And One Last Thing... Part 4

"We shouldn't have a problem then, because it was all true," I told her. "Everything I wrote was based on finding those e-mails. Wouldn't the pictures alone be enough to just cancel this whole lawsuit thing?"

"Well, no, you would have to respond to the suit either way, particularly since Mike and Beebee's complaint states that the e-mails were spam and Mike has no idea who they're from. They're claiming that the woman in the photos isn't Beebee, that this is a horrible case of a nosy wife who found bad information while snooping and wreaked havoc with it. They're saying you've defamed both of their characters, have damaged Mike's reputation/ earning potential, and harmed Beebee's standing in the community."

"Oh, what standing in the community?" I snorted. I opened the file folder with the e-mailed photos. "Besides, you can tell it's Beebee, just look at this..."

I sifted through the photos, tamping down the flare of rage ignited by seeing them again. But as I thumbed through, I realized that none of the pictures showed Beebee's face. I gasped. How could I not have realized that I never saw her face?

"c.r.a.p," I moaned.

"Exactly," she said. "These pictures are more anatomical in nature."

There were no face shots.

"He's going to win, isn't he?" I sat back, deflated. For the first time, I realized that as scared as I was, up until that moment I sincerely believed that I was going to come out of this unscathed. My marriage couldn't be saved, obviously, but I honestly thought I would be able to emerge from this ordeal able to carry on a normal, productive, not-working-as-a-french-fry-technician life. I wasn't aware I was even capable of that kind of optimism, so I wasn't willing to let it die just yet. "Wait!" I s.n.a.t.c.hed up one of the pictures. "Look! The b.u.mblebee tattoo. Beebee has a b.u.mblebee tattoo on her inner thigh. Can you subpoena her thigh?"

"Not as part of the divorce action, but to defend you from the lawsuit, yes. We can ask for an inspection of her thighs as proof of ident.i.ty," Sam said, examining the photo. "That's a good catch on the tattoo. Even if she tried to remove it before the suit goes to court, it would still show up.

"But for now, do me a favor," she said. "From this point on we need you to appear to be the brokenhearted discarded wife, not the angry, possibly crazy, woman scorned. Do not discuss the newsletter with large groups of people. If you see Mike or Beebee in public, do not cause an ugly scene. Do not call, e-mail, write letters to, or otherwise contact Mike or Beebee without contacting me first to see if it's a good idea. When you do appear in public, try to look sort of, well, beaten and tragic."

"That shouldn't be difficult, thank you."

"In fact, if you're comfortable with therapy, you might start seeing a counselor," she suggested. "It will help establish the psychological trauma Mike has inflicted on you. Since you obviously enjoy writing, it would also help if you started a journal to doc.u.ment your h.e.l.lish, slow recovery from said trauma. How is your current financial situation? How are you getting by day to day?"

I shrugged. "Actually, it's okay. I don't have a lot of living expenses. I'm staying with my parents, which I don't think can last much longer. I'll probably have to find an apartment soon. But I have a little savings cus.h.i.+on. If the case drags out, I have some investments I can cash in if I need to."

"I'll be honest, you're probably going to need to," she told me, pinning me with those frank seawater eyes. "It all depends on how contentious negotiations are going to be. And I doubt Mike is going to be forthcoming or cooperative with us. I've had some cases that only took sixty days. Then again, I'm still involved in negotiating a canine custody agreement that has dragged a divorce settlement out for almost three years."

"Canine custody agreement?"

"Both parties want sole custody of Bobo the Pomeranian. Lacey, I can't say that your literary aspirations are going to help us in court because some judges around here are pretty old school. But I have to tell you, I thought it took a huge pair of Spaldings. A lot of the people who come through that door are just so caught up in being a victim that they can't see straight. It's part of the job, but it's pretty d.a.m.ned annoying. It's refres.h.i.+ng to meet someone who's not helpless. You are not what I expected."

"You're not what I expected either, Ms. Shackleton." I rose and shook her hand.

"i you need anything, you call me."

"By that, do you mean, 'It's eleven p.m. and I just need to talk' or 'It's three am. and I need bail money'?" I asked.

Samantha grinned. "Urn, neither of those."

"Fair enough." I nodded.

"You're going to be one of those 'interesting' clients, aren't you?"

I arched a brow at her. "You're just now figuring that out?"

8 * Doubly Screwed by the Fourth Estate.

It was starting to feel crowded at the old home place.

Daddy returned from his reunion a few days after Mama and he was less thrilled to have one of the baby birds back in his empty nest. Other than repeated inquiries as to whether I would need extra boxes when I moved out, he refused to discuss anything with me. If I came into a room, he left it. If I happened to catch him long enough to ask him a question, he answered it in as few syllables as possible. I'm pretty sure the only reason he ate at the same table as me was that Mama refused to serve his meals anywhere else. Daddy was smart enough to know he couldn't survive on his own cooking.

Daddy was never what you'd call a hands-on father, but he'd never been so distant. When he was disappointed in us, his usual MO was to tell Mama and have her relay the message. Even when Emmett finally, quietly, came out to my parents, Daddy told Mama to tell my brother to be careful. And that was about it.

Daddy seemed to be employing more of a scorched earth policy these days. I think he believed if he made the situation uncomfortable enough, I would give up this whole silly divorce and go back to my own house. He was particularly irritated by the way Mama had managed to insulate me from the phone calls, the insistent visitors, Wynnie's repeated efforts to talk some sense into me.

"You've got to quit coddling the girl," I heard him grumble through their bedroom door on one of my nightly wanderings around the house. "She needs to face her own music. Personally, I don't blame Wynnie and Jim for being p.i.s.sed. Or Mike. Do you know what kind of jokes they're making about Mike and Beebee down at the golf course? And Lacey? I just don't understand what was going through her head when she did this. We didn't raise her to -"

"To what?" Mama demanded. "To stand up for herself?"

"To make a d.a.m.n fool out of herself," Daddy countered. "How would you feel if somebody wrote this sort of thing about one of our kids, Deb?"

"Keep your voice down," Mama hissed. "And our kids wouldn't be sleazy enough to cheat."

"Well, if Emmett does cheat, he'd better not tell Lacey about it; G.o.d knows what she'd do."

"Walt, are you upset because you're embarra.s.sed or because you want her out of the house?"

"Well, she's never going to leave if you keep stuffing her with pancakes and grilled cheese sandwiches!" he cried.

"Oh, she's not even eating them," Mama said. "She doesn't eat anything. She doesn't sleep. She just wanders around the house all night, which is why you should keep your voice down!"

I backed away from the door. I didn't want to hear any more. I was going to have to leave the house, soon. Besides the loser factor, I couldn't stay at my parents' house, causing tension and problems for the two of them. There were enough failed marriages in our family.

As I watched my parents' marriage from a newly enlightened adult perspective, I noticed little things about them I hadn't before. Little things, like when my dad got my morn a gla.s.s of water, he ran the tap for a while, to make sure he was getting her the coldest, least faucet-tasting water possible. Mike used to just stick a gla.s.s under the tap.

My parents had that something. Something Mike and I didn't have. I didn't know what it was and that was what was driving me insane. I'm not going to say Mike was a total monster. I mean, there was the year that he got me an air purifier for my birthday, but only because I'd mentioned that the infomercial was interesting. I shared some blame in that. We had no connection. No dependence on each other, no real intimacy. We started dating in high school because we ran in the same circles and our parents approved. We got married because that was what you were supposed to do when you'd been dating for a while and were graduating college. It seemed like the next step and we couldn't think of a better one.

There were things I didn't expect, a rush of longing when I smelled Tide detergent, a scent that would forever remind me of Mike's s.h.i.+rts. Not having someone to rub my cold feet against under the covers. Someone to eat my pizza crusts, which I always left behind and Mike called the "pizza bones." But I think these were signs that I needed a roommate, not Mike. Or maybe a neutered cat.

Yes, Daddy drove Mama nuts with his constant need to be around his stupid adolescent college buddies. But reconnecting, nay, dwelling, on his past kept Daddy happy. And that made Mama happy.

She compromised, she didn't settle.

I woke up the next morning to find that my car had been towed. Mike had removed my name from the t.i.tle more than a year before and I just hadn't noticed. When I called the county clerk's office to try to order a copy of the t.i.tle paperwork, I found that Mike had also managed to cut off my American Express, my Visa, and my MasterCard. I was still on the phone with MasterCard when Mama came into the kitchen wearing a bathrobe, staring in horror at the morning edition of the Singletree Gazette.

She turned the front page toward me so I could read the headline, "Scorned Local Woman Sued for Scathing E-Mail."

"Oh... no," I groaned, dropping the phone on its cradle.

Reporter Danny Plum, whose byline hovered over my own personal nightmare, was an industrious little b.a.s.t.a.r.d. He'd found the bridal portrait we'd included with our wedding announcement years before in the newspaper archives. It was front and center, just under a smaller subhead reading "Widely Forwarded Anti-Adultery Missive Sparks Divorce, Community Debate."

Mama's face was as white as the newsprint. "Baby, I didn't mean it. I didn't know he was writing it down. I'm so sorry."

I took the paper from her shaking hands. "Unable to return to her marital home, Mrs. Terwilliger is reportedly staying with her parents, rarely leaving the house except to consult her attorney, Samantha Shackleton." I read aloud. "When contacted by the Gazette, Mrs. Terwilliger's mother, Deb Vernon, insisted that many wronged wives would follow in her daughter's footsteps, 'if they thought of it.'

"Everybody thinks Lacey's gone crazy, but that's not true.

She knew what she was doing,' Mrs. Vernon said in a phone interview. 'She was just pushed too far. And yes, she overreacted a little bit. It happens to the best of us, but I don't want to comment. Of course, if Mike didn't want to be publicly embarra.s.sed, he shouldn't have run around town chasing some hussy like his pants were on fire ... but I don't want to comment. I just wish people would mind their own business. Really, I have nothing to say."

My mother cringed as I made a sound somewhere between a groan and call of a dying crane.

"I declined comment! Declined!" she cried. "And he's twisting what I did say all around! I'm going to strangle that little weasel reporter!"

I picked up the ringing phone without thinking about who could be calling. Samantha's voice, frustrated and weary, came through the receiver. "I know I didn't specifically tell you not to have your mama defend you to the press, but I thought I made it clear that you needed to keep a low profile."

"Mama says she declined comment," I told her, giving Mama an exasperated look.

"Did she say 'off the record'?" Samantha asked. "Those are the magic words. Unless she said, 'off the record,' anything she said, even in pa.s.sing conversation while she was declining comment, can be quoted. You should know this stuff. I thought you had a background in journalism."

"Yeah, the ethical kind, where reporters don't screw people over when they say they're not interested in being quoted. She didn't mean it, Sam. Mama couldn't stop him from writing a story, but she wasn't trying to make it any worse. Of course, it would have been helpful if she had told me she talked to a reporter in the first place."

"I didn't want to upset you," Mama whispered. "I was trying to screen your calls!"

"Why would they want to write about a divorce case in the first place?" I asked. "Don't I have the right to privacy?"

"When Mike filed suit, this became a matter of public record. This is not good, Lacey," Samantha said. "Mike is made to look like the injured party. And he managed to decline comment, through his lawyer, so he seems to have some sense... and tact. Your mama, as well intentioned as she may be, made it look like you don't have any remorse and that you feel justified in what you did. You're the harpy first wife. It's not exactly a sympathetic role. This probably won't improve our position in court."

"Well, I'm not really remorseful and I do feel justified in what I did," I said.

"That's fine; you just shouldn't tell anybody that!" Samantha exclaimed. "Look, this could just die down. But considering that the newsletter is supposed to be 'widely e-mailed' I doubt it. In case it doesn't, and by some horrible whim of fate you manage to get the attention of other media outlets, you don't even speak to decline comment, you just walk away. In fact, you don't talk to anyone you don't know, got it?"

"Lacey!" Mama called. "I think you need to come see this."

I carried the cordless phone into the living room, where Mama stood in the window, watching a news crew setting up on our front lawn.

"What?" Samantha asked.

"Umm, a camera crew from Channel Five." I told her.

"And Channel Seven!" Mama called.

"And Channel Seven," I told Samantha.

Samantha groaned as Mama snapped curtains closed. And if I wasn't mistaken, I could hear her banging her head against her desk. "Do you have somewhere you could go lay low for a while?"

"I'm thinking maybe Timbuktu," I muttered, padding back into the kitchen.

"Funny," she snorted. "I want you to leave town for a while and I don't want you to talk to anybody. Keep your cell phone on. Tell your parents if they get any media calls to refer all questions to me."

After a few more curt instructions from my lawyer, I hung up and banged my own head against the kitchen counter.

"This is just not good," I moaned. "I'm going to end up a punch line on Jay Leno, like that Runaway Bride girl with the crazy eyes."

Mama sighed. "You should have thought of that before airing your laundry." When I gave her a stern look, she shrank back a little. "Too soon?"

"Samantha says I need to find a place to lay low for a while."

"Maybe you should head up to the cabin," she said. "Hide out there for a while. Even if someone told the reporters where you were, I doubt they'd be able to find you."

I lifted my head, taking a Post-it note with "milk, eggs, bread" written on it with me. I swatted it off of my forehead. Why hadn't I thought of the cabin?

Mike and I hadn't been to the cabin or Lake Lockwood in months. Gammy Muldoon left the cabin to me just before we got married, with the understanding that Emmett could use it whenever he wanted to. But Emmett was religious about protecting his skin from damaging UV rays, so he never wanted to use it. Mike and I went up for weekends sometimes, but we'd fallen out of the habit unless it was Memorial or Labor Day.

Despite the fact that his boat-in-progress was housed there, Mike didn't particularly enjoy our time at the cabin. It wasn't as nice as our friends' places and he didn't feel like we could entertain properly there. He hated the rattling old window-unit air conditioner, the shabby, splintering porch swing, and the sprung chintz couch in the living room. One of the biggest fights we'd ever had was over Mike's listing the house with a Realtor to gauge the market viability of the property without telling me. He argued that we never used that "run-down old shack" and it would be much smarter to sell it and put the money toward a place in Lighthouse Cove. I called the Realtor, canceled the listing, and went out and bought new outdoor furniture, a hammock, a new couch, and a laundry list of other things to fix the house up. I maxed out my Visa for that month, but at least Mike couldn't complain about the d.a.m.n couch anymore.

The good news was that along with its lack of a prestigious address or central air, Mike deeply resented the tax liability the lake house represented. So, when we got married, it stayed in my name.

Mike's being a tightwad had finally paid off.

9 * First Impressions or Pride and Panties.

The cabin was only about an hour from Singletree, but it might as well have been an ocean away. It wasn't much to look at, one story of aging gray cedar set two miles back from the nearest access road. The water of Lake Lockwood was always freezing and smelled faintly of fish, but some of my best childhood memories were rooted in that cabin.

My maternal grandma, Gammy Muldoon, made no apologies for designating me her favorite grandchild. She wasn't cruel or hurtful about it. She gave thoughtful Christmas and birthday presents to Emmett. She took him out for special outings and called him her "little monkey." But I was Gammy's special girl... because I stood still long enough to listen to her stories.

Gammy was a pistol. She cheated viciously at rummy and drank a steady stream of daiquiris after 4:00 p.m. Many people say she's where I get my special unladylike mastery of "bluer" language, which my Grandma Vernon never managed to cure. Gammy and Grandpa built the family cabin almost fifty years earlier, back when even the richest of the rich didn't have air-conditioning. Going to the lake was the only escape from the sticky, humid heat. The whole house was decorated in early American Coca-Cola. Old signs, posters, gla.s.ses, plaques, everywhere you looked there were rosy-cheeked young citizens trying to sell you the most delicious caffeinated beverage known to man. It was either kitschy or within kissing distance of serial killer territory.

The closest thing to a town near Lake Lockwood was Buford, a tiny tourist trap that depended on summer traffic to keep stores open during the year. As I drove my mom's car through town, I had to dodge RVs and boat trailers as tourists with very little experience driving either negotiated the streets. We had a local woman, Mrs. Witter, who kept the place up for us. She came in once a month to check for storm or pest damage, gave it a good annual spring cleaning, and closed the place for the winter. It was obvious she'd given the place a thorough once over after I'd called her that afternoon. The floor was freshly scrubbed and the living room still smelled like lemon Pledge and Windex. As usual, she'd left a plate of her famous snickerdoodles for me on the table.

I carried in my suitcase, my laptop and a couple of bags of on the lam" groceries. Dropping it all on the kitchen counter, I stared at my new home. I'd never realized how small the cabin was. Or that it had a weird old refrigerator sort of smell. Or that the floor slanted slightly when you walked back toward the bedroom.

"Stop it," I told myself sternly. "Stop it, right now. Stop finding fault and freaking out. It's going to be -... Oh, for c.r.a.p's sake, I've been living alone for five minutes and I'm already talking to myself."

Right now the only thing the cabin had going for it was that the phone wasn't ringing off the hook. The reporters that had been calling, visiting, and just plain camping outside my parents' house had proved themselves to be resourceful little b.u.g.g.e.rs. My first order of business was to unplug the phone. I did, however, leave the cord in the outlet because I was going to need it for slowerthan-Christmas dial-up internet access.

For an hour or so I managed to occupy myself with mundane little moving-in tasks, but you can only rearrange your toiletries so many times. I tucked my suitcase under the bed, threw the boxes in the burn barrel, and fixed a turkey sandwich, which I couldn't eat. I just stared at the plate until the edges of the meat got sort of dry and crusty. I threw it out, dropped onto the couch, and rubbed at my chest, where my stomach acid rose with threatening velocity.

I had no idea what to do. Even when I "stayed at home" before, I had a daily to-do list. I had lists of lists. Grocery shopping. Committee meetings. Hair appointments. Yoga cla.s.ses. Picking up dry cleaning. Planning dinners for friends. Waiting at home for the carpet shampooers, the exterminator. Writing endless thank-you notes to people I barely knew, waxing poetic about their partic.i.p.ation in the Junior League Fall Festival or their donation to the Ladies Auxiliary Golf Tournament. My hand could practically write, "Thank you so much for your generous contribution" on autopilot.

What would I do all day? What would keep my racing mind occupied?

I didn't even have cable. My only TV options were videotapes that had been at the cabin since my grandmother owned the place. She refused to watch movies made after 1950, so her collection was comprised of black-and-white movies featuring actresses she called "broads" in the fondest manner. When I was little, I would come up for special weekends and she would French braid my hair and lecture me about how Joan Crawford was considered a free-spirited flapper before she harnessed the power of her eyebrows. When I theorized that dear old Joan and Bette's shoulder pads were like subst.i.tute t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es, she nearly wept with pride.

My grandmother would have been ashamed by what I'd become. If she were alive, she would have watched me cry for about two minutes, slapped some sense into me, and told me to show some backbone. I was a Muldoon, d.a.m.n it. And Muldoons didn't just roll over when someone kicked them. We stood our ground. We fought back. And we stole your good liquor on the way out the door.

Well, that was probably just Gammy.

Sighing, I picked up Gammy's favorite, The Women. Somehow, it felt appropriate - a movie about infidelity, divorce, and vindication where not a single male character was shown. Perfectly in keeping with my new "no p.e.n.i.s policy." I pulled the worn purple quilt from the bed, snuggled up on the sofa, and let myself get swept away to a world where everybody is beautifully lit and has blistering retorts at the ready.

My movie marathon didn't work out as well as I'd hoped. I forgot at the end of The Women, Mary throws away her pride and goes back to her husband. It didn't exactly put me in a drowsy place. I ended up watching a few movies where Rex Harrison pretended to sing and John Barrymore pretended to be sober. I wrapped up with Rebecca, a movie about a first wife who was such a vicious b.i.t.c.h that her mere memory eventually drove everyone around her kind of nuts.