A Good Woman's Tale
an excerpt

Chapter 1

Leila’s roommate was killed when the ancient oak tree outside her bedroom window fell over during the sudden storm that blew in late in the afternoon shortly before Leila was due to get home from work. The tree had fallen onto the roof of the three-story Victorian house where Leila and Angelique leased the top floor apartment from an ancient crone across the street who looked as if she had lived during the reign of the queen who gave her name to the style of the house. Speaking of whom, Mrs. Duggins was NOT going to like this. She was particular about the condition of her house, and the roof damage would not please her at all.
“Oh my God,” cried Maddie, a horrified yet fascinated look on her perfect, expensively spray-tanned face, baby-blue eyes widened in utter incredulity at Leila, “You mean our poor Angie was crushed by a tree?”
It was five hours after Leila had walked into their apartment, filled with some fantastic news she was eager to share with Angie, only to find, not her usual lively roommate, but one dead as a door knob, a surprised stare on her lifeless face, as if her latest one-night stand suddenly decided to return for a second night. Not a good surprise or a bad surprise, necessarily, just simply…startled.
“Ummmm,” murmured Leila, “Not exactly.”
The gang of friends was gathered at the corner Studs –n- Babes Pub, their local hangout. It might seem strange that they were at a bar mere hours after a friend’s sudden death, but it made sense for them. Once the initial shock wore off and the emergency workers and coroner’s office had done their jobs, Leila stood in the middle of an empty apartment and wondered, “What now?”
She immediately thought of all their friends. They would need to know, and they would want to be together during this time to talk, to toast their friend, and whatever else one does when one suddenly loses a friend in the prime of her life, someone one expects to see the very next day, speak to in the next hour. Where else was more logical to gather than the place where they spent most waking, non-working moments?
“Not exactly? I thought you said that old oak crashed through the roof over Angie’s bedroom?” Jack looked at her suspiciously through narrowed green eyes. His short, spiky black hair seemed to almost bristle with latent hostility toward her.
Leila stared back at Jack without blinking. Why did Jack always seem to harbor some sort of animosity toward her? It seemed as if he had held her in contempt from the first moment they had met five years ago, when she had been a senior at the university, planning her graduate school career, and he had moved to their small city, establishing himself as a CPA and becoming quite successful at it, although on the surface he looked like he could front a punk rock band with that spiky hair.
“It did fall through the roof,” Leila answered. “The tree isn’t what killed her, though.” Leila was stalling, and the others knew it.
“What killed her if the tree didn’t, then?” asked Tom impatiently. Tom had always harbored a not-so-secret crush on Angie, but he never pursued her. It was as if he relished the idea of unrequited love. It was a game they played, flirtatious, but harmless. He taught History at the local high school, and several of the young girls there thought he was “hot” with his chestnut curls and deep poetic eyes. He knew to keep his distance with the minors, but he did not even show any interest in his fellow single teachers, and they were not shy in letting him know that they would be more than happy to share more than their lesson plans with him. Considering these things, Leila wondered if Tom’s real love interests lay elsewhere, perhaps in another city with a young man named John, an old high school “pal” that Tom often took off to go visit and hang out with, but it seemed to be an off-limit topic, so nobody ever mentioned it.
Leila took a deep breath and returned her thoughts to Tom’s question. “When the tree hit, it knocked a lot of stuff loose. Pieces of plaster from the ceiling fell, the window panes shattered, the closet doors fell off the hinges, all of the mirrors in Angie’s bedroom fell off the walls and shattered…”
“Oh my…that will be a long time of bad luck,” whispered Bonnie, the superstitious one of the group. No one bothered to remind her that, since Angie was dead, bad luck was the least of her worries.
“…and finally, her chandelier fell. That is what killed her. It struck her head just a certain way,” Leila concluded, shrugging her shoulders helplessly.
Everyone was staring at her, dumbfounded and aghast at the manner of Angie’s untimely demise.
Maddie gasped, “NOT the Waterford?”
Leila nodded solemnly.
Everyone knew about Angie’s penchant for expensive crystal, and when the Waterford chandelier had arrived last month, she had been ecstatic for days. No one quite had the audacity to ask her how a graduate student in Medieval Studies who received no extra money from her parents, who indeed rarely even spoke to her parents, even had the money to afford a Waterford thimble, if they even make such a thing, let alone the magnificent piece which had been hanging over her bed the past few weeks.
Leila was leaving something out. In fact, she was leaving out quite a bit. When Leila had walked into the apartment that afternoon, an eerie silence had greeted her. Instantly, she knew something was wrong. Apparently, the electricity had been out because the clocks on the stove and microwave were blinking. Leila could not see the downed tree from her vantage point entering the front of the house and then into the apartment, so she had no warning of what would greet her upon entering Angie’s room. Angie’s room was positioned in the rear of the house, where the oak tree had grown in the back yard.
“Angie! You’ll never guess what…” Leila’s voice trailed off as she walked from the foyer and into their small living room area. Minou, Leila’s black Persian cat, was standing on the back of the sofa, mewing softly. Aside from the cat, the quiet in the apartment was not natural, and Leila sensed death before she saw it. Ignoring the cat and walking slowly toward Angie’s room, Leila called again, softly, “Angie? Are you here? I saw your car and figured you were home…” her voice trailed off when she walked into Angie’s room, door left ajar.
The scene was just as Leila had described it to their friends. The oak tree was half-way through the roof, windows and mirrors were shattered, plaster from the walls and ceiling was scattered throughout the room. Angie was still sitting in a cross-legged position on the bed, eyes wide open, as if surprised to see Leila walk through the door, a thin trickle of blood trailing down the left side of her pale face, her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. And the Waterford chandelier lying shattered on the bed next to her, a strand of her shiny hair caught in its prisms, along with small droplets of her blood.
There were a few other things that Leila left out of her description. For one thing, Angie was wearing sexy pink lingerie, and that was strange. Not strange that she would have been wearing something sexy, but that she was wearing something pink. Angie was not known to be modest, but she hated the color pink with a passion. If any piece of clothing had even just one dot of pink in it, she would either refuse to wear it, or she would find a way to color over the pink. Dye it, paint it, use a sharpie on it. She didn’t care as long as it wasn’t pink. Nobody knew why she hated pink so much. It was just one of those idiosyncrasies of her personality that everyone accepted, the way they accepted the fact that Bonnie refused to walk under ladders and was suspicious of Leila’s black cat, or Tom refused to eat any food that had green vegetables in it.
Angie also had a half-smoked joint in the ashtray beside her. This also might not strike them as strange in and of itself, but Leila simply did not feel the need to pass on the fact that Angie had been toking it on a Wednesday afternoon when the rest of them had been out working. Oh, she had her Teaching Assistant position at the University, but she taught two Medieval History classes in return for a tuition waver and a small stipend. She seemed to have no need for any additional income to make her bills each month or to make her purchases of Waterford crystal and other small luxuries, something they all shrugged at and secretly wondered how she did it.
Here was where it got strange, however, thought Leila. Angie’s laptop was open in front of her, frozen in time. Angie had been in a chat room called PissedOffHouseWivesLookingForAction.com. Housewives? Leila thought. Angie wasn’t married. She wasn’t divorced. She wasn’t engaged or even seeing someone half-way seriously. Hell, she couldn’t stay with a man for more than two nights, so she wasn’t even close to being a housewife. Why was she posting here? And posting she was, Leila saw. Her standard chat room name, IMNOANGEL, was right there on the screen, several posts under her name. The writing style was certainly hers. Yes, indeed, she was chatting with other “housewives” and ranting about her negligent husband, George, and two sons, Charlie and Joey, who evidently made Beavis and Butthead look like aspiring altar boys.
Leila took all of this in with a brief sweep of her eyes, and then her attention moved toward Angie’s television, where a DVD had evidently been playing prior to the storm and the tree’s rude entry. The DVD case was open in front of the TV. Leila moved in a dreamlike state toward it. Later, she would wonder what had nudged her in that direction, poking around Angie’s room like a delinquent when her friend sat dead in a near perfect lotus position just a couple of feet away from her. The reality of Angie’s situation had not hit her yet, and the DVD case now had Leila’s attention.
“The Canterbury TAILS,” wondered Leila. Even in her near trance-like state, the misspelling was not lost on Leila. In the back of her mind, she wondered if Angie was doing some kind of film study of medieval literary works adapted to film. If so, this was evidently some odd adaptation, obviously by a director who could not spell “Tales” correctly. Leila was familiar with some of the film adaptations of The Canterbury Tales herself, and she did not recognize the cover of this one.
She started to turn back toward her roommate, and as she did, Leila dropped the DVD case. Whereas the front of the case merely had the title of The Canterbury Tails in ornate, medieval Gothic script, pink at that, with a solid black background, the back of the case showed more. Much, much more. Voluptuous females in medieval-inspired clothing frolicked around…with much of the clothing falling artfully around them, revealing more than it covered, while muscular men wearing white linen blouses open to the waist and tight trousers that left little to the imagination as to how they were affected by the frolicsome females.
Surprised, Leila bent to pick up the case, and her eyes caught the words on the back: “The Canterbury Tails: Medieval Pilgrims Gone Wild!”
“Oh, good grief,” muttered Leila, “Someone has taken Geoffrey Chaucer hard core!” She read further, fascinated in spite of herself:

“Join our group of fantastically fun and scrumptiously sexy medieval travelers as they go on a pilgrimage that they, or you, will not soon forget. The group is heading toward Canterbury to pay homage to the saint, Thomas a Becket, to be sure, but our horny trekkers also know something else about the shrine. Therein lies the secret of sexual longevity, hidden among the relics of the saint by an impish nun the previous century. Who will get there first? Will that person share the secret, among other things? Who bangs whom along the way?”

Leila just shook her head. What had Angie been watching? Then her eyes widened in shock when she saw immediately below that:

“Starring the delicious and voluptuous Nawtee Angel as The Wicked and Wayward Wife of Bath and…”

Leila dropped the case again, this time in shock. “No,” she whispered, “It couldn’t be.”
Since they had been children together, Angie had always used some variation of her full name, Angelique, for various purposes, whether for e-mail, chat rooms, or a pen name for her poetry. Usually, it was some form of Angel, a fact that Angie found particularly amusing since she claimed to be more of a devil than what her name proclaimed her.
Leila bent once more and picked up the DVD case. She looked down again at the photo of the almost-naked medieval nymphs, and sure enough, there she was, the young woman furthest from the camera, back to the camera, glancing back over her shoulder, dark hair streaming as if blown by a gentle breeze, a mischievous smile on her reddened lips and a truly wicked gleam in her eyes that almost seemed to say, “Sure, you can catch me with that camera, but that is ALL you are going to get from me.” It was the same face, only in heavy makeup, of the young woman now sitting dead on her bed, staring blankly at a cyber chat room full of irate housewives.
Leila’s roommate, the girl she had been friends with since they were in 2nd grade, whom Leila considered the sister she had never had and thought she knew so well, was a porn film actress