Good thing I hadn’t eaten the salad; I just needed to remember to take it out of the lounge refrigerator so Tony wouldn’t know I’d doubled up on lunches.
“My impending poverty and I thank you,” I replied as we clinked glasses.
“I’m so excited for you, Fin,” Liv said as she tucked a strand of dark hair behind her ear. “It’s going to be great.”
“And I’m sure your undies will be safer in your new home,” Becky mumbled into her glass.
“I couldn’t believe it when Becky told me what that creep did,” Jane said, visually shivering as punctuation.
As usual, Jane was clad in a tight, lacy bustier, form-fitting skirt, and FM heels. The cherry-red demi sweater covering her shoulders was what took the outfit from pole dancer to proper. Liv was across the table from me. She must have had morning meetings, because she was in a tailored Chanel summer suit in a stunning shade of turquoise that matched her exotic eye color and flawlessly perfect features.
“I was afraid I might miss this,” Liv said. “Apparently some committee at Bethesda-by-the-Sea thought it would be a good idea to paint the interior of the church the week before the Semple-Gilmore wedding. That’s the reason she fired her last wedding planner. He okayed the painting. Terri is frantic. She definitely doesn’t want paint fumes mingling with the twenty thousand roses we’ll be using to decorate the church and the grounds.”
Bethesda-by-the-Sea is the church to be married in. When Donald Trump married his third wife there in 2005, he dropped a few million and wagged a few gossip tongues. The old-money rich don’t like it when the new money shines a spotlight on their private enclaves. The Episcopal church definitely fell under that purview. Built in 1889, which for Florida is seriously historic, the neogothic structure that dominates the intersection of County Road and Barton Avenue was added in 1925 and has served the religious needs of the filthy rich ever since.
Every so often, the church holds events that are open to the public, but they result in impossible parking and long lines.
“Candlelight service?” I asked wistfully.
“Of course,” Liv said. “Terri wants very traditional romance, soft lighting, soft colors and has an almost pathological attention to detail.” Liv frowned. “What she doesn’t want is publicity. I’m still struggling to get her to understand that I can control a lot of things, but paparazzi, celebutante junkies, and telephoto lenses make it virtually impossible for me to keep things low profile.”
Twisting the gold and coral bracelets on her wrist, Becky scoffed. “She’s marrying the hottest gazillionaire in the country. Does she really think the rest of us don’t want a peek at that?”
Glancing around, and then leaning forward and lowering her voice, Liv said, “She’s a little weird. I mean, she’s a big wad of contradictions. She’s demanding and aggressive and, well, loaded with street smarts, but anything in the tabloids or even the legit press makes her nutty. What does she expect? She went from secretary to fiancée of the World’s Most Eligible Billionaire Bachelor. Of course people want to know how a nobody pulled off that Cinderella scenario.”
I waited until the server delivered our lunches and refilled our glasses before asking Liv, “Do you think you could convince her to talk to me? Completely confidential, of course.”
“Sorry, Finley,” Liv said without hesitation. “I don’t want to do anything to jeopardize this job. This is going to catapult Concierge Plus to the next level.”
“Sorry I asked.”
Liv smiled, reached under her chair, and produced an expertly done gift bag, which she passed to me.
“What’s this?” I asked, gently pulling pink tissue from the bag.
“You’re not just a new homeowner,” Becky said. “You’re a coed again.”
They’d bought me pink and lime green pens, pencils, and notebooks. On the bottom of the bag, I found a vintage Nancy Drew thermos. “How sweet.” I looked from face to face. “You all do realize I’m going to the local college and not kindergarten, right?”
“Who cares?” Jane said. “The pink pen with fuzzy ball top lights up.”
“That won’t draw attention to me,” I replied dryly. I had visions of looking like Cher from Clueless, only fifteen years later. “Thank you.”
Liv reached across and patted my hand. “Don’t forget to write your name in marker in all of your sweaters.”
Yanking my hand away, I said, “Thanks for the tip.”
“You know,” Becky began as she settled back in her seat, sipping her second glass of champagne, “the benefit of going back to college at your age is the expansion of the dating pool. At your age, you can choose from both the students and the teachers.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I lied as I checked the time. “Sorry, but I’ve got to get back to the office.”
All three of them looked at me, stunned. Tilting my head to one side, I pressed my lips together for a second. “C’mon, I have to be careful. I can’t afford to give Margaret a reason to let Vain Dane dock my pay.”
Becky grinned. “From what I hear, Tony has your back.”
“When did you start listening to office gossip?”
“When I paid ten bucks to enter the office pool on when you and Tony will hook up. By the way, if you could sleep with him on the twenty-eighth, I’d be beholding.”
BY FIVE O’CLOCK, I was packed up and ready to leave the office. I’d caught up on a complicated trust document, and around 1:30 p.m., the pdf from DCF had finally landed in my inbox. I completed the request, filled in the payment information, and sent it back to Mrs. Podbeilski by 1:37 p.m.
The combination of a champagne lunch and four hours of sleep caught up to me as I dragged myself out to my car. Seeing the gift bag in the backseat mitigated the irritation of knowing I had to swing by my mother’s penthouse on the way home. I had to take pictures and measurements of her plants so I could pass the information on to my replacement supplier, Ricardo. A couple of the plants showed early signs of impending death. Before leaving, I raided my mom’s fridge and went home with a great bottle of chilled Chablis to go with my Tony-supplied chef salad.
Once I was home and had a glass and a half of wine in me, I ate about half the food before calling it a night.
I felt renewed the next morning. Good thing, since, shock of shocks, Mrs. Podbeilski had overnighted me two small boxes of files.
In a matter of minutes, I was greedily pulling neatly labeled file folders from the boxes in my office. Though each file was thick, much of the information had been redacted by thick, black lines. My spirits plummeted before I realized that there were initials and dates on the tabs.
In addition to five names Melinda had given me at lunch, I had another twenty-two sets of initials. Again I felt the weight of defeat, until I started reading the pages and realized DCF didn’t redact pronouns. In a matter of minutes I knew Melinda had fostered seven males and fifteen females long-term and another three dozen overnight emergency placements.
It suddenly dawned on me that it was strange that the state of Florida allowed coed foster care in a relatively small home. I did a quick net search and discovered that single-sex foster homes were preferred but not always available. The state didn’t implement mandatory single-sex foster homes until after 2003. With one mystery solved, I went back to work on the contents of the box.
The third folder I took from the box made my heartbeat skip. C.L. I did a quick search and discovered that there was only one C.L. in the bunch. This had to be the C.L. from the photograph. Before I read C.L.’s file, I hunted down the other names Melinda had identified at lunch just by using their initials. Then I leaned back to flip through the pages on C.L.
There was a photograph clipped to the first page. The boy looked to be twelve or thirteen, Hispanic, but it was the sad, vacant, expressionless black eyes that pulled at my heartstrings. The picture was taken when he entered the foster-care system, but according to the caseworker’s notes, he was fifteen when he went to live at t
he house on Chilian Avenue. Melinda was his seventh foster mother in just over two years. He was living with her when he aged out in 1997. And apparently the state of Florida didn’t keep tabs on former foster children, so I had no idea where C.L. ended up.
I closed the file. Sad as his case was, I wasn’t looking for a male foster child. My skeleton was female.
I stopped to refill my coffee cup and to silently berate myself for thinking in terms of my skeleton. She wasn’t mine, but I was becoming obsessed with uncovering her identity.
It took me all morning and a good hunk of the afternoon to whittle the possibilities down to white females who fit the approximate age range. Not knowing when she’d died was the worst handicap, but there wasn’t a thing I could do about that.
Opening the document I’d started yesterday, I ended up with a list of sixteen potential victims based on the information I culled from the extremely limited records. Other than a child’s initials, birth date, eye color, hair color, weight, and height at the time of intake, I didn’t have much else to use as a filter.
Law firms pay a lot of money for databases, LexisNexis being the major one for research. Plaintiff-Defendant database probably came in second, but my personal fave was the vital statistics database. I was authorized to use it in my estate work so I could order death certificates or birth records or certain Medicaid records, DMV records, and credit checks to hunt for AWOL heirs. I wasn’t technically supposed to use it for my own purposes, however.
Starting with the first set of initials, I discovered an Abby Andrews with the exact birth date as the A.M. I found in the DCF files. A couple more clicks and I knew Abby was married, living in Daytona Beach, Florida, and had given birth to twin sons two months ago. No way was she my skeleton, but that didn’t mean she didn’t know who the skeleton was. I put her file in my “to be interviewed” pile.
E.B. turned out to be Eve Bradley. Her Florida driver’s license had expired in 2000. I moved her file to the opposite side of my desk; she was one I’d have to trace through all fifty states. If that yielded nothing, I’d have to go international.
Carly Branson’s file landed on the floor. She died in a car accident at twenty-two.
J.B. was Jill Burkett. She had dropped off the radar just before aging out of the system. I put her file in the “more follow-up” pile.
Repeating the process, I ended up with three other well-documented deaths, all drug-related; current addresses for five more former foster children and two others whose trails ended when they aged out of state supervision.
It wasn’t until I rolled my head around on my stiff neck that I realized it was five thirty-five. My class started at six. The college was a good half-hour drive away. Son of a bitch.
Grabbing my purse, I scrambled out of the building and pointed my car toward I-95. As I reached the entrance ramp and began to circle up onto the highway, I eased my lead foot off the gas and applied the brakes to compensate for the sharp curve. The pedal went all the way to the floor.
I reached for the emergency brake just as my car jumped the small curb. Suddenly the air bag slammed into my face and my car was spinning like a top before going airborne. I heard the sound of metal scraping pavement, felt a hard thud, then nothing.
They say people who play with fire get burned.
Me? I get incinerated.
twelve
I DON’T THINK I LOST consciousness, but if I did, it couldn’t have been for more than a second. In addition to the suffocating nylon of the deflating front and side air bags, there was a lot of pressure on my hips and chest and left shoulder. It made perfect sense, since I was hanging upside down.
I heard tires screeching to a halt and figured it was probably less dangerous outside the car. Like a cat trying to free itself from a sack, I began to claw at the air bags. Shoving, stuffing, mushing—anything to give myself room to breathe, find the door handle, and bolt.
Now that the immediate danger was over—I hoped—I automatically started to cry. Tears of panic rolled into my hairline, a very strange sensation. The scent of gasoline filling the car’s interior scared the crap out of me.
“Hello?” a man’s voice called.
“I’m here! I’m stuck.”
“Hang in there. I’ve called for help.”
The next person I saw, albeit upside down, was a paramedic, who crawled through the tight metal sandwich on the passenger’s side of the car. Using his elbows, he worked his way in, carrying a brace, a blanket and a banana bag.
“I’m going to snap the collar around your neck,” he explained after introducing himself as Nick Something-or-Other and explaining that the driver’s side of my car was buckled and I might get jostled around a bit while they worked on freeing me from the wreckage. “Take deep breaths,” he instructed, again reaching behind himself. This time, one of those plastic lengths of tubing with the little nostril things was in his hand. “One early indicator for the possibility of going into shock is the body slowing to shallow breathing. I’m going to give you some oxygen—again, just as a precaution, because I don’t want you going into shock. How are you feeling, Lindsey?”
The tube had an awful medicinal/antiseptic/plastic smell. “Finley, not Lindsey.”
“Sorry.”
The blood pressure cuff inflated, tightening again. “I really, really want to get out of here,” I said, unashamedly begging him with my eyes and the pathetic whine in my voice.
Nick smiled. “I want that too, but we have to do it the safe way. You could have a spinal cord injury, and a sudden movement, like me cutting your seat belt and you falling uncushioned to the roof of the car, could result in exacerbating the injury. So what do you—”
The deafening noise of something that sounded like a chain saw roared into my left ear. Nick grabbed my hand and held it as the car rocked and shook to the harmony of metal being peeled off the frame. Unable to help it, my tears began again. I’m sure it wasn’t more than a few minutes, but it felt like days until four firefighters in full gear opened the side of my car like a can of tuna.
Nick was joined by another paramedic in a navy, short-sleeved uniform. Neither one of them looked much older than teenagers, but both men had well-muscled arms and strong, callused hands. And I loved them both for rescuing me.
Somehow, they managed to get me out of the car in an upside-down sitting position. Based on the cool draft I felt high up on my thighs, my skirt wasn’t covering much. Great. Traffic was at a dead standstill, and any number of gawkers were probably filming my girl parts for webcast on YouTube.
I was placed on a stretcher, and the minute I was righted and lying flat, I saw stars and the clouds in the sky swirling and twirling. My instinct was to rub my eyes, but they’d already strapped my hands beneath the blanket covering me as I was wheeled inside a waiting ambulance. In a matter of minutes, I was inside the busy ER at St. Mary’s Hospital on 45th Street. A chipper nurse came in, her shoes squishing on the linoleum floor. Her photo ID was clipped to her scrubs, and a stethoscope decorated with teddy-bear pins hung loosely around her neck. “Hi, I’m Rita,” she greeted me, rolling the tray table to the foot of my gurney and opening a large three-ring binder. She asked me for some information, helped me change into a gown, put my clothing in a bag with my purse, and checked my vitals before finally peeling back the sheet on my left arm.
Then and only then did I notice a blood-soaked piece of gauze taped just above my elbow. “I didn’t even know I was hurt,” I said, limited by the neck brace still clipped in place.
“It’s not bad,” Rita assured me, adding a reassuring smile that went all the way to her blue eyes. “A few stitches, maybe. And a few more on your leg.”
Tossing the blanket aside, I sat up enough to look down at my legs. There was another piece of bloody gauze covering the side of my left knee. “Why doesn’t it hurt?”
“It will eventually,” Rita promised. “They gave you some meds in your IV on the way in. Once they wear off, I’m sure you’ll feel some
discomfort.”
The longest part of the process was waiting for the full-body X-rays, then having the radiologist on call give the okay for the neck brace to be removed. Instead of being taken back to the ER, I was wheeled into the suture room. It was a long, narrow room with a dozen or so areas, with tracts of curtains diving the space. A different nurse who looked more stern than Rita came in a minute or two later. “Can you rate your pain on a scale of one to ten?”
“A one,” I answered. My cuts burned, but as long as no one was poking and prodding my injuries, it wasn’t a big deal.
“Good, because your private physician can’t get here for about another half hour,” she replied.
“You must have me confused with another patient. I don’t have a private physician,” I informed her. On the very rare occasions when I needed an antibiotic or something, I normally went to one of those walk-in places. The only doctor I saw on a regular basis was my gynecologist, and his specialty didn’t extend to arms and legs.
She looked at my chart again. “According to the people in the waiting room, they’ve arranged for a Doctor Adair to come in to do the sutures.”
“What people, and who is Doctor Adair?”
She looked at me as if I’d just asked her to donate a kidney. “He’s one of the best plastic surgeons in South Florida. The arrangements were made by a woman and a man who came in while you were in X-ray. Press the call button if you need anything.”
“Can the people in the waiting room come back and sit with me until the doctor gets here?”
She nodded, and as soon as she left, I scooted down in order to reach the plastic drawstring bag that held my purse. The closest thing I had to a mirror was the small rectangle in my silk lipstick holder. “Ugh,” I groaned, then feverishly began to finger-comb my hair.
“Why am I not surprised that you’re primping,” Becky teased, reaching out and giving my right hand a squeeze. “Thank God you’re all right.”
3 Fat Chance Page 16
