I had set the alarm for quite early, as there was a lot to do before taking Mary to work in the morning. She was very eager to see me, but also very tired as this had been her second night in a row with little or no sleep. Now it was time to start teaching her the weekday routine I would expect her to follow from now one.
"Do you need to piss now?" I asked her, and she begged to be allowed to go.
"Well go now" I told her, and soon there was a large puddle in the middle of her living room wood floor. I then released her and had her clean up the mess, and then told her prepare our shower for us, which she did.
We showered quickly and I chose her wardrobe for the day at work, inspecting every item to make sure it was clean and unwrinkled. I made her iron both her skirt and blouse and then clean her shoes, which were well worn and scuffed. All of her work shoes in her closet were either flats or had a very low one inch or less heel, and I told her that I would expect her to wear pumps in the future for work.
Then I told her to put on her makeup. She normally didn't wear any, she told me, but that answer was of course quite unacceptable. We scrounged what few pieces of makeup she did have and I made sure she used them. I told her that her employers would expect Mary to show up to work each day looking pretty and professional looking, and were probably quite tired already of seeing frumpy ugly Muffin instead.
Breakfast was simple, just juice, a banana each and some cereal. Her stomach was restless again this morning, but after a close call she managed to hold everything down.
If she expected to drive her own car into work alone, she was sadly mistaken. I let her drive, but I went with her and told her that I'd be borrowing her car for the day. I hadn't had the time to search it for contraband yet, and I certainly didn't trust her on her own yet. She had her own assigned parking place in the contract parking garage and I made her take me up to her office.
I emptied all of her desk drawers and found her work cutting kit, stashed in a small otherwise empty makeup bag, and then called in her administrative assistant Shirley.
"Shirley, Hi, my name is Ramsey, but you can call me Ray. I'm Mary's keeper this particular week and since she's been especially careless lately I want you to take care of the blades in this bag and make sure that they get properly thrown out. That should help with all of the accidental cuts she's been getting lately."
The embarrassment continued from there. I told Shirley that I did not want Mary going to the restroom or out alone by herself as she might 'accidentally feel a bit sick and want to throw up her lunch'. I further arranged for Shirley to order lunches from now on for both herself and Mary and that they should eat together, and then I gave her fifty dollars to pay for their meals together for the week. I gave her my cell phone number with strict instruction to call me directly in the event of an emergency or other problem that she couldn't handle.
Shirley took me aside afterwards and thanked me for my "intervention" with Mary, as it was an open secret that she was not mentally well lately and everyone was concerned about her weight and had strongly suspected bulimia. I gave her strict instructions to be my "eyes and ears" and told her I would be checking up on Mary as often as I could during the day. I also told her that the situation was indeed much more dire than she had realized and that a long vacation or a "medical leave" might be necessary at any time, and if she could have those papers already filled out and ready for pre-approval it would be much appreciated.
I had two critical things back at her house to do today and I also wanted to spring a couple of surprise visits on Mary, but this first step ended up taking far longer than I had planned and I missed meeting Mary and Shirley for a surprise luncheon visit. I gave Shirley a call and discovered that while Mary had eaten "most of her lunch" she then went straight to the bathroom and Shirley had heard her throwing it back up.
Damn one step forward, another step backwards. I directed Shirley to get them an afternoon snack and make sure that Mary ate it and couldn't purge afterwards.
My first critical errand that so far had eaten up nearly all of the day was a systematic search of Mary's home computer. I was sure there were a number of things that I would find that I wouldn't like or enjoy reading. That was an understatement. She had an entire folder in her saved documents labeled 'Suicide Notes', with about a dozen different flavors offered.
More serious was her web bookmarks of favorite Internet sites, all catering to extreme aficionados' of S&M and Snuff material. I could check her messages on many of these sites she had registered on and found that she had been actively searching for a sex partner that would kill her at the final stages of their lovemaking. Fortunately she hadn't yet found the right partner. I deleted her accounts from these message boards, and removed her shortcuts.
Next I began to search her favorite Usenet newsgroups. Naturally, she was active on alt.suicide, alt.sex.torture, and alt.sex.snuff.cannibalism. This last group seemed to be her main home, and she had written numerous short stories about how she fantasized her last hours of life would be. The stories were well-written, articulate and all extremely disturbing. Each story seemed to be increasingly more violent than the one before it and I printed out copies of all of them and also forwarded them by email to her father.
The methods of sexual torture and death that were described were always lingering and painful, with no consideration of her own wants and desires, her sole desire was just how best to serve the sadist that would soon be extinguishing her life. She was hung, strangled with cords, cut into tiny little pieces at a time, stabbed, bludgeoned, buried alive and often cooked alive and eaten in her stories.
The men characters in her stories were always one-dimensional fiends who had no love for "Muffin" but used her for their sadistic pleasure and once her corpse was no longer of interest, it was merely garbage to be disposed of.
This was horrifying to read how utterly empty and tired her soul was. I began to despair that she could be rehabilitated at all, even with the most modern drugs and with the most caring psychiatric medical staff. Suddenly the whole chainsaw brain surgery option began to look very good indeed, but Walt still didn't think so.
He liked what he had seen the other evening where Mary seemed willing to accept me as her Master and allowed me to utterly control every trivial part of her life. This was indeed a level of trust and he hoped over time that as her 'need to serve and make me happy' became stronger she could likely now be weaned from these stronger self-destructive impulses. He was going to read and study her stories to make sure, and he thought that he already had the kernel of an idea, but he wanted to think on it some more. I decided to let him call the shots, that's why he's got the PhD and makes all of the big bucks.
We hung up the phone just in time for me to go pick up Mary from work. My other task, to tear the house completely apart looking for anything she could use to hurt or kill herself would have to wait until tomorrow.
