Pavilion

By Douglas Browning

The Pavilion houses a sex club set up for both sexes by three influential women. Shortly after lovely Mona Marsden, the mistress of wealthy Justin Fendrich, becomes a member she is murdered. Since the police are stymied, PI Berk Sedrick is hired to seek out the killer. His investigation leads him from one member of the club to another, including a favored female who, unlike the other members, is underage. His inquires become more and more involved and frustrating. Haunted by the absence of the woman he loves but who previously deserted him he persists.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 10, 2009
• ISBN: 9781441578587

Douglas Browning

Douglas Browning, retired university professor of philosophy, lives outside Georgetown, Texas, where he labors at length over poems and novels, stays up throughout the night reading, writing, and listening to jazz, and enjoys life in his countryside hacienda with his talented and beautiful wife.

Book preview

Part I

ONE

October

It was an unseasonably warm late Saturday afternoon. The families of Justin and Kristiva Fendrich and Kristiva’s brother Ingar and wife Mona Marsden—or Maarsden, as Ingar sometimes found himself spelling it as his grandparents did—were, as was frequent, waiting to enjoy grilled steaks and hamburgers around the pool in the Fendrich backyard. All three of the children, Carmen Fendrich, thirteen years of age, and Reese and Sally Marsden, twelve and ten, respectively, were still in the water, along with Amber Martinez, the sixteen year old daughter of Rosalba, the Fendrich’s do-all housemaid who resided in the cottage next to the three-car garage at the rear of the estate.

Kristiva was standing with her husband at poolside, watching the young ones. She said something peremptorily to one or more of the kids, apparently warning them against some sort of rough play. Ingar was sitting beside the freshly fired barrel grill on the other side of the pool, looking stern and preoccupied. Abruptly, he raised himself from his chair and dove into the water.

Mona was sprawled, as was her custom, on the lounge on the veranda, clearly indifferent to the activity at the pool. She was inclined from her seat at a forty-five degree angle, droopy-eyed in the sun, with one hand clasped about a margarita in a tall tea glass that tinkled with ice when she moved her arm. Her deeply tanned legs, glistening with sun block, stretched out, slightly apart, so that she could view those at the pool between her feet. Her eyes were fixed on Kristiva’s husband. He felt her gaze. He looked across the yard at her. She opened her eyes at him, raised her glass to her lips, and, without sipping, stared at him across its rim. He said something to Kristiva and walked over to Mona and plopped down in the chair next to her.

He said, Enjoying yourself?

She swallowed and made a sucking noise through her teeth but didn’t reply. She didn’t look at him. He looked towards Kristiva, found her intent on the activity in the pool, and then inclined his head and allowed his eyes to caress the bikini-clad form beside him.

Mona closed her eyes and gave a long sigh. Question. Am I becoming too obvious?

Are you? Am I?

She turned her head to look at him, grinned, and then resumed her gaze at the pool.

Justin. She said his name softly and paused. We can’t keep on like this.

I know. I find it harder and harder to hide my … thoughts.

I know. Have I finally gotten under your skin then? You’ve been under mine for a long long time, my sweet. You know what that means, don’t you? We need to talk about it, what we’re going to do about it. Should I drop over on Monday sometime? When Carmen and Kristiva are not there?

He didn’t reply immediately. Rosalba is always about. She wouldn’t understand.

Of course she is. Kristiva is looking over at us. She raised her glass and waved it in an invitation to her to join them. She’ll be over in a minute or two. Let me call you Monday. Okay?

Yes.

Kristiva was coming towards them.

Justin, Mona said as Kristiva came near, go watch the kids, let your wife have a rest. Here, Krissie, take Justin’s seat.

Justin rose. Please, love. Take a load off.

Kristiva took the chair, adjusted the back, and let out a long sigh. What’s the topic of the hour?

Mona said, If there was one it went right past me. Justin is not your outstanding conversationalist, especially when he wants to bore one about the election or how much he hates his students.

Justin made a face and walked away.

Did he?

No, thank God. Not this time. Let me revive you with a margarita, darling. There is nothing more draining than children on a hot afternoon.

Image370.JPG

Justin tossed in bed. His mind tumbled with images, unfulfilled fantasies, hungers that made his mouth dry and his legs restless. His wife, immaculate and beautiful—she was that, everyone knew it—had no patience with him that night. She always enjoyed sex with him, went wild with it once they got into it and whenever he managed to get through to her, but she hadn’t initiated such intimacy for quite a while. He was the one who always prodded them into it. It puzzled him. She was, he was quite certain, a genuinely rabid sexual being, but for some reason these days she held it at bay. Her foundation work seemed to consume her. Every week day she spent at her office, her center for charitable concern, THAW, The Humanitarian Agency for Women as she had titled it, where she administered the foundation she had inherited from her parents and four other smaller foundations that had fallen under her care. It was an importantly humanitarian post, no doubt about it, but he found it difficult to understand why she found it so consuming.

Tonight when he had become, as usual, inflamed by Mona’s presence and as a result felt such need for intimacy with Kristiva, she was, she protested, too tired, too over-fatigued from sun, kids, and drinks, too not-in-the-mood.

What’s with you? she demanded, as Justin twitched, turning first one way and then the other.

Too much to drink maybe.

Well, go to your own bed. You’re keeping me awake.

He had his own bedroom right off his study. It was small, not much bigger than a closet, but it served him well when he worked late, reading, writing, grading, preparing for his lectures. For reasons he never concerned himself to question, he had all his life been a night-owl, unfortunately just the opposite of Kristiva who fell easily into deep slumber at ten or eleven every night and rose at the crack of dawn every damned morning, even on weekends. As an Associate Professor of Classics at the University, he was privileged to schedule his classes, both of them, in the afternoon on Tuesdays and Thursdays and to cram his office hours around them. His specialty was the Archaic Greek period, especially the seventh and sixth centuries, and he had recently published a well-received work of scholarship on the early Pre-Socratics and he was already working on a second on the cultural milieu of Miletus during the time of Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. It was well-trodden ground but he thought he had something new to say. Often he snuggled up to Kristiva when he eventually went to bed—it was really one of the truly comforting points of his day to feel her warm naked flesh curled along his own—but when she rose and began bustling about getting herself ready for her day, meticulously attiring herself in her stylish dresses and fuck-me pumps, he usually departed for his own bed where sleep came more easily. Well, sometimes he lay there and admired her. She was indeed a work of art.

In his bed, his tumult continued. It was Mona of course. He kept thinking how he would, finally, be blessed with intimacy with that gorgeous body. God, he thought, how her hair, her skin, her legs, her everything drove him out of his mind! For years they had teased and flirted with each other. Her harmless innuendos and knowing grins were the order of the day. She was so much better at such play than he was and its constancy was apparent to everyone as no more than just who she was, simply an ingrained trait of her personality. Her teasing had always been playful and open. Until recently. Something changed. He couldn’t miss it; they were both steadily slipping away from mere amusement and into deeper waters. Her mischievousness and his responses took on a surreptitious air, as though they were peeking over their shoulders to make sure that neither Ingar nor Kristiva nor anyone else took it as seriously as it had become. The time came when their eyes began fastening on the other’s and dares and promises flashed between them.

There was nothing for it. Lying there, his fantasies swelled into extended symphonies and he became hard as a rock. His fingers worked. He fumbled for a Kleenex so as not to stain his sheets. He was unaware of the one that watched his every move.

Amber Martinez, just sixteen, had prepared her spot. The window at Justin’s bedroom was right up beside his bed. It was curtained, almost diaphanously, but she had arranged a fold with a little paste so that there was a crack through which she could see him quite clearly even in the faint light. She was in fact not more than three feet from him. It wasn’t her first time. She was so very deeply in love with him. It didn’t matter that he was forty-one, over twice her age. Her love knew no age or years or seasons. What she wanted, desired more than life itself, was to lie with him, make love with him, run her mouth over him, entice him deep inside of her. She almost gasped when he took his penis and held it so lovingly. She wanted it in her mouth. She wanted to make him come in her mouth and tell her she was better than anyone, better than that dumb wife of his that she had come to despise. Her own fingers worked in rhythm with his. She was breathing heavily, trying not to gurgle out her passion.

He jerked and groaned with his orgasm. She could not hold back her own. She sank to the ground and sobbed.

He heard something and swung his eyes to the window, but he saw nothing. He turned on his side and welcomed sleep.

Image378.JPG

Ingar was a demon for work. He was a long-faced man, very tall and rangy, handsome to some perhaps, but his serious countenance had become habitual and somewhat disconcerting. Extremely wealthy by inheritance he nonetheless devoted his energies to increasing his wealth in his chosen business of trading in commercial real-estate, as well as investing in high tech start-ups and supplying venture capital for certain promising corporations. He seemed always to be busy and he went to work religiously every weekday and sometimes on Saturdays.

Sexual entertainment took second or perhaps third place with him, however much he enjoyed the missionary position with his voluptuous wife whenever he had time for it and she insisted. He was well aware Mona was insatiable, but he could only do what he could for her. He was well settled into the opinion that to be a woman was to be a sexually needy being, never fully satisfied. He had no idea she had enjoyed an off-and-on affair with her sister Margaret’s husband Jackson, even before they had divorced, though since Jack had fallen prey to the novelty of another woman it was off for good. Her brief affair with the husband of one of her tennis partners at the club and her somewhat longer if sporadic and recklessly fierce couplings with the club’s tennis instructor was also unknown to him. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he had an intimation that Mona might sometimes have strayed, but he kidded himself that such as there might be was girlishly harmless. After all, she was a very good mother and her center was quite obviously the home and the children. Nothing she could do would ever be a threat to him or to the security he had provided for his family.

In any case he was in thrall to a passion that served to keep him distracted from Mona’s activities. It was an obsession that brought nothing to him but shame, as he well knew it should, since its object was as forbidden to him as any forbidden fruit could be. That damned girl, that dumb teenager, how could she have such a hold on him? Jennifer Castleton was her name and she was fifteen.

Ingar left on a business trip on the Thursday afternoon following the backyard party at the Fendrich’s. The meeting he had to attend in Atlanta would keep him involved through Saturday. After he had left, Mona took the kids and walked the six blocks to Justin’s place, where she found, as she had anticipated, that Kristiva had just returned from work and Rosalba had just driven up in the SUV with Carmen and Amber after having picked them up from school. Mona was always welcome in the Fendrich household for drinks and dinner. Her unannounced visit was a pleasant surprise. While the kids entertained each other, Mona and Kristiva drank vodka tonics and chatted at the kitchen table as Rosalba finished preparing supper. More than just sisters-in-law, the two women had become close friends; they enjoyed amusing each other with stories about their children and their spouses and they laughed a lot together and quite often hugged each other without restraint.

While they lounged in the den after dessert and coffee and took note of the lateness of the hour, Kristiva invited Mona and the kids to spend the night.

Can’t, Mona said. School tomorrow and I really need to get the kids in their own beds.

But, Mona dear, you can’t think of walking back home now. It’s almost ten. Why didn’t you drive over?

I don’t know. I felt like a walk. Don’t worry. It’s only six blocks.

More like a mile! Justin, drive Mona home please. See that she gets straightened away. I think I’ll take a hot sudsy bath and hit the sack.

Mona and Justin didn’t speak on the short drive. When he drew up to the sidewalk to her front door, he said, I’ll walk you in. She didn’t say anything.

She herded the sleepy kids inside and asked him to wait while she put them to bed. When she came back into the living room where he had parked himself on the divan, she pulled him up and leaned over and brushed his lips with hers. Thanks, she said.

He pulled her close and she opened her mouth to him and the kiss lingered until they had drunk deeply from each other. His hands pulled at her bottom and she squirmed against him with a fierceness that she had held in check for much too long.

God, Justin, she panted. It’s what I had planned for a nightcap. But.

I figured that out, Mona. But what?

We have no time for what we have to do.

We can do something, can’t we?

What can we do? We have so little time. Kristiva will expect you back soon.

Maybe ten minutes?

Oh, Justin. Just hold me. The children are already asleep and my two, my servants, Henry and Amelia, are already in bed asleep by now and anyhow they are in their quarters way back there in the rear, but. But, but, but.

You’re so bad, Mona, but you’re right. Anyhow, I don’t have a condom. I don’t want a quick fuck anyhow. When we make love I want to make love, slowly, forever.

Yes. She took his mouth again and felt for his cock.

I can do this, she said. She pulled at his belt buckle. He let her unzip him and pull down his pants and shorts. She went to her knees. This is what I want! Oh God, Justin. It’s everything I want. Her mouth covered him. She moaned.

It’s truly amazing what two people can manage to do in fifteen minutes when each are primed by waiting for so long and hungering so desperately for that first rush of intimacy. There was no way Justin could hold back. He had to keep from jerking apart and yelling his lungs out as he emptied himself into Mona’s frantic, take-no-prisoners mouth. He sank to his knees, but his dismay at the insistency of time brought him back to his feet. He took Mona’s hand and pulled her up and covered her lips with his own and opened them and sucked and swallowed what he could of the liquor their parting yielded. He took her by her hand and rushed her to the big easy chair across the room.

It was quickly done. Like him, she was more than ready. She strained to keep her voice down, but those words kept boiling out of her, liquid and churning and uncontrollable. Oh God oh God oh God. And then she called out, a little too suddenly and much too loudly, Justin, oh God, and she pulled hard at his head still working between her thighs.

Mommy, came a girl’s voice from another room. Mommy, I heard something.

It’s nothing, darling. I’m coming, Mona called and then grinned down at Justin at her inadvertent pun.

And that was that. While driving home Justin kept breaking into laughter. He felt incredibly happy and he kept savoring Mona’s taste in his mouth with a piercing joy. When he got home, he rushed to the bathroom and rinsed his mouth with Listerine so Kristina wouldn’t smell Mona in it. It felt like surrender.

Image385.JPG

By next Monday afternoon Justin had found the apartment. It was on the second floor of a complex off the highway on the edge of town, not a high-class place exactly, but clean and adequately furnished. One deciding factor for taking it was the queen-size bed and the firm mattress. Another was the parking for the apartment directly below it, space reserved for two cars with a stairway that led up right beside the room. Its location was especially advantageous because the two of them could park their cars by entering from the alley and without announcing their arrival too noticeably.

Mona would meet him there every Wednesday afternoon at two and they would be gone before five.

And so on the first Wednesday of November they began five months of bliss. The two agreed on that first day not to fall in love with each other. It was nothing but the intimacy of raw, untamed sex they wanted. They agreed to keep meeting for as long as they kept enjoying each other as much as they did. The thing was, it seemed that neither could find any evidence that they were enjoying their relationship less than when they started. If anything the sex seemed to get better each Wednesday. It was that good. It was over the top. Neither could even conceive of the possibility that there would ever be any reason to call it quits. When it did end, it was for a reason that neither Justin nor Mona would have ever imagined.

Kristiva went on her daily way without worrying about what Justin did on Wednesdays or any other day. She loved him and he loved her, there was no doubt about that, and their sex seemed, unaccountably, to get hotter and more frequent, though only on Sundays and Mondays. If there was a change in their bed habits, it was that Justin was a bit rougher and more demanding. She liked that. She liked it a lot. But only on Sundays and Mondays.

TWO

November

Amber was a keen observer, especially regarding the comings and goings of her idol. She was soon aware of what was going on between Justin and Mona. It made her angry. It made her hate Mona even more than she hated Kristiva. Still, it was not Justin’s fault that Mona gave him what she, Amber, was not allowed to. She could give him more love and pleasure than Mona or Kristiva ever thought of. Some day he would realize it and he would toss those two in the garbage like moldy bread. She hoped that day would be soon. If not, she would surely die.

She was fetching in a peculiar way. Her black hair came to her shoulders and it tended to be stringy except when she washed and brushed it over and over or when she put it in a ponytail. Then it was shiny and straight and soft, but it was such a hassle. She had large black luminous eyes, unsettling when one was captured by their unblinking intensity. Though slender to the point of seeming anorexic and almost flat-chested, she had a pretty face and a nicely rounded bottom and skinny but well-formed legs. Obsessed by Justin, she consistently captured his attention by bending over and aiming a tightly covered bottom at him, a feature she knew to be a special asset of hers and a feat she practiced for his viewing with a variety of apparel, both pants and dresses, but especially and undeniably in a bathing suit.

When she displayed her treasure in that fashion, Justin never failed to react with a sudden twinge in his crotch, fleeting though it might be, a fact that did not escape either Kristiva’s or Amber’s attention. Kristiva’s recognition led her to warn the girl against what she called her posing. She understood quite well, as any sensually alive woman would, exactly what was going on with the girl and Amber knew she did. It was one of the reasons Amber hated her. She took no notice of Kristiva’s admonition however. It always thrilled Amber to catch Justin’s eye in that way, bending over like that—facing away from him she had, like most women, eyes in the back of her head—and she was certain that at the right time she would tempt Justin into a tactile response. Once successful at eliciting such a reaction, she was sure she would have him yearning to uncover her bottom and run his hands and tongue over her bared skin. Then she would have him quickly inside of her and her dream would be realized.

Being sixteen, Amber didn’t think of herself as a child like Carmen or like that conceited Jennifer who was fifteen and was a child in spite of her big grown-up titties and curvy hips and curvy butt and pouty lips and a sort of strutting self-confidence that Amber wished she could emulate. The girl seemed to show up at the house with her mother a little too often to suit Amber. It was obvious to her that Jennifer encouraged the visits, conned her mother into making them and taking her along just so she could prance around in front of Carmen and Ingar and Kristiva and everyone else like she was a queen and show off her physical attractions. Not that it would have been hard for Jennifer to convince her mother to visit. Flame-haired Jeanne Castleton—so tiny, like a doll, skinny to boot, at best five feet tall and at least three inches shorter than her prematurely ripe daughter—worked for Kristiva at her office and she must see her five days out of the week, yet she showed up regularly at the house as though she couldn’t keep away. She had something fierce for her boss, something sexual, that was clear enough to Amber if to no one else. She was so obvious in her adoration. The way she looked at Kristiva and mooned and sighed made Amber sick.

But it was Jennifer whom Amber detested. Apart from the way she wrapped her mother around her little finger, there was the disgusting way she preened for Ingar, Mona’s husband. Whenever Jennifer showed up on a weekend, which was, as was just noted, much too often to suit Amber, lo and behold Ingar seemed to materialize out of thin air as though by magic. And he mooned over fifteen-year-old Jennifer just as obviously and disgustingly as Jennifer’s mother mooned over Kristiva. Amber had no trouble seeing it, though everyone else seemed oblivious. Amber couldn’t fathom how anyone could miss the signs. How could they not notice how tongue-tied and awkward Ingar got when Jennifer was present. He acted like a three-legged idiot, stumbling around and barely able to form a complete sentence. Well, Jennifer just ate it up. It was certainly one of the reasons Jennifer wanted to visit with her mother, just so she could feel good about how she could get a man who was over twice her age—thirty-eight years old, for God’s sake—to go ape-shit over her. She was so full of herself and so obnoxious. She acted like she had some secret power that Amber, for example, would never have, however much little Miss Martinez must wish she did.

Amber smiled to herself. Justin paid almost no attention to Jennifer. He adored Amber’s ass, but he never even looked at Jennifer as though she even had one. She was, unlike Amber, just a child, not worth fiddling with.

Another thing. Amber felt a certain amount of concern for Carmen. As cute and pretty as a picture, she was special to Amber because she was Justin’s daughter. When Justin got rid of Kristiva and took Amber as his lover, she would take Carmen under her wings and teach her the right things and make sure she was happy and grew up strong. What infuriated her was the way Carmen followed Jennifer about like a puppy wanting its belly rubbed. She would sidle up to Jennifer with eyes aglow whenever she could and the two would whisper to each other and laugh

The damn girl idolized Jennifer and it made no sense. It had to stop. Somehow Amber must make Carmen understand what a nothing Jennifer was and that it was Amber who really wanted be her friend and take her under her wings and show her what love really was.

What really counted was Justin. Not Kristiva or Jeanne or Jennifer or any of the others, and certainly not Mona.

Amber’s distress at the affair between Mona and Justin led her to take a rather chancy action. Divining that Wednesday afternoon was the occasion of the lovers’ trysting and assured that they had their own secret place for it, she picked his return from the tryst to sneak into Justin’s bedroom while he showered to search his pockets for evidence of the location of their nest. She was so overcome by her success that she almost dropped the key she found. A number was on the key, surely of the apartment, and, equally startling, was the name of the apartment complex she read on the attached tag. She was about to return the key to the pocket when a wild idea took hold of her. A copy could be made that would provide her with access to the apartment! She didn’t think twice about it. By Friday she not only had the copy, but she had located the apartment complex on a map of the city.

Still she found herself in a quandary. Justin had changed pants in the interim and had probably already discovered the key’s absence. What to do? She took another chance and placed the key on the floor of his bedroom and pushed it slightly out of sight under the bed when she searched it at just the spot where his pants had been. Whether he would discover it by next Wednesday or not, it eventually would be found and its temporary disappearance explained. At least she hoped so. In any case she had no doubt he would find a way to make the Wednesday rendezvous, even if he had to alert Mona to his loss.

Amber’s next move was foreordained. On Sunday she stole away and rode her seldom-used bike to the apartment. She entered the room and searched it. Besides towels and sheets in a linen closet, several cans of coke and 7-up in the small refrigerator, a set of glasses for mixing drinks from an open bottle of gin and another of rum, and an opened box of condoms which she considered punching pin-holes in but on second thought wisely refrained from, it was quite bare. The place had a musty smell overlaid with a delicate flowery scent, something that Mona must have freshened the air with. The mattress on the bed was bare, a fact that brought a grin to her otherwise joyless face; obviously it was Mona who stripped the bed after each session and assumed the job of toting the sheets and pillow cases somewhere to be washed. Her grin turned into sudden tears of rage. The woman was evil in her scheming. A knife straight into her heart was what she deserved.

Amber took a piss and sat down in the straight chair at the lunch table. She sat there for quite a while. She made up her mind.

The following Wednesday Amber Martinez skipped school. She made her way to the apartment and hid her bike in a parking space down the row from the spaces where the lovers would park their cars. Then she entered the apartment and waited.

At the first sound of a key in the door, she scurried into the empty clothes closet, opened the door a bare half-inch, and tried to still her heart and slow her breathing. It was Mona who had entered, as Amber could tell from her steps and her shaking out of sheets to make the bed. Justin entered. There were moans as the two embraced and kissed.

She heard Mona say, Oh God, Justin. Oh God. what followed was sheer agony for Amber. She crawled closer to the closet door and pushed it open another half inch, just enough to allow her to see the two lovers undress each other—apparently a ritual—and tumble onto the bed. As Mona thrashed about and climaxed over and over, screaming and uttering words that made no sense, and Justin gave loud grunts each time he went off, tears rolled down Amber’s cheeks. She couldn’t help making sounds, but the others were not listening. It was the oral business that drove Amber over the top; Justin and Mona seemed to make so much of it and it lasted so damned long. When Justin became soft, Mona absolutely gloried in bringing him back to life with her mouth, moaning and slurping and making disgusting noises like a pig at slop.

Amber was masturbating and trembling with release, then roughly masturbating again until she was raw. Though the spectacle on the bed lasted for only two hours or so, it seemed interminable to the girl. It was a mistake her coming here. words kept running through her head, over and over. He doesn’t see me because of her. She doesn’t love him like I do. Doesn’t he know I would do anything for him, anything he wants, anything. Oh, Justin! Can’t you see me? Please see me. Please, please, please.

The two left together. Mona said at the door, Oh, Darling, this was the best ever. It keeps getting better and better. I don’t know how I can stand to wait until next time.

Justin said, What we have … Lord! Sometimes I think I’m falling in love with you.

THREE

When the parents of Kristiva and Ingar Marsden died, the children divided equally an inheritance, after the sale of the Marsden home and other real estate, as well as of their ownership of Marsden Publications, of well over a hundred million. Included in Kristiva’s share was the Marsden Foundation of fifteen million. It had been established by Kristiva’s parents, Axel and Marta Marsden, as a charitable foundation for the encouragement and subsidizing of publications in literature, poetry, and significant studies of broad social interest. When Kristiva took over the foundation as its director, she narrowed the focus to novels and poetry by women and significant studies of women’s worldly lot devoted mainly to the sexual and emotional travails of girls in their teens. After her marriage to Justin Fendrich when she was twenty-two and he was twenty-seven, Kristiva set up an office in downtown Austin to handle the applications, solicitation of additional funds, and the oversight of awards. Then she immediately set out to interest other smaller charitable foundations that focused on issues regarding women to bring themselves under her administration. There were four such that were eager to pass their burdens to her, ranging from one funded at approximately five million to the smallest with a principle of approximately one million. She thought that five such foundations were probably enough for her to handle comfortably, though she remained open to the addition of other charitable trusts should they petition for her help. Since five foundations were now collected under her oversight, she set up an organization, properly licensed by law as a charity, under the name The Humanitarian Agency for Women, known otherwise under the acronym THAW Tapping the interest earned on the invested principles of the five, she bought and outfitted a much larger area at Waestern Towers, remodeled it, and increased her office staff from one to three full-time workers, all of whom were women.

Mortgage payments for the suite on the third floor of the Waestern Towers were rather steep and the other expenses for setting up and maintaining the office were at least double that. She paid her three employees and herself the same whopping salary of fifty thousand a year which, together with yearly bonuses for her staff members, came to a good deal more. The renovation of the suite and its adornment with the finest furnishing and décor was a large initial and continuing cost. Nor did she stint on supplies, telephones, TVs and cable, computers, travel expenses and kitchen treats such as coffee and sandwich fixings, the whole of which Kristiva lumped together and simply called foundation overhead. As for herself, she didn’t need the salary because she was independently quite wealthy, but she took it that such a salary, modest as it was, was needed to indicate her own dedication to the oversight of the organization as would be shown on the yearly accounting of assets and debits that was available for those who might find it sensible to keep track. It was important to her to keep up the best appearances for applicants and especially for those she spent much of her time soliciting for additional charitable donations to the five foundations. At the present time the total balance of the principle for the five varied between thirty-five and forty million and it was still growing. Much of that value came from the interest collected from the investment of those monies, a sum that varied around a million and a half a year added to the principle and a sum that approached half that much for salary, rent, furnishings, and overhead. She spent a significant sum on