Ladies' Night (9 page)

“That’s right, Judge,” Dickie said quickly. “You haven’t heard how Ms. Stanton raised such a ruckus that their entire neighborhood could listen in on this private marital spat. And I’m assuming you didn’t see the network news footage of the aftermath—including footage showing Mr. Stanton’s personal vehicle sitting at the bottom of his pool?”

Stackpole’s eyebrows shot up. “It was on the news?”

“I had nothing to do with that,” Grace offered.

“Enough!” Stackpole glared over the top of his glasses at her.

Dickie held up a small plastic rectangle. “I have the news footage right here on a flash drive, if Your Honor would like to see it.”

“I don’t intend to do any such thing,” Stackpole said. “Let’s get back to the matter of finances. Mr. Murphree, I want your client to come to some kind of equitable agreement with Ms. Stanton.” He flipped through the files before him.

“Ms. Stanton? Your attorney has asked for what seems like an exorbitant amount of money to pay your monthly expenses. I find it hard to believe a resourceful woman like yourself can’t live on $2,000 a month. My own wife manages quite nicely on that amount.”

“But Judge,” Mitzi sputtered. “Ms. Stanton is entitled to much more than that. She has business expenses involved in writing and producing her blog. And she’ll need to find a place to live. She can’t continue to live in her mother’s very small quarters. And furnishings … Besides, it’s really immaterial how much allowance you give your wife. Ms. Stanton was the primary breadwinner in this marriage…”

Dickie shot to his feet. “That’s not true! Mr. Stanton incorporated Gracenotes. He managed the business, sold advertising, dealt with every aspect of the business, and built it up from a small-potatoes hobby to the entity it is today. He, in fact, is the CEO of Gracenotes, Inc., and the owner of the domain name, among other things. It was Ms. Stanton’s choice to be paid a weekly salary on a work-for-hire agreement, because she did not want to be troubled with the business of running a business.”

“What?” Grace shrieked, then quickly covered her mouth with her hands. She tugged urgently on Mitzi’s hand. “I never agreed to any kind of a weekly salary,” she whispered. “Ben just drew money out of the corporate account and put it in our personal checking account. I left all of that up to him and the accountant.”

“Judge,” Mitzi began, but Stackpole wasn’t listening.

“Two thousand a month,” he said firmly. “It was apparently Ms. Stanton’s decision to leave this marriage, so I’m afraid she’ll have to deal with the repercussions of that.”

“Thank you, Judge,” Dickie said quickly.

“That’s not all,” Stackpole said. He took his glasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Ms. Stanton, I find myself at a loss for words as far as your behavior in this matter goes. This is the second instance today of parties to a divorce acting in dangerous, violent, even criminal behavior. I’m troubled by that. Deeply troubled.”

“Judge, if you’d just listen to what provoked my client,” Mitzi began, but Stackpole held up a hand to stop her.

“There can be no justification for the wanton destruction of property or for harassment or assault on a third party. This is just the kind of thing that escalates, until we have domestic violence, armed stand-offs, and God knows what.”

“It won’t happen again,” Grace said in her meekest voice.

“It certainly won’t,” Stackpole agreed. “We’ll see how you do with this new financial settlement, while the two of you work out the other details of your divorce settlement. But in the meantime, Ms. Stanton, I want you to begin seeing a therapist who is an expert in divorce, uh, counseling. Immediately. Dr. Talbott-Sinclair does excellent work, as you’ll see.” He glanced down at his calendar. “I believe she has a group meeting on Wednesday. If she can fit you into her group meeting tomorrow night, that will give you six weeks.

Mitzi stared at the judge. “Your Honor, are you also ordering
Mr
. Stanton to attend these group sessions?”

“No,” he snapped. “Mr. Stanton seems to have his anger issues under control. Now, Ms. Stanton, if Dr. Talbott-Sinclair signs off on your rehabilitation, then I’ll take that into consideration when I see you later this summer. Understood?”

Grace could do nothing but nod. Inside was another story. Inside she was screaming.

But Mitzi wasn’t done. “Judge, we still need you to rule on the matter of ownership of Ms. Stanton’s business. As it stands right now, Ms. Stanton has been deprived of access to her blog, which in effect deprives her of making a living.”

“Why can’t she just start another blog?” Stackpole asked, gathering up his papers and shutting the file in front of him. “Nobody’s keeping her from writing, are they?”

“Mr. Stanton is keeping her from writing,” Mitzi said, sounding weary and out of patience. “He is in effect hijacking her intellectual property.”

“Talk to me in six weeks after your counseling,” Stackpole said. He jerked his head in the bailiff’s direction. “I can feel my blood sugar getting low. Let’s break for lunch.”

*   *   *

Mitzi was stuffing papers into her briefcase. Ben stood and began to stride past, but Grace reached out and grabbed his sleeve.

Ben looked down at her with a blank expression. “Don’t do this,” he said, his voice chilly.

She jumped up. “Do what? Ask you to answer my lawyer’s phone calls? Ask you to treat me with some kind of fairness, some kind of decency, even if our marriage is over? Why are you doing this? If I can’t write my blog, neither of us makes any money. You realize that, right?”

Dickie was at Ben’s side now. “Now, Gracie. This is very inappropriate. You heard what Judge Stackpole just told you. You need to get your issues under control. If you have something to say to Ben, you need to have your lawyer bring it up with me.”

Ben looked her in the eye. “That means no more phone calls. No more showing up at the gates at Gulf Vista, embarrassing the security guards. You wanted it over, Grace, so that’s what you’ve got. It’s over. You get on with your life, and I’ll get on with mine.”

He carefully pried her fingers from the fine fabric of his suit coat, then picked up his briefcase and strolled toward the door, where J’Aimee was already standing, waiting for him. She grasped his arm and, just before walking out, turned and shot Grace a triumphant smile.

8

It was four o’clock on a steamy Tuesday afternoon and Jungle Jerry’s Olde Florida Family Fun Park was nearly deserted. There were no families present, and not much fun in evidence.

A quartet of blue-haired tourists from Michigan were taking advantage of the “buy one, get one” coupon they’d found in that day’s newspaper. They were having a nice enough time, wandering the crushed-shell footpaths, admiring the unusual flora and fauna, especially the wading pool full of preening pink flamingos.

If they noticed that the temperatures were in the high nineties, and the humidity at 2,000 percent, they didn’t remark upon it. Instead, they fanned themselves with the yellowing cardboard Jungle Jerry’s Fan Club fans they’d bought for $1.99 in the gift shop and inhaled the heady fragrance of frangipani and ginger lily.

The four paused in their leisurely tour to stare up at the gnarled crimson boughs of a particularly eye-catching tree. “What the heck is this?” asked the only man in the group, a spry seventy-six-year-old who was actually the youngster of the crowd.

Wyatt Keeler happened to be nearby, trimming dead branches from an oleander bush that seemed particularly stressed by the summer’s dry spell.

He was dressed as he always was at the park, in a khaki shirt bristling with epaulets and with flap pockets and embroidered Jungle Jerry patches, matching khaki cargo shorts, lace-up work boots, and, of course, his ever-present safari hat.

Wyatt walked up to the group and gave them a welcoming smile, flashing his dimples. Old ladies were crazy for the dimples. He gave the tree trunk a loving pat, as though it were a beloved family pet, which, to Wyatt, it essentially was.

“This is a gumbo-limbo tree,” he volunteered. “It’s one of the more unusual species we have in the park. It’s Latin name is
Bursera simaruba
, and it’s a native of tropical regions like Florida, of course, as well as Mexico, the Caribbean, Brazil, and Venezuela. Some people call it the ‘tourist tree,’ because the bark is red and peeling—like a lot of tourists we see down here in the wintertime.”

The Michiganders laughed at this and themselves by association.

“Interesting,” murmured one of the women, a sturdily built eighty-five-year-old widow in a pink sun visor.

Wyatt felt himself suddenly cheered by his own speech, and by the interested comments from these tourists.

The very oldest member of the group, a spindly legged ninety-year-old in a thin cotton housedress, stepped closer and peered at Wyatt’s Jungle Jerry’s name patch, which had faded into obscurity from years of laundering.

“You’re not Jungle Jerry,” she said sharply. “You’d be too young.”

“No ma’am. I’m Wyatt Keeler,” he offered her his hand. “Jungle Jerry was my grandfather. He bought this place in 1961, when it was still a commercial orange grove.”

One of the women did a little full-circle turn. “You don’t see a lot of orange trees here now.”

“That’s right,” Wyatt said. “My grandfather, Jerry Brennan, bought six hundred acres here on County Line Road, back in the day when this was considered way out in the boonies, and he thought he’d become the orange king of Manatee County. And he might have done it, too, except that this area experienced a record-breaking frost in 1963. Temperatures dipped into the low teens and stayed there for three days. My granddad didn’t know enough about citrus growing back then to know that he needed to fire up the smudge pots. He lost most of his orange trees in that freeze, and most of the family money, too.”

“Too bad,” the man muttered.

“Fortunately,” Wyatt went on, “he met my grandmother, Winnie, not long after that. And
her
family still had some money. Granddad’s family had once owned a little amusement park back home in Tulsa, and, since tourism was going great guns in Florida then, he decided maybe he could take the old orange grove and convert it into what he called a kiddie park.”

Wyatt gestured to a rusty jungle gym partially obscured by a hedge of orange-flowering shrubs. “He put in all kinds of rides and playground equipment, and because my grandmother Winnie loved flowers, the two of them also started planting new trees and shrubs as they took out the dead orange trees.”

“It’s lovely now,” the ninety-year-old said. “We used to bring our grandchildren here when we all came down every spring. Whatever happened to all your wild animals? I was just telling my friends, there used to be lions and a tiger, and do I remember a zebra?”

“Yes ma’am,” Wyatt said with a laugh. “We had all that and more. My granddad watched a lot of those old Tarzan movies in his younger days. He bought the animals from a traveling circus that had gone bust. A lot of circus outfits used to winter down in this area, you know. He’d always loved animals anyway. So he named himself Jungle Jerry, and he got a retired lion tamer to teach him a few tricks of the trade.”

“I thought I remembered a lion show,” the woman crowed. “So that was the real Jungle Jerry?”

“The one and only,” Wyatt said. “We had the big cats, plus Zoey, that was the zebra, and an elephant, and even a Florida black bear, right up until the late seventies. After my granddad retired, my dad took over, and he phased out most of the large animals.”

The woman in the sun visor glared at Wyatt. “They didn’t … kill them. Tell me they didn’t.”

“Not at all,” Wyatt assured her. “Those animals were like my grandfather’s own kids. Boo-Boo, he was the bear, he died of natural causes the same year granddad retired. Monty, the lion, and Tonga, that was the tiger, they retired to an exotic animal shelter in Ocala. Daphne, our elephant, was donated to the Lowry Park Zoo over in Tampa.”

The four tourists all seemed relieved. “I love all the tropical birds you have around here,” said the woman in the baggy shorts.

Wyatt put his fingers to his lips and gave a long, shrill whistle. They heard a flapping, and suddenly a huge gray parrot flew down from the top of a nearby poinciana tree and perched on Wyatt’s shoulder.

“Oh!” one of the women said, clapping her hands in glee.

The bird nuzzled Wyatt’s ear, then dipped its neck and poked her head into the right breast pocket for a treat.

“This is Cookie,” Wyatt said. “She’s an African gray, a total diva, and the star of the parrot show. I can’t take any credit for her, though. The birds were my mom’s idea.”

“Weren’t there monkeys, too?” the ninety-year-old inquired.

“You’ve got a good memory,” Wyatt said. “The monkeys were here when I was a little kid. But when this neighborhood started going residential, with all the subdivisions closing in, we were getting a lot of complaints, especially since the little boogers were too clever and kept getting out of their pens and frightening the neighbors. Eventually, all of them were adopted out.”

Cookie found a parrot pellet in Wyatt’s pocket and began chewing contentedly.

“That was certainly interesting,” the old man said, pumping Wyatt’s hand again. “This is a grand place you’ve got here. We’re a little surprised to have it all to ourselves today.”

Wyatt was not surprised. But he made a valiant effort to keep up a good front.

“You just happened to catch us on our slow day,” he lied. “But you come back later in the week, and the crowds will be here, I guarantee.”

That was a lie, too. They hadn’t had what you could call a real “crowd” at Jungle Jerry’s in months and years. Okay, decades, if you wanted to be brutally honest. In this post-Disney era, families got their kicks in air-conditioned comfort, with audio-animatronics and movie-quality special effects. Animal rights advocates didn’t approve of exotic birds performing quaint tricks like riding a tiny bicycle on a high wire, and kids were bored silly just looking at a bunch of plants and trees.

Jungle Jerry’s had shrunken significantly over the years. Right now, they were at around a hundred acres, since Jungle Jerry’s son-in-law, Wyatt’s father, Nelson, had been forced to sell off a chunk of land to pay inheritance taxes after Jerry’s death.