Chapter 16

 

Feeling as vulnerable as I did, I would have given anything to avoid a confrontation with Amelia. But I couldn’t just turn and walk away. Forget cowardly; it would have been rude. It also would have been imprudent. Amelia had been respectful to James, and she was paying Lee’s bills.

She looked totally together in her plaid shirt and khakis. When younger, she’d had the same pure blond hair as Vicki and Jude, and though hers was now mixed with white, it remained thick. For as long as I’d known her, she’d kept it short, brushed back behind her ears in a clipped, CEO-appropriate style. Gentleness wasn’t a priority for her. Even today, under a cloud cover that softened the afternoon light, she looked flinty.

She also looked smug. “Trouble in paradise?” she asked in her ballsy alto.

“Actually, no,” I replied without lying. New York was no paradise, not by a long shot.

“He didn’t look happy with you,” she pressed. “No kiss? No hug?”

“You weren’t with us last night.”

“No,” she conceded. “I suppose it was kind of him to come.”

Kind? What about loving or devoted or worried? Even horny? Amelia had chosen the blandest word, so I tossed it right back.

“James is that way. He cares about people. He’s the kindest person I know.”

Kindness was the last word anyone would ever use to describe Jude, who had to be behind this somehow. My presence stirred up things in Amelia; she had made that clear at our last one-on-one.

“Does it upset your parents?”

“His kindness?”

“Your separation.” There was a gleam in her eye. I didn’t want to think it was malice, but I couldn’t blame it on booze. She had been with Charlotte prior to our meeting, meaning she wasn’t drinking then, and she didn’t have a glass with her now.

I gave her a puzzled smile. “There’s no separation. He’s busy at work, and I need a rest.”

“A trial separation, then?”

“Not in the sense you mean.” I thought to leave—make up an excuse, say I didn’t feel well—but if Amelia had a point to make, she would make it either now or later. Better now, while we were alone.

“Jude says you’re avoiding him,” she began.

I smiled, curious. “Is that what he says? No. I’m not. We just don’t have much to say to each other.”

“I’m sorry for that. I was hoping it would be different.”

“I’m married, Amelia.”

“But not happily,” she said, raising a hand to forestall my reply. “Say what you will, but I sense problems. And that’s all right. Every marriage has its tests. You would have had those if you’d been married to Jude, too.”

Amazed, I laughed. “Jude and I couldn’t pass the admissions test.”

“I’m sorry for that, too. I used to hope you were the one.”

I was flattered, but not surprised. She had liked me that summer. The dislike had come when I left and she had needed a scapegoat. “He’s probably better with someone else.”

“Who?” she asked, less composed. “He messes up every time. Why do children let parents down?”

I didn’t have to think about that one. “Maybe because their expectations are too high.”

“Shoot low and you get low.” She moved to the space where James’s rental had been, now an empty spot beside Vicki’s van. After scuffing the gravel for a minute, she studied the van, running a hand over its logo before turning to lean against it.

Pensive, she stared at the woods. “It’s hard with kids. You raise them to be one thing and they turn out to be another. You do your best, but there are no guarantees. Vicki was easy. My son? A challenge from the start. He knew just which buttons to push.”

Thinking of some of the outlandish things Jude had done—like bet with his buddies on football, with the loser having to run naked around the town green, which I only heard about but would have loved to see, since Jude had lost and been quite pleased about it, Vicki said—I had to smile. “At some level, it’s endearing.”

“Fine for you to say. You aren’t his mother.” She looked at me then. “And you aren’t his wife. Tell me, where’s James from?”

“Maryland.”

“What do his parents do?”

“They work for the government.”

“Career bureaucrats?”

“Not bureaucrats. They’re civil servants. Administrations come and go, but they stay.”

“Do they own a home?”

“A small one. Why the questions?”

“I’m trying to get a fix on why you chose him over Jude.”

“Amelia,” I reminded her with an astonished laugh, “Jude ditched me. He chose Jenna.”

“Well, I know that,” she granted, “but for you to choose someone so different—I’m just trying to understand. What was the appeal?”

“James isn’t different. He’s everything I’d grown up planning to have and to do. Jude was the anomaly. James coming along when he did was a reminder, a sign of where I was meant to be.”

“I don’t believe in signs,” Amelia stated.

Not wanting to mention cars that stalled or coyotes that howled, I remained silent.

“Things just happen,” she went on, “and not always the way we plan.” She shot an aggrieved look toward the green. “I didn’t plan to be in this town, that’s for sure.”

Resentment? “But you love it here,” I protested.

“Really? I’m here because I married Wentworth Bell. I did not plan on his dying at the age of forty-eight, any more than I planned on heading the Refuge, but when there’s no one else to do it, and you have to sleep at night with the echoes of those Bells saying that the Refuge has to stay in the family, you can’t walk away. My taking over when Wentworth died was the only responsible thing to do.”

“But you love it,” I insisted. To me, that had always been her strength. She was possessive of the place, involved in every aspect of its operation. The Refuge had grown on her watch. “And you’re good at it.”

She sighed. “Well, it’s what I have, and there’s no point in doing something unless you do it well, but it isn’t what I’d grown up planning to do.”

“What was?”

“You’ve talked with Lee. Can’t you guess?” She folded her arms. “She and I didn’t grow up together. She’s much younger—her mother was my mother’s baby sister. And my side of the family wasn’t in trouble with the law. We were just poor. I was working from the time I was ten. My dream was not having to work.”

“A woman of leisure? I have trouble picturing that.”

“We grow into our lives. You see me as I am today. But I wasn’t always the one giving orders. When I was in high school, I worked in a nursing home, and I did whatever I was told. The pay wasn’t great, but it was something.”

“Where did you meet Wentworth?”

“Oberlin. I was on scholarship. Needless to say, his family wasn’t pleased with his choice.” Her mouth twitched. “Sound like Lee?”

It did, though having thought of Amelia one way for so long, it was still an adjustment. “Bretton is an aristocratic name.”

“Isn’t it though. Amelia Bretton Bell. I’d have chosen something else, if it hadn’t had a certain ring to it.”

She was staring at me, her gaze defiant but vaguely … diluted. It struck me that her fawn eyes were faded, their gold flecks less noticeable than I remembered them being. Of course, gold eyes were a Bell trait, and she was a Bretton. In that, just then, she seemed more human.

“Why am I telling you all this,” she said, a question but not.

Me, I was still waiting for the other shoe to fall.

“Maybe because I want you to know that I do occasionally have reason to be sour. Vicki thinks I drink too much, but I don’t. I’m careful. I grew up with sots. I know the pitfalls. Not that I don’t imbibe now and again. Drink can lighten the mood when you think you’re doing the right thing but get it thrown back in your face.”

Absurd, since we weren’t really friends, but I felt like she was confiding in me—like she was trying to share something and not succeeding terribly well. I waited.

With another sigh, she pushed away from the van, and for a minute, I thought the conversation would end there. Then her step faltered, and I felt that small window of humanness open wider.

“Jude thought I was awful. He made fun of my house, my car, my jewelry. Did he not see how hurtful that was? Fine, if he didn’t want to live in a house like ours, I could live with that, but in a filthy cabin? Do you know how a parent feels when an adult child rejects her like that?”

“He just wanted to do things his way,” I tried gently, though I’m not sure she heard. The tidy ball that was Amelia had begun to unravel. She was speaking again barely before I was done.

“But how was I supposed to deal with that? A parent cares. Her children think she’s immune, because she is officious, because her life has demanded that of her, but she has feelings. Every mother does. You have no idea what it’s like to see your child doing one destructive thing after another, when there are better options. But he won’t listen. You point out facts. He sneers. You try to talk sense into him, but he is deaf. You raise your voice and get emotional for once, and what does he do? He walks away!”

“He’s here now,” I said softly, but I felt bad for this different Amelia. Her eyes were haunted. I had never seen them like that.

“He’ll leave again. He isn’t comfortable with me.”

“I thought things were going well.”

“For him, maybe,” she said, and sputtered. “What’s not to go well? He takes what he wants and ignores everything else. But I see it coming. He’ll leave again unless someone like you gets involved.” There it was, the other shoe. Her eyes drilled mine. “You could save him, Emily. Are you sure there’s no hope for the two of you?”

The only reason I felt even remotely bad was the pleading I heard, which was odd—sad—coming from as regal a woman as Amelia. But this other shoe didn’t fit me.

“I can’t,” I said, pleading right back that she not ask this. “The time for Jude and me is done. But not your time with him. If he doesn’t want to head the Refuge, he can do other things.”

“Like what?”

I tried to think what might work. “Create a title for him. Make him a roving ambassador—VP at Large, or something.”

“Isn’t that what he used to be?”

“Not formally, and not with a promise he wouldn’t end up back here as CEO. That’s what terrifies him.”

“It terrifies me, too,” she argued, her voice rising. “What happens when I die? Who’ll take over? Noah? Oh, lovely. He’s nine. And if he inherits his mother’s brains, I’m sunk.”

“What about Charlotte?”

“She’s three.”

“There are cousins—”

“It was supposed to be Jude!” Lowering her voice, she tried again. “He loves you, you know.”

I might have reminded her that she had denied that barely a week before. But suddenly there seemed another point to make. “Jude loves what he can’t have.”

“He came back for you.”

“No. He didn’t know I’d be here. He came back for you. He wants …” I stopped, considering.

“What? Tell me. I’d give him most anything.”

I was suddenly on that bench outside the General Store with my dad. “My parents would say the same thing. The only thing I want is to be loved as a grown person with the right to her own dreams.”

“Don’t I love Jude that way?” Amelia argued. “I let him live where he wants, even if I think it’s a hovel, and dress how he wants, even if he looks like … like someone I grew up with and spent my life trying to escape. I let him do this.”

Just as my father “let” me stay here. “But he feels your disapproval.”

“Because what he’s doing is wrong,” she insisted.

“For you, maybe, but he can’t live for you.”

“Help me, Emily. If you care anything for Vicki, you’ll do this, because I’m her mother. I love my son. I want a relationship with him. I went ten years without. I can’t do that again.”

“Oh, Amelia,” I said, regretful not about Jude but about Amelia’s inability to accept the truth. “I can’t control Jude. My life is elsewhere, and it’s everything he hates. I don’t have any pull with him.”

“You do. You are the best woman who ever entered his life. He calls you his conscience.”

Well, I did know that. The fact that Amelia did, too, suggested Jude might have put her up to this.

“Talk to him,” she pressed. “Reason with him. Tell him that he should get custody of Noah. Tell him that he could revolutionize the Refuge—that he could leave his mark—that he could make it a one-of-a-kind place for his son to inherit.” She took a quick breath. “Help me in this, Emily. Would that be so hard for you to do?”

I didn’t answer, and she left me soon after. A week and a half earlier, when my head had been filled with static and my energy depleted, I would have packed my bags and driven off. I had problems enough of my own without taking on hers. But the similarities between the two couldn’t be missed. I was to my father what Jude was to Amelia—a child rejecting a parent’s dream. If in helping them I helped myself, we might both benefit.

At least, that was my rationale for not leaving Bell Valley that day.

And then something happened that clinched it. Lee woke up Friday to find four flat tires on the truck she had been driving to and from work. The truck was old, the tires new, and the deed was done in a way that wouldn’t be captured on film. Someone had fired a gun from cover of the trees, likely using a silencer to avoid waking Lee.

We met with the police in the kitchen of the Red Fox—three of Bell Valley’s finest munching on apricot scones while Amelia insisted they had a murderer to catch, which did nothing for Lee’s peace of mind. The police promised to watch the house, but beyond cataloguing the kind of bullet used, there was little else they could do.

Lee was freaked out, and I couldn’t blame her. But while she used this as an example of why she shouldn’t rock the boat, I used it as an example of why she should. It took a while—and Amelia’s insistence—to convince her. Leaving Amelia to tell the police what we would need from their files, I led Lee to Vicki’s small office to make the call in private.

“Monday at ten?” she echoed Sean, looking at me. When I nodded, she said, “Yes. Thank you. Yes. Ten. I’ll see you.”

Still looking at me, she hung up the phone. With a shaky hand, she pushed that swath of hair back from the eye it hid, revealing double the fear. “I can’t go then,” she cried meekly. “I’d miss all of breakfast, because I’d have to leave at seven to get there at ten, traffic will suck, and I don’t even know where to park.”

I held her arms. “You’ll get everything ready the night before, so that Vicki can just pop it all in the oven. This is important, Lee. If someone has gone to the extent of thwarting cameras by using a gun on your car, he’s enjoying himself, which means it won’t stop. And you’re not signing your life away. If you don’t like Sean, you’ll walk out and it ends there. I don’t know where to park either, but we’ll find out. I’ll drive. And if traffic slows us down, we’ll call Sean, and he’ll wait.”

I was arguing for more than Lee or Amelia or Sean. I was arguing for James and me. Helping Lee was common ground for us, which meant that the stakes were high.

James must have sensed it, too, because we had barely settled in the lawyer’s office in Boston Monday morning when he called Sean, who looked increasingly pleased—smiling, jotting notes—as the minutes passed. I was starting to wonder what James was saying when Sean put the call on hold and gestured me toward the conference table at the end of the room.

“Want to talk with him while I get background information from Lee?”

I did. Pulling out a chair there, I picked up. “How are you?” I asked softly enough not to disturb the others.

“Great, babe,” he said, sounding more energized with those two words than I’d heard him in months. “Wait’ll you hear this. One of our associates is from a prominent family in Boston. I don’t usually work with him, but just for the hell of it, I dropped the name of the executor of Lee’s trust, Albert Meeme. Instant reaction. His family had used Meeme until weird stuff started showing up on their trust reports—dozens of charges, little things that added up. Meeme cried innocent, but when they started asking around, they learned he had a history of fraud.”

“Proven?” I asked excitedly. This would make Lee’s case.

“No, just bar infractions that stopped short of prosecution. Dubious record-keeping, funds mysteriously moving around, evasive maneuvers.”

“Tax evasion.”

“Right. But—and this is right down Lee’s alley—there have also been claims that estates were fiddled with to favor one or another of the beneficiaries, with Meeme getting a kickback. No one has been able to prove it, and the firm covers it up, so only insiders know. Sean has heard rumors, but disgruntled clients start rumors all the time. Lee is something else. She isn’t disgruntled. She’s an innocent victim, and Meeme’s history gives juice to her claim. Plus, it adds incentive for Sean. If he can finally pin something on the guy, it’ll be a feather in his cap. But that’s not all, Em. I got an amazing case this morning.”

“Did you?” I asked, still delighted for Lee.

“It’s pro bono, but it could be an interesting case. The client is a woman—Denise Bryant—who is serving time for vehicular homicide for hitting a kid on a bike. She had no record, but forensics showed she was over the speed limit when she tried to pass another car. It was a passing zone, but the weather was bad. The boy was fifteen. He and his friends were riding their bikes off a ramp into the street. She’s suing the boy’s family for letting him ride without wearing a helmet. Do you love it?”

“Interesting,” I said, because the philosophical issue certainly was. But while I was pleased for James, I was not so pleased for me. If I was holding our work to be the enemy, a good case wouldn’t help.

He heard my hesitance. “I know, Em. It’s a gesture. Mark knows I’ve been frustrated with the cases I’m on. Derek Moore is the partner of record, but he’s so busy that it’s basically my case. I’ll be at Bedford Hills interviewing the client. I’ll be in court. I’ll be working with the corrections department, the judge, and the ADA—all personal interaction. I’ll be able to build my name doing something meaningful. A case like this can go a long way in tiding me over until things get better.”

That worried me, in part because I didn’t trust Mark’s motivation. I feared that James was being patronized, or that piling on work was a test of his stamina. Mark knew that a pro bono case would be hard for James to refuse. Heck, it would be hard for me to refuse. Helping someone who was being punished, when the victim shared at least a bit of responsibility? I could happily build a practice of cases like that. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t pay the bills, a fact of which Mark had to be acutely aware.

“Do you have time for it?” was all I asked.

“I’ll make time. How’s it going with Sean?”

“Okay, I think. He’s talking with Lee now.”

“How was the drive?”

“Fine.”

“No claustrophobia?” he asked with just enough dryness to make his point. I had run from one city. Was this one any different?

“Honestly, I was so focused on making the right turns and getting into the parking garage that I didn’t see much else,” I said. “I’ll let you know on the way back. Thanks for that information, James. You did good.”

I hung up the phone telling myself that he had a right to wonder about my frame of mind, but that his interest in Lee’s case was positive, that his pro bono case might not pan out, and that, in any event, I was glad he had asked to talk to me. We used to call each other often about new cases, old cases, cases where a coworker wasn’t doing his share. It was a reminder that we had us above and beyond the rest.

“Just finishing up on history,” Sean explained when I rejoined them. A pleasant-looking guy with short red hair and wire-rimmed glasses, he asked a steady stream of questions, pausing to reword only when Lee looked blank. I figured that his usual client was more savvy, certainly more wealthy.

Listening to the last of it, I asked Lee a question or two myself when I felt she had left something out. She gave him the police file documenting the harassment, as well as trust statements showing the dramatic decline in value from before her husband had died to after. Reading those, Sean’s cheeks grew more ruddy. “One bad lawyer makes the rest of us stink,” he said, clearly irritated. “Pinning something concrete on Albert Meeme would be a community service.” To Lee, he said, “We have a big probate department here. I handle the trial end, so I’ve done this before. First thing, we petition the court for an accounting of the trust.”

“What does that entail?” I asked.

“Submitting a brief, these files, maybe an affidavit containing Lee’s statement. We could take that now. I’d submit the petition as an emergency, vis-à-vis the harassment.”

“Will this stop it?” Lee asked timidly.

“It should,” he said, though tentatively. “If someone knows they’re being watched, it’d certainly up the ante to continue with it.”

“I wouldn’t have to be there, would I? In court?”

“Yes. You’re a compelling witness.”

“I’m not. I don’t know what to say.”

“That’s what makes you a compelling witness,” he said, and included me again. “I’ve had petitions granted with less cause, so I’m not worried, and I know the clerk at the Probate Court, which means a quick hearing. Once it’s granted, the court has the right to appoint an accountant, but if I suggest a name they know, they’ll use it. I know the best person. She’s quick and she’s smart.”

“What happens then?” Lee asked.

“She examines the books.”

“Where?” I asked.

“The easiest thing would be doing it at Meeme’s firm.”

“But then Jack’s brothers will know,” Lee said.

“They’ll know anyway. They’ll be notified by the court about the petition hearing. They’ll send someone to try to get it denied. Whoever it is won’t have much luck. Like I say, there’s precedence with less cause than this. And Lee will be a good witness.” He eyed Lee. “Now’s the time to decide. Do you want to move ahead with this?”

She wasn’t happy, and for a split second, I felt as bad as I had talking with Layla in New York. Going forward would be frightening, but doing nothing was worse.

I didn’t have to say it. Slowly, her reluctance became resignation. To Sean, she said a quiet “Yes.”

I paid attention as we left Boston. Yes, there was traffic. And yes, I hated it. Yes, there was construction. And yes, I hated it.

Was it claustrophobic to me? By the time I went back and forth making comparisons to New York, we were crossing over the Charles River. There was still traffic on the other side, still construction, still noise. But I knew it would end and that once we moved farther along I-93, the cityscape would flatten.

What did that mean?

It meant that Boston was less offensive as cities went, but that I wasn’t any wilder to rush back to it than Lee. I’d do it, as would she, because the Probate Court was there. And it would be bearable as long as I knew I could leave.

What did that mean?

It meant James and I still had a long way to go if we were hoping for a meeting of minds.