Pawleys Island-lowcountry 5 (10 page)

“I just don’t like y’all talking about me, that’s all. You hardly know me. I came here to paint and to get away…”

“Yes, we know that, Rebecca. You’ve said it a thousand times. But while you’re away and painting you are allowing Nat to rob you of everything you are entitled to…”

“Ostrich!” Huey offered, smiling, pleased with his cleverness.

Rebecca and I stopped and stared at him.

“Honest to God, Huey,” I said.

“Thanks a lot, Huey,” Rebecca said. And then she added, “You’re right. He’s right, you know. It’s just that I don’t want to fight with Nat. You don’t know how he is. He’s ruthless. If he wants the kids and the house, let him have it all. I quit. And he can have that lowlife Charlene too.”

“Lowlife?” Huey said.

The kitchen door swung open. All conversation ceased as Byron cleared the untouched soup and replaced them with plates of tiny lamb chops propped on mounds of risotto, drizzled with a gleaming sauce. He put a bowl of watercress salad on Huey’s left and excused himself.

“I’m going to see about Miss Olivia now,” he said.

“Of course. Thank you, Byron,” Huey said. “This looks beautiful.”

“Is she not well?” Rebecca asked.

“No, she’s fine. Just a little tired,” Huey said. “Now, back to Charlene? Who is she?”

“She’s gross! She has a flat chest, a flat butt, barely a high school education, nasty hair…I mean, y’all, she’s a little redneck nothing! She makes minimum wage and…”

“Um, Rebecca, she doesn’t have a flat chest. Or a flat anything,” I said.

“She has ears like a mule!” Rebecca said.

“No, she doesn’t,” I said.

“She most certainly does!” Rebecca said with insistence.

“Not anymore, and I can prove it,” I said.

“Please do!” Rebecca said.

“What in the world…” Huey said, thoroughly confused.

“I have other pictures in the car. Should I get them now?”

“You have other pictures
in the car
? By all means!” Rebecca blurted.

“Abigail, darling,” Huey said, “let’s have dinner first. We didn’t touch Byron’s soup and I’ll hear about that for sure, and if you don’t eat dinner he’ll have a fit, and besides…it’s still pouring outside.”

“There’s an umbrella by the door,” Rebecca said. When we looked at her, incredulous that she would send me out into the proverbial dark and stormy night, she said, “What? I want to see the pictures!”

“So do I,” Huey said. “Take my raincoat from the hall closet.”

I ran to my car thinking, well, at one point in her life she had gumption, and although my favorite sandals were squishing from the puddles of rainwater and the great crackles of lightning terrified me, I was glad to see Rebecca speak up for herself. It was about bloody time! And who was Huey kidding to suggest that we eat before looking at the pictures? But on second thought, it would take an earthquake to get between Huey and a meal on a plate in front of him.

When I got back, Huey was gobbling up dinner and Becca was pushing hers around the plate. The pictures remained on the table, tucked inside the pages of
People
magazine, where I had slipped them to keep them dry. There was a photograph of them leaving the bank and, yes, I had censored the one of them taken from the tree across the street from Rebecca’s bedroom. I don’t know what had made me pull that one out but I guess I couldn’t bring myself to have Rebecca see her husband in such a sordid position. And the one of them leaving the bank? It was bothering me, that’s all. There were a few others—less incriminating, but shots of this Charlene clear enough for Rebecca to say whether or not Charlene had altered her appearance with surgery.

Huey couldn’t finish dinner fast enough. His eyes twinkled with devilment anticipating what he was about to see.

“Well?” he said, sitting back and wiping his lips with his napkin.

“All right,” Rebecca said, “let’s have a look.”

I passed the magazine to her and she pulled them out, gasping and passing them to Huey until she came to a really graphic one.

“They were in my bedroom!” she said. “What kind of nerve!”

“Let’s see, hon,” Huey said.

“No, I don’t think so,” Rebecca said. “I’ll just keep this one to myself.”

Huey shot me a look, and I shook my head to say,
Let it go, Huey
.

“I’ll go get the magnifying glass,” Huey said and got up from the table.

We went over them again and again until Rebecca finally said, “There’s no question about it at all. She’s had massive work done. Those aren’t even her teeth! He wouldn’t pay for marriage counseling, but he paid for this?”

“Heavens!” Huey said.

“I mean, I could understand if Nat left me for someone who was beautiful and aristocratic, but this tramp Charlene is the trashiest thing you can imagine! I mean, y’all, she’s as thick as a brick! Dumb as a post! She’s stupid! She has nothing, I mean
nothing,
going for her!”

“She’s got something,” I said. “She probably makes Nat feel like the king of the world.”

“Well, next to her, he is!”

Then the funniest thing happened. Rebecca began to laugh, which of course, gave us the signal to laugh with her.

“It’s just, I don’t know,
absurd
!” she said.

“People can be so stupid,” I said.

“Lord! She’s tacky!” Huey said.

When we all finally regained our composures, I said in my theatrical attorney’s voice, “Mrs. Simms? Can you say with reasonable authority that those are new breasts?”

“Absolutely! Goodness! She went from Little Orphan Annie to Dolly Parton!”

Huey suppressed another giggle attack and so did I.

“And these ears are different?”

“Honey? She had ears that stuck out so far you’d have thought she could take off in a stiff wind and fly the whole way to Florida!”

“And these buttoc—I mean her rear, um…”

“Her derriere?” Huey offered.

“Yes! Thank you, Huey! Her derriere?”

“Abigail? Her booty, her teeth, her ears, her bazooms—the whole woman has been rebuilt! How can she pay for this when she earns minimum wage? Well, she didn’t, did she? Y’all know what? Now I am
officially
pissed off in purple. Abigail, will you help me at least recover some of my money?”

“Rebecca? This is the most egregious and appalling misuse of marital assets I have ever seen in all my years. I will represent you and with pleasure! And on the house! I’ll extract my fee from your sorry excuse for a husband as I scrub and polish the courthouse floor with his arrogance and stupidity.”

“But call Jeff Mahoney first, okay?”

“What would you like me to call him?”

“Abigail! I haven’t ever seen you quite so animated!”

“Huey, baby? You ain’t seen
nothing
yet!”

I looked at Rebecca again and my eyes went to her hands as she flipped through the pictures once more. Her wedding band was gone.

“Rebecca? Did you toss your wedding band into the Waccamaw?”

“What? No! Heavens! It
is
gone!”

“Alice Flagg, cupcake. Alice Flagg came and stole your ring. Happens all the time,” Huey said.

“Well, if she wants Nat Simms, she can have him!”

“I think Alice has better taste,” I said. “Even from the grave.”

R
EBECCA
reminded me to call Jeff Mahoney to advise him that I was taking over her case. In any other circumstances I would have made the call simply as a matter of course, but I was already convinced her Jeff was such a moron that I didn’t feel like extending any courtesy to him. I mean, what did this guy ever do for her? Let’s see…lost her house, her children, her life? He probably got his law degree online while watching live cams of coeds. And, what contribution could he make toward the win? Probably nothing. It didn’t matter. I simply added his name to my daily agenda of things to do.

I got up with the sun and walked the beach. What in the world was making me so cranky? Well, for one thing, I had this intense reluctance to enter a courtroom. I kept seeing myself pushing through the oversized doors, walking up the center aisle, dropping my briefcase on the floor and my folder on the table, looking up, over or back into the face of Julian Prescott and then falling off the cliff of propriety into the abyss.

His face played in my head like a CD with a deep scratch. What would happen if I saw him? The one indiscretion of my entire life. In the daylight I regretted our affair with my whole heart, but there were many nights I would have given anything to have it happen all over again. But I’m not here to tell you about that chapter in my past. I only mention it so that you won’t think I’m trying to paint myself as Joan of Arc, some sexless icon of the battlefield. I understand desire and lust as well as I know betrayal and the pain it brings. I’ve known nothing but guilt and remorse since then.

We were married to other people. Ashley had just died and John was drinking too much, which was his way of dealing with it. I was considering divorce and I wound up in bed with Julian at a conference in Chicago. I couldn’t help myself. Neither could he. There was this invisible thread between our hearts, something that in another place and time would have been a beautiful thing…We knew it was wrong, that the stakes were high and that if we continued, we would be found out. And, to our surprise, we were.

His wife was devastated, had a complete nervous breakdown, including the nastiest case of shingles I have ever heard described, and had to be hospitalized. Julian was so stricken with guilt that he completely stopped talking to me, saying only that it had to be over. And my John? It broke whatever was left of his spirit and I know it contributed to his death.

No, I had no desire to ever hurt anyone again. My love for Julian Prescott and my ambitious law practice swallowed my life whole. I had not only allowed it, I had invited it. Now I was completely alone. In one way I believed it was a sentence I deserved, that the penance for my sins was to be paid right here by being alone.

If any one thing was to be said of Pawleys Island, it was that it reminded you of what was true in the most basic terms. You were born, you lived and then you died. And while that was no revelation to anyone, I was always amazed at how many people just banged their way through year after year, never giving a thought about what their lives meant. Or how they intended to make them mean something.

All along the shores of Pawleys Island stood houses that had been there for a hundred years or more. The families who occupied them were the same ones whose ancestors had built them. Oh, sometimes they were sold to someone outside the family, but for the most part they stayed in the hands of the original family. If any of the houses were blown away by a hurricane, an improved duplicate replaced it.

Pawleys Island residents walked land soaked with the memories and dreams of their relatives who had gone on before them. It was an awesome reality. The tide rose and fell anyway. It didn’t matter which generation occupied the house.

It was hard not to think about your allotted years with that kind of continuum staring you in the face. Of course I thought about my beautiful Ashley and how I missed him. And of course, John.

In many ways I had been a willing zombie, acting so fine, so well for my tiny audience of Huey and the others. Inside I was dead, thinking somehow that I had already lived my life and lost what happiness I would ever have. And that it served me right. I was waiting for death to find me—that is, until this whole business with Rebecca Simms found its way to my plate. Now I could feel the strength of my heartbeat and I was somewhat glad to be useful again.

I sat on my bottom step and knocked the sand from my sneakers and went inside to begin my day with a phone call to Jeff Mahoney, Idiot Attorney.

To my utter astonishment, he was a gentleman. As soon as I explained the reason for my call, his first words conveyed certain tenderness for Rebecca and genuine despair over her unbelievable predicament.

“How is Rebecca? Mrs. Simms, I mean. Where is she? Is she well?”

“How is she? Well, I suppose she’s as well as any woman could be in her situation.”

“May I be candid with you, Ms. Thurmond?”

“By all means.”

“In all my years, not just my professional years, but in my years on earth, I have never seen anything to match the ruthlessness of her husband or the animosity of her children. Just incredible.”

“What do you mean?”

Jeff Mahoney began to gush like a bloated river, charging over its banks, swirling in every direction at once.

“It’s just that I heard all these terrible stories.”

“For example?”

“Nat Simms went to Clemson and played football for them, right?”

“And so?” Don’t get me started on football, I thought.

“And so, his daughter, who adores him and could never play football, only wants to be a cheerleader for Clemson.”

“What’s so terrible about that?”

“Well, the scuttlebutt is that Mr. Simms promised her breast implants to improve her chances of becoming one if she would sign papers stating her preference to live with him. I don’t think she’s even sixteen. She’s in my daughter’s class.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Mahoney, but you
are
kidding me, aren’t you?”

“I wish I were. And there’s more.”

“I can hardly wait to hear.” I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, Nat’s girlfriend was practically bionic.

He cleared his throat, sensing his own overenthusiasm and a highly probable lack of propriety.

“Look, I want you to understand something, Ms. Thurmond. My own wife of twenty years just died from breast cancer last month. She was only forty-three. She was the sweetest woman I have ever known and I don’t say
sweet
to imply she wasn’t a highly intelligent, extremely competent woman in any situation. She could have held her own in a senate hearing or in a bank robbery. I have the greatest respect for women.”

“Bravo,” I said, with a taint of sarcasm, and then realizing the man’s wife had just passed away, I added, “I am very sorry about your loss. I lost my husband not long ago, so I know something about what you must be feeling.”

“Thank you. Look, all I’m saying is that there’s more to this than met the eyes of the court. Nat Simms had some other agenda going on. I mean, I think it’s fair to say that he fell out of love with Rebecca a long time ago. Ask anyone. The stories of his public humiliation of Rebecca are legendary in our neighborhood alone. There hasn’t been a dinner party in the last four years when Nat didn’t do something to embarrass Rebecca and their hosts. He’s sadistic, and to tell you the truth, he was a little frightening. People thought he was a loaded bomb, if you know what I mean.”

“I don’t mean to sound dense here, counselor, but a loaded bomb can mean a lot of things. You have to tell me exactly what you mean if I am to help her.”

“I mean that, for his own reasons, and no one yet knows what they are, Nat Simms wanted Rebecca out of his life and the lives of his children. The conundrum is that I cannot imagine why anyone would want Rebecca Simms out of his life! She was faithful to her family and she never forgot anyone in need or failed to thank anyone who had shown any member of her family a kindness. And she’s a good-looking woman. I mean, what
more
could a man want in a wife?”

“I don’t know.”

In the next few minutes, Jeff Mahoney, who I now almost liked, agreed to FedEx me all the paperwork he had on Rebecca’s case. Then he gave more examples of Nat Simms’s temper and recounted different scenarios of how the children rebuked Rebecca, and how Nat supported their positions. Jeff offered to answer any questions, anytime, including offering himself up as a witness for a sworn deposition. I said,
Yes, thank you,
to that.

We hung up and I went out to the porch for a few minutes to collect my thoughts. I considered myself to be a rather cool customer. I was not easily upset. My conversation with Jeff Mahoney made me very uncomfortable.

Nat Simms was dangerous. Now it was easier to understand why Jeff Mahoney had allowed Rebecca’s family, home and assets to slip away. Simply put, he decided Rebecca’s very life may have been at stake and that custody of her hateful children wasn’t worth dying over. Possession of her house was not worth her life. And a reconciliation with Nat? Hell, to hear Jeff tell it, Rebecca was lucky to get away with her skull intact.

The more I thought about it, the more angered I became. We knew that Nat had a girlfriend—a tacky specimen to be sure, but a girlfriend all the same. We suspected he had footed the bill for her transformation. Now we had another example of Nat and his promises of plastic surgery. What had he promised their son? Who knew? A trip to the moon?

I came to several conclusions. Nat would have Charlene. No argument there. For the moment, he could have the house and custody of the children as well. Rebecca was entitled to half the assets they held, which meant a huge cash settlement for her. The children? I didn’t know them but I knew I could demand a psychological evaluation and convince the court that Nat had to pay for therapy for them. He obviously and in a very methodical manner worked to undermine and eventually completely alienate the children from their mother. Rebecca had cowered. She probably thought that biding her time would pay off, that Nat would come around, that the children were going through a stage…she had guessed wrong and lost.

Nat Simms was a bulldog, and this whole drama he produced was still most likely about money and about lust. It was a new trend in the land of divorce and one that I despised. In the old days, a gentleman would never have sued his wife for the house, custody of the children and child support. Now it happened all the time. It was a déclassé intimidation technique.

Nat didn’t love Rebecca, and he probably didn’t love Charlene either. But Charlene was easy. Charlene was some poor, uneducated woman who probably struggled to keep food on her table. Was she going to give Nat a hard time about going to every football game Clemson played? No. Did Rebecca? Yes. Rebecca told me she was sick to death of football. If Nat didn’t want to go to the Charleston Symphony but preferred to watch golf on television, would Charlene put up a fuss? No. She probably opened a can of chili, nuked it and served it to him. Charlene had probably never heard of the Charleston Symphony or stepped one foot inside the Dock Street Theater either. Had Rebecca? Yes. Rebecca loved the Dock Street and the Symphony and had served on tons of committees as a volunteer to organize benefits for them.

The only problem I had with what Jeff had told me was that I couldn’t decide if going after Nat’s wallet would jeopardize Rebecca’s personal safety.

I decided I would do everything in my power to see that it did not. There were probably more laws on the books and more legal precedent in divorce law than in any other area. I read somewhere recently that a million people get divorced every year. For whatever reason Nat Simms would claim, he couldn’t just boot Rebecca out without a dime after twenty years of marriage.

My next step was to call Nat’s attorney, the infamous Harry Albright, and put him on notice. I took a deep breath, went inside and dialed his number. I gave my name and the reason for my call, was put on hold, expecting to have the secretary come back and take a message. That’s what I would’ve done. If I had been Harry Albright I would have called Nat Simms and asked him why a new attorney was calling. But his arrogance prevailed and Harry Albright picked up the phone.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Albright? This is Abigail Thurmond calling.”

“What can I do for you, Ms. Thurmond?”

“I wanted to let you know that I have been retained by Rebecca Simms to represent her in her divorce from your client, Nathaniel Simms.”

“Don’t waste your time, Ms. Thurmond. The judge has already handed down a decision and…”

“We’ll see about that, Mr. Albright. You might want to advise your client that I am going to begin discovery of his financial affairs…”

“I’m sure he will be delighted by the news,” he said with a little laugh that sounded like a snort.

“Tell him to expect an interrogatory,” I said.

“Sure thing,” Harry Albright said. “But it’s an exercise in futility.”

“We’ll see what’s futile. And I will be investigating his personal relationships as well,” I said.

“What do you mean
personal relationships?
Nat Simms is a straight arrow! A family man!”

“Yeah, sure, and my grandmother was a samurai.”

Albright got quiet and the conversation took on a new tone.

“Another woman? He never told me there was another woman…”

“Well, Mr. Albright, you have to wonder how many other lies he told you, don’t you? He sure lied to his wife plenty. But I’ll get this all sorted out…”

By the time I said good-bye to Harry Albright, which was as soon as possible, he was seriously annoyed.

No attorney appreciated being lied to—especially the dregs like Harry Albright, whose reputation oozed the slime of a tar pit. Attorneys acted on information the client provided, and in the end, if counsel acted on lies, it reflected badly on not only the attorney but the entire firm. In Harry Albright’s case, he was a dank firm of one, having squirmed down to the swamp one sleazy win at a time. I mean, his mother was his secretary, okay?