It turned out that Monroe was a very pleasant neighbor when he wasn’t convinced I was out to seduce him against his will.
We still kept our distance. Monroe generally stayed inside, working at his computer, unless there was some pressing reason for him to come out. I was careful not to be the reason he had to come out. But now, instead of glaring at each other from across the yard, we smiled and waved. Monroe wasn’t pressured into socializing, which made him happy. And I was getting fewer dirty looks, which made me happy.
And apparently there were heretofore unknown advantages to Mike being so anal-retentive about money. It had taken him and his lawyer very little time to turn over his financial statements.
Samantha called to say she would be “coming by” to discuss Mike’s financial disclosures. She made it sound like it wasn’t a big deal to drive fifty miles of back roads to visit a client, but I was paying for her time… and mileage. Hmm. I think she wanted to check out my living arrangements and make sure I wasn’t writing “Die, Mike, Die” on the walls.
It felt sort of weird to see her in my natural habitat, because my natural habitat involved me wearing sweatpants, but no makeup, at 3:00 p.m. I was sitting on the porch, reading over my “how my marriage died” statement, when I heard her car pull up.
My big bad divorce attorney had her hair drawn up into a ponytail, her jacket slung over her arm, and was hefting an oversized picnic hamper along with her briefcase. Her sleeveless silk blouse was rumpled and wrinkled. She looked about twelve years old. Her voice was stretched very thin as she said, “Hi.”
“Long day?” I asked, offering her a glass of iced tea, which she downed in a few gulps.
She flopped into the wicker chair across from me. “Do you know what it’s like to spend six hours with two grown adults fighting over custody of Star Wars action figures?”
I shook my head, pouring her another glass. “No, I honestly do not.”
“Well, count your blessings.”
“One by one,” I agreed as she took a manila file out of her briefcase.
“Did you know Mike organizes your credit card statements by year, month, card, and the color of the card?”
Sadly, I didn’t know that, because I never looked at the statements.
She handed me the folder, which seemed sort of scant. “The bad news is that we didn’t find anything illegal or even slightly shady. As advertised, Mike is as dull as a box of mud, but clean as a whistle. The good news is that you don’t have any joint debts that you weren’t aware of. He hasn’t bought a house in another state or mortgaged the one you have without telling you. The interesting news is that you own both of the Hardee’s franchises in town and the Baskin-Robbins. They are turning a handsome profit, by the way.”
“And to think I’ve been paying for my frozen yogurt all these years,” I muttered.
“The iffy news is that there are no suspicious charges on your personal credit cards. No jewelry receipts, no out-of-town restaurants, no hotels. But his lawyer, Bill Bodine, is giving me grief about handing over the cards for the accounting firm, so I’m thinking that’s what he used.”
“You’re probably right,” I told her. “He went on a golf weekend in Destin with some friends a few months back. There should be a charge on one of our personal cards for that. And in February he went to a bachelor party for a college friend. There should be a charge for the restaurant in Nashville, plus a hotel stay. I don’t see anything here. And you’re right, it makes sense that he might consider money spent wooing a staff member a business expense.”
“Nice,” she chuckled. “Just give me a little time. It shouldn’t take too much persuasion to get those statements.”
“Why?”
“Because otherwise, we will reproduce every e-mail Mike ever sent Beebee, blow them up to poster size, and review them in open court. Where Mike’s mother will see them.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “So we’re using the I’m-telling-your-mom! strategy in court?”
She nodded solemnly. “I didn’t go to a fancy law school for nothing.”
“So I finished my version of events.” I said, handing her one hundred and twenty typed pages. “My characterization is not at all balanced. I come out looking naive, but brave.”
Samantha snickered. “Wow. You had a lot to get off your chest.”
“Yep. And I skimped on my ‘vengeance’ period.”
She read over the front page and grinned. “Well, keep going. If nothing else, it’s good therapy. And it’s evidence of your frame of mind. Oh, yeah, any idea why a Maya Drake has been calling me, begging me to ‘give you the encouragement you need’ but refusing to tell me what that means?”
“Because she’s resourceful and incredibly creepy,” I told her. “She wants me to go into business with her … in a way that would not make you happy.”
“You should stop there, so I have plausible deniability,” she said, holding up her hand in a Diana Ross-ish gesture.
“Agreed.”
Samantha lifted the picnic hamper with a grunt. “Also, this is from your mother.”
“My mama sent me a care package through my divorce attorney. I’m going to have to hand you my grown-up card when you leave.” I opened the hamper to find carefully wrapped parcels of fudge, banana bread, cookies, divinity, hummingbird cake, molasses cookies, and a cheesecake. “Apparently Mama wants me to emerge from this divorce weighing four hundred pounds. Want some fudge?”
“No, but I’ll take a brownie,” she said. I tossed her a Saran-wrapped lump of chocolate-frosted future cellulite. “Don’t worry, my mother expresses emotions exclusively through carbs. It’s why I was the only freshman on my floor to drop fifteen pounds as soon as I moved away from home.”
“So how goes the lawsuit?” I asked.
“Well, through some fairly impressive legal maneuvering, if you don’t mind my saying so, the lawsuit has been postponed until we’re finished with the divorce case,” she said.
“You subpoenaed her thigh, didn’t you?” I asked, grinning, feeling suddenly superior in my legal knowledge.
“No, but I convinced a judge that it would be a waste of the court’s valuable time to pursue a libel lawsuit if we could prove in the course of the divorce case that Mike did, in fact, have an affair with Beebee. The judge prefers fishing to presiding over the court, so it wasn’t a hard sell.”
“Using a man’s laziness against him; that is impressive,” I admitted.
“It’s a gift,” she said. “Now we just have to find the documentation proving Mike had an affair with Beebee, but that’s nothing to worry about. So how is life in exile? Do you need anything?”
I shook my head. “I’m doing pretty well. I’m enjoying the writing. I’m learning to appreciate slasher films. My neighbor doesn’t seem to hate me anymore. Apparently, the way to get a man to stop sneering at you is to follow a gay man’s advice.”
She chewed thoughtfully. “There’s background here that I am unaware of, isn’t there?”
******
It was 3:00 a.m. and I was just nodding off when the storm struck. I started awake as thunder rumbled right overhead. The cabin was dark. The clock face was blank and the air conditioner was stonily silent. I jumped as another bolt of lightning shook my walls. My heart hammered in my chest. Still bleary, I crawled out of bed and checked the backyard.
It was normal for a sudden squall to kick up over the lake in late summer, though that didn’t make it any less startling to be jolted awake by atmospheric conditions. When I was a kid, Gammy would take advantage of the spooky atmosphere by lighting candles and telling me ghost stories. Ghost stories that would scare me so much I forgot how badly the storm scared me.
Clearly, this was where Emmett got his dark streak.
I stumbled to the window. The glass was so distorted by raindrops that the world outside looked like a dark, impressionist painting. Sheets of rain were falling over the lake. Windblown tree branches batted violently against each other. I was caught between conflicting emotions: the rising anxiety in my chest and the strange urge to go outside and feel the wind and the rain on my face. Where the old Lacey would have gone running for candles and a weather radio, some perverse little pocket of my post-Beebee soul was fascinated by the potential for destruction. The storm was a living thing, angry and hungry, rippling with unrestrained power.
