House on Fire (ARC)

by Bonnie Kistler

  When her door nonetheless swung open again an hour later, she turned around with her eyes flashing and a rebuke on her tongue.

  “Hold your fire!” Shelby cried, throwing her arms in the air. “I’m on your side!”

  Leigh wasn’t sure that was true anymore, but she got up with a shaky laugh and embraced her anyway. Shelby was wearing a sleeveless jumpsuit in marigold yellow. Leigh could never get away with wearing something like that, not in this firm and not with her untoned arms and pasty white skin either. On Shelby it looked fabulous. “How’d you know I was back?”

  “Are you kidding? The drums are beating all over the city. Husbands, hide your assets. Leigh Huyett is back!”

  An old joke, but Leigh managed a laugh.

  Shelby held her back at arm’s length. “I made a reservation at Ebbitt’s, but now I think we better go to Medium Rare instead. You need some red meat, darling.”

  The idea was nauseating. Strolling into a fine restaurant, shaking out her napkin, and pretending to peruse the menu while the hubbub of other voices built to a loud buzz inside her head. “Oh, thanks, but I can’t. Really. I have so much—” Leigh waved an arm at her desktop.

  “I thought you might say that.” Shelby leaned into the corridor. “Polly, go ahead and bring that in, would you, hon?”

  Polly entered a moment later with takeout bags, and Shelby handed one to Leigh. Inside was a turkey club sandwich.

  Leigh smiled. “You remembered.”

  “Of course.”

  This was her standard lunch fare back in their days at Penn. They ate together nearly every day in law school, discussing their future careers and their present boyfriends in identical tones of what-if speculation. Their career paths had diverged wildly since then, and Shelby had had about a hundred boyfriends while Leigh had two husbands and five children. By the time they were ten years out of school, they had nothing in common anymore. But they never grew apart. At least not until one of those children died.

  Shelby reclined in one of the two client chairs in front of the desk. Her own lunch was a small tray of sushi, which she picked up with delicate pinches of her chopsticks. “I’m sorry about you and Pete,” she said.

  Leigh’s sandwich froze an inch from her mouth. He told her. She didn’t think he would. She thought their split would be as secret and shameful and inexplicable to him as it was to her. But she supposed he had to tell her. Don’t send your bills to the house. I’m not living there anymore.

  “And I’m sorry, too, that I couldn’t talk to you about the case. But you know the rules as well as I do. I can’t reveal any information relating to my representation of a client.”

  A rule lawyers routinely violated with every war story told at every cocktail party. Leigh put the sandwich down. “Is there anything you can tell me?”

  “Such as?”

  “Is there a plea offer on the table?”

  “Not yet.”

  “It’s going to be the minimum, suspended, plus fine and community service, right?”

  “Hopefully.”

  “Then why won’t he put an end to this? Why won’t he tell the truth?”

  The deltoids rippled on the caps of Shelby’s shoulders as she shrugged. “Maybe he is.”

  “Come on.”

  She tweezered up another sushi roll and popped it in her mouth.

  “I can’t believe you’re wasting your time on it. Not to mention Peter’s money.”

  There was a trick with Shelby’s eyes that Leigh had witnessed dozens of times over the last twenty-five years. The irises turned from green to citrine when her blood was up. The warning lights were flashing now. “Here’s something I can tell you,” she said, putting down her chopsticks. “When this file hit the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office, the intake attorney, Andrea Briggs, made a nolle prosequi recommendation and sent it to her boss to rubber-stamp. You remember her boss. Commonwealth’s Attorney Boyd Harrison. He gave it his usual cursory review until one name jumped out at him from the hospital records. Leigh Huyett. As soon as he saw that, he stamped a big veto all over the nolle pros memo.”

  Leigh stared at her. “You can’t possibly know that.”

  “I got it straight from Andrea’s mouth. The only question Harrison asked: Is this the same Leigh Huyett who’s the divorce lawyer?”

  “Why—why would he do that?”

  “He wants to destroy your family the same way you destroyed his.”

  “I didn’t—! What are you saying? This is all my fault?”

  “I’m saying the man holds a grudge. And Kip’s paying the price for it.”

  “He’s paying the price for his own— He brought this on himself!”

  “Sure, and he would have gotten a slap on the wrist for it. If you weren’t his stepmother.”

  It was the second time in two days that Leigh could hear the unspoken wicked in there. “Is that what you told Peter? Is that why—? How dare—!”

  She cut herself off before she said something worse, but it was already too late. Shelby pursed her lips and slid the rest of her sushi back in the bag. “I can see this was a mistake.” She rose to her full height and strode to the door.

  Leigh got up, too. “No, Shelby, wait—”

  The intercom buzzed. “Mr. Stoddard’s here,” Polly announced over the speaker. “He’s waiting in the Steadman Room.”

  “There’s my cue,” Shelby said, as if she weren’t already out the door, and then she was. Leigh stood alone, staring at the after-flash of marigold-yellow as it blinked and disappeared.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The Steadman conference room was one flight up and on the other side of the building. By the time Leigh arrived, it was empty. Apparently John Stoddard couldn’t be kept waiting ten minutes even when custody of his child was at stake. Just as well, she thought. It saved her the trouble of getting rid of him.

  She turned to leave as a voice sounded from somewhere inside the room. “Negative. Negative,” it said. “Not until we have eyes on. No visual, no go. Confirm.”

  She edged back inside. No one was seated in any of the dozen chairs around the long conference table, and no one was standing at the window to admire the view either. The speakerphone sat on the center of the table, but the light was off, so that wasn’t the source of the voice. Slowly she circled the table and lurched to a stop. On the rug between the table and the credenza lay a man’s rigid body.

  “Roger that. Stand by.” The body levitated a foot off the floor, then lowered back down, then up again in effortless rhythm.

  It was a man doing push-ups as he carried on a conversation into a Bluetooth mic. Leigh let out her breath in a puff of relief. At the sound, his head came up and his elbows locked. “Stoddard out,” he said.

  He got to his feet. Not with a hop or a haul, but in a smooth rise from horizontal to vertical. Probably six foot four of vertical. He pushed a button on what looked like dog tags around his neck, and the light on his earpiece went out. “Mrs. Huyett. I’m John Stoddard.”

  She looked up at him as his big hand enveloped hers. He had a plain square face with close-cropped brown hair, and he wore a green Polo shirt that, despite the push-ups, was neatly tucked into dress slacks. The shirt was a size too small, chosen deliberately, she thought, to show off a hard, muscular torso.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” he said with a finger-point at the earpiece. “I’m running ops on a security detail today.”

  “This needn’t last long.” Leigh tossed her legal pad on the table. “I can summarize in five minutes the unlikelihood of your ex-wife losing custody.”

  His lips curled in a humorless smile. “She already lost custody,” he said. “On account of being—you know—dead.”

  Her face froze in horror. “Oh. I’m sorry. I must have misunderstood the situation. Who is it then who now has custody of your child?”

>   “His father.”

  “I’m sorry?” she said again, then “Oh!” It never would have occurred to her that this combat-ready man would present that kind of domestic situation. Her biases were showing, and she hurried to hide them. “Oh. I see.” And suddenly her interest was piqued. The most cutting-edge issues in family law were coming out of same-sex marriage. She ought to at least hear him out. “Please. Have a seat.”

  His humorless smile stretched to a grin. “I’m not gay.”

  She frowned. Was this some kind of game? “Then I’m afraid I don’t understand. He’s the father of your child?”

  “That’s what they tell me. That in the eyes of the law, he’s the boy’s father. It’s my blood in his veins, but he’s his legal father. I tried to live with that while Heather was alive, but with her gone, it can’t be right anymore. I need to know if it’s true.”

  “Ohh.” Finally she understood. “Your parental rights were terminated?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Maybe if you started at the beginning, Mr. Stoddard.”

  “John.” He pulled out her chair with a surprising courtliness and sat down beside her to tell his story.

  When he was twenty, a buck private in the army on the eve of his first deployment, his girlfriend Heather announced she was pregnant. They had a hurry-up wedding, and six months later, when he was in Fallujah, he got the news that Bryce had been born. He came home on leave as soon as he could and every chance he could get after that, but it was never enough, not while he did another tour in Iraq plus two in Afghanistan. Heather was miserable with the life of an army wife, and they divorced when Bryce was six. John was recruited into Delta Force soon after, and didn’t make it home much at all for the next few years.

  Leigh reached for her legal pad and started to take notes.

  Two years ago Heather contacted him to announce she was getting married. She wanted him to sign a termination of parental rights so her new husband could adopt Bryce. She wanted to start fresh, she said. She wanted to make a real family. He was about to embark on a new mission deep in-country—there was a decent chance he wouldn’t come out alive. So he consented. The papers were filed and a guy named Bill Gunder became Bryce’s legal father.

  Late last year Heather was killed in a car accident. John was two weeks away from re-upping when the news reached him. He mustered out instead and got an apartment close to where Bryce was living with Gunder in Bethesda. But Gunder wouldn’t let him see the boy. He was his father now, he said. John was the guy who gave up his parental rights and stopped paying child support. He had no more right to see Bryce than a stranger would.

  “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 suddenl
y 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.