and how did Lauren not know about it? You'll need to read on to find out, just click "Continue reading." If you like what you read so far, hit "Vote" and leave a comment.