“What d’you weigh?” Nobbin eyeballed. “One-forty, fifty?”
Kip flushed. He hadn’t filled out yet, and he was self-conscious about it. “About that.”
“Still. Oughta take more than two beers to register point-oh-five-five.”
He shrugged. “So the lab made a mistake.”
Shelby said, “We’ll look into that,” but Pete could tell from the glance she exchanged with her investigator that there was no realistic hope of beating the machine.
Nobbin homed in on the roadside witness next, and Kip repeated what he had said last night. A man stopped to ask if they were all right and drove on when Kip answered that they were. He remembered that he was dressed all in black except for that patch of white at his collar, which made him think he was a priest.
“Age?”
“I don’t know. Middle?”
“Tall, short, skinny, fat?”
“Tall, I think. Not fat.”
“His hair. Was it dark or light, long or short?”
Kip looked by turns helpless and pissed off at Nobbin’s interrogation. “I don’t know. I mean, it was dark and I only saw him for a second. I was more focused on getting the truck out of there, you know?”
Pete felt by turns frustrated and reassured by Kip’s response. If he were lying about the witness, surely he’d do better than this?
Nobbin moved on. He opened a folder stuffed full of photos of what looked like every make and model of big, four-door vehicles available across the country. “Thumb through these,” he said, “and pick out whatever looks like what the priest was driving.”
“I’m not really a car guy,” Kip said with a hangdog glance at his father. Pete would have been able to identify the make of every vehicle in the folder and come pretty close on the model year and equipment package, too. But Kip didn’t get that gene. Anything between a Volkswagen and a Cadillac Escalade was the same generic car to him, and after only a few minutes he gave up looking.
“It’s only a four- or five-mile stretch of road,” Pete said. “There can’t be more than a hundred cars traveling it a day and practically none at night. This priest has to be somebody who lives on Hollow Road or was visiting somebody who lives there. Can’t we just put a notice in the local paper or something?”
“We’re doing that,” Shelby said. “And Frank and his team are going to do door-to-doors at every house along that road.”
“Hey, I can do that. I’m there every day.”
“No.” Shelby and Frank said it nearly in unison and with a surprising forcefulness. “You mustn’t talk to any potential witness,” she said. “It could taint their testimony.”
“What, like I’m gonna bribe somebody or something?”
“Avoid the appearance. It’s best practice. Meanwhile.” She turned to the other man in the room. “Elliott?”
He was a young guy wearing glasses and a skinny tie who handled social media for the firm’s marketing department and occasionally provided investigative services, too. He’d already launched a search for the priest on three different internet platforms. First he set up a Facebook page with photos of the truck and the scene of the accident along with photos of Chrissy and Kip, and put out a call for anyone who witnessed the event to contact Shelby Randolph. He told Kip to share the page and get all his friends and family to share it, too. He also created a few different Twitter hashtags and sent out tweets every twelve hours with the same call, and he posted the same photos on Instagram. Some of Chrissy’s classmates had already created a Facebook page in her honor, and he basically hijacked it and posted the photos there, too, along with an emotional plea for the witness to honor Chrissy’s memory by coming forward and reporting what he saw. Kip should share and retweet all of it, Elliott said, and Pete and Leigh should signal-boost, too.
Pete nodded and made a note to ask Kip later what that meant.
Back to Frank Nobbin. It was likely that the priest had a church in the vicinity, he said. He’d run them all down and get photos of every clergyman and put together an array. He’d shoot the file to Kip in a day or two, and he should study each photo and see if he could pick out the witness he saw on the road that night.
That was it. Meeting over.
St. Alban High School was a flat-roofed sprawl of brick buildings surrounded by the bright green turf of five different playing fields. Pete parked in front of the main lobby entrance and went in with Kip to tender his excuse to the attendance office. But before he could get away, the principal tapped on the glass partition and beckoned for them to come in his office.
“Uh.” Kip shifted from foot to foot. “I got physics.”
“Go on,” Pete said. “I’ll take this. Hey,” he added as Kip started down the hall. “You’ll catch a ride home?”
“Yeah, with Brad. Like always.”
Pete pushed through the door of the administrative suite as the elderly secretary rose from behind her desk. “Oh, Pete.” She held her hands out to him. “We’re all so sorry for your loss. What a terrible tragedy.”
“Thank you, Patty. I appreciate it.” That he was on a first-name basis with the principal’s secretary was testament to the fact that he’d been summoned there way too often. Mostly for disciplinary infractions of the backfired prank variety, but Kip had been caught cutting classes, too, and the only thing that saved him from more serious penalties was that he was acing all those classes.
“Please give my condolences to Leigh.”
“I will. Thank you.”
The principal was waiting at his office door to usher him inside. He had a florid face and a belly that oozed over his belt like soft-serve ice cream over the rim of the cone. Dr. Dairy Queen, Kip called him. Pete hoped there wasn’t a gay slur buried in the nickname.
“Mr. Conley.”
“Dr. Fulton.” No first-name basis in here.
Another round of condolences followed before the principal got down to business. He’d read about Kip’s arrest in yesterday’s newspaper and wanted a status update on the proceedings.
“Sorry,” Pete said. “Our lawyer said not to discuss the case with anyone.”
“Oh, of course. But you can understand that not only are we concerned for Christopher, but we also need to plan for certain eventualities.”
Pete didn’t understand at all. “What eventualities?”
“Well, for one thing, Christopher’s on track to finish second in his class, which would ordinarily make him salutatorian at commencement. But under the circumstances.”
For one surprised second Pete let himself bask. His son, going to Duke and speaking at his graduation. Who would have guessed the Conleys could come this far? Except they hadn’t, yet. “I don’t understand,” he said. “If he earned it.”
“Oh, of course, but we have to consider the reception he might receive. We wouldn’t want him to be made to feel uncomfortable. With these charges hanging over him.”
Pete tried to picture it. A stadium full of friends and family falling suddenly silent as Kip took the lectern. Probably waiting for him to deliver some kind of cautionary tale—Don’t drink and drive, kids; look what happened to me—like the man with no jaw who came around once a year to talk to them about the dangers of smoking. Except that Kip wasn’t drunk and maybe he wasn’t even driving. “We expect the charges to be dismissed long before graduation,” Pete said. “He has a complete defense.”
“Oh?” Dr. Fulton raised an eyebrow.
“He wasn’t the one driving,” Pete heard himself say. He wasn’t sure where that came from. He wanted to believe it, and now it looked like he’d gone and committed himself to it.
“Well.” The principal’s belly shifted as he settled back in surprise. “That would change things, wouldn’t it? In that case suppose we table this for a few weeks?”
“Yeah.” Pete got up to go. “Let’s do that.”
His phone rang as he headed for his truck. It was Kip, speaking in a whisper that told Pete he was probably ducking under his desk to make th
e call. “Can you pick me up after school?”
“What happened to your ride with Brad?”
“Fell through. Can you pick me up at three?”
It was already close to noon. Pete needed to get some work done before the entire day was gone. He swung into the cab and started the engine. “Sorry, champ. You’ll have to take the bus.”
Kip groaned, as if he couldn’t imagine a worse fate. A kid who’d already spent a night in adult jail.
“Suck it up,” Pete said and backed out of the lot.
Chapter Eleven
Peter was gone by the time Leigh woke that morning—Kip, too—and the house was eerily quiet. She couldn’t remember a time when she was ever in the house alone. When the kids were at school, she was at work, and when they were out playing sports or performing in musicals or competing in horse shows, she was there with them, cheering them on. When they were at home, they were all together. It was why the house had always felt too small and why she’d agreed to Ted’s elaborate expansion plans—because it was always bursting at the seams with the children and their friends galloping up and down the stairs and slamming in and out of doors. It was a house full of music and laughter and TVs blaring. Now, though, it seemed vast and empty. And quiet. As quiet as a tomb.
Even Shepherd was quiet when he jumped down from the window seat in the kitchen and wagged a greeting. “At least you’re still here,” she said, but he’d already had his breakfast and wanted only to go outside.
She let him out and wandered alone through the labyrinth of rooms, from the kitchen, where Kip dropped his bombshell last night, all the way to the den, where Shelby declined to defuse it. The three of them were together now, plotting a strategy. The truth would come out eventually, when Kip’s manufactured witness failed to materialize, but meanwhile Peter was spending all his money and hope on a lie, and there was nothing she could do to spare him either one.
The house was so quiet she could almost hear her thoughts ricochet through the empty rooms. She should try to eat something, she knew. There was nothing in the refrigerator but funeral leftovers, but in the freezer was a bag of the chicken nuggets Chrissy liked to snack on. Don’t forget the barbecue sauce, she’d holler whenever anyone left on a grocery run. Leigh shook a few nuggets out on a baking pan and put them in the oven.
A shower might help, she thought, and she went up the back stairs to her room. But instead of turning into the master bath, she drifted down the hall, past the guest room and up the half-flight of stairs to the children’s wing. Chrissy’s door stood closed, and she cracked it open. It was so quiet inside, and dark, too, with the blinds drawn. Chrissy never closed them. She always liked to wake to the sunshine. Leigh closed the door behind her, and the vast and empty house shrank to this little twelve-by-twelve-foot room. The darkness was strangely inviting. It felt like crawling into a cave when she pulled back the comforter and slipped into the bed.
Someone had changed the sheets, but when Leigh pressed her face into the comforter, she could still breathe in the sweet scent of strawberry shampoo in the fabric, and here and there the salty tang of the popcorn Chrissy liked to munch while she read in bed. During a single week when she was ten, she read the entire Harry Potter series in this bed. Mom, she wailed whenever she came up for air, I wanna go to witch school!
Leigh lay there and watched the slatted shadows of the blinds drift across the wall and ceiling as the sun moved into the afternoon. She knew she needed to pull herself together. She mustn’t let this—development—come between her and Peter. She had to hold tight to what was left of her family. Peter and Kip and Leigh. The three of them plus Mia every other weekend. Everyone who was hers was gone.
No, no, that kind of thinking would undo everything she’d worked for these past five years. Her children were his and his were hers. Not even that. They were all theirs.
But Chrissy had been hers. Peter might have loved her, he did love her, but she was Leigh’s magical child, Leigh’s alone, and no one else’s grief could ever begin to rival her own.
It was a shameful thought, and she quashed it as fast as she could.
She should at least get up and check her office email. She’d never gone a single day before without checking in with the office, whether on vacation, on her honeymoon, even when her babies were born. Now she’d gone—how many days? She didn’t even know.
Or care. She wished she could take back all the tens of thousands of hours she’d spent at work and spend them with Chrissy instead. The old adage came to mind: no one on his deathbed ever regrets that he didn’t spend more time at the office. The same was true when it was a loved one’s deathbed. All those years she could have been home with her child instead of out practicing family law. What irony there. Leaving her family so she could help other families. And that wasn’t even what she did. What she really did was help families to self-destruct. Her specialty: lawyer-assisted immolation.
That was the thought she went to sleep on.
A piercing shriek jolted her awake. She flailed out of the comforter and flung herself to her feet as the screech sounded again. It took a dazed moment to recognize the smoke alarm, and another to remember the chicken nuggets she’d left in the oven. She raced downstairs into a kitchen already thick with smoke. The nuggets had turned to charcoal briquettes, burned to cinders and still smoldering. She hurled them into the sink, and when she turned on the tap, a cloud of white steam hissed up.
She opened the doors and windows and switched on the exhaust fan and covered her ears until the shrill whistle of the alarm finally died. No lunch for her after all, and no shower either, but she should at least do one of the things she’d planned. She sat down at her laptop at the kitchen desk. Her inbox was overflowing with emails, but her assistant Polly had gone through them and sorted them into folders. The biggest folder was labeled CONDOLENCES, and Leigh left it unopened. Another was labeled FIRM BUSINESS, and she skipped that, too. Another folder contained messages from Polly herself, summarizing the snail mail and telephone messages.
Leigh scrolled through them dully. Hunter Beck’s lawyer called; he wanted Leigh to join him in requesting an accelerated briefing and argument schedule on his client’s appeal. No, thank you, she replied. Not only because she wasn’t ready to work yet, but also because Beck’s demand for access to his wife’s uterus would be moot by the time the court heard the case on a nonaccelerated schedule. None of the other messages looked urgent. Some were merely sales calls. Solicitations for journal subscriptions. A life insurance offer.
She jumped when the doorbell rang. It was a sound that was always followed by pounding footsteps and a holler of I’ll get it. A hundred pounds soaking wet and Chrissy thundered like a herd of elephants on the stairs. Don’t run, Leigh would scold. You’ll slip and break your neck.
You’ll bounce and break your brain.
She got up and looked out the kitchen window. A little red car was in the driveway. A Mini Cooper, she thought, though she didn’t know anyone who drove one. The bell rang again, and quickly she finger-combed her hair and went down the hall to answer it.
A young woman stood on the front porch smartly turned out in a belted trench dress and holding a designer attaché case. “Mrs. Leigh Huyett?”
“Yes. Can I help you?” The visitor was too well dressed to be a political canvasser or a Jehovah’s Witness.
“My name is Emily Whitman. I’m sorry to disturb you.” Her wheat-blond ponytail swung through the air like a scimitar as she stooped to lift a package wrapped in a shroud of green tissue paper. “The sheikha asked me to deliver this to you.”
“The sheikha—? Devra?” Leigh said, stupidly, as if she knew more than one.
“Yes, ma’am. May I?” She swept around Leigh and carefully placed the package on the hall table before she stripped away the tissue paper to reveal an enormous floral arrangement.
“Oh.” Leigh stood stunned. It wasn’t the usual white lilies and pink roses that had flooded the house this week. This was
a mix of exotic blossoms in rich, saturated shades of fuchsia, coral, and crimson. “They’re lovely,” she said. “She shouldn’t have.”
“She only wishes she could do more.” The young woman stepped back and clasped her hands together at waist level like a finishing school graduate. “The sheikha was devastated when she learned of your terrible loss. Coming so soon after her own, it hit her particularly hard.”
“Her own—?”
“It’s been only three months since the sheikh passed away.”
Leigh stared at her. The sheikh—? “I’m sorry—you’re saying Devra’s husband is dead?”
“She didn’t tell you.” The young woman sighed. “I’m afraid she’s still so distraught that sometimes she denies the fact of his death even to herself. It was so sudden. A heart attack,” she added in a confidential whisper.
Leigh could understand denial, but seeking divorce from a dead man seemed more like derangement. She couldn’t believe it. “Ms.—Whitman, is it?”
“Please. Call me Emily. I was the sheikh’s personal assistant, and I’m staying on to help the sheikha adjust to her new life.”
“Emily. I’d like to call and thank her in person. Is there a number where I can reach her?”
“Of course. It’s on the card.” She turned to the door. “Again I apologize for disturbing you. You have my deepest condolences as well.”
Shepherd squeezed in the front door as the young woman stepped out. Leigh watched her swing gracefully into her little red car and back out of the driveway before she shut the door and turned to the flowers. They were exquisite, and it was such a kind gesture, considering they’d met only once. But it was all so bizarre, Devra’s detailed probing about the procedure for divorcing a husband who was already dead.
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