by Rachel Kane
That open generosity was the big difference between Dad and Val. Val might have looked supremely at home with his steaming coffee and his finance section, but your needs and dreams were not at the forefront of his mind. I questioned sometimes whether he really thought about me at all.
I avoided the coffee things on the table and went straight to the drinks tray. There was no ice. I contented myself with a whiskey and soda, and stood next to the window looking out.
“Some big case,” I told Val. “He made his apologies, but had to go. Which leaves us to figure out the house—”
“You two are spending a lot of time together,” he said.
Who needs ice in your drink when you’re frozen solid by someone’s words?
“There’s a lot going on,” I said hesitantly.
“Yes, and it involves me. I’m not sure why I am not being included in these conversations. Also, why do they all take place outside next to the lake?”
Sometimes I couldn’t tell whether Val was pretending to be dim about the things going on around him, in order to make a point, or whether he genuinely had no clue.
What I did know, was that I wasn’t going to talk to him about Micah, about…my feelings.
Ugh. Hadn’t I given up feelings years ago? Wasn’t that part of my grand bargain? I’d sold off my future, my past, and all my emotions.
“What do you think of Nick?” I asked.
Val’s eyes clouded. “Are we allowed to have an opinion?”
“If not us, then who?”
He carefully folded his newspaper and set it aside. “I do not think he is a threat to the family. He comes from money. His recent charity—”
“Wait, did you do some kind of check on him?”
“Not personally.”
“But you’ve been digging.”
He shrugged, as if to concede the point. “I promised to protect the family legacy. That includes men coming around Mother to steal her money. Nicholas is not doing that.”
“What he is doing is trying to convince her to get rid of the house. I’ve got a problem with that, Val.”
“Yes, I know. I was there at breakfast.”
“So what do we do?”
Val rose from the chair and joined me by the window. “Are you in love with Micah?”
I nearly spit out my drink. “What?”
“These meetings by the lake, are they part of an affair? I don’t know a non-embarrassing way to ask that, I’m sorry. I’m not intruding for intrusion’s sake.”
“No. God, Val, you’re totally misinterpreting things again. There’s nothing between Micah and me.”
My heart sank a little as I said it. My feelings about Micah were not completely clear.
For instance, I had no idea why I was so crushed by disappointment when he’d left.
It had happened so quickly, too. He had put his phone away, came up to apologize. Important work emergency, client being raided. Look, I know we’re on the same side in this, he’d said. But the same side in what? The house issue? The mother issue? The kiss next to the lake issue? I’ll call you soon.
What was I supposed to say to him?
No, stay, I drew a picture of you!
A fun scene that would’ve been. Asking him to stick around even though he had business to attend to.
But that was the story of my life, right? Everybody’s business was more important than my feelings.
The kiss had clearly been meaningless to him, a one-time aberration brought on by stress and nostalgia, and so I should just box it away, put it up in the attic with all the other nonsense of my past, and never think about it again.
It made perfect sense. So why did it make my heart hurt to think about it?
“You understand that I’m not judging you, don’t you?” asked Val, back in the real world of the here and now. “If you two were…re-embarking, I suppose, on a relationship—”
“We’re not.”
“I wouldn’t stand in your way.”
“Thanks. But we’re not.”
He stared at me a minute, then nodded, satisfied that I was telling the truth, or at least as much of it as I could.
“In that case, we should talk to Mother,” he said.
I shook my head. “Sorry, I missed a step there.”
Val didn’t realize it, but I was watching him closely. So I could see his fingers twitch, as though he were typing on a keyboard. He was putting his thoughts together for presentation.
“If you were interested in Micah, Mother would be less likely to listen to you. She would think you were taking his side, his mom’s side, out of misguided loyalty. There would be a significant chance that she would then end the discussion and move ahead with selling the house.”
I squinted at him. “And you calculated all that up in your head?”
“One would think by now that you’d trust my estimations. The business thrives on them.”
“Yeah, but this is people we’re talking about, not companies. What about Nick? How does he factor into your calculations?”
At this, Val scowled. “Without knowing his motivations, I can’t speculate. He seems very intent on pushing Mother into this decision, though, doesn’t he?”
“Well, there’s only one way to find out his secret motivations, I guess.”
“Wait, where are you going?”
“I’m going to talk to the man,” I said.
Nick wasn’t with my mother, oddly. I spotted her reading a book in the study, still carefully tucked away so she didn’t have to deal with Consuela and Mildred’s fears for the future. She touched her temple with her fingers, massaging it. That headache hadn’t gone away. I thought again about that bottle of pills.
In any case, I wasn’t ready to talk to her yet, so I stepped softly past the study. I made sure she didn’t see me.
I scoured the downstairs looking for him, coming up empty, until I spotted him out the back window, doing something mysterious out on the lawn. He wasn’t eating, or drinking, or reading, or talking on the phone. He was just…sitting.
Walking outside, I kept my eyes on him. What was he up to? He’d taken a blanket out here and set it on the grass to sit on. But there was no food. It wasn’t a picnic. His stillness was a little frightening. What was so interested about the lake, that he would stare at it without moving?
It wasn’t until I got closer that I realized he wasn’t looking at the lake at all. His eyes were closed, eyelids gentle and still. Legs crossed in front of him, sitting upright, hands loose in his lap.
He wasn’t unhandsome, really. In his tranquility, there was even something noble about him. I found myself memorizing his eyelids, the crease in them emphasized by the sunlight. Back when I drew and painted all the time, eyes were such an interest to me. They were so hard to get right, and yet so crucial. The eyes were everything. You could be forgiven a crooked jaw or hastily-rendered hair, as long as the eyes were realistic.
Without opening those eyes, he said, “If you’d like to sit next to me, there’s room on the blanket.”
“I’m fine, thanks. Are you…busy?”
“On the contrary. I like to spend a little time each day untangling myself from things. I am the opposite of busy, in these moments.”
“Admittedly, talking to my family requires long breaks to settle the mind, but you only just got here.”
He smiled at that, eyes still closed. “Yes, and I could feel the tension the moment I entered the room. There’s a battle brewing, I know, and I’ve walked right into the middle of it.”
“Look, I’ll get right to it.”
“Of course you will.”
“I want you to convince Mother to keep the house.”
At that, his eyes fluttered open. “Indeed.”
“Or let me buy it. Or let the family trust hold it. Or…or anything, really, other than putting it up for sale.”
“Theo, how long have I been seeing your mother?”
That stopped me short. “Why do you ask? Surely
you know.”
His eyes were kind. “I know. Do you? How long has it been?”
It felt like one of Val’s puzzles, where he demanded I figure things out for myself rather than just telling me a simple fact. “I mean, it’s recent, I know that. Long enough that you have some influence on her decision. So…I don’t know, a month?”
“Theo, I have been seeing your mother for thirteen months.”
I don’t know why I was shocked. I don’t know why I stepped back when he said that. “That can’t be,” I said.
“Over a year. And in that time, you haven’t been here once. I think I could count on one hand the number of times you’ve spoken to her since I’ve known her, because she tells me about your calls.”
“If you’ve been with her over a year, why hasn’t she said anything about it?”
He rose now, in a smooth motion that suggested a secret strength in his middle-aged frame. He put his hand on my shoulder, as though to support me. As though I were falling down.
“Because you don’t care, Theo. You never ask her about her life. You are fundamentally unconcerned about her.”
“That’s not true, she’s my mom. I mean, I’m sure I talk to her just as much as Val does—”
He tutted. “Val is…a special case. I don’t think she expects Val to ever show interest in anything but the business. But you? Her baby boy? Where are you, Theo? Where were you, when this house was weighing down on her? Where are you now? You’ve come down to make demands, haven’t you? Not to find out how she’s doing, not to empathize with her. She says in the brief time you’ve been here, you’ve spent far more time with your old friend Micah, than with her. Even now, when you’re worried about her decision, you’re talking to me instead. Do you see how that looks? Do you understand how that makes her feel?”
I felt a flare of anger then. Who was this man, this stranger, to tell me about my mother? He wasn’t my dad, he couldn’t say things like you need to visit your mother more, you need to talk to her more.
Most especially he couldn’t do that, not realizing everything I’d given up for her already.
For her, for dad, for Val.
In fact the only person who would really understand that, the only person who could grasp how angry I was about this…was gone. Had just driven back to the city, to deal with real life, while this strange puppet-show of my family tumbled on.
“So because I didn’t call Mother enough times, my entire history gets erased? Is that the deal? I just want to be very clear on this, Nick.”
His hand on my shoulder squeezed. “You’re angry.”
“Well, yes, obviously.”
“I see that. You’re angry a lot. Your mother says you used to paint. Do you still? I work with many young artists, and if there’s one thing that helps with anger—”
“Spare me, okay? Look, I’m sure you’re very nice. Mother clearly sees something in you. But you have to see that you’re a collaborator in the destruction of my family’s history. That history has made so many demands of me, that I’ve become its absolute servant, giving up everything for it. There has to be a reward for that somewhere. There has to be. And I claim the house, and all the memories in it. That’s what I want as my reward, for being a good son—maybe not a good-enough son the way you think of it, with cards and calls and letters and gifts—but a good son the way my family engineered it.”
I felt so full at that moment, so crackling with energy, but dangerously so, like I might leave the surface of the earth at any moment.
He must have sensed it, must have understood that I was at a pivotal, hazardous point in my life, because he let go of my shoulder and nodded.
“You and your mother have a lot to talk about,” he said. “You should talk to her now.”
14
Micah
“I want to go over this again,” I said, flipping back to the beginning of my notes.
Braddock Moore groaned and shifted in his chair. “Damn it, Reynolds, you’re worse than the fucking investigators. I’m not hiring you to give me the third degree, I’m hiring you to help me.”
The whole drive back to Corinth, I’d had Bernard on speaker, briefing me on the case.
I’m not going to lie, it was good to have something like this to clear my mind. Or, rather, to fill it up, so there was no more room for Theo and his family.
“Two years ago, you built the Trinity Tower complex in what was then an under-developed section of downtown Corinth.”
He sighed. “Yes. Same answer I gave you last time. I built the fucking tower. High point of my damn career, if you ask me.”
“It was a big project. Lots of paperwork. Approvals, zoning…”
“Yes, damn it, yes. Big fucking project. I had my then-lawyer handling the damn details, before he went and got himself arrested, the bastard.”
“There were several misstatements, let us say, on the environmental impact reports.”
“His misstatements. I never had anything to do with that shit. All I want is to build a damn building, not worry about the goddamn ducks or whatever. That’s why you hire a lawyer, to figure this stuff out for you.”
I glanced up from my notes. “So it’s your contention that your former attorney is to blame for flooding causing major property damage to the first three floors of Trinity Towers, including backed-up sewage, along with electrical and structural failures, all of which could have been avoided by properly studying the environmental impact, the water table, the elevation—”
“Yes, damn it! That massive fuck-up was all my lawyer’s fault.”
Leaning back, I gave Braddock Moore a thin smile. “You realize that this strategy of blaming your lawyer might make us a little uncomfortable. If you lose this case, are you going to hang us out to dry?”
He jabbed his meaty forefinger at my legal pad. “I’m not going to lose this case, because it isn’t my damn fault. And you took my money, so you’re on my side, so you better stop thinking about your own discomfort and start thinking about mine. They had no fucking right to raid my office. Those files had nothing to do with anything. You know exactly what they’re doing, don’t you? It’s a fishing expedition. Who the fuck cares about a little flooding? You pump out the water, you run some fans—”
“You filed for over half a million dollars worth of damage on your insurance claim. That’s more than some fans.”
“They don’t care about that! Don’t you see what I’m saying? They don’t give a damn about structural damage, or flooding, or goddamn water mains bursting. It’s an excuse to get into my business. See if they can find anything bigger to charge me with.”
I capped my pen and set it next to my pad. “So tell me, Braddock. Are they going to find something bigger to charge you with? What are we looking at here?”
My mind was already ranging over the possibilities.
The most obvious one was taxes. Easiest thing in the world to catch a crook on, because the one lesson criminals never learn is, you can get away with anything in the world, almost, as long as you pay your taxes. But the minute you try to get funny with the IRS, you’ve started a countdown to your own destruction.
Braddock was a cagey guy. There were skeletons in his closet. There could be a lot more.
He’d hired quite a few contractors to build the tower. Were they all legit? Or had he been funneling his investors’ money to other parties, citing budget overruns? Was he simply mobbed up, using this building as an opportunity to enrich himself and his friends?
The possibilities were endless, and they were all complicated.
But I suppose, by dropping everything to come back home on a Sunday, I was agreeing to it all. No matter what I found, I was agreeing to represent him through it.
Wasn’t that my choice?
I could have stayed and talked to Theo.
Harrison House was already like a hazy dream in my mind.
It was another world, a bright, sunlit world of nature and emotion. Something entirely different than the
coldness of Braddock’s cheap fluorescent lighting, the stale air of his office.
I’d chosen this.
Or at least, I’d escaped into it, because it was easier than working through my feelings, and through real problems.
I chuckled. Real problems, like what to do with an attractive ex-boyfriend and his mansion, as opposed to unreal problems like this crook in front of me.
“What’s so funny, Reynolds?”
Smiling at him, I said, “This. This case. My life. Never mind. Now, let me go back to last May, when you filed an insurance claim…”
“Do we have a shot?” asked Bernard. I was letting myself back into my apartment while he spoke through my earpiece.
My place was so small. It was exactly as I’d left it. Tiny, cramped, a little cave for me to hide in occasionally, on those nights where I wasn’t sleeping in the office.
“A shot? I won’t know that until I’ve talked to the prosecution,” I said. “I’d say he was doomed.”
“Great, just what we need, a stunning loss,” Bernard said. “Be sure to keep him on the damn hook long enough to get paid.”
“Talk to you tomorrow,” I said.
There was so much to do. I needed to expand on my notes, and outline a strategy for the week. First stop, dropping by the state attorney to see if they’d tell me what they wanted from him, exactly. Did they want him in jail? Or to roll over on one of his other crooked buddies? That would determine a lot of things about my approach to the case. I’d also need to speak to the zoning commission, his insurance company, possibly his now-jailed former lawyer, along with…
Along with…?
I sighed. There was no room to breathe in here. I’d just come from a house full of high, high ceilings, broad halls, gorgeous views. Now I was in a studio apartment with a view of the alley beside the building, and the ceiling felt like it was pushing down on me.