Suspicious Minds
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Rhianon Jameson
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Suspicious Minds
by Rhianon Jameson
February 2009
“Suspicion is a thing very few people can entertain without letting the hypothesis turn, in
their minds, into fact.
” – David Court, Social Astonishments (1963)
Suspicion is a...
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Suspicious Minds
by Rhianon Jameson
February 2009
“Suspicion is a thing very few people can entertain without letting the hypothesis turn, in
their minds, into fact.
” – David Court, Social Astonishments (1963)
Suspicion is a terrible thing.
It can tear a marriage apart, slowly, silently.
The only
solution to a nagging suspicion that one’s spouse is being unfaithful is to find proof of it.
No, wait.
How can that make any sense? Mr.
B is sitting in his office, stewing
about the possibility that Mrs.
B has taken her affections elsewhere – perhaps at this very
moment, when Mr.
B can do nothing but contemplate the gray filing cabinets to his left
and the window that overlooks a garbage-filled alley to his right – so he decides his best
shot at happiness is to retain a private detective to find out.
Now, this can end in one of
two ways only.
First, the detective finds no evidence of a clandestine lover.
How does
that help the situation? One cannot prove a negative, so the suspicions, perhaps abated
somewhat, remain and smolder.
Second, the detective provides conclusive proof that
Mrs.
B is enjoying the attentions of another man, that she is getting her groove back, as
some uncouth phrase might put it in a time when the English language has been utterly
debased.
Fine, now he knows.
But is he happier?
Still, man is a curious animal, and empirical evidence indicates that the only
intolerable situation is not knowing.
Hence the ever-increasing demand for private
detectives whose stock-in-trade is knowing how to peep into a window without getting
caught.
So it came to pass one day in early February that Mr.
Charles Forsythe found
himself leafing through a directory to hire a man for just such an unsavory job.
Mr.
and
Mrs.
Forsythe had been married a decade, and, to his mind, it had been a generally happy
decade for the two of them.
Perhaps the bloom was somewhat off the rose, perhaps
Charles had gained a few pounds over the years and Theresa was not as firm of body as
once she was, and perhaps the toll of work at the office (for Charles was an accountant at
a moderately successful firm, with offices in Victoria City) and home (for Theresa kept a
lovely home in Mayfair for her husband and two young children, with no help but a parttime housekeeper and a day nanny) made the couple a little more tired in the evening than
had once been the case.
Mr.
Forsythe accepted these facts as part of life, and had thought
his wife did as well.
Several days before, however, he found himself following his wife down the
street at a discreet distance.
What roused his suspicions in the first place he could not say.
Theresa had been acting strangely for some time, and several times he had come home
for lunch only to find Theresa gone, and the nanny could not vouch for the whereabouts
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