Blood Ties

by Sigmund Brouwer

  “Help me? Or you?” he asked. A mixture of rage, frustration, and searing pain filled him. He wanted to lash out. With words. With his fists. Instead, he gripped the steering wheel with both hands and stared unblinking through the windshield.

  “I’ve got an apartment in Kalispell,” she said.

  “You’ve been planning this. Did you have a checklist? One through ten. Number nine was get the apartment. Number ten was finally let the husband know.”

  “I’m not responding to that. There’s no sense throwing mud at each other. I’ll get you my phone number as soon as it’s installed, Until then, you have my cell-phone number.” She paused, emphasizing her next words. “For any emergency.”

  Clay took some deep breaths to steady himself. “And what about Taylor?”

  “I’m assuming you’ll keep him. We both know why.”

  No words were needed, Clay thought. It was true. They both knew why. “He’ll miss you,” Clay said.

  “I doubt it,” she said.

  “I’ll miss you.”

  “Don’t. I won’t be back.”

  Taylor was banging on the door on Clay’s side of the Jeep.

  “Will you tell me why?” he asked. He wasn’t going to beg, but he deserved more than what she was giving him. “I know it hasn’t been good for a while, but –”

  “It’s nothing you did or could change. This is not about you.”

  “Another man?” There was the bruise on her right arm, one that she’d tried to hide. He’d wondered if it came from another man, someone who had gripped her in the heat of excitement.

  “No.” He noticed she hesitated slightly.

  “Of course not,” he said. The pause was like a sword piercing his heart. He couldn’t hold back his bitterness. “Of course not. You’re the perfect mother. The perfect wife. The perfect lawyer. The perfect churchgoer. Adultery wouldn’t fit your image.”

  “I’m going,” she said, “before this gets ugly. Please don’t try to stop me.”

  “Go,” he said, wanting to stop her.

  As she got out of the Jeep on the passenger side, Clay opened his door and let Taylor climb onto his lap.

  Clay watched Kelsie’s near-perfect outline of shoulders, back, and hips as she marched to the porch. He ached to hold her again, to have her bury her head in his neck and drape her arms over his shoulders.

  “Hey, cowboy,” he said to his son.

  “Cowboy, me,” Taylor said, jabbing a proud thumb at his own chest.

  “Cowboy, you.” Despite his churning guts, Clay smiled at his son. “What do you say, cowboy? Picnic this afternoon? You and me and Louie Two?”

  “Picnic, me,” Taylor said, nodding fierce agreement.

  The smile that was on Taylor’s face most of his waking moments never appeared, however. Instead, there was a look of perplexed wonderment. With both stubby hands, he reached up and touched the shine of tears on his father’s face.

  Day 2

  12:05 p.m.

  As if Kelsie needed another reminder of her situation, when she dug into her shoulder bag for her car keys on Monday before leaving her office for lunch, she found the warning note that had been placed in her glove compartment with the snake the previous Thursday.

  Don’t cry, she told herself, survive. Tears won’t help. The important thing is to survive.

  She moved across her office. She took down the musical dancer jewelry box from a bookshelf, her hands trembling as she remembered the flashing triangular head and the unexpected suddenness of the snake’s attack. She hid the note along with all the others in the false bottom of the box. The irony had long since been lost on her, that where once she had stored all the precious mementos of her childhood dreams, now she kept the notes that had destroyed those dreams.

  Instead of going to a nearby restaurant for a salad that she knew she'd only pick through, Kelsie left McNeill, McNeill & Madigan and drove aimlessly for most of the lunch hour, trying not to think.

  She wasn’t remotely successful. The memory of Clay’s stoic pain filled her with sadness. The growing legal quagmire on her desk remained to pull her into its depths. And always, underneath all her

  thoughts, fear festered.

  Totally unrefreshed, she drove into the parking lot behind the two-story office building owned by McNeill, McNeill & Madigan. She turned off the ignition and leaned her forearms on her steering wheel then rested her forehead against her arms.

  When she opened her eyes, she nearly gasped.

  “Pretty,” Lawson McNeill said. He’d arrived noiselessly and without casting a shadow upon her. He stood at the passenger side of the BMW, looking down into the roofless car. “Very pretty. Even in the harsh glare of midday sunlight.”

  “That’s shallow and sexist and patronizing.” She grinned and spoke with a light-hearted tone, hoping he hadn’t noticed her startled reaction. “You’ve implied I’m aging to the point that daylight may be considered an enemy. And you’ve implied my physical appearance has importance in this situation. Judge me by my merits, Lawson.”

  “You are woman. Hear you roar?”

  “Jerk.”

  “So talk to one of the partners if you’ve got a complaint about me.” Lawson crinkled a grin. He was the second McNeill of McNeill, McNeill & Madigan. Since Earl Madigan’s death from a heart attack two years earlier, they were the two full partners, overseeing three junior partners, two legal secretaries, and a good percentage of the legal revenue generated by the longtime residents of Kalispell as well as the tanned, famous, and rich Californians who were making the area their new, trendy mecca.

  “I will talk to the partner. Next office meeting,” Kelsie promised. She hoped banter would drag her from her dark mood. “Expect a memo.”

  “Sure. I’ll sign myself up for sensitivity training.” Lawson was still grinning, a handsome, blond, middle-aged man, sure of himself and his expertly knotted ties and thousand-dollar suits. Over the years, of course, Lawson hadn’t lost his height nor a rangy grace in his manner of walking. He was slightly balding now, with a trace of a paunch, but in courting games he offset these minor afflictions with tortoise-shell glasses for the intellectual look and with a hefty monthly draw against the firm’s ample profits. From his nearly awkward teenage years, Lawson had become extremely confident around women. Kelsie sometimes wondered if he made conquest after conquest to offset those shy teenage years. While the local women knew his habits, many didn’t mind the gamble anyway, and there were always new California women to take interest in a chance at permanent domestic bliss with Lawson and his paychecks. Kelsie was often tempted to warn these hopeful candidates but had long ago decided it was as much caveat emptor as none of her business. If a woman couldn’t see this one as Peter Pan in the first place, any warning would fall on deaf ears.

  “Hey,” Lawson said, “while I'm at it, I’ll talk James into signing up for sensitivity training with me. We’ll crash-course ourselves into becoming men of the nineties.”

  The thought of her sixty-seven-year-old father as a caring, nurturing “New-Age” man brought forth Kelsie’s first real snort of laughter of the day. "Sure, Lawson. I’m visiting him tomorrow. I’ll ask him for you.”

  She sobered at her own words. There were two reasons she needed to visit her dad. Neither was pleasant.

  “Anything wrong?” Lawson asked.

  Kelsie stepped out of her car before replying. “If you want to know, it’s Emerald Canyon. Dad’s name has come up.”

  Lawson held up his hands, palms outward, warding Kelsie off, although she was on the opposite side of the car from him. “I don’t want to hear about Emerald Canyon. I have two rules about my legal work: no complications and profitable billing.” He shrugged. “From what I can gather, Emerald Canyon breaks both rules. Right?”

  Her turn to shrug. “This one’s never been for the money – although money seems more possible now.”

  “My point exactly. That’s why I don’t want any details. Especially if you have a run-
in with the old man. I’m on my way out to the ranch for an appointment with Clay. He’s grouchy enough about agency-land regulations.”

  Kelsie hoped her outward smile hid an inward tightening. The ranch, she thought, where she did not live anymore. “Dad should hear about Emerald Canyon from me first. Not a stranger.”

  “You’re a brave woman,” Lawson said. He leaned against the top edge of the passenger window and stared across the car. “If it was politically correct, I’d pat your hand or your shoulder.”

  “Salute,” she said. “That would be more appropriate. Remember my reputation as the ice queen.”

  Without warning, she felt tears fill her eyes. She was an ice queen in an old furnished condo that smelled of years of cats. Her last memory of the ranch was Taylor clinging to Clay at the porch, Clay with bewilderment and pain in his eyes. Ice queen indeed.

  “Kelsie?” Lawson began to walk around the front of the car to reach her.

  “Don’t ask,” she said. Lawson would eventually find out about her separation from Clay, but she didn’t have the strength to tell him now. “Don’t ask, all right? This is not a good time for me.”

  Kelsie marched to the office without looking backward.

  * * *

  Kelsie faced the computer on her desk with her office door closed, much as she had done for most of the morning. She told herself that self-pity would not help. She told herself that, in work, at least, she had control over events, and at this point any control would be a blessing. She told herself this might be the biggest case of her career, that she shouldn’t let her emotional turmoil distract her.

  After a half-hour with her eyes blank, she reached for the power switch on the computer. It felt like another person’s body responding. She rubbed her face as she waited for the programs to load.

  To her left, a clipboard was attached to a swivel arm. It would let her transcribe directly from the report on the clipboard to the computer. Normally she’d have one of the secretaries do the input typing, but the report, if true, was too important for office gossip. Typing also gave her an excuse to concentrate on anything but her lonely apartment and how she would manage to spend the first evening there.

  She found the file she had been working on before the weekend, opened it, and scanned through the words on the screen to see if she wanted to make any changes to the draft following the preamble:

  ...this suit contends that the defendant’s policy of approving zoning, building permits, and building inspections of the homes and businesses on shrink-swell soil and in violation of building code requirements, constitutes a “taking” of plaintiffs’ property without just compensation in violation of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution.

  This suit further contends that in April of 1974, the County Planning Department voted approval of development based on soil samples taken from the perimeter of the land in question, instead of requesting a complete survey of the land.

  Moreover, this suit contends that members of the County Planning Department, County Administrator, Building Officials, and corporations involved with Emerald Canyon will be held liable for the negligence involved by voting said approval.

  Not only had this draft taken her triple the time she’d normally expect, she was capable of better and knew it. Given her emotional stress, Kelsie thought, she should be on a leave of absence. But the timing couldn’t be worse for this particular lawsuit. Things were falling into place, and it was beginning to appear the suit had some merit. Besides, leaving work wouldn’t help solve her problems. And she had problems to solve for others.

  Emerald Canyon was a huge golf-course real-estate development. It had been a forerunner of a new development trend that in retrospect was obvious. Developers were no longer building golf courses for the sake of golf but for the astronomical prices buyers were willing to pay for a residential lot adjoining the golf course. Over the previous ten years, developers all across the country had used the tactic with overwhelming success.

  Emerald Canyon, however, had begun twenty years earlier. Its success had been guaranteed by something few other developers could offer – a world-class resort as a neighbor, the Big Sky Casino, located on the edge of. the Flathead reservation.

  Like many other Native American tribes across the country, the Flathead tribe had turned to legalized gambling as a way to earn income. As spectacular as any Las Vegas resort – the project had been overseen by architectural and management consultants from the neon city – Big Sky Casino was in a perfect location, in a valley designed for winter and summer tourism.

  The developers of the Emerald Canyon golf and retirement village had been shrewd enough to foresee Big Sky as a tourist mecca. On property adjoining the Flathead reservation boundaries, they had built two eighteen-hole golf courses to world-class specifications. Because of their foresight, they’d been able to obtain huge tracts of land at low prices. Not only had they been able to sell golf-course lots at a premium, but they’d also been able to sell hundreds of homes on the land that merely gave a view of Flathead Lake.

  Many of these homes had been sold as retirement villas. Many of these owners were now relying on Kelsie and the report in front of her.

  It was from an engineering firm in Great Falls, which she had received from the early-morning courier. Her lack of reaction to the report was further proof that her emotional stress was draining her professionally. At any other time, the gist of the report would have filled her with urgency and excitement. Any other time, she would have reacted immediately instead of letting the report sit on her desk all morning. Any other time...

  She blinked herself back to the report, aware with chagrin that her lack of concentration was brutal. Kelsie began to transcribe directly from the engineer’s report, inserting the significant part of the report into the middle section of her lawsuit.

  Based on recent core samples of soil taken throughout the entire development area, an outside engineering firm has confirmed that: “Substantial limitations to development stem from adverse soil conditions and pollutants... It is therefore imperative that design and construction criteria for development specifically deal with the site limitations dictated by the possibility of unstable foundations resulting from shrink-swell soil problems, and the final recommendation is that no development should be undertaken until pollutants are removed from the soil.”

  Kelsie scanned through the addition a few times, looking for typos. Content it was satisfactory, she glanced through the rest of the lawsuit until she carne to the conclusion.

  In short, the shrink-swell soil problem came to light in 1993 as residents came to the County Board, one by one, with damage complaints. All complaints were ignored.

  By 1996, nearly 200 homes were found to have damage related to soils and shoddy construction. Over thirty residents have shown medical problems related to the major pollutant reported in the soil.

  The plaintiffs are each seeking $1 million in compensatory damages, as well as a $25 million pool for punitive damages, with liability for compensatory damages to be shared by members of the County Planning Department, County Administrator, Building Officials, and Corporations involved with Emerald Canyon.

  It was the last line that bothered Kelsie the most. Corporations involved with Emerald Canyon. Would there come a point, she wondered, where she might be forced into a position of conflict of interest? And if so, what choice would she make?

  2:12 p.m.

  Taylor McNeill-Garner sat cross-legged in a shaft of sunlight inside the large patio doors of the walkout basement. Beyond the doors were acres of pine trees, and through a gap in the pine trees was a glimpse of the lake, and beyond the lake a view of the abrupt blue walls of the Swan Mountains.

  Taylor, however, gave the mountains no thought. He preferred the pretty way in which tiny pieces of dust seemed to dance in the shaft of sunlight. Once in a while, he tried to bite one of the tiny pieces. This would make him giggle.

  From above, he heard the low
hum of angry words. It broke his happy mood. Taylor McNeill-Garner lifted his head and frowned. He forgot about the pieces of light. He forgot about the teddy bear in his lap. He forgot about the music-maker in his bark pocket. Anger distracted him, bothered him. And it bothered him most when anger came from his father or mother.

  He couldn’t understand the words coming down from the closed door at the top of the stairs. Taylor wasn’t good with words, but he was good with feelings.

  His feelings told him his daddy was angry. He spoke in a low, hard voice when he was angry.

  Taylor smiled as a nice picture filled his head. He would go up the stairs and wrap his arms around his daddy’s legs. That would make him feel better. Taylor unbent himself by pulling his ankles out from under his crossed legs. When he stood, he felt the teddy bear fall. Falling wasn’t good. He knew that. It hurt. He picked up the teddy bear and kissed it on the forehead, just like sometimes his father kissed away hurts from his own falls.

  Taylor made it to the bottom of the stairs. Far up, he could see the door. He would have to be careful. He didn’t like to fall.

  Then Taylor heard scratching on the patio door behind him. He teetered on the first step as he turned to the new distraction. It was Louie Two, the golden Lab, pawing to get in. Taylor grinned. Many times, Louie Two licked Taylor’s face and made him laugh.

  For a moment, he hesitated. His daddy was angry. Taylor wanted to hug him and give him warm feelings to take away the anger, but he also wanted to play with Louie Two.

  Louie Two was closer.

  Taylor reversed direction. Almost at the patio doors, he remembered. Louie Two was outside. Taylor slowed. He remembered these doors bumped his nose if he walked too fast. It had happened before. Other times, when he put his hand against them, they were cool to his touch. When he pushed against them, they didn’t let him through. This was funny, because Taylor could see things on the outside, but not get to them.