Wreathed (20 page)

“Then he’s not a very good one, because he let me walk right past him.”

“Be that as it may,” Curlin said, “he’s still out there. I am curious to know what your explanation is for him being there.”

“Since I haven’t talked to him, I’m not entirely sure,” I said. “I did get a phone call earlier from my mother, and she said that she had been served in a matter related to a will contest regarding some property she had supposedly inherited. My best guess is that he’s serving me with a copy of those papers as her attorney.”

“That’s what you think?” Curlin said. “That’s what you’re telling me?”

“It’s the most reasonable thing I can think of,” I said. “I don’t know what else it could be. I’m not trying to hide anything.”

“You’re not trying to hide anything. Like, for example, getting sued for assaulting a photographer at a funeral.”

“You’re not serious,” I said. I felt a hot jet of anger rush through my bloodstream. I knew I hadn’t heard the last of Vanessa Sullivan, but I hadn’t imagined that she would be so deranged as to sue me for stepping on her foot.

“I am
extremely
serious,” Curlin said. “In my opinion, you should be, as well.”

“I am extremely annoyed and irritated. This is harassment on her part. It’s a nuisance-value lawsuit at best.”

“So you deny the allegations in the complaint?” he said. I couldn’t help noticing that he was standing in the door.

“I haven’t read the complaint yet. Have you?”

“The plaintiff’s attorney was a classmate of mine at Penn. He forwarded to me as a courtesy. It says that you intentionally stepped on the plaintiff’s foot and that she will need surgery to repair ligament damage.”

“Bullshit,” I said.

“And she’s asking for punitive damages on top of that.”

“Unreal. Delusional, even. Well, I’ll take care of it.”

“I asked you to take care of this before,” Curlin said. “You said that you had. You told me the situation with the media interest in your affairs had been resolved. Clearly it has not.”

I felt that rush of anger again, and had to remind myself to breathe. “I am dealing with a freelance writer who has decided to conduct a very misguided vendetta against me. I can’t be held responsible for her actions.”

“I expect our associates to be able to resolve problems without brawling in the street. If you can’t do that, then you need to find somewhere else to work.”

“I stepped on her foot. That’s hardly a street brawl. She’s exaggerating what happened.”

“And you gave her the opportunity to sue you by doing that. That doesn’t speak well for your judgment,” Curlin said.

Not punching Vanessa in the stomach spoke very highly of my judgment, I thought, but this was not the time to make that particular argument. “If it hadn’t been that, it probably would have been something else,” I said.

“And yet, you were surprised when I told you what was going on.”

I knew Curlin was angry with me. I was wasting his time on something trivial, which was his pet peeve. And he was right that I shouldn’t have stepped on Vanessa’s foot the way I did, although at the time it seemed like the quickest way to handle the situation. I couldn’t even entertain the fantasy of smacking Vanessa with something flat and heavy, because anything I did to her would likely result in another lawsuit. I would have to figure out another way to get her back, probably something sneaky and underhanded. Something she wasn’t expecting.

“I’m sorry, sir,” I said. “I let myself get provoked into doing something that damaged my reputation and this firm’s reputation, and I shouldn’t have done it. Let me do what I can to repair the situation.”

“Well, you’ll have plenty of time to do that,” Curlin said.

“Am I fired?” I asked. I’d suspected as much, what with Curlin blocking me from getting in my office. I told myself that if Curlin was going to fire me, I wouldn’t show the anger or outrage I felt in front of him. I wasn’t going to whine or beg, either. If I had to leave my job, I would do it with dignity.

“All personnel decisions have to be approved unanimously by the management committee,” he said. “If it was my decision, you’d be on your way home now. But I’m only one vote out of five.”

“And the other partners?” I asked.

“Fortunately for you,” Curlin said, “we don’t have a quorum at the moment. Warren is still in Bermuda on that reinsurance merger. He gets back next Monday. He wants to defer the final decision until then.”

“I see,” I said. Warren Cornelius was the oldest of the partners. I had dated his grandson at one point. It hadn’t gone well.

“Warren likes you personally, but he shares my concerns about your professionalism. I wouldn’t count on his support.”

“And the rest?”

“Yaniv and Ryan are concerned about your drinking habits. I am not overly concerned, but you didn’t help yourself by dragging in here hung over this morning.”

“Oh, great,” I said.

“And Fielding is thinking about the bottom line. None of us are inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt here.”

I knew what that meant. Firing me now meant that the firm wouldn’t have to pay me a bonus, which would increase the pool for everyone else. That also meant I couldn’t expect any kind of severance payment. I was going to have to scramble to find any kind of job to pay my bills until I could find a position with another firm.

“It’s your decision,” I said. “What do I do in the meantime?”

“You are suspended without pay,” Curlin said. “Indefinitely. If we decide to terminate you, I will let you know on Monday and arrange for your things to be delivered to you.”

“Then there isn’t anything else to say,” I said. I could think of several things I would have liked to have said, but all of them would have made things worse and wouldn’t have accomplished anything other than proving that Curlin was right about my lack of professionalism.

“You have the rest of the week,” he said. “If you can manage to resolve this unpleasant litigation you seem to have stepped into, let me know and we’ll take that under advisement.”

“Sure.”

“And don’t forget to see the young man in the reception area on the way out,” Curlin said.

There was a ghost of a smile on his face, and I devoutly wished that there were some way I could wipe it off his smug features. I stalked my way down the hallway, snatched the complaint from the process server’s hand, and made my way out the glass doors and down the elevator.

It took me five minutes to get home. I slammed the door shut and threw my pocketbook on the counter. I went into my bedroom to change clothes. The stuffed giraffe Adam had sent me was staring at me from across the room.

“Shut up,” I told the giraffe. “You’re not helping matters.”

Chapter 24

It didn’t take me long to go through Vanessa’s complaint. It was remarkably frivolous, even by the low standards of the personal-injury bar. I’d never litigated a tort claim before, but it did not appear that it would take that much effort to swot up a defense. At a minimum, it was a way to keep current on my New Jersey civil practice.

The simplest thing to do was to make an immediate settlement offer. I could see if Vanessa would take nuisance value at this point. That was the quickest and easiest way to make her claim go away, and I knew that was what Curlin would want me to do. But I had no intention of offering her a thin dime. Vanessa was taking me on my home turf, and I had every intention of grinding her into the dirt.

I spent the better part of the week drafting my answer to the complaint and putting together a countersuit, along with a motion to dismiss and a slew of intrusive discovery requests. I knew Vanessa was strapped for cash, and that she probably wouldn’t be able to keep paying her lawyer forever. Once he got a good look at exactly how expensive fighting me in court was going to be, he would back out and Vanessa would be forced to withdraw the lawsuit. That was my plan, and the only drawback was that it wasn’t as satisfying as direct physical force would have been. You can’t have everything.

I switched off between that and working on my résumé and developing a plan of attack for the likely event that I wouldn’t have a job come Monday. I had a list of recruiters to call, and I was hopeful that I could get a short-term contract job somewhere doing legal scutwork. I wasn’t relishing the job search, but it was a necessity. Even if I somehow managed to avoid being fired, I was going to have to find another job eventually. If all five of the partners didn’t think I had a future at the firm, it was time to find another firm.

I had used up most of my reserve alcohol in last weekend’s drunken stupor, and I knew that I needed to save every nickel in case I was out of work for the long term. So I didn’t buy any more liquor, which was annoying but had the side effect of making me feel virtuous. Once I got a new job, I told myself, I’d get a nice bottle of wine to celebrate. But for now, I had to stay sober. It was a challenge to stop drinking so abruptly, and I didn’t enjoy it, but the lack of alcohol kept me focused on what I needed to do.

I got up early on Saturday morning. I looked at the clock, rolled over, and right before I was able to get back to sleep, I remembered my promise to drive down and scope out the house on Idaho Street. I threw on my comfy Temple hoodie and a pair of jeans, loaded up a Thermos full of coffee, and went downstairs to the garage. It didn’t take me long to get the Audi out on the interstate, and it took me much less time than that to get up to eighty miles an hour. I had a long day ahead of me and I didn’t want to waste any time.

My game plan was simple. I had the key to the house in my pocket. I was going to drive down to Cape May as quickly as the laws of physics and good judgment would permit. When I got there, I would walk up to the porch, unlock the door, and check out whether the house was in good enough shape to put on the market any time soon.

In a perfect world, the house would be vacant, without any furniture or other clutter. All the inside walls would be freshly painted neutrals, just the way that you’d want it if you were staging it for a prospective buyer. I had no plans to lift one finger to clean out a lot of old junk, or deal with whatever else might be wrong with the house.

I didn’t know what to expect, but I knew what to be worried about. I had three main concerns, all of them tied to different types of reality shows. One was that the previous resident of the house had been a hoarder, and that the house was crammed full of dead cats or worse. The second was that the house had been under intensive renovation when Sheldon died, and that there were holes in the walls and sawdust everywhere. The third was that the house was haunted. In any of these events, I would advise Mother to hand the house back to Adam as a bad investment, especially if there were teams of paranormal investigators rooting around, because you can never get rid of those guys.

If the house was in a serious state of disarray, we were both committed to dumping the headache of selling it on Adam and figuring out a way to split whatever profits remained after all the bills were taken care of. Mother was comfortable in her apartment at the senior community, and wasn’t interested in a near-beach house. I wasn’t all that interested in spending my precious vacation time anywhere other than the Caribbean, thank you very much. I was anxious to seal the deal in any case, so I could salvage whatever was left of my relationship with Adam.

Assuming I still wanted to.

In the last week, Adam hadn’t called me or tried to call me or sent me any other large, awkward presents. I’d checked his public Facebook profile, and he hadn’t done anything except go out to a Mexican restaurant in Freehold the night before. He had posted a picture of a plate of nachos. Other than that, he was running under radio silence as far as social media was concerned. I had no way of knowing whether he was still thinking about me, or if he still wanted to be with me. If he was feeling any pressure from sexual frustration, it wasn’t apparent.

I had a roommate in college who once dumped a boy because he got his ear pierced. It turned out to be the right decision, because the ex-boyfriend ended up going to jail for running a meth lab and my roommate ended up marrying the lieutenant governor of Minnesota, but that’s not the point of the story. My roommate had been nearly besotted with this guy, and never stopped talking about how much she cared about him and how sweet he was, but she dropped him cold over a tiny little diamond stud in his earlobe—more accurately, because he wouldn’t take it out when she asked him to. (The boyfriend was majorly cute, and I thought my roommate had made a big mistake in dumping him, and I would totally have dated him if my roommate had not specifically threatened to smother me in my sleep if I had tried.)

The house on Idaho Street wasn’t a small thing, like a diamond stud, but it was coming between me and Adam and I hated that. It was a big, expensive thing, and it was tied in to my relationship with my mother, which was another big thing and one that I wasn’t equipped to walk away from. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t reasonable, and it sure as hell wasn’t romantic. But I still spent the entire drive down to Cape May wishing and hoping that the house on Idaho Street had caught fire, or crumbled in on itself, or had blown away in a freak tornado.

The day was clear and sunny, but it wasn’t yet warm enough for me to put the top down on my convertible. I made excellent time coming down the Parkway all the way to Avalon, and then hit traffic in Cape May Court House. I was finally able to make my way across the causeway to Cape May proper, and made a quick stop by the Wawa on the north side of town and fortified myself with a hot chicken sandwich and a cold Diet Coke. If the house was a hoarder house, and if the smell made me want to throw up as soon as I walked in the door, I thought it was a good idea to have something in my stomach, just in case.

I drove down Lafayette Street through the middle of town, past the cute little antique shops and the bed-and-breakfasts and the twee art galleries. I turned left on to the beach road. It was just warm enough for people to be walking along the promenade without serious risk of frostbite, and they were out in force. Most of them seemed to be couples, walking hand in hand, enjoying the sunny day and the brisk wind whipping off the bay. I found the cross street I wanted and turned towards the house on Idaho Street.