“So I gotta know.” Stoddard spread his hands. “Is that true?”
Leigh put down her pen. “I’m afraid so. So long as he’s the sole custodial parent, he alone decides who can visit his child.”
He pushed to his feet and strode to the window and stood with his arms crossed, staring out into the city. “And I’m supposed to live with that.”
“Unless you can prove that he’s unfit to make parental decisions. In which case you could sue for visitation rights. For custody, for that matter.”
He spun a pivot. “But how? I signed my rights away.”
“Custody doesn’t turn on the rights of the adults. It turns on the best interests of the child. Anyone can petition for visitation rights or for custody. Grandparents, for example, but even a stranger if he can prove the custodial parent is unfit and it would be in the best interests of the child to make a change.”
He uncrossed his arms. “Like, even a real stranger?”
She held up a cautioning hand. “There is a parental preference presumption, so the burden of proof is on the stranger.” But even as she said it, she wondered which way the presumption would cut in this case. John Stoddard was the biological father and until two years ago, the only father. The parental preference doctrine was based on the strength of the parent-child bond, and who had the stronger bond here? The natural parent, she thought, the one who was there from birth. Stepparents could never feel the same kind of primal connection. Peter was the best evidence of that. He loved Chrissy, he was wonderful to her, but how easily he went on with his life without her.
But she mustn’t project, and she mustn’t give Stoddard false hope either. “That means you’d have to convince the court that Gunder’s an unfit parent,” she said.
Stoddard sat down again and studied the surface of the table. “I’ve been hearing things,” he said after a moment. “From a couple old buddies who still run around with Heather’s friends. Stories about Gunder drinking too much, knocking Heather around sometimes. There were some rumors about that car accident, that he might have been drunk when he ran off the road. No charges were filed, but there might be something there.”
“That might help, if it’s true,” Leigh said. “I could put an investigator on it.”
“No, I can do it myself. I’ve got some pretty good connections.”
“Oh?”
“I’m working private security now. You get your fingers in a lot of different pots.” Suddenly he frowned, said a curt “Excuse me, ma’am,” and swung out of his chair. “Report,” he barked as he paced back to the window.
As a low muttered conversation took place behind her, Leigh looked over her notes. The situation wasn’t what she’d expected when she’d walked into the room. John Stoddard was every bit as impressive as Miguel Gonzalez advertised, and his case looked like it could be interesting. Maybe even rewarding, if she could succeed in getting custody away from a drunk driver who had killed the child’s mother.
Stoddard ended his call with “Stoddard out” and returned to the conference table. “Let me run this down,” he said. “See if there’s anything to these rumors before we meet again.”
He was assuming she’d agreed to represent him. Maybe she had. “Sounds good,” she said and got up to walk him to the elevator.
Back in her office the message light was flashing on her phone, and Leigh hit the playback button as she settled into her chair to go over her notes.
“I hear someone’s been sleuthing,” came a singsong greeting.
Her head snapped up.
“Yes, this is Emily Whitman,” the message continued. “And yes, Devra’s husband is very much alive. I do apologize for the disinformation, but you have to understand, divorce is simply out of the question. So please, stand down. Save yourself a lot of time and trouble. A lot of trouble.”
Leigh stared at the phone, her mouth agape. She’d been warned off cases before, there’d been some thinly veiled threats over the years, but never anything as bald-faced as this. Disinformation? These were outright lies.
She pushed a button to replay the message with the envelope information. The call was received at 1:15 today from a blocked number. She dialed the number on Emily Whitman’s business card again, and again the call went to voicemail. It was obvious she worked for the ambassador, though, so Leigh telephoned the embassy next and asked for Emily Whitman.
“There is no such person here,” replied a man with a heavy accent.
“The ambassador’s assistant. A young woman. Blond?”
“There is no such person,” he repeated and hung up.
She googled Whitman’s name and got hundreds of results, but none had anything to do with Qatar or the embassy. Emily Whitman could have been privately employed by the ambassador, but her name wasn’t linked to any detective agencies or investigative services either. Still, the conclusion was inescapable that she’d been hired by the ambassador to spy on his wife and to dissuade anyone from representing her. She tried first through lies and ploys and now through outright threats.
Which just backfired. Spectacularly. All of Leigh’s uncertainty and hesitation were gone. Now she was determined to get Devra her divorce, and every penny of her mahr as well.
And suddenly she realized: she was back to work. Today wasn’t merely a one-time drop-by. She had two new cases, and she was ready to work them both.
She spent the balance of the afternoon brushing up her research on the Virginia domicile requirements for Devra and the Maryland custody rules for Stoddard. It felt good, being back in the saddle again, turning her brain out for exercise the way she might run Romeo on a lead line. Let him stretch his legs a bit, fill his lungs, get some traction under his hooves.
Then she spun in her chair to reach for a file, and her brain stopped. There was Chrissy, smiling out at her from the lineup of photos on the credenza. In her tutu and her soccer jersey and her riding breeches. Midair on Romeo’s back and sitting cross-legged on the floor last Christmas.
All of the day’s mental gymnastics came to a crashing end. Leigh stared at the photos. She barely saw herself and Peter in the frames or any of the other children, his or hers. All she could see was Chrissy. A beautiful child on her way to becoming a lovely young woman.
Becoming. Unbecoming. Never to be.
The house was so quiet that night. She reheated some leftovers in the microwave, and the sound of the electromagnetic waves oscillating through the chamber roared like a jet engine blasting through the kitchen. The bell dinged when it was done, and the silence swelled up again as she removed her plate and carried it to the table.
Four chairs were pulled up to the table, and one blink of the eye filled them with the other three occupants. Chrissy bubbling over with some story from school that day, Kip interrupting with his wisecracking commentary, and Peter grinning at the pair of them while Leigh basked in the glow of her perfectly blended family.
She sat down at her solitary place at the table and gazed at the three empty chairs while she picked at the pasta on her plate. It was like looking at a picture hanging crooked on a wall. So out of balance it disturbed her inner equilibrium, and she had to stop what she was doing and cross the room to straighten it. Those three empty chairs disturbed her even more. She got up and dragged one of them into the laundry room.
When she returned the table still looked cockeyed, so she dragged another chair to the laundry room and stacked it teetering on top of the first.
How pathetic would it look, she wondered, if she left only one chair at the table. She wondered what people did who always lived alone. Did they keep an empty chair or three at their kitchen tables? She couldn’t imagine it. She’d never lived alone in her life. She lived with her parents, then college roommates, then Shelby in law school, then Ted and marriage and children, then Peter and remarriage and stepchildren. She didn’t know if she was even capable of living alone.
No, of course she was, she tried to tell herself. She was a strong, capable woman with a
busy, fulfilling profession.
But she was a wife and mother, too, her other voice answered. At least she used to be.
No, this was silly. She gave herself a shake. She was still a mother, of two fine sons who would be home from school before she knew it. They wouldn’t be working for Peter as originally planned, which was too bad—if they were on-site, she’d have an excuse to drop by with their lunch now and then—but at least they’d be living here with her. There’d soon be plenty of family meals around this table. She went back to the laundry room and dragged one of the chairs to its place, then returned for the fourth chair and slid it under the table, too.
There. She sat down again and stared into space until the pasta turned cold and gelatinous on her plate.
She went to the desk and put her hand on the phone. She could call the twins, but they were in finals now and she shouldn’t cut into their study time. She could call her parents, but it alarmed them to receive phone calls after nine, and she couldn’t risk shaving even a minute off their lives. She could call Shelby Randolph and apologize for their quarrel today. She could call Peter and beg him to come home and bring Kip with him and somehow they’d all learn to walk on the eggshells strewn between them.
No. She couldn’t do any of those things.
She pulled her hand from the phone and sat down at the computer and typed a name into the search window. Reverend Stephen Kendall.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Kip finished his AP History paper at midnight on the night before his extended, absolutely final, no excuses deadline. They didn’t have a printer on the job site, so Pete drove him to a twenty-four-hour FedEx Print Center and sat next to him at the worktable and proofread the hundred-plus pages as they slithered out of the machine. He was too exhausted to absorb much of the content of the paper, but it looked like Kip was positing some new theory for the real reason why the Crusades ended. It wasn’t because the Christians lost some crucial battles, though they did. It was because they lost their willingness to forgo earthly life for the sake of some heavenly reward. They began to believe that their hopes of securing a place in heaven depended less on martyrdom and more on living a good life in the here and now.
Pete was all for living a good life, but he wasn’t sure he liked Kip’s takeaway from all this. “Live in the present is the moral of the story,” the boy said on the drive back to Hollow Road. “Carpe diem, you know? What’s the point of giving up what you want to do in the present for the sake of some future payoff that might never happen? Live for the moment is the only logical way to go.”
“That’s stupid,” Pete said. “If we only lived for the moment, we’d still be huddling in caves and eating nuts and berries. It’s working toward the future, building things for the next generation—that’s what makes the world tick.”
“But what about when the future’s full of uncertainty? Who can say where we’ll be next month or next year? So why not party down?”
“And just give up? The thing to do is to control the future. Shape your own destiny.”
“That’s an illusion. We don’t have any control over what happens to us.”
There was something Pete wanted to say to that, but it was two in the morning by then. He let it go.
The next day was a tough one on barely four hours’ sleep, but he powered through on slugs of coffee and willpower. Kip, though, looked like he was dozing on his feet when Pete picked him up at the end of the school day. He leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes with a sleepy little smile on his face.
But he woke up fast when they reached the site and found Yana Miller in the driveway. She was standing next to a beauty of a car, a vintage Jaguar convertible, gleaming white on the outside and a deep cherry red on the leather upholstery. Kip sat up straight and jumped out of the truck before Pete could even put it in park.
“Hey,” Kip called, loping up to her.
“Hey yourzelf.” She leaned back against the rear bumper of the car. She was wearing a black sundress with a flared skirt and a tight bodice that left her white shoulders bare. It looked vintage, too, the dress of a 1940s movie siren.
“Is Drew inside?” Pete said.
“No, ees only me,” she said, and Kip laughed like a fool. “I come to ask fawor.”
“What’s that?”
“I must begin organize for when we move, yes? But zhere’s too much clutter. In garage and attic and basement. Too much for me, but we don’t want for strangers to touch our zhings, you know? So Drew, he say, why don’t hire Keep for few weeks to geeve hand?”
Kip blinked wildly, like someone flashed a searchlight in his face.
“He’s still in school,” Pete said. “Until the tenth.”
“Starting next day zhen. You do us such fawor. Ten dollars an hour, eef zhat ees fair.”
Kip turned a look on Pete he hadn’t seen since the boy was eight years old and pleading for a puppy. “He can’t drive.”
“I can drive heem. Ees no problem.”
Pete hesitated. He’d been planning on putting Kip to work on the job this summer. But grunt work was grunt work, and a change of scenery might be good for him. And if it kept the Millers happy, so much the better. “Okay with me if it’s okay with him.”
Kip was all but swaying on his feet. “Um, sure!” he said to Yana.
She gave him a wide smile in her angular face. “I see you the eleventh zhen.” She got in the convertible and drove off, and Kip stood and watched her go until Shepherd came bounding around the corner of the house with a Frisbee in his mouth. Kip laughed and snatched it from him and sent it sailing up toward the top of the hill.
Pete decided to call ahead before he drove to the house the next day. Let her know he was coming. That way he could sidestep the question of whether to use his key or knock like a stranger. If she was expecting him, the door would be open and he could walk right in. Assuming she said yes, that is. Assuming she even picked up the phone.
He thought about it all day, what he should say and what she might say, but he waited until he was a mile from home to make the call. He brought Shep along as an icebreaker, and the dog was squirming with excitement, his head hanging out the window, sniffing in all the familiar scents as they got closer to home.
It was seven o’clock by then. He wondered if she still bothered to cook, now that it was dinner for one instead of four. His thumb hovered over her name on the screen of his phone, and finally he touched it.
“Hello?”
He startled at the sound of her voice. It seemed like years since he heard it. “Hi! I was wondering if I could swing by the house and pick up a few things.”
“Yes, of course.”
Her tone was perfunctory, like she was talking to a neighbor or a deliveryman, but the important thing was she said yes. “I need to pick up Kip’s suit and mine,” he said. “Graduation’s coming up.” He’d planned that part carefully, to give her an opening to say she wanted to come to the commencement exercises, too.
“I’m on my way out right now, but you know where they are, right?”
Out? Where? They never went out in the evenings unless it was with each other. Where would she even go? To a movie, to sit alone in the dark? Or maybe to pick up her own dinner. “Okay, so—”
“Bye.”
She didn’t realize how close he was. He could be home before she left, and maybe they could go get dinner together. He put the phone down and drove a little faster.
The turnoff to their road was a quarter mile ahead, and his long-range vision was pretty sharp. Sharp enough to see the Volvo ahead at the intersection. She was already on the road. He pressed down on the gas as the Volvo turned and headed the other way. He was still close enough to catch up with her, but what then? Tail her until she spotted him in the rearview? Honk the horn until she pulled over? But what if she didn’t? He eased off the gas and she disappeared from sight down the road.
He made the turn onto their road and pulled into the driveway and used his key
to open the kitchen door. Shep pushed in ahead of him and stopped to sniff at the floor where his bowl usually stood. Pete stopped and sniffed, too. There were none of the usual cooking aromas, but he caught Leigh’s favorite fragrance in the air. It was his favorite, too, a scent he would always associate with the soft skin between her earlobe and her collarbone, the spot he liked to nuzzle.
Shep was making the rounds of the first floor, and Pete did the same. Everything in the place looked tidy, and he supposed that was a good sign—no deterioration in cleanliness to suggest depression—except the place was normally a little untidy, the way any busy household full of kids and working parents tended to be. Now it seemed more like a museum exhibit. The Relics of a Fractured Family, circa 2015.
Upstairs was better. Clothes were strewn across their bed, and she’d left the light on in their bath. The clothes were all dresses, he saw, tried on and rejected and left where they lay. He ran his fingers over the fabrics. These weren’t the kind of clothes she wore to work. These were the dresses she wore to receptions and dinner parties. So where was she going? Her makeup case was open on the bathroom vanity, and three different lipstick tubes rolled loose on the marble top. A dressy dress and lipstick on a Thursday night.
He packed up his own clothes and grabbed some things for Kip, too. He threw the bags in the truck and went back upstairs for Kip’s TV. Shep was whining at Chrissy’s door when he came down the hall, and he balanced the TV against the wall long enough to push the door open and show him she wasn’t there. The curtains were drawn at the windows, and the room was dim in a way it never was. They were always open when Chrissy lived there. The blinds were always up.
He kneed Shepherd back and closed the door.
House on Fire Page 20