Promise of Safekeeping : A Novel (9781101553954) (12 page)

“You don’t understand. He’s questioning your character. Your values. And he’s being snaky about it. Trying to get the board to rethink your candidacy for partner. And I think he’s lobbying to get them to vote while you’re away. I just thought you should know.” A pause, and Lauren heard the sound of children squealing in the background. “I told you . . . no fingers in the fish tank!” Rizzi yelled.

Lauren pulled the phone away from her ear.

“Look, I have to go,” Rizzi said. “I’m doing my best to keep pumping positive energy into your cause, but we both know I don’t have any clout here. Please tell me you’re coming back soon.”

“It’s not like I’ve been gone a month. It’s only been four days.”

“But it feels like a month,” Rizzi said. “An important month. I really have to go.”

“Okay, thanks,” Lauren said. She shut her phone, her mind racing. Bryce was trying to move in on her territory. He had ammunition: her publicly embarrassing involvement in Arlen’s case, her absence from work at a critical time. She loved her job, but she
hated its politics. Over the years she’d become reasonably good at dealing with big egos and high competition. But she couldn’t guard her position against her enemies if she wasn’t there to defend it. She needed to get back home.

She slowed, passing mannequins dressed in vintage cotton sundresses and plastic beads, a gift shop with lead mermaids on concrete pedestals, a bakery that smelled of chocolate and yeast. Though no one thing stuck out as familiar, the neighborhood as a whole had a familiar vibe. And when she looked around, she was startled to realize she had walked herself to the neighborhood of the antiques shop. It wasn’t long before she stood in front of the building. There was a sign out front:
APPOINTMENTS BY PHONE OR BY CHANCE
.

She stopped walking, thinking of the job she’d come here to do and her job back home. Burt needed her; she knew that. He needed her to be there while he helped support her run for partner, and he needed her to handle her caseload. She’d planned on being gone for one day—two at the most. And yet here she was, the morning of her fourth day in Richmond. She’d told Burt that she was having an emergency—she gave only the vaguest description of her appointment at the cardiologist—and she’d promised to be back. She didn’t know how she could buy herself any more time.

As far as she could tell, there was only one option. She had to compel Arlen to see her. Today. Her heart in her chest felt like a leaf on a branch, flipping over before a storm.

She crossed the street, heading toward the antiques shop, the double yellow line passing beneath her sneakers—and just in time, she saw the door to the shop fly open, the glass sending a shard of sunlight her way so that she had to shade her eyes, and then:
Arlen
.

He held a small doormat, and he let it go so it flopped on to the sidewalk with a puff of dust. She stopped walking, not quite out of the street, but almost. He looked up. He was thinner now than when she’d last seen him. He wore a tired T-shirt that had faded
from years of wear. White tube socks were pulled halfway up his calves, interrupted only by the straps of the sandals on his feet.

“Arlen . . . ” She’d stopped a few feet away, said his name.

The recognition came instantly. She supposed her voice gave her away. And no sooner had surprise flared across his face, than it was gone—burnt out like flash powder—and anger set in. He pulled himself up straight, his wide shoulders flexing.

“What do you want?”

“I . . . ” Words failed. Lauren had thought she’d wanted to give something to Arlen: her apology. Her willingness to step up and take some responsibility for what had happened to him. And yet, he wanted to know:
What do you want?
And she realized that he had far more to give her than she could offer him.

She swallowed hard. “I was hoping we could talk.”

He pulled himself upright. “I got nothing to say to you.”

“Please, if you could just . . . for a few minutes—”

“I got nothing to say.”

He held up his hand. With his head tipped back and his eyes squinting at her in the dawning sun, she knew that he’d made himself into the kind of man who was master of his kingdom—and his kingdom was anywhere he happened to be standing at the time. His upper lip drew back in disgust. And then he shut the door behind him and was gone.

When Eula opened the paper the next morning, her ex-husband’s face was staring back at her.

Eula cursed, pulled the About Town section out of the paper, and punched it down into her recycling bin. She supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised when, that evening as she got home from work, there was a reporter waiting for her on the front lawn.

“Excuse me. Eula Oates?” The man was carrying a handheld voice recorder, and his smile was stretched as tight as leather. “I was hoping you wouldn’t mind if I ask you some questions.”

“You can ask anything you want,” Eula said. The man was following her across the lawn, to her front door. “Don’t mean I’m gonna answer.”

“Has Arlen Fieldstone been in contact with you?”

Eula dug her keys out of her oversized purse. “Not too many men bend over backward to get in touch with their ex-wives.”

“After he was found guilty, you divorced him. You’d only been married for a few months at the time. How does it make you feel to know that the reason you divorced him was all wrong?”

Eula held her head high. “My mistakes are my business. Nobody else’s. Now, if you’ll kindly excuse me . . . ” She turned her key in the lock and opened the door.

“Wait, wait,” the man said. His bald head gleamed as waxy and pink as Silly Putty in the sun. “What if Arlen still loves you? What will you do?”

Eula closed her eyes, and to the reporter, it probably looked like no more than a blink. But for an eighth of a second, Eula could see Arlen again—see him exactly as she’d seen him that day, when he got down on his knee right in a puddle in the storm-soaked parking lot outside the Chinese restaurant. When he opened the box and showed her the tiniest stone she’d ever seen. He was beaming with such perfect, boyish love that he might have been offering her
the Hope diamond. She saw herself reaching out—for him, for the ring, for everything he was offering, and they stood together under the streetlight, holding each other and kissing and crying happy tears for a very long time.

By the time Eula’s eyes were open again, the world was back to normal. “You go on, now,” she told the reporter. “Get off my lawn.”

“But—”

“Go!” she said. And then she shut the door in his face, and locked it, and slid down along the wall until she was sitting on the floor. She rested her face against her hands.

Lauren was working a case in Phoenix when she first saw Edward. He was across the courtroom, leaning with his palm flattened against a desk, reading some papers, his red tie hanging down from his chest like an arrow pointing to the ground. She watched him. She liked his stern navy suit, his perfect white teeth, his flourish of dark hair. And the moment he looked up, his gaze honed in directly on her without vacillation, as if he knew where she would be standing even before he raised his head. He didn’t look away, but he smiled his heartbreaking smile. There was a certain challenge in his stare, and it called to her in the way that mountain peaks call to climbers, or clouds call to men who like to jump out of planes.

There were a million stories Edward’s eyes could have told to her then, though he didn’t say a word. If his gaze had traveled over her, unseeing, she would have known that he had things on his mind and no room for her among them. If he’d looked at her for a significant moment, then glanced back to the paper on his desk, she might have known that he was interested in her, but not prepared to act.

But from the other side of the courtroom, he’d spotted her, and if he’d pointed his finger at her and then crooked it to say
Come here
, he couldn’t have been more obvious in the message that his stare communicated. And yet only the two of them heard the conversation, though to Lauren it had seemed as loud as if the very walls around them had fallen down.

She’d gone that night—alone—to the watering hole that she’d been told was the hangout of the judicial set. The night had been chilly, so she’d pulled a light sweater over her shoulders and walked the half mile down the road in the violet Arizona dusk. She sat at the bar, reading the crowd like a book—all the fascinating stories—waiting to see if the man who would turn out to be Edward would show.

But he never came. And in hindsight, she supposed it was silly to think that he might somehow know where she would be,
and
that she would be waiting to see him. For all she knew, he had a girlfriend, a lover, a wife. And yet, she simply couldn’t believe that she’d misread his glance that was more than a glance, the thing in his eyes that was more than passing flirtation.

Later that week, on her last day in Arizona when she’d given up on him, he found her. He stopped her with a hand on her arm while she stood at the clerk’s counter. His grip was firm, almost possessive, as if he—a stranger whom she’d spoken to only without words—had some preexisting right to touch her.

“Lauren,” he’d said.

And she’d been startled because he knew her name.

“You’re the one everyone keeps talking about. The one who reads people.”

She smiled, flattered. “And you’re . . . ”

“Hungry,” he’d said. “I’m heading out to lunch. I’d love for you to join me.”

His boldness had taken her aback, sent something electric and
charging up her spine. And yet she’d expected it. Her instincts had been right—at least in that one small thing—before he turned her certainty about him completely upside down.

In the afternoon, Lauren followed Will and a man named Abbott through shin-high grass. The earth looked arthritic, gnarled with rocky lumps and scarred with seams of old walls. They traipsed through tangles of outbuildings, crisscrossing paths that may or may not have once been roads, and it occurred to Lauren that the clusters of old buildings—part sheds, part cabins—might have been slave quarters. At the far end of the field stood an old farmhouse that was once painted a color but had now turned the dull gray-brown of neglect.

“How long you owned the place?” Will asked.

“Lord.” Abbott took off his tractor-green hat and rubbed the gray remnants of his hair. “Since before the war.”

Lauren glanced at Will, uncertain.

“The Civil War,” he explained.

“Ah,” she said under her breath. Then, to Abbott: “It’s been in the family that long?”

“Yes, ma’am. And we got plenty of stuff here worth some pretty big bucks. Stuff I got to sell.”

“That’s why we’re here,” Will said cheerfully. “With cash.”

They came to one of the larger outbuildings; on second glance, it seemed that it had once been someone’s house, in the bungalow style of the twenties. It was crooked on its frame, with a bamboo rake and a shovel leaning up against the side. The door was half-open, dappled in sun and shade.