Fortunes of the Dead (41 page)

Chesterfield raised his eyebrows. “Hell, Wilson, I didn't know you could cook.”

“I can't sir.” Wilson nodded, and headed out the door.

Chesterfield sat for a moment, thinking this over, then he put his head out the doorway to call Wilson back. He wanted to talk to the man more, see if maybe a leave of absence would be acceptable, but it was already too late. For a man with such a sizable limp, Wilson moved quickly, and Chesterfield got a quick glimpse of the bad leg and the well-cut hair, before Wilson turned at the end of the hallway and was gone.

Chesterfield closed his office door, which usually stayed open, and sat in his chair, turning it around to stare out the window at the traffic on Sepulveda. He couldn't help but notice the brand new pickup truck, teal blue, extended cab, oversized tires. He watched it squeak through a yellow traffic light, and whistled, thinking he wouldn't mind having a pickup himself, maybe after he retired.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY
-
FIVE

Tonight Joel and I are hosting the official housewarming party for our new cottage. Joel is down in the kitchen cooking, and whatever it is smells wonderful all the way upstairs, where I am still soaking in a hot bubble bath. I have a little neck pillow now and a foot cushion so I can stretch out lengthwise and not float away. In a few minutes I will get out and get dressed. I have been soaking too long as it is and my hair, which is pinned on top of my head, will be too curly.

We sent invitations out to our housewarming party three weeks ago. McFee sent immediate regrets, but I called him, and I'm hoping he'll come.

Kate's mother called me yesterday. Kate is out of the hospital and recuperating quickly. Her father went to both Edgers's and Miranda's funeral, but she says he won't talk about it. Yesterday they found Leo in the stall of a rather bad-tempered stallion, but the horse was matter-of-fact and Leo was sitting cross-legged under the feed bin building some sort of structure with straw. It was George who alerted them. Kate's mother had been sure Leo was taking his nap, and confided that her grandson has an uncanny ability with locks and requires more supervision than she is used to, and she couldn't be happier. When Kate is well enough, she and Leo were going to move out to one of the old farmhouses on the acreage.

Joel tells me that the Bass family managed to get Laura buried in private with no publicity at an undisclosed location in Texas, and that they had consented to Wilson's request to attend. Joel was amazed to learn that Wilson quit his job at ATF, got married, and opened a southern-style barbecue restaurant in Marina Del Rey.

The Dunkirk investigation changed my relationship with Joel. What we have together is different now, something more complex. We are closer, though we are aware that there are things that each of us hold close and secret, and do not share. I still look forward to taking Joel for granted, but I don't worry now, that if I make a wrong step the relationship will break. I'll communicate and Joel will express a feeling every year or two and we'll manage. As a matter of fact, Joel is getting almost too good at communication, which has resulted in us hiring a cleaning service that comes once a week.

When I first started taking the kind of cases I do, I admit I saw things in black and white, with good guys and bad guys and no shades of gray. I did not think about clients like Miranda Brady. I know I will be more careful to keep a distance between myself and the people I try to help. It is still a struggle, trying to keep up with the finances and barter system, and I have cultivated the art of living in the moment, and not worrying about bills down the road, trusting that things will work out one way or another, which, Joel tells me, is the worst kind of financial planning he's ever heard of. I tune him out when he brings up retirement.

I don't think you can immerse yourself in the drama of other people's lives and come through clean and unmarked. But I think there is a need for someone like me, someone who is not a cop, someone who has been to the dark places and come through okay, someone who used to be a victim herself.

This is not the life I pictured. I had thought that my days would be more organized, more routine-oriented, certainly smoother. Do the job, pay the bills, curl up at night with the man you love. I figured that by now I would at least have gotten the linoleum off the bathroom floor and painted the hallways and the kitchen and the bedroom.

Life never follows the rules. But Joel and I did the packing together, and have moved all our furniture in. And the living room walls have two new coats of red, just in time for the party. It looks terrific.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Lena Padget Mysteries

LENA

C
HAPTER
O
NE

I have often thought that my sister knew she was going to die. I don't mean that she had psychic dreams; I don't mean she was pessimistic. I think she evaluated the odds of her situation, and, in her heart and her mind, she had faced the outcome. Whitney was seven months pregnant when my ex–brother-in-law killed her, my little nephew, and, by default, my unborn niece.

Whitney always knew how dangerous Jeff was—after she married him, she knew. Yet she had one child with him and conceived a second. There were times, many times, when I wanted to strangle her for this stupidity. Easy for me, on the outside looking in. When Whitney looked at Jeff, she saw the person he could be; she saw the best in him. And when she realized (finally, and much too late) that everything good about Jeff was heavily outweighed by everything bad, she cut him out of her life.

But she always knew that the odds of keeping him out weren't so very good. My sister knew that she might not win, but knowing that never seemed to make a difference. She didn't have to know that she would win before she did what she knew was right. That's brave. It's powerful, too. It means you are free and clear of the kind of manipulations that can sear your soul.

Emma Marsden was like that. She was a lot like my sister in other ways too. She had that same inner vibrancy, a tuned piano full of music. She was ready for the next thing, a wary half smile on her lips, and in her eyes you could see that she was expecting something interesting to happen.

Her likeness to my sister made me vulnerable to her, according to my one and only, Joel Mendez. It was what made me believe in her. It was what made me work for her, and stick with her, when the rest of the world was ready to burn her at the stake.

But I think Emma Marsden brought out the best in me, because to me, Emma Marsden was like that elusive Christmas back home when everything goes right. Just being around her eased the nostalgic homesickness those of us who have lost family always carry in our souls. I guess because she was so much like my sister.

It's all about taking sides. Life, I mean. That's what it comes to if you're honest. Right, wrong, revenge, forgiveness … you take a stand. That's what Emma Marsden did. She took her daughter's side. Everything she did was for Blaine, her fifteen-year-old girl. Even when Blaine lost her way. Maybe that's why women are so much better at taking sides than men are. Maybe it plays on the nurturing and mothering instinct—my child first, no matter what.

Which is why, when I met her, Emma Marsden's life was a nightmare. Because she'd been accused of Munchausen by proxy, which, as you know, from watching those television movies of the week that you refuse to admit you watch, means a mother is so reprehensible, and so disturbed, that she will make her own child sick in order to get attention for herself.

I can imagine the hell a parent goes through when they lose a child. But I have no children of my own, so I can only imagine it. To be accused of killing that child, for motives of personal narcissism, was, according to Emma herself, the tenth circle of hell that is reserved for women who have the temerity to thwart the medical system.

The first time I met Emma Marsden was in the Main Street office of her attorney and ex-husband, Clayton Roubideaux. It was a small office, behind a brown door in a townhouse-style building. Roubideaux clearly kept an eye on the overhead. He may have been one of the most successful litigators in Lexington, Kentucky, but there were none of the oversized conference rooms, heavy mahogany furniture, or hushed discomfort you find in large law firms where billable hours are considered an art form.

No ankle-deep carpeting—a status symbol of the past, along with the office fireplace in the center of the room. None of the shiny new hardwood floors preferred by the edgy firms in entertainment law, none of the creaky old wood floors found in the hallowed halls where the business of making money is sometimes confused with social significance.

Roubideaux's office had Berber carpet, the wealthy man's form of indoor/outdoor: practical, pricey, ugly. The front desk was small and the receptionist clearly limited to answering the telephone. Marsden worked with two other attorneys, and there were no cubicles or horseshoe work areas for legal secretaries, researchers, paralegals, or the amazing and generally underpaid legal creature who does all of the above.

There was a receptionist, aged twenty or twenty-two, and as it was five fifteen and Friday she was happily putting away the pencil that was the only clutter on the tiny oak desk behind the kind of partition one usually finds in a small doctor's office or veterinary clinic. She pointed me to a small hallway on her way out the door. I followed the sound of a man and woman who were laughing in the way people do when they are in a waiting room somewhere, anxious about the appointment ahead, and trying to keep their spirits up.

I understood from Clayton himself that he and his wife—ex-wife—hadn't been divorced that long. A year at most. I was wary about being in the office with the two of them, but the only tension I could sense arose when I walked through the door. I wasn't used to being dreaded.

Clayton Roubideaux stood up the minute he saw me, but the first person I noticed was Emma Marsden, who sat with her legs crossed in a high-backed maroon chair. She wore blue jeans and a black sweater and worn, dirty Nikes. We were dressed just alike, except I wore high-topped Reeboks, which were white and new. Her hair was clean, but pulled back in a rubber band, and she hadn't bothered with makeup. She looked like she hadn't had a good night's sleep since the last presidential election. Many of us hadn't.

Emma Marsden was thirty-seven years old, and her hair was already threaded with gray. Her forehead was ridged with worry wrinkles that were startling but not unattractive on such a young face. She had the look of a woman who has forgotten how to be beautiful.

She looked at me over her shoulder, steadily, without smiling. Her ex-husband, already on his feet and waiting for my attention, shook my hand across the oak veneer desk.

“Lena Padget? Clayton Roubideaux.” His grip was firm, his smile toothy. “This is my wife … ex-wife, I mean. Emma.”

Her hand was ice cold, fingers slim, nails cut short, a tall woman whose hand dwarfed my own.

“Please, sit down,” Roubideaux said.

I took the other wingback chair and sat all the way back in the cushion so that my feet did not quite touch the floor. I didn't feel ridiculous. I'm used to my height, and the posture had exactly the effect I wanted. Emma Marsden smiled and loosened up, settling back in her own chair. She wasn't rude enough to laugh out loud, but the vision of me with my feet dangling over the edge of the seat clearly amused her.

“We appreciate you coming in after business hours,” Clayton said.

I nodded. Why lose credit by explaining that I set my own business hours, that I had slept late that morning and had plenty of time to drink coffee, read
USA Today
, and peel the threadbare indoor/outdoor carpet away from half of the little screened-in porch in the cottage I shared with my significant other?

The old carpet had been evocative of many faded but die-hard layers of ancient cat urine, an odor that is as hard to kill as a cockroach, although it does not run away. But I had soaked in my claw-foot tub, and changed to clean jeans and another of the black sweaters that make up a significant portion of my wardrobe. I was clean and crisp and smelled only of the vanilla lotion I buy from Bath and Body Works. I was ready to go to work.

Clayton Marsden looked at his ex-wife, who looked back at him. “Emma, do you want to start, or do you just want to interrupt me later?”

Great
.

“Go ahead,” she said.

She had an interesting voice, a little scratchy, like she was recovering from laryngitis.

Roubideaux looked at me. “Lena, do you have any children?”

“I have a cat.”

He didn't smile. Neither one of them did. Cats, clearly, did not count, although I was not being flip, and I absolutely love my cat.

“Emma and I had one child together. She also has an older daughter. Her youngest child, our son, died two years ago, while being treated by Dr. Theodore Tundridge at Fayette Hospital. Tundridge is a pediatrician and the director of the Tundridge Children's Clinic.”