Wreathed

by Curtis Edmonds

  “I expect our associates to be able to resolve problems without brawling in the street. If you can’t do that, then you need to find somewhere else to work.”

  “I stepped on her foot. That’s hardly a street brawl. She’s exaggerating what happened.”

  “And you gave her the opportunity to sue you by doing that. That doesn’t speak well for your judgment,” Curlin said.

  Not punching Vanessa in the stomach spoke very highly of my judgment, I thought, but this was not the time to make that particular argument. “If it hadn’t been that, it probably would have been something else,” I said.

  “And yet, you were surprised when I told you what was going on.”

  I knew Curlin was angry with me. I was wasting his time on something trivial, which was his pet peeve. And he was right that I shouldn’t have stepped on Vanessa’s foot the way I did, although at the time it seemed like the quickest way to handle the situation. I couldn’t even entertain the fantasy of smacking Vanessa with something flat and heavy, because anything I did to her would likely result in another lawsuit. I would have to figure out another way to get her back, probably something sneaky and underhanded. Something she wasn’t expecting.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” I said. “I let myself get provoked into doing something that damaged my reputation and this firm’s reputation, and I shouldn’t have done it. Let me do what I can to repair the situation.”

  “Well, you’ll have plenty of time to do that,” Curlin said.

  “Am I fired?” I asked. I’d suspected as much, what with Curlin blocking me from getting in my office. I told myself that if Curlin was going to fire me, I wouldn’t show the anger or outrage I felt in front of him. I wasn’t going to whine or beg, either. If I had to leave my job, I would do it with dignity.

  “All personnel decisions have to be approved unanimously by the management committee,” he said. “If it was my decision, you’d be on your way home now. But I’m only one vote out of five.”

  “And the other partners?” I asked.

  “Fortunately for you,” Curlin said, “we don’t have a quorum at the moment. Warren is still in Bermuda on that reinsurance merger. He gets back next Monday. He wants to defer the final decision until then.”

  “I see,” I said. Warren Cornelius was the oldest of the partners. I had dated his grandson at one point. It hadn’t gone well.

  “Warren likes you personally, but he shares my concerns about your professionalism. I wouldn’t count on his support.”

  “And the rest?”

  “Yaniv and Ryan are concerned about your drinking habits. I am not overly concerned, but you didn’t help yourself by dragging in here hung over this morning.”

  “Oh, great,” I said.

  “And Fielding is thinking about the bottom line. None of us are inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt here.”

  I knew what that meant. Firing me now meant that the firm wouldn’t have to pay me a bonus, which would increase the pool for everyone else. That also meant I couldn’t expect any kind of severance payment. I was going to have to scramble to find any kind of job to pay my bills until I could find a position with another firm.

  “It’s your decision,” I said. “What do I do in the meantime?”

  “You are suspended without pay,” Curlin said. “Indefinitely. If we decide to terminate you, I will let you know on Monday and arrange for your things to be delivered to you.”

  “Then there isn’t anything else to say,” I said. I could think of several things I would have liked to have said, but all of them would have made things worse and wouldn’t have accomplished anything other than proving that Curlin was right about my lack of professionalism.

  “You have the rest of the week,” he said. “If you can manage to resolve this unpleasant litigation you seem to have stepped into, let me know and we’ll take that under advisement.”

  “Sure.”

  “And don’t forget to see the young man in the reception area on the way out,” Curlin said.

  There was a ghost of a smile on his face, and I devoutly wished that there were some way I could wipe it off his smug features. I stalked my way down the hallway, snatched the complaint from the process server’s hand, and made my way out the glass doors and down the elevator.

  It took me five minutes to get home. I slammed the door shut and threw my pocketbook on the counter. I went into my bedroom to change clothes. The stuffed giraffe Adam had sent me was staring at me from across the room.

  “Shut up,” I told the giraffe. “You’re not helping matters.”

  Chapter 24

  It didn’t take me long to go through Vanessa’s complaint. It was remarkably frivolous, even by the low standards of the personal-injury bar. I’d never litigated a tort claim before, but it did not appear that it would take that much effort to swot up a defense. At a minimum, it was a way to keep current on my New Jersey civil practice.

  The simplest thing to do was to make an immediate settlement offer. I could see if Vanessa would take nuisance value at this point. That was the quickest and easiest way to make her claim go away, and I knew that was what Curlin would want me to do. But I had no intention of offering her a thin dime. Vanessa was taking me on my home turf, and I had every intention of grinding her into the dirt.

  I spent the better part of the week drafting my answer to the complaint and putting together a countersuit, along with a motion to dismiss and a slew of intrusive discovery requests. I knew Vanessa was strapped for cash, and that she probably wouldn’t be able to keep paying her lawyer forever. Once he got a good look at exactly how expensive fighting me in court was going to be, he would back out and Vanessa would be forced to withdraw the lawsuit. That was my plan, and the only drawback was that it wasn’t as satisfying as direct physical force would have been. You can’t have everything.

  I switched off between that and working on my résumé and developing a plan of attack for the likely event that I wouldn’t have a job come Monday. I had a list of recruiters to call, and I was hopeful that I could get a short-term contract job somewhere doing legal scutwork. I wasn’t relishing the job search, but it was a necessity. Even if I somehow managed to avoid being fired, I was going to have to find another job eventually. If all five of the partners didn’t think I had a future at the firm, it was time to find another firm.

  I had used up most of my reserve alcohol in last weekend’s drunken stupor, and I knew that I needed to save every nickel in case I was out of work for the long term. So I didn’t buy any more liquor, which was annoying but had the side effect of making me feel virtuous. Once I got a new job, I told myself, I’d get a nice bottle of wine to celebrate. But for now, I had to stay sober. It was a challenge to stop drinking so abruptly, and I didn’t enjoy it, but the lack of alcohol kept me focused on what I needed to do.

  I got up early on Saturday morning. I looked at the clock, rolled over, and right before I was able to get back to sleep, I remembered my promise to drive down and scope out the house on Idaho Street. I threw on my comfy Temple hoodie and a pair of jeans, loaded up a Thermos full of coffee, and went downstairs to the garage. It didn’t take me long to get the Audi out on the interstate, and it took me much less time than that to get up to eighty miles an hour. I had a long day ahead of me and I didn’t want to waste any time.

  My game plan was simple. I had the key to the house in my pocket. I was going to drive down to Cape May as quickly as the laws of physics and good judgment would permit. When I got there, I would walk up to the porch, unlock the door, and check out whether the house was in good enough shape to put on the market any time soon.

  In a perfect world, the house would be vacant, without any furniture or other clutter. All the inside walls would be freshly painted neutrals, just the way that you’d want it if you were staging it for a prospective buyer. I had no plans to lift one finger to clean out a lot of old junk, or deal with whatever else might be wrong with the house.

  I didn’t know what
to expect, but I knew what to be worried about. I had three main concerns, all of them tied to different types of reality shows. One was that the previous resident of the house had been a hoarder, and that the house was crammed full of dead cats or worse. The second was that the house had been under intensive renovation when Sheldon died, and that there were holes in the walls and sawdust everywhere. The third was that the house was haunted. In any of these events, I would advise Mother to hand the house back to Adam as a bad investment, especially if there were teams of paranormal investigators rooting around, because you can never get rid of those guys.

  If the house was in a serious state of disarray, we were both committed to dumping the headache of selling it on Adam and figuring out a way to split whatever profits remained after all the bills were taken care of. Mother was comfortable in her apartment at the senior community, and wasn’t interested in a near-beach house. I wasn’t all that interested in spending my precious vacation time anywhere other than the Caribbean, thank you very much. I was anxious to seal the deal in any case, so I could salvage whatever was left of my relationship with Adam.

  Assuming I still wanted to.

  In the last week, Adam hadn’t called me or tried to call me or sent me any other large, awkward presents. I’d checked his public Facebook profile, and he hadn’t done anything except go out to a Mexican restaurant in Freehold the night before. He had posted a picture of a plate of nachos. Other than that, he was running under radio silence as far as social media was concerned. I had no way of knowing whether he was still thinking about me, or if he still wanted to be with me. If he was feeling any pressure from sexual frustration, it wasn’t apparent.

  I had a roommate in college who once dumped a boy because he got his ear pierced. It turned out to be the right decision, because the ex-boyfriend ended up going to jail for running a meth lab and my roommate ended up marrying the lieutenant governor of Minnesota, but that’s not the point of the story. My roommate had been nearly besotted with this guy, and never stopped talking about how much she cared about him and how sweet he was, but she dropped him cold over a tiny little diamond stud in his earlobe—more accurately, because he wouldn’t take it out when she asked him to. (The boyfriend was majorly cute, and I thought my roommate had made a big mistake in dumping him, and I would totally have dated him if my roommate had not specifically threatened to smother me in my sleep if I had tried.)

  The house on Idaho Street wasn’t a small thing, like a diamond stud, but it was coming between me and Adam and I hated that. It was a big, expensive thing, and it was tied in to my relationship with my mother, which was another big thing and one that I wasn’t equipped to walk away from. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t reasonable, and it sure as hell wasn’t romantic. But I still spent the entire drive down to Cape May wishing and hoping that the house on Idaho Street had caught fire, or crumbled in on itself, or had blown away in a freak tornado.

  The day was clear and sunny, but it wasn’t yet warm enough for me to put the top down on my convertible. I made excellent time coming down the Parkway all the way to Avalon, and then hit traffic in Cape May Court House. I was finally able to make my way across the causeway to Cape May proper, and made a quick stop by the Wawa on the north side of town and fortified myself with a hot chicken sandwich and a cold Diet Coke. If the house was a hoarder house, and if the smell made me want to throw up as soon as I walked in the door, I thought it was a good idea to have something in my stomach, just in case.

  I drove down Lafayette Street through the middle of town, past the cute little antique shops and the bed-and-breakfasts and the twee art galleries. I turned left on to the beach road. It was just warm enough for people to be walking along the promenade without serious risk of frostbite, and they were out in force. Most of them seemed to be couples, walking hand in hand, enjoying the sunny day and the brisk wind whipping off the bay. I found the cross street I wanted and turned towards the house on Idaho Street.

  The street was empty, and I parked right in front of the house. The landscaping needed serious work, and the right-side banister on the front steps looked to be loose. The exterior paint looked even worse up close. The pink was a wretched pastel shade, like Pepto-Bismol. The green trim looked like dead pine needles. I had to resist the urge to take the battered white wicker chairs off the porch and put them on the curb so that someone could put them away in a nice landfill somewhere where they couldn’t poke anyone ever again.

  The only interesting thing on the porch was the door, which was a massive thing, hand-carved, with two lovely slender stained-glass panels running down its length. They needed to be cleaned, but that would take somebody five minutes with Windex. And right in the center of the door, there was a wreath.

  It was a large wreath, with white roses and orange flowers that I didn’t know the name of, and a fading black ribbon. The flowers looked like they had been cut three weeks ago. This was because they had been.

  I had seen this wreath once before, but it was attached to the door at Sheldon Berkman’s apartment.

  I felt the stereotypical cold chill skitter up my back, but I shook my head to dismiss the momentary feeling of dread. All it means is that Adam moved the wreath from there to here, I thought. Nothing to worry about. I found the house key and turned it in the lock. I heard an audible click that said the key had caught, and opened the door.

  The foyer was narrow, and had a gorgeous long mahogany table in front of a graceful staircase. The flooring was a deep, rich red wood, gleaming in the afternoon sunlight. The side of the staircase had matching paneling, except that there were dark maroon inlays in complex geometric patterns. The banister was hand-carved from what looked to be ebony. I looked up, and there was a glittering reddish copper chandelier hanging down. Its metalwork was as intricate as the woodwork on the stairs.

  I went into the parlor on the right-hand side. It was a large room, with crown molding whose pattern was echoed in the deep-red Persian rug. The furniture was clearly antique but looked comfortable and inviting. A huge brick fireplace was decked out with gleaming brass tools. On the back wall, there was an ancient upright piano which had been polished, deep and glossy. A set of sheet music sat on the piano, and I looked to see that it was an old Elvis song, “Can’t Help Falling in Love with You.”

  The chill down my spine came back, stronger than before. I sat down on the piano bench. I noticed I was breathing hard, and I tried to relax.

  It wasn’t just that the inside of the house was as gorgeous as the outside wasn’t. It was that everything looked bright and new and shiny. Somebody had put a hell of a lot of effort into making it that way. Based on the price that the house had sold for, and the description on the listing, it hadn’t been the previous owner. If the rest of the house was like this, it was worth a million dollars. Easy.

  Of course, the smart move wouldn’t be to sell the house. The smart move would be to keep it, to run it, to rent out rooms all summer for an exorbitant, astronomical price. You could earn enough to pay the mortgage for the year in two months, if you had full occupancy, and the rest would be pure profit. It might be enough to live on, even, if you had a law practice on the side that made you a little extra money.

  It could work, I thought. It could. All I had to do was prove that poor dead Sheldon Berkman was not as crazy as everyone else thought he was—which shouldn’t be that hard—and take over the house. Mother didn’t want anything to do with the house; she’d be happy to let me take it over and handle the rentals and keep up the maintenance. I could sell my condo and quit my job and move down here full-time. I could put out my shingle, too, and do wills and divorces and contract work during the quiet winter months. Once I got my student loans paid off, I could buy the house from Mother outright, or wait until after she died and buy out my siblings, whichever made more sense. I could spend my mornings walking on the beach, and my evenings watching the sun set over the bay.

  All this could be yours someday, kiddo, one side of my brain said.
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  As long as this is what you want, the other side said.

  “Too early to make any kind of decision,” I said, and then I jumped because I had said that out loud without meaning to. “I must be getting nervous in my old age,” I said, mostly to reassure myself. “Let’s move on to the next room.”

  The kitchen was splendid, with gleaming white cabinets and salt-and-pepper granite countertops flecked with quartz. The big appliances were stainless-steel and showroom new. There was a shiny silver espresso maker and a Kitchen-Aid stand mixer. At the far end of the kitchen was a breakfast area with a sturdy butcher-block table. It looked like the Crate and Barrel catalog had come to stark, glittering life. The next room was a dining room with lush, velvety green wallpaper and a handsome antique table and spindly, elegant chairs. The table was set with silver candlesticks, and I imagined how exquisite it would look by candlelight.

  Of course, the make-or-break item was the state of the guest rooms upstairs, and the bathrooms. People might file in and out to gawk at the house, but if nobody wanted to stay there, we’d be better off selling it. I went up the stairs, checking the banister to see if it was loose anywhere, and it wasn’t.

  The first room I checked out was painted a dark blue, with stark white crown molding and a brushed-nickel chandelier by way of contrast. The bed had a soft, squishy down comforter, and all sorts of comfy throw pillows. I had to suppress a sudden desire to dive in and take a long, restful nap. The room had a fireplace as well, but the bricks were painted white, with contrasting iron tools.

  There was a white display cabinet in the corner, which I went over to check out because it was the first modern piece of furniture I had seen in the house. It was glassed-in, and had three or four airplane models inside. The one at the top was the largest, and had pride of place. I took a close look, and it was a large bomber plane.