Ladies' Night (37 page)

Got some news about Paula. Meet me for lunch at Rod & Reel Pier, 1 pm?

Who is this?
Grace texted.

Camryn. R we good?

She looked down at her messy clothes. She’d have time to wash her hands and face, but not much more time than that. Fortunately, the Rod and Reel was an open-air restaurant at the end of the fishing pier on Anna Maria. She could go dressed as she was.

OK!

*   *   *

She almost didn’t recognize the woman sitting at one of the tables by the window. Most of the tables were full of families, tourists, and anglers who’d spent the morning trying their luck fishing for trout or redfish on the pier. Finally, a lone woman in a floppy straw hat and sunglasses waved her down.

“Camryn? Is that you?”

“You see any other black women loitering around here?” Camryn snapped. She fanned herself with her hands. “Lord, Jesus, I’d forgotten how hot it is out on this pier.”

Grace shrugged and sat down. “You picked this place, so don’t blame me.”

“I’m just sayin’,” Camryn said. “I come here once a year for the fried grouper sandwich. Best thing I ever put in my mouth, but I try not to eat fried food, so I generally stay away.”

“Why the disguise?” Grace asked.

“I’m what they call a minor celebrity in this town,” Camryn said. “When I first got in the business, I got a big kick out of having people come up to me at Dillard’s or a restaurant. ‘Ooh, you’re the lady on TV.’ Uh-huh. Then I gotta have my picture taken with ’em, maybe autograph something. And I swear, every time I step foot out of my house without makeup or my hair all looking nappy, that’s when somebody spots me. You think I don’t see them snapping pictures of me with their cell phones, telling their friends at work, ‘I saw that Camryn Nobles on channel four at the gym, and girl! Without her TV makeup, she is looking old in the face.’”

“So on Saturdays, you leave off the makeup and wear a hat and sunglasses. Makes sense.”

Camryn studied her. “If I went somewhere in this town, looking like you look right now, people would be tweeting and Facebooking my picture all over the Internet.”

“I was painting a house when I got your text,” Grace said, deciding not to be insulted. “There wasn’t time to go home and change. So what did you find out about Paula?”

“Let’s order first,” Camryn said. The waitress took their orders: fried grouper sandwich for Camryn, mahimahi for Grace, unsweetened iced teas for both.

When their drinks came, Camryn sucked down half her tea. “First off, don’t you think it’s funny that a supposed marriage counselor is divorced?”

“Maybe not,” Grace said. “After all, she’s not counseling us on how to hang on to our marriages. She’s helping us deal with breakups. So I guess it’s not all that surprising that she’s in the same boat. How’d you find out she was divorced?”

“I got tired of waiting for our silly little intern to do her job, so I made some phone calls myself. Did some googling, a little investigative journalism. To tell you the truth, I’d forgotten how much fun it is to dig up good dirt. Anyway, yeah. Dr. Paula Talbott-Sinclair has only been divorced a couple years. We already knew she’d been in practice in Oregon—Portland. I called one of the assistant producers at our network affiliate out there, and she knew all about our Paula.”

Their food arrived, and Camryn picked up her sandwich, nibbled, and sighed happily. “I’ll have to do an extra hour on the elliptical to pay for this, but it’s worth every calorie.”

Grace was surprised by how hungry she was, so they ate in silence for a while. Finally, Camryn finished her sandwich. She picked up the paper plate with the remaining curly fries and dumped them in a nearby trash bin. “I don’t need the temptation,” she explained.

“You said that producer knew something about Paula?” Grace prompted.

“Mm-hmm. Paula and her husband, Thorsen Sinclair, were in practice together. He was a psychiatrist; she was a therapist. Connie, the woman I talked to at KTXX, says they were pretty prominent, gave workshops all over the Pacific Northwest on ‘mindful marriage,’ whatever that is. They self-published a book with the same title. And everything was golden with the Sinclairs. Until he fell in love with one of their patients.”

“Oh, wow.” Grace breathed.

“Uh-huh. Both couples split up, and it made a nice little scandal, because the husband called the state board and filed a formal complaint against Thorsen and then leaked it to the media out there. Connie sent me a link to the story in the Portland paper. ‘Mindful Marriage Melt-Down.’ Long and short? Thorsen dumped Paula. After their divorce was final, he married the other woman. And Paula, apparently, fell to pieces. She ‘borrowed’ one of her ex’s prescription pads and wrote herself a bunch of scrips for tranquilizers. But she got caught.”

“Did she go to jail?” Grace asked, wide-eyed.

“It was a first offense, so the judge agreed to drop the criminal charges and allowed her to check herself into a rehab program for impaired healthcare givers,” Camryn said. “She must have completed it to the court’s satisfaction out there, because Connie couldn’t find any record of the arrest.”

“Poor Paula,” Grace said. “I guess she’s been through the wringer, just like all of us. But how did she end up all the way out here?”

“Probably got sick of the rain. You ever been to Portland?”

“No.”

“I don’t actually know what brought her to Florida,” Camryn admitted. “What I do know is, she only set up this divorce and life coaching business six months ago. And it seems like it’s just barely legal—as long as she doesn’t call herself a therapist or a marriage counselor. Which she doesn’t.”

“I see,” Grace said, toying with a piece of lettuce that had slid off her mahi-mahi. “So—is Paula actually qualified to do what she’s doing? I mean, I thought she was a quack that first week, but honestly, I think she really is trying to help us. And she has some real insights into what goes wrong with marriages.”

“When she’s sober or not having a ‘family emergency,’” Camryn said, still clearly not convinced. “Her credentials are for real. I checked. Her undergrad degree is from the University of Washington, and she got a master’s in clinical social work from Portland State. She belonged to a bunch of professional organizations in Portland and was even on the board of a center for battered women, until her life went to shit.”

Grace drummed her fingernails on the tabletop. “Obviously, she’s back on the pills, self-medicating. It’s such a shame.”

“She’s a grown-up,” Camryn pointed out. “Nobody’s making her take those pills. What I want to know is, how did she and Stackpole get hooked up?”

“Good question.” Grace considered the woman sitting opposite her at the table. “Camryn?”

“Hmm?”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“You’re a member of the group. It affects you as much as it does me.”

“There are three other people in our group. You don’t even like me.”

“Did I ever say I don’t like you?”

“Well, it’s not like we’re buddy-buddy. You’ve never called me and asked me to go to lunch or anything.”

“I don’t
do
lunch, Grace. You want to know about the glamorous life of a morning anchor in a third-tier market? I get up at five in the morning, get on the elliptical, haul my ass to the station. I’m in makeup at six, on air at seven. After I get off the air, I’ve got meetings, I read the wires, the online editions of
The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Miami Herald.
Since I still do my own enterprise stories, I’ve got phone calls to make and interviews to set up, and lots of times I go out on remotes with a camera crew. I eat a take-out salad at my desk, go to some more meetings, make some more phone calls. Oh yeah, and I talk to my lawyer about this freakin’ divorce and brood about being single again at my age. And that’s my day.”

Grace still wasn’t convinced. “Why me?”

Camryn considered her over the top of her sunglasses. “Because other than me, you’re the only normal person in this group.”

Grace started to protest.

“Stop!” Camryn took off the sunglasses. “Wyatt doesn’t count. He’s a guy. A white guy, and I know it’s a new century and we finally have a black man in the White House. And I should be better than this, but I still consider him the man. Ashleigh? Pffft. I won’t even go there. You and I? Yeah, we did some stuff to our men, but they had it coming. Ashleigh is just all kinds of flaky. I wouldn’t trust her any farther than I could throw her.”

“What about Suzanne? She’s shy, sure, but she’s also smart and compassionate, and she seems to understand people.”

Camryn shook her head. “No. I can’t put my finger on it, but there is something definitely off about that woman.”

“She’s an introvert,” Grace protested.

“It’s more than that,” Camryn said. Suzanne is damaged goods. Like it or not, Grace, it’s you and me.”

“You and me—doing what?” Grace said impatiently. “We don’t definitely know that Paula and Stackpole are involved. She’s not breaking the law billing herself as a divorce coach. I don’t see us blowing the whistle on her because she’s got a problem with pills. If anything, I think we should try to get her help.”

“Help her?” Camryn looked disgusted. “Who’s helping us? Who’s helping us pay three hundred dollars a session for a ‘divorce coach’ who can’t keep her eyes open for an hour at a time? Who’s helping all those other poor women Stackpole sends to Paula for help? You ever consider that? I have. I hung around outside her office yesterday. Yeah. I saw what looked like three different ‘divorce recovery’ groups filing in there. Total of fifteen people. All women. I did the math. That’s 4,500 dollars. In one day. Do you make that kind of money in one day? I sure as hell don’t.”

It didn’t take long for that to sink in. “What do you want from me?” Grace asked.

“You said your lawyer went to law school with Stackpole? You trust her?”

“Yessss?” Grace said reluctantly.

“Talk to her. Ask her to sniff around. I’d ask my lawyer, but he’s a man. And he’s from Miami, went to law school down there. Balls of brass, great for negotiating your next contract at the station, but he’s definitely not in the local courthouse pipeline.”

Grace hesitated. “I’ll ask Mitzi what she can find out, but in the meantime I’ve got an idea of what we can do to help Paula. But I’ll need your help. The others, too.”

“You bleeding-heart liberals,” Camryn said. “What have you got in mind?”

“I’ll e-mail everybody else in the group, let them know the plan. Wednesday night, assuming Paula shows up, we ambush her. Do an old-school Betty Ford intervention.”

Camryn nodded thoughtfully. Put on her sunglasses, picked up the check. “I like it.” She pulled her straw hat down so that it put her face in deepest shade. “Don’t tell anybody else, but I like you, too, Grace Stanton.”

“Davenport,” Grace corrected. “It’s Davenport now.”

Grace watched while Camryn sped purposefully down the pier toward the parking lot. Had Camryn Nobles actually just befriended her? Were they in cahoots? Conspiring against Stackpole? Her life had just taken another unexpected turn. For the better, she hoped.

39

Grace took the outside stairs to the apartment two at a time. She let herself into her bedroom and set Sweetie on her bed. She knelt beside the bed and whispered into the dog’s silky ear. “I’ve got to take a shower and get ready for tonight. But you have to be really, really quiet, or the bad lady downstairs will kick us both out of here.”

Sweetie blinked, gave Grace’s nose a lick, then settled herself on one of Grace’s pillows, with her head on her paws. By the time Grace emerged from the shower, the dog was asleep. She dressed quietly, in a pair of blue and white seersucker shorts and a scoop-necked white T-shirt that she’d found for a total of five dollars at the Junior League thrift shop.

She found Rochelle downstairs, behind the bar, refereeing a hot argument about politics between two of her regulars.

“You look nice,” Rochelle said, raising an eyebrow. “Going somewhere?”

“I promised Wyatt I’d take dinner when I drop Sweetie off for the night,” Grace said.

Rochelle frowned. “Is that dog…”

“Sleeping in my room. Don’t get your panties in a wad. It’s just until I round up some food to take over there. He’s got Bo tonight. What do little boys like to eat?”

“I never had a little boy, so I wouldn’t know. But I can tell you what the big ones like. Meat. Fried things. Cheesey things. Anything with ketchup or barbecue sauce. Or jalapeños.”

“Well, it’s after five now, and I promised to have dinner there at six,” Grace said. “So I don’t have time to fix anything healthy from scratch. What are our specials tonight?”

“Wings. Crab burgers. Fried fish bites. Taco casserole.”

“God help me, but the taco casserole hits on all the major male food groups,” Grace said.

She went through the swinging doors into the kitchen and found the taco casserole on the steam table. Grace scooped up enough of the casserole to fit into a foil nine-by-twelve to-go tray and fitted it with a cardboard top. She was filling another foil tray with salad when Rochelle joined her.

“What about dessert?”

“Maybe just some fruit?”

Rochelle snorted. “If you’re ever gonna land another man you’ve got to get over this healthy fetish of yours.” She turned to one of the big walk-in coolers and lifted out a plastic-covered dish. “Never met a man or a kid yet who didn’t love my brownie pie,” she said, slicing off a huge slab and placing it in a large Styrofoam clamshell. Then she reached back into the cooler and handed her daughter a white can. “Whipped cream. You know what to do with this. Don’t you?”

“Get your mind out of the gutter,” Grace said primly. She sorted everything into a large brown paper sack. “Thanks, Mom. This will be great.”

Rochelle raised one eyebrow. “Don’t forget the damned dog.”

*   *   *

Wyatt Keeler emerged from the shower to find the other male inhabitants of his home immersed in the Rays game. Nelson was stationed in his recliner command center, and Bo was sprawled on his belly on the floor, his face inches from the television. The room was a disaster. A mound of clean, unfolded laundry took up most of the sofa. Bo’s mud-grimed T-ball uniform, underpants, socks, cleats, and sweat-soaked cap were tossed on the floor. The wood laminate coffee table was littered with three days’ worth of newspapers; dirty dishes, including a half-eaten potpie; empty Coke cans; and the remains of their fast-food lunch.