Four Wives (11 page)

“S
ORRY
I’
M LATE.
” M
ARIE
charged through the door, making excuses as she rushed past the conference room and into the office. It was nearly eleven o’clock, and after watching Love’s children for the better part of three hours, she was almost frantic to get to work. “It’s OK. How’s your friend doing?” Randy Matthews stood at attention behind his desk, where a casebook lay open. With his jacket draped behind his chair, his sleeves rolled up, tie loosened, he was beginning to fit in with the office decor.

Marie stopped moving and let the question sink in before responding.

“It’s not good, actually. She’s in a lot of pain and no one knows why.” She shook her head, then continued to her desk. “And will you please stop doing that?”

“What?”

“Standing up every time I walk through the door. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not Emily Post.”

The reference to the manners guru was lost on Randy, but he took his orders and returned to his seat. “Sorry. Old habit.”

“What? Military school?”

Randy laughed and hung his head slightly with amusement. “No. My father was a stickler when it came to formality. Especially with women and elders.”

“Did you really have to ruin my day the moment I walked in here?”

“No … I didn’t mean you.” Fumbling to explain, the young intern was suddenly flustered. “I mean, yes you as a woman, but no, not you as an elder.”

He was now fully embarrassed, and Marie smiled as she pulled off her own jacket and dropped it on a pile of folders stacked on the floor beside her. Then she kicked off her shoes and pulled a leg under her as she sat down to face him. She could get used to Randy Matthews, having him beside her, listening and watching as though everything she did and said was divinely inspired. It wasn’t as if she
ever
got that at home. Her girls loved her, she knew, but the
Ihateyom
could easily outnumber the signs of affection they doled out each day. After all, they were girls. Emotional manipulation was their birthright. That left her husband, who had’to her utter bewilderment’left out his cereal boxes again that morning in what one could only presume to be an act of childish defiance.

“Nice try, but too late. Did you say you would be needing a recommendation at the end of the summer?”

Marie’s wry smile disarmed him, and Randy Matthews was again laughing. And when he turned his eyes from her face, she found herself studying the creases that spread across his cheeks when he smiled.

“This came on the fax,” Randy said, handing her several sheets of paper. “I think it’s the Farrell police report.”

“What’s it say?” Marie asked, consciously avoiding the touch of his hand as she took the documents.

“I didn’t know if I should read it, or wait. So I waited.”

Marie sorted the pages, placing them in order. As she began to read, she heard the squeak of chair wheels.

“Can I look on?” Randy was close now, having moved his chair to her desk. And though she nodded silently, casually, she became unsettled by the smell of his cologne, the soft ruffling of his starched shirt as he rested his elbows on the desk.

The report was surprisingly brief.

June 12

Victim Simone Farrell, a 10-month-old infant, died from injuries sustained while falling down front staircase in the Farrell home. Father Carson Farrell was at home with the victim at the time of incident, left child unattended in upstairs hallway to make a call. Baby gate was installed at top of stairs, but was not secured at the time of the incident. Cause of death: spinal shock.

There was more paperwork, the ME’s report, the names of the officers who responded, the call made to 911.

“Farrell called for help at ten twenty-one.”

“Hold on.” Randy dug through a separate pile of documents, pulling out a page from a phone bill. “I flagged the bill from that month … ,” he said, running his eyes down the page. “Farrell called the office at nine forty-five. The next call was to 911 at ten twenty-one.”

Marie nodded silently as she continued to read.

“It’s like he said, then? An accident?” Randy asked, turning from the report to face Marie.

“Looks that way.” When she got to the last page, she leaned forward, clutching the paper with both hands. “Hold on …”

“What is it?”

Marie read the last page of the fax.

April 7

Domestic disturbance. 1462 Shelton Avenue. Neighbor reported yelling at residence of Carson and Vickie Farrell. Officer dispatched. No signs of injury at the scene. Officer issued a warning. No complaint lodged.

Marie placed the report down on her desk, then leaned back in her chair.

“Well, I guess things weren’t quite as placid as our client implied. Apparently, our Mr. Farrell has quite a temper.”

Randy stared at the report and nodded softly. “So what now?” he asked. “Bring Farrell back in?”

Marie sighed deeply and shrugged. The truth was, in her six years as a divorce lawyer, this was the first instance of domestic violence she’d come across. It just didn’t happen in Hunting Ridge’or, at least, didn’t make it to the surface.

“This is where it gets tricky. We don’t know very much about the incident. If we find out more, and Farrell takes the stand, our hands are tied as to what we can allow him to say.”

“Suborning perjury.”

“Exactly. We have a lot more latitude if we don’t know.”

“But what if there’s more here. What if he …”

Marie held up her hand. “One step at a time. If it’s relevant to the custody issue, Mrs. Farrell’s lawyer will raise it at the deposition. Then we’ll see what he says. I’m not worried about Carson handling the question. You saw him. He’s as cool as they come. And I’d rather not let on that we’ve looked into his daughter’s accident.” Marie stood abruptly as her last statement played out in her head.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she started to say. Then she said to Randy what she would have said to the office walls such a short time ago. “I usually don’t go behind a client’s back. I can’t even say for sure why I did this time.”

Randy shrugged with a definitive nonchalance, the innocence all but gone now from his demeanor. “I do.”

“Really? Want to fill me in?”

“There are three children involved and you thought Farrell was being evasive. You have an obligation as an officer of the court to report a client who might pose a danger to others, so you checked it out. And, as it so happens, you were dead right.”

Marie sighed as she looked at Randy, leaning back with his legs crossed, shoulders held firmly in place’more of a man than she had seen in him before. And for the first time since their initial meeting, he looked back at her not with youthful awe, but with an alarming degree of certainty in her judgment. It was that certainty that the mirror over the bathroom sink had been missing, the very thing she had missed feeling about herself for far too long.

“Don’t tell me’you had Professional Responsibility last semester, right?”

Randy smiled sheepishly and nodded. “And?”

“And,
it’s a lot more complicated in practice. I have my reputation, my firm to think about. I’m not even sure I know what that police report actually means, if anything.”

“So should we forget about it?”

Marie walked to the window and looked out at the parking lot below.
Yes, Marie. Leave it the hell alone.
But it was not an option. Not for her.

“God help me for saying this, and I’ll deny it to anyone outside of this room. But I’m a mother first, and if Farrell is hiding something that could hurt his children, I want to know.”

“I think that’s right.”

“What?”

“Being a mother first. A
parent
first. Especially when they’re young. Who else is going to look out for them?”

Marie gave Randy an odd look. “Interesting perspective for a single

guy-”

“I’m not saying I know what it’s like to be a parent. But I
was
a child. And I’ve seen how you talk about your girls.”

“Is it that bad? Do I go on and on like the rest of them?”

Randy laughed. “Who’s
them?”

“You know’people who talk about their children as if anyone else cares.”

“I like hearing about your family.”

“You like hearing about nail-polish dilemmas, wardrobe disasters, fights over TV and cereal boxes?”

“Yes. And don’t forget the tiff with Suzanne’s teacher over her math homework, Olivia’s irreverent potty talk that has the other moms up in arms’my personal favorite, by the way’and, of course,
golf I”

Marie hung her head, pretending to be embarrassed’and trying hard not to think about the way his attention to her children was making her feel. Did Anthony even know about Olivia’s potty talk? Had she bothered to tell him?

“The evidence is in. I
am
one of them. Now, what about Farrell?”

Following her lead, Randy’s voice took on a more serious tone. “Tell me what I can do.”

For starters, you can stop looking at me that way.
Then again, did she really want him to stop? It came as a relief that, at the very least, she knew what she wanted to do with her client.

“Let’s get into it.”

T
HE FLIGHT FROM
L.A. was long. With delays on both ends, the six-hour event had turned into a ten-hour jaunt, and that was before consideration was taken for the travel to and from the airports. Nevertheless, it had to be done.

Yvonne Welsh waited for the driver to come around for her door. Even if her day had passed, she still felt worthy of the respect and not above demanding it. It was true that few civilians recognized her from the daytime television work she’d put out in the sixties and early seventies. And, at sixty-something years of age, she wasn’t stopping traffic the way she once had. Still, she was
Yvonne Welsh
’the longest-running daytime drama actress of her time. And though the money was close to gone, the residuals she’d lived on for years steadily dwindling, she kept up appearances as well as any other Hollywood has-been. The ranch house she lived in was small, but it was in the Hills. Her clothes were department store, but she wore them like Prada. With dyed red hair shapely piled atop her head, carefully penciled eyebrows, and the softest skin, Yvonne Welsh would always be a star.

She studied the house from the back seat while the driver pulled the bags from the trunk.
Has nothing changed?
she thought to herself. It had been nearly a year since her last visit to the home of her only child, and her disapproval at the state of things’even from the outside’was diluted only by her own guilt, both new and old. Love was deserving of more than this, bound to a small-town doctor with a mountain of debt, stuffed into this little cottage like those poor Mexicans she’d seen on the evening news back in L.A. She should have had more. Love Welsh had been born with a
gift-

Standing at the curb outside her daughter’s house, a long silk shawl wrapped around her shoulders in a dramatic sway, Yvonne paid the driver and prepared herself for what lay ahead. It didn’t matter at the moment what Love could have had. Her child was sick again. Some kind of back injury’a different ailment altogether’though to the mother in Yvonne, this was not reassuring in the least. None of them had dealt with what had happened to Love, and she couldn’t suppress the feeling that this was some kind of payback.

With Baby Will riding on his hip, Bill Harrison met her at the door. He had waited three days before admitting the seriousness of Love’s condition, praying it would be unnecessary to call for reinforcements. Yvonne had taken the next available flight, and now it was clear that her presence would be a bitter pill for both of them to swallow. Despite her general disdain for the medical community at large, she and Bill had gotten on from the first introduction. For some brief moment in time, she’d found him charming. That she pretended to still feel this way made it all the more awkward between them’Bill finding it humiliating, and Yvonne being too damned tired to pull it off. She would be helpful now, tending to the kids, tending to Love. But in between the colorful Hollywood tales and embellished memories to pass the idle time, there would be plenty of hard feelings for the man who had failed to provide her daughter with the life that should have been hers.

“Yvonne!” Bill said, extending his free arm to offer half a hug.

“Bill. Nice to see you.” The mother-in-law pushed past him, taking the baby on her way.

Through the high-pitched cooing, Bill grabbed the suitcases and carried them into the small foyer. Soon, a wave of feet pounded the stairs, announcing the arrival of Jessica and Henry. With their hair wet, pajamas in various states of adornment, the older children surrounded their grandmother and demanded their presents.

“What? No ’Hello Grandmother, how was your trip’? Where are your manners?” Yvonne teased as she handed the baby back to Bill. After a slight delay’just enough to elicit the wide-eyed anticipation’she reached into her carry bag and pulled out two treasures wrapped in the finest paper and ribbon.

Henry ripped into his first, then beamed at the sight of the latest Bion-icle Lego. Jessica struggled a bit, but it was worth it. The Pet Pal stuffed kitten in a miniature carrying case, pink, of course, sent her jumping up and down in a giddy frenzy.

“Now upstairs. Bathroom, teeth, pick out books. I’ll send your grandmother up as soon as she gets settled,” Bill said, relieved that he knew the bedtime routine cold.

When the children disappeared, their excited voices trailing behind them, Yvonne’s smile faded. Then she looked at her son-in-law with the most serious of expressions. “Now,
where
is my daughter?”

“She’s in bed. You can go up.”

“And
how
is my daughter?” Her dramatic tone forced Bill to stifle a smile.

“We did the MRI. There’s no tear in the muscle, which was puzzling. She just has pain’pain we can’t explain at the moment.”

Yvonne looked at him with scrutinizing incomprehension. “I don’t understand.”

“We’re running some blood tests,” Bill answered, feeling defensive. “We’re going to rule out Lyme disease first.”

“Lyme disease!” Now Yvonne was alarmed.

“It’s highly unlikely. We just need to rule things out before accepting that it’s a muscle strain.”

Yvonne nodded and did her best to be gracious. “So you have no idea yet?”

Bill shook his head.

Then Yvonne shook hers. “My money’s on a muscle strain. She always did too much, my baby girl.”

“Let’s hope.”

Yvonne walked past him and started up the stairs, where the hushed giggles of children not doing what they were told filled the hallway. Yvonne smiled, but then fought to hold back her disapproval of the state of things’the stains on the stair runner, a cobweb in the ceiling corner, laundry piling up right there in the hall for everyone to see. Standing before her daughter’s former study/bedroom’another disgraceful commentary on her life’Yvonne inhaled deeply to swallow all the things she wanted to say.

Then she opened the door and said them anyway.

“Nice to see you, too, Mother.” Lying flat on the small bed, pillows propping up her knees and elbows, Love felt a warm current run through her. Had her mother not burst in pointing out her failings to avoid her own fear, it would have been all wrong.

Yvonne shrugged, then struggled to walk to the side of the bed. “Good God, I can hardly get through here!”

“I know, Mother.”

“Can I sit? I won’t hurt you?”

Love patted the mattress in the spot she’d cleared for visitors’just below the pillow supporting her left arm, just above her hip. The shift in the mattress from another body could be tolerated there.

Sitting now next to her daughter, Yvonne looked at her with conviction. “Your mother’s in the house now. You don’t have to worry about a thing.”

Love studied the regal woman before her, taking in her smell’the sweet perfumes and lotions, the hairspray that was keeping all those extensions so perfectly in place. Her makeup was just right, adding color in a subtle, natural way to skin that had been carefully protected over the years. The delicate pearl earrings, silk scarf, lady’s Rolex on her graceful wrist. Those long, elegant fingers and manicured nails. She was as she had always been’a slight and wispy lady, in the truest sense of the word. Still, looking now into her pale blue eyes, so steady and sure, Love could see the steel foundation she had always leaned on. Yvonne Welsh had done the inconceivable’she had survived Hollywood with her integrity, and most of her pride, in tact. It was that woman who defied the fragility of her appearance that Love always saw when she looked at her mother, as she now did. And in an instant, she was a little girl again.

“Come now,” Yvonne said, wiping a stream of tears from her daughter’s eyes, “your face is getting all puffy and the children will want to say good night.”

Love nodded and took a breath, but the tears kept coming. It had been almost a year since she’d seen Yvonne, since she’d felt the comfort of her mother’s presence. It was long overdue.

“What is all this about?” Yvonne said, taking her hand. Then she sighed deeply and watched as her baby girl let go. She pulled a linen handkerchief from her bag, and gently patted dry her daughter’s cheeks. But that was all she could do, she had come to realize over the years’sit and watch as her only child ran herself into the ground, desperate to keep one step ahead of her past. And now that SOB was dredging it all up.
Damn that man,
she thought.
Damn Alexander Rice.
He was brilliant to be sure, but he was also a born narcissist and philanderer. She had known from the moment they met that he had not been placed on this earth to be a good husband and father. She should have also known he would be nothing but trouble.

It was that way with the great ones, she reminded herself. Able to buy themselves a ticket out of the moral scrutiny of an otherwise unforgiving public. How many years did she suffer him, living on the narrow walk between perfection and ruin, exhilaration and despair? Rice was a habit she’d been too weak to kick, even though she’d faced every morning with the sickness of uncertainty.
Would this be the last day?
she used to wonder.
Is this the day he ’11 go back to his wife?

She held her daughter tighter, wishing she could change things, choose a man who would stick around to be a father. But, ironically, it was fatherhood’their greatest moment, the creation of their child’that had driven him away. Their love child (hence the name Yvonne had insisted upon) had cast a black shadow over him, adultery being one thing, and what was essentially bigamy being quite another. His indulgence had resulted in the making of two families, and public opinion had finally turned against him. The year Love was born, he published his tenth book’an inquiry into the corruption of intellectual thought by religious faith. His life became a testament to his own theories as the public discourse focused on his infidelity, leaving his book sales to languish. It soon became clear to everyone in his inner circle that he would have to choose, and Yvonne never doubted which way he would go.

Of course, that had not been the end of it. Rice’s older children had fallen into the trappings of mundane existence’marriage, corporate jobs, kids of their own. None of this had been of interest to him. When Love’s gift was discovered, he’d come back to claim his prize. He took over her childhood, investing both his money and his wisdom in her education’not to mention his reputation. That all of his efforts would crumble under the weight of his own arrogance was, in hindsight, almost predictable.

Now he was back again, and Love was running even faster. As if that were possible. Three children in five years, no help to care for them, scrubbing toilets and dishes, washing soiled clothing over and over without a thought for herself’trying to accumulate enough virtue to erase events that could not be undone. And yet it was she who had not been able to see what was right in front of her’the know-it-all Yvonne Welsh, who’d been so invested in Love’s future that she’d failed to notice the train wreck approaching.

She thought about the letter she’d received from Rice and wondered if somewhere in this house she wouldn’t find a piece of that same gray stationery with the chicken-scratch scribblings that neither of them had seen for years. More than this, she wondered if Rice’s re-entry wasn’t behind everything that was going wrong in her daughter’s life.

Yvonne forced a smile and stroked Love’s hair.
This stops now,
she thought, making a list of the things she
could
do’hire a housekeeper, watch the kids, whip Bill into shape. She would send him to the grocery store, get him to fix the front porch step that felt loose, put up a ladder and reach that damned cobweb. Despite her image, she wasn’t above scrubbing the stains out of the carpet. And, of course, they would do those tests. Thinking of these things’practical things that could be accomplished’ settled her nerves as she watched her little girl begin to calm.

When Love’s face was dry, Yvonne carefully folded the handkerchief and returned it to her bag. Then she reached out, softly touching Love’s face with the back of her hand. In a whisper, but with a firm tone, she said it one last time.

“Your mother’s here.”