Everywhere else in the nation, the email continued to circulate about. Though no newspapers and no television program printed or aired anything about the accusation, the story continued to proliferate. Much of this proliferation was on the internet as it became one of the first things to go viral, nearly two decades before that term was even coined. Others spread the story around orally, telling friends the tale, and those friends told other friends, and those friends told even more. And a good portion of those who read or were told the tale believed it.
After all, it had been written down. There had been a photograph. It had to be true if it was written down and there was a picture, right?
And so, by the time that the Kingsleys hosted their annual Christmas gathering at their house on the hill (they had still not told any of their friends and family apart from Elsa about their plans to have another member at the following year’s gathering, although most of the town of Oceano already knew this), there were literally millions of people in the United States and other parts of the world who sincerely believed that Jake Kingsley and Laura Kingsley were keeping a transvestite sex slave in their home and were regularly abusing her.
This belief and this topic of conversation by a certain subset of society would persist for decades into the future.
Chapter 15: Ziggy
This was a very dangerous time for the young zygote. More than half of all human pregnancies ended right here in this phase when something went wrong. Usually, the woman who lost them had not even been aware she had been pregnant, did not even miss her next period. But nothing went wrong in this case. The cells continued to divide over the next forty-eight hours, getting bigger, and secreting more and more progesterone and follicle stimulating hormone, which flowed down into the uterus and signaled that a little passenger was on the way. The uterine lining continued to grow instead of shedding away like it normally did at the end of a cycle.
After three days, the zygote broke out of the zona pellucida layer and became a blastocyte. It then began to move toward the uterus, slowly pulled along by millions of little cilia on the fallopian tube walls. It continued to rapidly replicate its cells on the journey, until at last, eleven days after Jake had sent out the sperm, it reached the uterus and implanted itself on the posterior wall. Once there, it continued to grow at an exponential rate.
April 11 was Laura’s thirty-second birthday. They were still in Oregon, still staying in KVA’s clifftop house there and working on the
Jake and Laura had plans to celebrate the conclusion of her latest trip around the sun. They were going to take the day off from the studio—it was Friday, after all, and they would not be missed much—and fly to Portland. Once there, they would have breakfast in the little café by the river they had dined in on their first trip there, visit the music store that had been their business that day (Jake would likely buy a new guitar since it was rude to just drop into a music store and not buy something, right?) and then have some dinner and stay in a suite in one of the downtown hotels where she could be as loud as she wanted when they fucked. Laura had gone to bed the night before quite looking forward to the trip.
But now, as she opened her eyes at 8:35 AM, she knew that something was not right. She was naked in the bed, smelled of sex, and had a little bit of a headache from the wine she had drank the night before. Jake was equally naked, equally smelly, and still sound asleep next to her. All of that was normal. What was not normal was that she was nauseous. And not just lightly nauseous, but
A second later she was scrambling out of the bed, fighting desperately with the covers which seemed to be doing their best to confine her. She finally managed to free herself and made a mad rush for the bathroom, barely able to take up position in front of the toilet before she started retching violently into it. A good portion of last night’s dinner came up, as did a good amount of bile that smelled of chardonnay.
All of the commotion had awakened Jake. He was now standing in the doorway behind her, looking at her with concern. “Are you okay?” he asked gently during a pause between retches.
“I don’t know,” she breathed. “I just woke up and was sick to my stomach. It came out of nowhere.”