Niceville (6 page)

He nodded curtly at the other people in the room, all eight of them, the unhappy ex-couple at two separate tables, standing by their lawyers, the clerk of the court, the court deputy, and a familiar elderly couple at the rear, the Fogartys, Dwayne and Dora, both retired deputy sheriffs, childless, amiable and well liked by the court staff, as alike in appearance as hermaphroditic toads. The Fogartys attended almost every trial, large and small, like retired horses that can’t stay away from the track.

Judge Monroe’s steel eyeglass frames glittered in the late-afternoon
sunlight streaming in through the western windows. He straightened his papers into a pile, lifted them up, and tapped the fat sheaf into squared-off order on the desk, and laid it down again, resting his blue-veined hands on top.

“Kate—Ms. Kavanaugh—is there anything you would like to add before I render my decision?”

While he was presiding over a case, as a matter of ethics, Ted Monroe worked to suppress his soft spot for Kate Kavanaugh, who had effectively taken over his family law practice when he was elected to the bench. He and Kate’s father, Dillon Walker, had both gone up to the University of Virginia, many long years ago now, and Ted Monroe had watched Kate grow from a long-legged coltish child with wild auburn hair and wary blue eyes into this self-contained and forceful young lawyer now appearing before him. Her marriage two years ago to an ex–Special Forces officer she had met while attending Georgetown Law in D.C. had broken the hearts of at least three young Niceville men.

Monroe had worried about the match—Nick’s heart, according to Tig Sutter, was still in the covert wars, but after Tig had managed to talk Nick into taking a job with the CID instead of going on to the judge advocates, Nick had seemed to settle into the insular Niceville world without too much difficulty, quickly building a reputation as a hard cop, ruthless but fair. Ted Monroe, who had met him several times, inside the court and out, felt there was something troubling the man, something buried deep, but it had been his experience that this was true of most men who had lived complicated lives.

In short, as Ted Monroe sat there on the leather chair looking out at the scene that lay before him, he felt that Kate Kavanaugh was a happy young woman who was exactly where she was supposed to be and doing precisely what she was born to do.

Kate glanced briefly at her client, a meager and bruised-looking young woman with home-streaked hair and a pinched look in her thin face. The woman stared wide-eyed back at Kate, her tiny red hands raw as they twisted a scrap of blue polka-dot scarf. Kate gave her a reassuring smile and turned back to the bench.

“Thank you, Your Honor. Only that, should the court grant sole custody to my client, Miss Dellums wishes to inform the court that she intends, if the court allows, to accept an employment offer in Sallytown,
which would involve a move of eighty-eight miles away from her ex-husband, Mr. Bock, whose employment with the Niceville Utility Commission would very likely prevent him from following, and that this move may affect the nature and construction of the court’s directions concerning subsequent rules of access to the daughter.”

“Thank you, Ms. Kavanaugh, for being scrupulous, but the court was aware of that development, and has already taken it into account. Miss Barrow?” He turned to the other table, addressing a tall, broad-shouldered woman in a well-cut gray pantsuit, with a pink complexion, no makeup at all, a wild aura of steel gray hair, and an air of disorder and distraction that clung to her like cigarette smoke.

“Thank you, Your Honor. Only to stress once again that my client—” Here she turned to indicate a Mr. Christian Antony Bock, a short, rather bulging young man with wide-set gray eyes, bright pink cheeks, full, feminine lips, and a blunt, petulant face, his features not quite forming into a unified whole, as if he had been composed of spare parts left over from a more successful incarnation. His nose was flat and dotted with blackheads, his skin patchy and pockmarked, his thin black hair receding, even at his young age, into an inverted vee, which had the effect of seeming to crowd all of his features into the lower third of his face.

Most people react to the random defects of their physical appearance with equanimity and humor and thereby manage, with grace, to transcend these defects and make themselves appealing, very often lovable. Tony Bock was not one of those people.

Bock straightened his sloping shoulders, adopting a parody of the military’s at-ease position, and assumed what he thought was an ingratiating look as Miss Barrow turned back to the judge.

“Only to stress again that Mr. Bock has voluntarily and successfully undergone an anger-management class, that he has fully paid his entire arrears of child support, that he has paid for the damage that was accidentally done to his ex-wife’s front porch and car, that he has voluntarily enrolled in a parenting-skills seminar that begins next week, and that he restates his desire to be a kind and loving presence in his daughter’s life, if the court will only grant him the opportunity.”

Judge Monroe’s eyeglasses glittered again as he raised and lowered his head in a perfunctory acknowledgment of the statement.

Everyone in the courtroom was reasonably certain that barring a
stroke of lightning, Judge Theodore W. Monroe was about to come down very hard on somebody. He had his vulture face on.

He did not disappoint.

“Duly noted, Miss Barrow, and the court thanks both counselors for their professionalism and clarity during what has been, at times, a very contentious and emotional hearing.”

He paused here, set his fountain pen down on the papers in front of him, leaned back in his wingback chair, which creaked under his weight, oddly loud in the silent courtroom, clasped his arthritic hands over his belt buckle, and let his detached gaze move slowly over the upturned faces staring back at him.

“Well, so … having heard the arguments of both sides, and taking into full account all the various depositions filed and the petitions made, and the reports filed by Children and Family Services and the Belfair and Cullen County Domestic Violence Advisory Panel, this court has decided to grant full and sole custody of Anna Marie Bock—now Anna Marie Dellums—to her mother, Colleen Claire Dellums—and that Mr. Christian Antony Bock, formerly Miss Dellum’s husband and the biological father of Anna Marie, will have no contact of any kind, either written—Miss Barrow, restrain your client—”

Bock, his face darkening, had begun to object, but his lawyer shut him down with a hoarse whisper.

Judge Monroe let a long moment pass while he glared down at Mr. Bock’s inflamed face.

“I will repeat. Mr. Bock will have no contact of any kind, either supervised or unsupervised, until such time as an independent family review committee shall make a determination of the likelihood of Mr. Bock repeating the pattern of manipulation, deceit, bad faith, cruelty, aggression, and abusive and assaultive behavior that has been so well documented in this court. I do not rule out,” said Monroe, gesturing with a clawlike hand knotted by age, “some sort of supervised contact in the future, but only after an assessment such as I have described has been made and the results delivered to me for my consideration. I have also directed and required the various law enforcement agencies involved to ensure that there is no contact of any kind—written, electronic, visual, televisual, semaphoric, hieroglyphic, telepathic, in a séance—no contact of any kind will occur between Mr. Bock and any member of the Dellums family. Hear me now, Mr. Bock …”

He fixed Bock with a cold gray eye.

“I will regard even a casual encounter on the street as a matter to be carefully reviewed. I will consider the unexpected arrival on Miss Dellums’ front porch of a white dove with a sprig of laurel in its beak to be a flagrant breach of this order and I am ready, Mr. Bock, quite ready, to enforce your full compliance with this restriction upon you in any way within my power, up to and including your incarceration upon a bench warrant for such time as the statutes and my judicial discretion may allow.”

A stir from his lawyer, framing an objection.

The judge lifted a hand, bony fingers spread out, his head turning from side to side.

“No, Miss Barrow, with all respect, please do not offer a comment, if you will, at this time. I have just one final statement for the record, and then we may all go about our daily lives in peace. Let the record show that I am now directly addressing Mr. Bock. Do you hear me, Mr. Bock? Are you paying close attention?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” said Bock, in an artificially small voice, but with a grating undertone, like stone sliding on stone. For a short, almost dwarfish man he could radiate a lot of mulish resentment, which he generally did only when he was alone in a room with someone or something smaller and weaker. But today, for the first time, he showed it to the whole court, and Kate Kavanaugh took careful note.

“Good. I do not approve of you, Mr. Bock. Not at all. Were it in my power to see you out of Niceville, out of the state entirely, I would do it. You have depths, Mr. Bock, and are not at all what you present to the world. I have encountered your like before, in my long life, and I imagine I will again before I go to my Maker. But I wish you to know, Mr. Bock, that I have
seen
you, and I have
noted
you, and that for as long as I am on the bench and you are within my jurisdiction, I shall have my eye upon you. Do you understand what I am saying to you, Mr. Bock?”

A long, strained silence during which Mr. Bock struggled to find an acceptable face to put before the world. To Kate Kavanaugh, who deeply loathed the nasty little man for what he had done and had tried to do to Anna Marie and her mother over the last eight months, it was like watching one of the minor demons trying on various freshly skinned human faces.

The one Bock finally picked was only half human and when she saw it a deep chill raced through her body. Bock was careful to show it to her only, in a flash of a sidelong scowl, and had a more human one in place as he faced Judge Monroe.

“I do, Your Honor,” he said, in a penitent voice, inserting a tactical throat catch and blinking his eyes rapidly. “And may I say that I will try very hard to spend whatever time I have left in my life doing everything in my power to make you feel very different about me. You. My wife. My child. All of you.”

Judge Monroe considered him for a time, his blue lips tight and his fingers steepled on the desk in front of him.

“Will you now, Mr. Bock?”

Bock nodded, his hands hanging down at his sides, his eyes averted from the shining disks of the judge’s glasses, now trained upon him.

“I will, sir. I promise you all that I will.”

Judge Monroe said nothing for a long moment.

“I believe you, Mr. Bock. I believe that for the first time in my courtroom you are speaking the literal truth. Duly noted. Court is now adjourned.”

Delia Cotton lived alone, quite happily alone, right up until the evening of her disappearance. She was an erect, full-figured, and elegant lady with soft brown eyes, once a heartbreaker and even now a rare beauty with a pale autumnal glow and a full head of rich silvery hair swept high and held in place with a Cartier diamond pin, bought for her in Venice by a long-dead lover.

She had enjoyed a long and complicated life filled with personal and professional success, and she had known many charming and brilliant and utterly engaging people who, by the time she had reached eighty-four, bored her to distraction.

Except for the ones who were dead and therefore could be depended upon not to grate on a woman’s nerves. She was now down to two regular visitors, aside from the ladies in her book club: Alice Bayer, who drove over from The Glades five times a week to clean, bring groceries, restock her bar, and tend to Mildred Pierce, her Maine Coon cat, and Gray Haggard—his real given name, God bless him—who came around occasionally to do some gardening and routine maintenance and, from a safe distance, in a tastefully unobtrusive way, quietly adore her.

Delia cherished her privacy, and her memories, many sweet, some bitter, and all far enough in the past to have lost either their savor or their sting, and she dearly loved Temple Hill, her rambling old Victorian pile buried deep inside the tree-shaded privileges of The Chase.

Tonight, around sunset, with a lance of sunlight shining through the oaks and laying a golden glow on the rolling lawn, she was sitting
in the ornate octagonal window-walled room that her husband had liked to call the bandbox when the front doorbell bonged softly in the outer darkness of the great hall.

She did not hear it right away, because up until a few minutes ago, she had been watching, with deepening depression, the urgent reporting of some hideous atrocity that had been inflicted earlier in the day upon several young highway patrol officers, up in the northern part of the state. Four dead, slaughtered in their cars. Not to mention two newspeople in a helicopter who had been killed when their machine crashed.

The cop killings had driven another story, a fatal truck rollover on the interstate, right off the television.

Watching all this, she recalled … who was it?

Hannah Arendt?

Dorothy Parker?

Someone such as that, who said, “One should not be required to know of events over which one could have no hope of influence.”

Finally, heartsick, she had turned the television off and was now listening to Ofra Harnoy play a series of Vivaldi sonatas—glacial, precise, and perfectly depressing—music to slice your wrists to, but oddly soothing.

The doorbell had a low vibrating bronze note, rather like a cello, so it took a moment for the sound to register.

She sighed, looked at the clock above the fireplace, set her scotch down carefully, picked up the television remote, turned the set on, and switched the input to
CAMERA ONE
.

A pretty young girl of an indeterminate age, late teens or perhaps older, perhaps not, auburn curls, nicely curved, unlike the current crop of praying-mantis girls. She was wearing an old-fashioned light cotton sundress, pale green, and shiny red slippers like Dorothy’s. She was waiting on the verandah, lit by the glow of Delia’s porch light, staring intently at the front door, apparently unaware of the camera.