by Maria Vale
Thea Villalobos shrugs off her backpack and pulls out a file and a flash drive before settling into the corner of one arm of the chair, her knee propped against the other. I want to see her do it again. I want to see that economy of movement, deliberate and smooth.
“I think you’ll find everything you need here. I didn’t want to waste your time,” she says, “but my uncle felt that a letter from a firm like yours would send a stronger message than something downloaded from LawDepot.”
As I take the manila folder and flash drive, she settles back, almost motionless. Almost but not quite. Her ring finger gently pulses against the upholstered back of the big chair. There is, I think, a restrained sensuality in Thea Villalobos. I feel that long-lost prickling in my thighs, and my Pavlovian part stands up and remembers.
Leaning over my desk and her file allows me to adjust the suddenly awkward side tuck. My mind is only half there as I look over the papers she’s typed up.
Thea Villalobos is an environmental conservation officer living in Buttfuck, New York. Robert Liebling, lunatic, is suing her for springing the body grip traps he’d set on his land but right across the border from the wilderness she patrols. He set them again, and Thea tripped them again. The third time, he took video and decided to sue her for trespass. As she points out, by the time he’d taken the date-stamped video, trapping season was over.
“You’d done it before, though? During trapping season.”
“Maybe.” She watches me eject the flash drive. “But his case against me is based entirely on that video.”
“It would still be useful to know the history.”
She says nothing.
“You do know that everything you say here is privileged?”
“It’s not germane and I don’t think you would understand.”
I follow her unyielding eyes to the two shelves of my bookcase that are empty of books and filled with photographs of me with various high-profile clients. The head of the United American Energy Commission, the board of Northeastern Developers Association, the CEO of Consolidated Information. A line of men, none of whom will ever make it into Us or People or InStyle and must make do, instead, with ruling the world.
“I am not my clients,” I say.
She leans back, pulling an errant strand of hair away from her forehead. When she bends forward again, she sits closer to my desk.
“Have you ever seen an animal in a body grip trap?”
I shake my head. Hunters come during the Iron Moon, but we’ve only had one man set a trap on our land. Marked so heavily with wolf urine, no animal would go near it until the Iron Moon was over, and John had the opposable thumb he needed to trip it. And once she had the words she needed, Josi, the 3rd Echelon’s lawyer, took care of the silly little human.
“They say they’re humane, but they’re not,” she says, fingering the flash drive. “I’ve released animals when I can, but mostly you just have to kill them.
“Liebling claimed he was a trapper, that he needed the money and had the right to trap furbearers on his land. Furbearers. Like they’re nothing but the keratin on their backs. It’d be like reducing everything you were to ‘hair bearer.’” She leans back into the corner of the chair. “See, I knew a man like you would think it was funny.”
“No, not funny. Not funny at all. I agree with you completely. It’s just the part about ‘hair bearer.’ I can think of a few men who would say that was an apt description of me.”
“Bald men?” she asks, a cool half smile hovering around her lips.
“Mostly.”
“Anyway, Liebling claims he’s a trapper, but he doesn’t have a license. I took pictures of the skins he’s taken. They’re shredded and unsellable. It’s just so much pain and waste. So yes, I triggered those traps, and yes, I will do it again.”
I like this woman.
“You don’t like him much, do you?”
“No, he’s a shit.”
It’s one of the things you learn about humans early on. They’re always hedging their bets. Always putting things in the conditional, always making concessions. Leaving their options open.
Thea doesn’t, and it makes me like her more.
I tap the edges of the papers she’s given me, as though to even them up.
“Unfortunately,” I lie, “there are complications you haven’t accounted for here.”
She doesn’t say anything at first. Then she pulls out a pen.
“What kinds of complications?”
“He claims to be a farmer, so he doesn’t need a license to trap on his land.”
“He’s no farmer. I put some stills on the flash drive. Every month for five months during spring and summer of last year when he first brought up this ‘farmer’ idea. He put some plants in old plaster buckets that never got big enough to identify before they died.”
“I really am happy to do this for you, Ms. Villalobos—”
“Thea.”
“Thea. I’m just saying it may take a little longer than we originally thought.”
“And I’m saying I’d rather take care of it myself.”
“It’s all pro bono. Won’t cost you a thing. We owe it to your…to Tony Marks.”
Her ironwood eyes focus on mine. It is all I can do not to look away. “My uncle’s employer’s ex-husband?”
“He’s a big client. Look, you live in Arietta? We have an office in Albany and I have another very important client up near Plattsburgh that I visit…frequently. I could meet you in town and—”
She laughs at that. It’s deep and throaty and untamed, and I have to hear it again.
Everything I knew about Arietta came from a road sign on one of my more meandering drives home for Iron Moon. Turns out that Arietta is 330 square miles with a population of 304. Her physical address is a set of coordinates. Her mailing address is a post office box near Piseco Lake over forty-five minutes away.
But she agrees to meet me at the HST offices in Albany. Next week. I’ll have something drafted for her by then.
She pulls on her coat. Her eyes catch on my photographs again before she tosses her backpack over one shoulder. Then she slides her left hand in her jeans pocket, her anorak caught behind her forearm, and takes my proffered hand with a smooth slide of her palm against mine.
After she goes, I look at my photographs. How is it that I never noticed before? Never noticed that my pose is the same in every one of them: left hand in pocket, jacket on that side behind my forearm, right hand taking that of my powerful client.
Holding my hand to my mouth, I breathe deeply the scent of Ajax and black earth, while from the office window I watch the stretch of sidewalk that gives onto Vesey.
After a few minutes, Thea Villalobos emerges from the building. She bends down to loosen the pant leg from her boots. A little beyond her, the leashed man continues to work on the glass.
In Liebling’s jumpy movie, a woman in jeans, shitkickers, and a cable-knit sweater carries nothing but a long, thick branch. Standing far back, she pokes the thin metal trigger until it snaps. Her makeshift staff snaps on the second one. She picks up another branch and heads for the most distant one, the third.
“Janine? Tell Albany I’m going to need an office next Wednesday.”
Liebling waits for a little and then starts to move, whispering softly that he’s going to the third trap so the GPS on his phone will record that she was still on his land. “And, Janine? Where exactly is the Albany office?”
Then I message Samuel, the investigator I use most often, to stop by as soon as he gets back. Two hours later, I slide him a copy of the video and a piece of paper with Robert Liebling’s name on it. “Find out everything you can about him.”
He pauses, looking at the other side.
“Yes. About her too.”
On sale August 2018!
Acknowledgmen
ts
Acknowledgments seems like such a pale word. A nod of the head. A token. It does not begin to cover my gratitude to the women of Sourcebooks—Susie Benton, Heather Hall, Beth Sochacki, Stefani Sloma, Laura Costello, Dawn Adams—who took such great care and never complained once. Or my utter amazement on finding that my great editor, Deb Werksman, and my magical agent, Heather Jackson, said yes in the first place.
Thank you.
About the Author
Maria Vale is a logophile and a bibliovore and a worrier about the world. Trained as a medievalist, she tries to shoehorn the language of Beowulf into things that don’t really need it. She currently lives in New York with her husband, two sons, and a long line of dead plants. No one will let her have a pet.
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