Suzanne passed around the documents Mitzi had prepared: disclaimers, giving Camryn the right to film the women telling their stories and attesting that they were giving their statements of their own free will.
Harriett Porter cleared her throat nervously. Camryn gave her an encouraging nod. “Just pretend you’re talking to a friend,” she prompted.
Harriett licked her lips and began speaking. “We had our first hearing before Judge Stackpole back in December. I, er, did something I now regret, and Judge Stackpole was very, very angry with me.”
“What exactly did you do that made him so angry?” Camryn asked.
“Well, I found out that my husband was having an affair with a stripper…” She looked at Camryn. “Is it okay to say it was a male stripper?”
Camryn laughed and nodded.
“Okay, so it was this guy. Named Anubis. I guess that was his stripper name. Anyway, Daryl, that’s my husband, was putting tens of thousands of dollars on our American Express card at this place in Tampa called Jeepers-Peepers. I was getting our tax stuff ready for the accountant, which is how I found the AmEx bills. And, well, I, uh, um, I went over to that place one Thursday afternoon, Jeepers-Peepers, and I saw him—Daryl, that is, standing in the parking lot, and he was stuffing money into this guy’s—what do you call it? Not a G-string, if it’s a man, right? It was sort of a sequined jockstrap.”
“Actually?” Thea, an attractive woman in her early fifties raised her hand. “Technically, it’s not a jockstrap. It’s called a codpiece. I know because I’m from New Orleans.”
“Thanks, hon,” Harriett said. “He was stuffing fifty-dollar bills into this stripper’s codpiece. Right there in broad daylight! And it made me so mad, I lost it. Literally. One minute I was trying to take pictures of Daryl and his boyfriend with my phone, and the next minute I had crashed the car into a Dumpster. The police said I ran over Daryl’s foot. I don’t remember that part. I do remember he was wearing the four-hundred-dollar Italian loafers I bought him for Father’s Day.”
Camryn’s chest was heaving with silent laughter, and tears were rolling down her face. Harriett was too caught up in her story to notice the reporter’s reaction.
“Judge Stackpole called me a renegade!” she said angrily. “My lawyer said I should get half of Daryl’s pension plan—I never worked after we married, because he wanted me to stay home with our children. But Stackpole told me I was an able-bodied woman and I should get a job and stop being a leech. And then he told me he wouldn’t sign off on our divorce until I completed this divorce-recovery counseling. With a woman named Paula Talbott-Sinclair. Who I later found out isn’t even licensed to practice therapy in this state!”
“Did the judge give you the option of seeking treatment with any therapist? Or did he specify Ms. Talbott-Sinclair?” Camryn asked.
“He handed me her business card, right there in the courtroom,” Harriett said. “And he said she would have to notify him that I’d completed six weeks of sessions before he would grant our divorce.”
Harriett’s face was pink with indignation. “She charged me nine hundred dollars a session. Later, after I talked to some other women in the group and we began comparing notes, I found out they were only paying a third of that! And the thing is, I’m still pissed off at Daryl. I haven’t recovered from our divorce at all. I don’t know if I ever will.”
“Thank you, Harriett,” Camryn said soberly. She put the camera down and beamed at the women around the table.
“That was great. Who’s next?”
Suzanne took a deep breath and a sip of her iced tea. She was wearing a bright orange top and a flattering new shade of lipstick, and she’d had her hair cut and colored.
“Shall I go?” she asked.
“Oh my God,” Grace whispered. She was seated, facing the door, when a slender woman with unruly blond curls opened the door of the Sandbox and looked around hesitantly. She stood in the doorway, scanning the room, looking for something.
Grace jumped up and waved. “Paula! We’re over here.”
* * *
Conversation at the table came to an abrupt halt as Paula Talbott-Sinclair timidly approached the table. She stopped a few feet away, looking at Grace for guidance.
“What’s she doing here?” one of the women said angrily, jumping up from her seat and snatching up her pocketbook. “Spying on us for Stackpole?”
Paula’s already-pale face blanched.
“I invited her,” Grace said, standing. She reached out a hand for the therapist. “Paula? There’s an empty seat right here, beside mine.”
Paula’s lower lip trembled. “I don’t want to intrude. Maybe it would be better if I didn’t stay.”
“No,” Camryn said. “Stay.”
“Please,” Suzanne said.
When she was finally seated, Rochelle hurried over to take the newcomer’s order.
“Mom?” Grace said politely. “This is Paula. Paula, this is my mom, Rochelle.”
“The therapist?” Rochelle looked from Paula to Grace to Wyatt. “You’re the therapist?”
“Counselor,” Paula corrected. “And I’ll just have iced tea, please. Green, if you have it.” She lowered her voice and leaned in closer to Grace.
“How’s Ashleigh? Have you heard anything?”
“You know about Ashleigh? Already? Has it been on the news?”
Paula shook her head. “Ashleigh called me this afternoon. I guess it must have been before you went to meet her. And then a detective called me just before I came over here. The police retrieved Ashleigh’s cell phone, and they were following up on all her recent calls. They wouldn’t tell me much—just that she’d made an attempt on another woman’s life and nearly killed herself in the process.”
Grace stared at the therapist. “Let me get this straight. Ashleigh called you? Today?”
“She called me at the office, and I just happened to pick up. She’d obviously been drinking. She was ranting and raving about getting revenge against—what’s the other woman’s name?”
“Suchita.”
“Right. Suchita. Ashleigh was manic. It was hard to get a word in edgewise. I begged her to come to the office, to talk things over, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She was cursing and making all kinds of wild threats. She talked about setting fire to her ex’s house or somehow poisoning the woman.”
Paula shook her head. “Ashleigh was in a very dark place.”
“I still don’t understand why she called
you
,” Grace said. “No offense, Paula, but she thought you were a quack.”
“I’m well aware,” Paula said. “She told me that several times today. But I think Ashleigh knew she was spinning out of control. She was desperate for help.” Paula looked around the table, recognizing all the faces arrayed around it.
“I failed Ashleigh. And I failed all of these women.” She glanced over at Wyatt, who was sitting on the other side of Grace. “And I failed you, too.”
Paula squared her shoulders and addressed Grace. “You said your lawyer would be at this meeting. Is she here?”
Mitzi raised her hand. “Mitzi Stillwell, attorney at law.”
Paula motioned to Camryn. “You can turn on that camera now. I’m ready to tell my story. All of it. If you’re ready to hear it.”
* * *
“I met Cedric at a cocktail party, soon after I moved down here. We struck up a conversation. He seemed interested in my work—I told him about the seminars I’d done out west and about the book. And—I guess I rattled on a little too long about the end of my marriage. He was sympathetic, and it was clear he was attracted to me…”
Paula looked directly into the camera. “I know this sounds incredibly lame—but at the time I had no idea he was married. If I’d known then—I would never have started an affair. Not after the way my own marriage ended. That’s no excuse, I know. I should have made it my business to ask more questions, when he never wanted to meet me in public, insisted on meeting at my place. Maybe I didn’t really want to know. Cedric is the first man I’ve been intimate with since my divorce.
“Maybe a month after we’d started seeing each other, he confessed he was married. I was shocked, tried to break it off, but he seemed committed to ending his marriage and being with me. I gave him my book and suggested he read it. Not long after that, he suggested that he should refer clients to me—clients whose divorces he was presiding over.
“It didn’t occur to me that this was a breach of ethics. I was flattered and delighted that a distinguished judge thought I could assist these people.”
“Oh for God’s sake,” Camryn said, pausing the video. “Paula, are you trying to tell us that it never occurred to you that you’d hit the motherlode with Stackpole making these counseling sessions mandatory? Come on! You were making fifteen hundred dollars a week just from the people in my little group.”
Paula bit her lip and looked away. Rochelle brought her iced tea. She took a long sip. “I’ll answer that on camera, if you like.”
* * *
“When I moved here, I was very nearly destitute. I’d been in rehab and lost my license to practice in Oregon. When my husband and I divorced, we sold our home there at the very bottom of the market, for what amounted to pennies on the dollar, and, of course, he got half of that. I moved to Florida with my clothes, my car, and very little else. I was living in a motel room and working part-time as a social worker in a nursing home when I met Cedric.
“Cedric thought I should go into private practice again. He suggested I could get around Florida’s tough licensing laws by not calling myself a therapist or a marriage counselor. He loaned me the money to rent my office space and buy a computer and some secondhand office furniture. Start-up funding, he called it. He was hearing so many divorce cases. He said there was a real need for the kind of therapy I offer. And he said it could very lucrative.”
“I’ll say it was lucrative,” Harriett put in. Camryn swung around in her seat and focused the camera on her. “With what I paid you alone in the past six months, you could have bought a nice midsized sedan. And yet you’re still driving that dinky little toy car and operating out of that dump office. What happened to all the money? We heard you had a drug problem. Is that where it all went?”
Camryn chuckled, as did several other women at the table, although not Grace and not Suzanne.
Paula winced.
“That’s a fair question, Harriett. I’m guessing by mentioning my drug problem you’re referring to my arrest for forging prescriptions for tranquilizers in Oregon. I completed my court-ordered rehab out there, and I was doing reasonably well until I got involved with Cedric. And then … well, I can’t sugarcoat it, can I? I had a relapse. Obtaining drugs is much easier in Florida. I went to a storefront clinic, got a script, and I was in business again.
“You want to know where the money went? Not to drugs. I’m clean again. Most of it went to Cedric. Right off the bat, he told me my fee schedule was a joke. He said the patients he was referring to me were screwed up and desperate to get out of their lousy marriages. Why shouldn’t they pay, and why shouldn’t he be compensated for all those referrals? Especially since he’d already ‘loaned’ me all the money to get on my feet again.”
“Kickbacks,” Mitzi said succinctly. “You were paying him kickbacks? How much?”
“I can’t give you a precise figure,” Paula said. “But I only kept roughly a third of my fees. The rest I handed over to Cedric.”
“How did you pay him?” Mitzi asked. “Cash, check? Do you have any records?”
Paula looked puzzled. “You mean receipts? Don’t be absurd. Remember, Cedric was a lawyer before he was a judge. He’s really quite brilliant.”
“Then, how did you pay him?” Camryn asked from down the table. “If we’re going to be able to make charges stick against Stackpole, Mitzi here is going to need some proof.”
“I understand,” Paula said. “I was getting to that, Camryn, if you’ll just be patient.”
“Sorry.” Camryn flashed a grin and started filming again.
“Cedric’s wife kept all their household accounts. He said she watched every penny he earned or spent. I know she was pretty wealthy in her own right, and he resented that—she didn’t work, but she controlled the purse strings. He was very careful. He set up a janitorial business called Clean Sweep. All the money I paid him, I wrote out the checks to Clean Sweep. It was supposed to be for nightly cleaning and paper supplies, things like that.”
“But it was a dummy corporation?” Mitzi asked.
“As far as I know, I was Clean Sweep’s only client,” Paula said. “And I never got any janitorial services. I cleaned the office myself.”
“Sounds like you got taken to the cleaners yourself, girlfriend,” Thea chimed in.
Paula sighed. “He said he loved me. But he’d signed a prenup before marrying his wife. If he left, he’d be living on a judge’s salary. Peanuts, he called it. The money I gave him, he called it our nest egg. We were going to buy a cottage on Anna Maria. I was going to work on getting my licensing back. He’d leave the bench, start his own law firm. We’d give our own version of my old divorce diversion seminars and travel all over. We’d write a book together. He even had a title:
De-Toxing After Divorce
.”
“Damn!” Camryn said. “That’s a fabulous title. I’d buy a book called that. You know, if it was written by somebody other than Stackpole.”
“And me,” Paula said. She shrugged. “That’s all I came to say, really. I’m sorry I allowed all of this to happen. Sorry I was a party to Cedric’s scheme. Sorry I failed all of you. Could you turn the camera off now, please, Camryn?”
Camryn set the camera down carefully on the tabletop.
“Thank you, Paula,” Grace said. “I mean it. Your coming here tonight and telling your story, that took a lot of courage. We all appreciate it, don’t we, ladies?” She looked around the table, but the women returned only blank stares.
Suzanne stood up. She clapped her hands together. Slowly. Grace nodded and stood, too, and began clapping, as did Wyatt. They looked expectantly at Camryn, who nodded, stood, and joined in. Slowly, one by one, all the women at the table stood and joined in the polite applause.
69
Wyatt tiptoed into the bedroom and set the teacup on the nightstand. He hurried to the windows to draw the curtains. The EMTs had versed him in postconcussion rules—no bright sunlight, sharp noises, or too much physical activity. Plenty of sleep, plenty of fluids, plenty of watchfulness. Grace had fallen asleep in the truck the previous night, just minutes after they’d left the Sandbox.