Page 61 of No Kind of Hero
“AtBlake’s?”
“Well, yeah. I talked to Dakota, and she and Russell want to do the affidavits. Blake too. I interviewed them on the phone and typed things up. One attorney—well two, counting me—one visit, four signatures, and we’ve got this. At least the first step. The next part’s mine.”
This was going too fast. He was barely hanging on. “What’s that?”
“I file the petition tomorrow at the courthouse, with the affidavits attached. And then comes the tricky part. Where do you think she is? April?”
“She went to her parents’,” he said reluctantly. He didn’t want to think about this. Doing it felt like sticking his hand into a nest of rattlesnakes. You didn’t do that.
Unless your baby girl was in there. If it was your baby girl? You climbed right into that nest, and you did anything you had to do. He asked, “Are you sure? That it wouldn’t be better to wait? If April went a year, say, without seeing Gracie. Wouldn’t that be a stronger spot?”
“Judges want kids to know both parents. Especially their mother. Unless she’s drug-addicted or seriously abusive, they want family reunification. If April comes back, if she wants Gracie, unless there are special circumstances like that, they’re going to give her some kind of custody. If you make the power move now, though, while she’s running away from her responsibilities and she just wants out, my sources say you’ve got a good shot at sole legal custody. She’d get to have Gracie for some periods—some visitation—but you’d get the say.”
When she put it like that, how could there be any other answer? “Then let’s do it,” he managed to say through the tightened-up mess that was his chest. “Because I need the say.”
His baby girl. Not with him.
No.
It wasn’t quite eight-thirty on Friday morning, and the parking lot of the professional building near the courthouse wasn’t a quarter full. Which didn’t matter anyway, because Beth hadn’t driven. She’d walked the twelve blocks from Dakota’s house with Henry, enjoying the fact that she could. There was a hint of autumn in the air already, and she was wearing a purple Wild Horse Resort sweatshirt from Dakota’s closet over her jeans. The huge old trees that shaded the sidewalks in the town’s older neighborhoods, though, hadn’t started dropping their leaves yet, and the kids were already out riding their scooters and bikes along the sidewalks as if determined to make the most of their last week of freedom. It was all very small-town. All very serene. It was nice.
She texted a few words into her phone, and a minute later, as she was tying Henry’s leash to a spindly new sidewalk tree, a fiftyish woman opened the glass door. Joan Armitage, presumably. One of two partners at Armitage, Caskell, LLC. Intimidating, and not.
“Hi,” she said. “Are you Beth?”
“Yes. Joan? Thanks. Just a second.”
“Oh, bring him in,” Joan said. “We can always use some doggie love.”
“Thanks.” Beth untied Henry, then came over and shook hands.
Joan crouched and gave Henry the kind of ear rub he liked best. “Aren’t you a gorgeous boy.” She stood up. “Come on in.”
“I appreciate you making time,” Beth said as they headed inside.
The other woman smiled, softening her severe features, though her tone was still matter-of-fact. “Professional courtesy plus your dad? The firm does some of his work, the employment pieces, so that was an easy decision. You mind the stairs?”
“Not at all.”
It was an effort to keep pace. Joan, neatly but comfortably dressed in gray cotton pants, a blue tunic with a beaded collar, and sandals, practically ran up the two flights. “Although itismy busy season,” she said at the top, not sounding a bit winded. “January and August: prime divorce time. Every single year.”
“I can see January,” Beth said, following Joan down the hall and through another locked door into a small reception area, as yet unmanned, then down another quiet hallway. “Stressful holidays, family mess, wanting a fresh start. People tackle estate planning in January, too. But why August?”
Joan shrugged and gestured Beth into an office with a view around the curve of the lake, with Blake’s new Wild Horse Resort in the background. “Some of the same reasons. Too much family, reality versus fantasy. Spending too much on a vacation that turned into your kids fighting in the back seat, and maybe you don’t even get vacation sex anymore. Financial stress, kids in daycare over the summer. Disappointment, resentment, and money worries. The relationship killers. Speaking of which—sit down, and we’ll take a look at what you’ve got.”
Beth had Henry lie down at her feet and handed over her file, and Joan put on a pair of rectangular reading glasses and studied the documents one after another, setting each neatly face-down afterwards.
“Right,” she said at the end, picking the pages up and tapping them together, then handing them back to Beth. “Good stuff. Blake Orbison was a smart addition, even if his testimony only covers the past few months. And even though no judge will consider Evan’s mother unbiased, the fact that she’s been providing daily care to Grace will help mitigate that. So Mom never came back at all? Pretty unusual. Normally Dad’s the runner. Are we sure she’s still living?”
Beth hesitated, then opened her purse, pulled out a dollar, and handed it over. “Guess this makes me a client,” she said with a smile that was only slightly nervous. “Just to be on the safe side.“
Joan leaned back in her black leather desk chair, stuck her legs out in front of her, and rocked a little as she studied Beth. “Uh-huh. You checked her out.”
“Through a friend.” Actually, an investigator for Kentworth, Docherty, but Joan didn’t have to know that. Beth never did anything irregular, but she’d done this anyway, instructing the man to “just bill me directly on this one.” Her pulse rate had kicked up even as she’d dictated the Social Security number, name, and birthdate, half of her expecting to be questioned. Or, for that matter, to be fired. This was in no way legal. Andrew Hogan, the ex-cop investigator, had sounded unfazed, though, which made Beth wonder exactly how far over the line other people skated.
They’d been lucky that Evan hadrememberedApril’s Social Security number and birthdate, of course. “Math skills,” he’d said when Beth had commented on it. “Or my one freak talent. I remember numbers.”
Now, she went on to tell Joan, “A background check didn’t turn anything up. Wherever she is, she’s quiet. No rental applications. No criminal activity, but she never had that. None in the past, either.”
