Unthinkable

by Brad Parks

  Nate mostly associated guns with tragedy. She couldn’t imagine him wanting to be in the same room as one.

  But there was something in Parker’s eyes, glowing in the half light seeping in from the hallway, that made Jenny realize this was serious business for the little girl.

  Not wanting to spook her daughter, Jenny remained calm and said, “Oh, really?”

  “Guns are bad,” Parker said earnestly.

  “Sometimes they are. It depends who has them and what they’re going to do with them. Grandpa has guns and he’s not bad.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  Parker said it like this perhaps settled matters. But Jenny still had questions.

  “Did you actually see Daddy with this gun?”

  Parker nodded.

  “Where was it?”

  “In the kitchen.”

  “When you got back from Grandma and Grandpa’s house?”

  Parker nodded again. “He thought I didn’t see. But I saw.”

  “What, exactly, did you see?” Jenny asked, still uncertain if this was a figment of her little girl’s creative mind.

  “It was shiny.”

  “A shiny gun.”

  “Yeah.”

  Jenny was aware of Parker studying her carefully.

  “I see,” Jenny said, working hard to maintain her unworried, calming bedtime demeanor. “And how did that make you feel?”

  “Scary,” Parker said. “But if Daddy has the gun, it must be okay. Like Grandpa.”

  Jenny looked off into a dark corner of the room.

  “Yes, honey, like Grandpa,” she said.

  Then she pulled the blanket up, closer to her daughter’s chin, and smoothed it out. “We can talk more about this tomorrow if you want. Now it’s night-night time. Love you, my big girl.”

  “Love you, Mommy.”

  She bent over and kissed Parker’s forehead, then straightened and walked unsteadily out of the room.

  It was one of the first pieces of advice Jenny Welker had ever received as a trial attorney: Never ask a question in the courtroom to which you don’t already know the answer.

  Which was easy enough when you had the opportunity to depose a witness, collect documents, and spend months preparing.

  What was she supposed to do with this? Had the “leaky faucet” existed at all? Had he dropped the kids at her parents’ house and then used his time away to . . . buy a gun?

  Why would Nate feel like he needed a gun?

  And why wouldn’t he tell her about it?

  For Jenny, the flint that created the spark of their relationship wasn’t the immediate physical attraction she felt to Nate, a six-foot-four former college swimmer with a V-shaped torso and an easygoing charm. It wasn’t that he was secure enough in himself not to be intimidated by a powerful woman. It wasn’t even the incredible passion and creativity he brought to their lovemaking.

  It was that, unlike so many of the guys she had been with, Nate Lovejoy never tried to hide anything. He didn’t play games.

  He was the guy who, at the end of their first date—which wasn’t really a date as much as an extended make-out session in the back of a bar—had come right out and said, “Jenny Welker, I think you’re dazzling.”

  And he had never really budged from that way of being.

  So what was she to make of this?

  Did she ask him about this when she didn’t know what his answer would be?

  But how could she not? After all, this wasn’t a courtroom. It was a marriage.

  Their normal routine, once the girls were in bed, was to finish cleaning up, eat a quick dinner, then flop on the couch and either talk or cuddle while watching TV. Jenny lingered upstairs for a few more minutes, going into their bedroom, thinking about how she wanted to approach this.

  Before long, the door to the bedroom was opening.

  “Hey,” Nate said as he came in behind it. “I made stir-fry. Are you going to come down and eat with me?”

  “Yeah, I just . . . I need to ask you about something.”

  “Uh, okay,” he said, shutting the door behind himself. “That sounds ominous.”

  Might as well come out with it: “Parker said she saw you with a gun earlier today.”

  “A gun?”

  He laughed nervously.

  “Yes,” she said.

  There was a pause. Then there was that look again. The same one he had been wearing when she first came in the door.

  And then, again, the look went away.

  “Well, you know what kind of imagination she has,” Nate said.

  “So she’s imagining it.”

  “Well, of course she’s . . . oh, I know.”

  “What?”

  “I was watching a movie on my laptop this afternoon while the girls were playing. There was a man brandishing a gun at one point. Did she say it was a silver gun?”

  “She said it was shiny, yes.”

  “Yeah, that’s it then. There was a man with a silver gun. And she . . . she was just suddenly looking over my shoulder and she must have seen it.”

  “You were watching a violent movie in front of the girls?”

  “It wasn’t violent, it was just . . . but, you’re right, I shouldn’t have. I started it during nap time last week and I wanted to know how it ended. It was stupid. I won’t do it again. Anyhow, are you hungry?”

  Jenny noted the pivot, but decided to let him get away with it.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Let’s eat.”

  CHAPTER 5

  NATE

  The gun.

  That stupid silver gun.

  When I’d regained consciousness after my chat with Lorton Rogers, I had been lying on our living room couch. The gun was digging into my back.

  I hadn’t known what to do with the damn thing. I barely had enough time to make the hour drive out to Surry to pick up the girls and get back before Jenny arrived home from work. In a panic, I had just tossed the gun in a drawer in the kitchen on my way out the door.

  During the drive, as my brain finally started working again, it occurred to me that was an incredibly stupid place to store a deadly weapon.

  When we got back home—with about fifteen minutes to spare—I had to make a snap decision about where to move it next and decided on the basement.

  I thought I had been stealthy enough about sneaking the gun out of the drawer. But leave it to my precocious Parker to notice everything.

  Before I stashed it—high up in a storage bin, between some sweaters, in a place Jenny would never have a reason to go and the girls couldn’t reach—I took a quick moment to study it.

  The silver plating made it feel like something that belonged to the Lone Ranger. The butt of the gun had an oval-shaped stamp on it that read WHITE CHUCK NO. 8 along the top half and BEDAL, WASHINGTON along the bottom.

  Whatever that meant.

  I probably should have just thrown it in a dumpster, or tossed it into a reservoir, or turned it in to a police station. It’s not like I was actually going to use it. There were things I simply wasn’t capable of doing, and pulling the trigger of a gun placed next to Jenny’s head was at a prominent spot at the top of that list.

  In some ways it was just selfish. I didn’t want to think of my life without her.

  We had been together for thirteen years, having met when we were both twenty-five, on the first day of new-associate orientation at Carter, Morgan & Ross. The moment she walked into the conference room, an army of harpists began playing in my mind. She was absolutely striking, with wavy brown hair that fell perfectly about her shoulders and this powerful stride, like she knew exactly where she was going in the world.

  In other words, she was way out of my league. But I summoned the nerve to walk up to her and say, “Hi, I’m Nate Lovejoy.”

  I’ve always been killer with the lines that way.

  I soon learned she was Jenny Welker; that she had grown up on a small farm in rural Virginia and still liked to help her father fix broken fence posts
on weekends; that she was the first in her family to go to college, much less law school; and that whereas everyone else was shyly nibbling at the spread of pastries and fresh-cut fruit the firm had put out for us, she loaded her plate, then went up for seconds. I was instantly smitten.

  We ended that evening making out in the back of a dive bar, so I think it’s fair to say I had made a positive first impression too. As we parted that first evening, I breathlessly said, “Jenny Welker, I think you’re dazzling.”

  She loved that line.

  Primarily because it wasn’t a line.

  Even still, it became a running joke with us—all the things that were dazzling.

  But it really was the perfect word for her.

  In the romance that ensued, the country girl introduced the boy from the Upper West Side of Manhattan to some of life’s finer pleasures (pig roasts, sunsets on the porch, cheesy country music), and the city boy reciprocated (with foodie restaurants, sunsets on the rooftop, and indie rock).

  It was a dizzying time. My childhood was something I worked hard to overcome—mostly by trying to act like it never happened. My parents had split when I was small. To further cement my disillusionment, my mother divorced twice more, fracturing whatever faith I’d had in relationships.

  As a kid, I drowned all my resentment and frustration in the pool, becoming an accomplished junior swimmer. I had the kind of body—long arms, broad chest, size sixteen feet—that college coaches coveted, earning me a scholarship. I spent most of my youth and early adulthood swimming from my troubles.

  But I never really recovered. At least until Jenny came along. Even when I told her my most horrible secrets, she only seemed to love me more.

  Before I knew it, I believed in fairy tales again. Over the course of two years, we breezed through all the milestones, moving from dating exclusivity to cohabitation, then to engagement.

  The only dilemma we faced was that Carter, Morgan & Ross had a nepotism policy. The firm could not hire or promote into partnership any family member of an existing partner.

  So before we got married, Jenny and I made a deal. Whoever made partner first, their career would receive priority. The other would step aside.

  This, I later came to realize, ran counter to advice my grandfather had once given me: Never start a fight you can’t win.

  Whereas I was a fine lawyer—methodical and workmanlike—Jenny was a rock star, a highly intuitive problem solver, gifted in both the conference room and the courthouse. She was always ten steps ahead, always anticipating her opponents’ moves and then countering before they could even make them.

  She made partner when she was thirty-two, one of the youngest in firm history. I hung on as an associate for another few years. But when she got pregnant and we decided it would be best for our family to have a parent stay home? That parent was clearly going to be me.

  Our marriage wasn’t perfect, inasmuch as I nagged her about spending less time at work, and she exasperated me by coming home and trying to tell me how to run the house.

  And, at least lately, our love life had been nonexistent. There’s nothing like a three-year-old and an eighteen-month-old to sap the libido. Between that and Jenny’s work schedule, which had been particularly hectic, it had been two months since we’d done anything in bed that didn’t involve reading or sleeping.

  But that little dry spell was just a temporary problem. We were basically happy; and more importantly, we were fulfilled—with each other, with our girls, with the beautiful family we had created together.

  So to think I might ever be able to harm her?

  It wasn’t just unthinkable. It was appalling—total anathema to who I believed I was as a human being.

  Especially when Vanslow DeGange was so clearly a fraud to begin with. Could anyone actually see the future?

  No. Of course not.

  Vanslow DeGange wasn’t some soothsaying guru. He was the Wizard of Oz, the supposedly all-powerful leader who turned out to be a con man.

  Or maybe he was Keyser Söze: he had been summoned from the depths of Lorton Rogers’ imagination and didn’t actually exist at all.

  Either way, I needed to figure out who was behind this, and, more importantly, where their hiding place with the fancy paintings was. Then I would report them to the police and get them charged with kidnapping—and whatever crime it was to scare a man into thinking he needed to kill his wife.

  This was finally coming to me late that night, as I lay in bed sleeplessly, long after Jenny’s breathing settled down. Really, it was the first time I had been able to calm my brain enough to let logic take back over.

  Whoever these people really were, they wanted me to believe that my wife’s lawsuit against Commonwealth Power & Light was the source of all evil and needed to be quashed.

  Therefore, the simplest explanation for the Praesidium, Vanslow DeGange, and all this nonsense?

  It was really CP&L.

  The company’s executives had come up with a wildly creative way to make this lawsuit go away and had hired Lorton Rogers and the Praesidium to work the scam.

  There was no question CP&L had the money to pull it off. Part of what made it such an attractive target for a mass tort claim was its deep pockets: roughly $20 billion in annual revenues and $80 billion in assets.

  CP&L also had the motivation. For all those riches, this lawsuit still posed an existential threat to the company. Jenny kept a tally of the total damages she had estimated for the 279 clients she had signed up thus far. The last number I saw was above $400 million.

  That was manageable for something CP&L’s size. But if she could actually establish a precedent? CP&L had at least ten other coal-fired plants around the state. The Shockoe Generation Plant wasn’t even the largest. It would take time and legwork to sign up more clients, sure, but damages would easily run into the billions. Plus the endless legal fees.

  If things went poorly, CP&L could become the East Coast version of PG&E, the huge California power company driven into bankruptcy by its culpability for a deadly wildfire.

  And Lorton Rogers—if that was even his name—was absolutely right about one thing: if there was no Jenny, there would be no lawsuit.

  She was the one partner at CMR who believed in this thing. The associate managing partner, Albert Dickel—a friend, mentor, and erstwhile racquetball combatant of mine—was even starting to make noises about how the firm should drop it.

  The rest of the partners on the executive committee seemed to be somewhere in between, willing to keep tossing money at it for a while. One-third of $400 million was sufficient motivation, and the firm could afford to bankroll what was essentially an expensive lottery ticket.

  But without Jenny to spearhead it, no one else at CMR was going to risk their time or their reputation. If she lost faith or got scared away, the case would be over.

  It wasn’t a stretch to think CP&L had figured that out. Richmond may have appeared as a medium-size city on a map, but it was really a small town. Everyone knew everyone else’s business, especially in the tight circle of people who actually ran stuff—the business, legal, and financial communities, all of which overlapped because we sent our kids to the same schools, socialized in the same places, gave money to the same charities, and so on.

  Someone could have easily whispered into a CP&L executive’s ear: You know, the only thing keeping this lawsuit going is Jenny Welker.

  There was no finessing Jenny or talking her out of something once she got her mind set. CP&L’s chief counsel would discover that quickly if he didn’t know it already. Jenny was an uncrackable egg.

  Me? I was a much softer target. The guy who had been a good lawyer but not a great one. The husband who had stepped aside so his wife’s career could thrive. The affable pushover.

  For $400 million, it was worth hiring Lorton Rogers and a band of brutes to grab and terrify me.

  That mansion they’d taken me to, for all I knew, belonged to CP&L’s CEO, a stuffed shirt named J. Hunter Matth
ews II. He was pulling down something like $20 million a year and could probably afford a Rembrandt or a Vermeer—or knockoffs good enough to fool an amateur like me.

  Maybe they could convince me to scare my wife into dropping the lawsuit with their wild tale.

  Maybe they could even get me to kill her.

  Either way, problem solved.

  Did they really think I was that dumb? Obviously, yes.

  It all added up to CP&L being the man behind the curtain.

  Now I just had to prove it.

  The next morning, Jenny made her usual early escape. Once I got the girls fed and dressed for the day, I set them up with age-appropriate distractions.

  I began with Cate, a squirming mass of energy and springy brown curls who looked like Jenny’s mini-me. I placed her in her high chair in the kitchen, then dumped a fresh lump of purple Play-Doh in front of her. She immediately plunged her fingers into it, squishing it with delight.

  Then I handed my phone to Parker, a precocious, highly verbal child who had the misfortune of looking more like her father, with straight brown hair and serious eyes. But she also had the virtue of being easily entertained. For her, I queued up the ultimate toddler intoxicant: the original Baby Shark Dance video, three billion YouTube views and counting.

  When it got to Grandma Shark, and Parker was properly entranced, I got to work.

  The first thing I did—because isn’t it the first thing everyone does these days?—was turn to Google. I typed in Lorton Rogers.

  The lead result was a Facebook account for Mary Rogers, who lived in Lorton, Virginia. Then there was a LinkedIn entry for a man named Lawrence Lorton from Rogers, Arkansas. Many pages of similarly irrelevant entries followed.

  Next I googled Vanslow DeGange. The first match was a book about rangeland stewardship where one author had the last name Vanselow and another had the first name Degang. Nothing else was even remotely close.

  Had these men really been that assiduous about obscuring their digital tracks?