“I’m sure Peter watches out for her.”
“It’s no place for Kip to live either.”
Her tone had never been so frosty, and Leigh knew she must blame her for Kip’s exile. She must be the wicked stepmother who banished him to the woods. “I know,” she said.
Karen slammed the trunk lid shut. “You know, I always thought I’d get him back at the end of that first year. I thought he’d get it out of his system and want to come home and Pete wouldn’t have a leg to stand on in court.” She stopped beside her door. “Then he went and married a divorce lawyer and I lost all hope.”
Leigh blinked with surprise. This was nothing she’d ever heard before. “Karen, I never advised Peter on custody. I never got involved.”
“You did, though. In more ways than one.”
The narrative was changing by the moment. Now Leigh was an interloper. “I never tried to take your place with Kip.”
“Didn’t you?”
Leigh stood speechless as a UPS truck rumbled into the driveway. Behind the wheel Gary threw his hands up in disgust—he’d be blocked for the two minutes it would take the driver to complete his delivery.
“Sorry,” Leigh said and hurried to take the package. She didn’t know what it could be. The time for flowers and fruit baskets had long since passed. The driver hefted an oversize carton off the truck, and it wasn’t until he handed her the electronic signature device that she remembered. It was Kip’s surprise graduation present.
Every college-bound student wanted a new computer, but Kip had a wish list of special requirements, and over the course of many stealthy conversations she figured them out and ordered it custom-built to his specifications. It took many phone calls and thousands of dollars, but it was pure pleasure for Leigh as she imagined his usual smart-aleck cool dissolving into stunned joy as he unwrapped it.
“I’ll carry it to the door,” the driver offered while Gary fumed.
Leigh looked down at the box, then over at Karen. “I wonder if you could take this, too?” she called to her.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know,” Leigh said. “Something Peter got for Kip’s graduation.” In truth it would be a surprise for Peter, too. He’d come up with the golf clubs for Kip’s birthday but left it to Leigh to think of a graduation present.
“Oh, all right,” Karen said with a put-upon sigh, and as the UPS truck backed out of the drive, Leigh loaded it into the backseat of the car.
On Tuesday Leigh returned to the office. She had no choice. Miguel Gonzalez refused to take not yet for an answer and went ahead and put a meeting on her calendar with John Stoddard, the war hero who now wanted to wage a custody battle. She wasn’t going to take the case, she hadn’t changed her mind about that. But if Gonzalez wouldn’t take no for an answer, she could see to it that Stoddard would. She’d take the meeting but make herself so discouraging, so dismally skeptical of his chances of wresting the child away from her mother, that he’d storm out after ten minutes. She’d earn herself a few black marks in the process, but she hardly cared.
She left the house early enough to avoid the worst of the commuter crowds on the Metro and arrived at the office in time to avoid any awkward encounters in the elevator. The corridors were dark as she wended her way around the perimeter of the building past the open doors and cluttered desktops of her colleagues. Her own office door stood uncharacteristically closed, and when she pushed it open, a musty odor rose up, like a spritz of gloom diffused through the air.
She closed the door and sat down at her desk. This was always her favorite time to work, in the still of the early morning, the quiet before the storm of phone calls and Got a minute? head-pokes around the door. A leaning tower of accumulated, nonurgent mail overflowed her inbox. She was able to make quick work of most of it, and quick work of the administrative messages piled up in her electronic inbox, too. Except for one. A request from Accounting that she account for the $100,000 wire transfer from Austria.
Either she should open a new client file for Devra or she should refund the retainer, but she couldn’t decide which. It wouldn’t be an easy case. She’d have to establish Virginia domicile based only on a weekend getaway, then she’d have to step carefully around the thorny question of diplomatic immunity. The Vienna Convention protected foreign diplomats from any legal action in their host country. The purpose was to ward off politically motivated prosecutions, but technically the immunity extended even to private domestic relations cases between the diplomats and their spouses. In practice, the home country typically waived the immunity defense so the divorce action could proceed in a U.S. court, but the procedure for obtaining that waiver was cumbersome. And even when diplomatic immunity was waived for purposes of dissolving the marriage, it was often resurrected to shield the diplomat’s assets. In effect, the foreign sovereign told the diplomat’s spouse: yes, you may have your divorce but not a penny of settlement or support. If the government of Qatar followed the same course, it would jeopardize Devra’s entitlement to her mahr. The Virginia court might order the ambassador to pay her the agreed sum, but the order would be unenforceable against any of his assets in the United States. And the Qatari courts wouldn’t enforce the order because her American divorce wouldn’t be recognized there. The final complication was how she’d even serve the divorce complaint on the ambassador. The embassy was technically the property of the government of Qatar, and the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act would render it off-limits for Leigh’s process server.
Even apart from the legal hurdles, so many other questions remained. Why wouldn’t Devra just leave her husband when she had at least $100,000 at ready disposal? And who was Emily Whitman, and why would she concoct such an elaborate lie?
She dug out the phony business card and punched in the young woman’s number, but as before, the call went straight to voicemail. She left a terse message and was hanging up the phone as her office door swung open.
She whirled in her chair. Polly teetered under an armload of files, and they both gasped their surprise.
“Polly!”
“Leigh! Oh, my God, I had no idea you were back!”
“Sorry. I wanted a quiet morning.”
Polly put the stack of files on the worktable across the room. She was a stout woman of sixty with six grandchildren and three daughters who called her every day. She was also a crack assistant-cum-paralegal who knew more about the minutiae of divorce filings than anyone in the city. If she’d had the same opportunities as Leigh growing up, she would have been Leigh’s most formidable opponent instead of her indispensable assistant.
“Can I get you anything?” Polly asked. “Coffee?”
They’d worked together nearly twenty years and Leigh had never once asked her to fetch coffee. Now she must have FRAGILE. HANDLE WITH CARE stamped on her forehead. “No, thanks. I’m fine.”
“It’s so good to see you back.”
“It’s good to see you, too. And thanks again for everything you did while I was out.”
“Well.” Polly shifted her weight awkwardly. “I thought you had enough on your plate.”
“Yes.”
“You let me know if you need anything. Anything at all.”
Leigh smiled weakly. This was more solicitousness than she could bear.
“Shall I close the door?”
“No, it’s fine. Leave it open.”
She paid a price for that small vanity. The open door invited a stream of well-wishers to stop by and deliver their platitudes, and she had to nod and smile and try to remember who sent flowers and who made charitable contributions in Chrissy’s name so she could thank them again for their kindness. They were kind, all of them, and she knew they meant well, but after a dozen visitors, she couldn’t face another. She closed her door and buzzed Polly to say she was in conference and couldn’t be disturbed.
When her door nonetheless swung open again an hour later, she turned around with her eyes flashing and a rebuke on her tongue.
&n
bsp; “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.
House on Fire Page 19
