I was thirty-five years old.

As an insurance claims representative, I had just coordinated the evidence for my sixth … no, I mean my seventh … civil trial.

I liked what I was doing, and I was good at it.

The case in question was complicated because Sunhee Gulati was well on her way to convincing the jury that she was an innocent immigrant, ignorant of the language and being victimized by an evil capitalist insurance company. Meaning that she was three bases towards a home run.

Until Louisa Abramson testified.

It hadn’t been all that difficult to track down other students in Mrs. Gulati’s adult English class who were more or less acquainted with her language skills, but the clincher had been Sunhee’s teacher, who stated under oath that not only was Mrs. Gulati fluent in English, she was also Mrs. Abramson’s best (although clearly not her favorite) student.

Later, in private, I asked Mrs. Abramson why she so clearly disliked the woman.

“Because she cheated on her final exam,” the teacher replied indignantly. “Sunhee knew the material quite well. She cheated because she thought that she could get away with it. Because she thought that she was smarter than the rest of us.”

Arrogance. You see it often in insurance fraud cases. Arrogance was what brought down Sunhee Gulati, and arrogance is what trips up most people who think that they can outsmart us.

Gulati claimed that a faulty electric wire had started the fire that caused her dry-cleaning business to burn down. Our Special Investigation Unit determined that the fire was arson, and we developed a solid line of evidence to tie her to the arsonist.

Once we had put together a case, we denied the claim.

Not surprisingly, she sued us.

Surprisingly, however, she lost.

My co-workers hugged me, patting me on the back, shouted, “great job,” “good work,” and “way to go” at least a dozen times on the day after the trial. By the following Saturday, I should have been floating on a pink cloud of self-congratulations.

But I wasn’t.

I did not feel good. I did not feel bad. I didn’t feel much of anything, except flat. Deflated. I was a one-dimensional character in a three-dimensional movie.

First thing that morning, I went to the deli across the street to buy a jelly doughnut and a coffee. The world outside was damp and dead. Like an old movie that had slipped off its sprockets and was flickering grainy images of torn black and white film across the screen.

I carried my deli bag home.

I have a nice apartment. More than nice. It’s a first-floor one-bedroom with my own private garden.

I had won an important case. I was in good health, and I’d pretty much achieved everything in life that I’d started out to do. I should have been happy, but I was not.

A business card stared at me from the middle of my desk. Its very existence perplexed me, and every time I stole a glance its way, I felt a sense of disconnection with my own life.

I sipped my coffee. It was bitter.

I took a bite out of my doughnut. It was stale.

Other than disquietude, I felt zero. Zero times a thousand, times another thousand, times ten.

I don’t like to feel nothing. I forget that I’m alive, and I begin to indulge in melancholy musings more appropriate to pimply adolescent girls.

Why am I here? Does life have a purpose? Is happiness possible?

I wished that I were tired. Or bored. Or miserable. Or jealous.

But I wasn’t. I was a vacuum in a pair of blue jeans, sitting at a desk, staring at a stale doughnut, and wondering why no Great White (or Black) Hunter had led me on a safari to search for sparkle in the Dark Continent of my Soul.

I thought about sparkle.

Was sparkle at risk of perishing, like an endangered species?

Was it being herded into a sparkle reserve and methodically bred to keep its numbers down?

Were there export bans on sparkle?

Had a successful black market in sparkle sprung up?

Was bogus sparkle being manufactured by counterfeiters and sold on the Internet?

I took a sip of bitter coffee and began to rummage through my desk.

Long before I was hired to work with the arson and fraud unit at Precaution Property and Liability Insurance, I was reading crime novels. Sherlock Holmes was Wilkie Collins my first exposure. Then came Agatha Christie. My favorite, though, and the one I still consider to be the perfect instruction manual on forensic investigation, is Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

I found a copy in the top right drawer of my desk, pulled it out, and flipped it open. Maybe, I thought, if I read a few paragraphs of Porfiry Petrovitch’s brilliant psychological meanderings through Raskolnikov’s soul, my brain would engage, and I could extradite myself from the drab hell of my personal malaise.

I read:

“The heat in the street was terrible: and the airlessness, the bustle and the plaster, scaffolding, bricks, and dust all about him, and that special Petersburg stench, so familiar to all who are unable to get out of town in the summer – all worked painfully upon the young man’s already overwrought nerves.”

I slammed the book.

Screw Raskolnikov.

I threw Crime and Punishment back on my desk, but it bounced off a corner and fell to the floor. I picked it up and was about to toss it back where I’d found it when I noticed my old black address book inside the drawer. The one that I’d bought after I left home.

When I was eighteen-years-old.

Continued Next Friday.

Copyright © Shelly Reuben, 2024. Shelly Reuben’s books have been nominated for Edgar, Prometheus, and Falcon awards. For more about her writing, visit www.shellyreuben.com.