Whittaker 02 The One We Love Read online

  Ugh.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It took nearly an hour to sort through my client roster. Only a few clients would really have difficulty transferring to an interim counselor while I dealt with Regina’s caseload. Two were in full-blown crisis mode, and a third had abandonment issues so severe that she would hang up the phone before the other caller could say good-bye. But the majority was in a relatively good place, either nearing the end of treatment or so firmly entrenched in denial that a couple of weeks apart wouldn’t set us back. I hoped it wouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks to settle my obligations. Any longer than that and I risked exposing how dispensable I apparently was.

  Sighing, I leaned my head back against the worn cloth of the chair. For all my whining, I really did recognize my obligation to Regina. Even without the legal arrangement, I should have jumped at the chance to pay back the debt I owed. Should have.

  The truth was I didn’t like thinking about Regina because doing so called to mind painful memories, not the least of which involved a certain, hunky, former boss hiding out in the West. I toyed with the idea of calling him, just picking up the phone and punching out the number I’d never dialed before, but had memorized, just in case. Despite their differences, I’m sure he’d want to know about Regina’s accident.

  But not from me.

  I sat up, snatching the papers Bob had foisted on me. Professional Executor? I’d never even heard the term before, although the concept made sense.

  Unlike most legal documents, this one was comprised of simple, easy-to-understand language. I scanned quickly trying to get a feel for the job. Despite my light perusal, Regina’s dedication to her wounded charges rose off the pages as though the ink were scented with her own special brand of fanaticism. I skipped ahead to a section titled “Specific Instructions to my Professional Executor” and slowed to read more carefully. While Bob had touched on the essentials of my new duties, Regina spelled out a veritable to-do list for following up with her clients.

  I finally smiled—leave it to Regina to take care of her people from beyond the grave—and started taking notes.

  Toward the end of the instructions was a section of general, housekeeping-type information. The form stated where I could find extra sets of keys to her offices, including the file cabinets, closed files storage, malpractice insurance policy, and managed care contracts. Very tidy.

  Wait a minute. Offices?

  I went back to the beginning and immediately self-diagnosed myself with an exotic form of visual processing disorder, because apparently I’d blacked out what I’d read. The will very clearly stated that my responsibilities included her clinic duties and those at the domestic abuse shelter. The place where, after I was attacked, she’d dragged me for group therapy and self-defense classes, the place where I’d vowed to never return. The place, after all, where Regina had saved lives and, literally, given her own.

  Shit.

  Sue met me at the donut shop across the street from the HP & Me club. We could have met at the club, but, Higher Power notwithstanding, the coffee was crap and we’d have had to share our donuts with the two or three grizzled drunks who always hung around the lobby, bitching and cheating at pinochle.

  Sue became my sponsor shortly after I’d stumbled into AA, hung-over and desperate, nearly ten months earlier. I would have liked a sponsor who fed me cookies on rainy days and listened to all my sad stories. Someone I could go to when life got too scary, which felt like all the time. Someone whose gentle nature let me grow like a seedling in the sun.

  Instead, I got Sue.

  In all fairness, I picked her. A retired middle-school teacher, she was born cranky and stayed that way, seeing no reason to change since it was obvious, to her at least, that the world was at fault, not she. I shudder to think what she must have been like drunk. Nevertheless, she guided my sobriety with a combination of tough love, gritty wisdom, and the implicit threat of a beat-down should I fall off the wagon. She was, in a word, formidable.

  Unfortunately, back during the days following the attack and Marshall’s leaving, Sue had met Regina. And liked her. They got along. They’d conspired to protect my sanity and health in ways that I, in my depressed haze, hadn’t been privy to and would probably never understand. In short, they’d formed an unholy alliance.

  Although Sue had attended the visitation the night before, she hadn’t been able to come to the services this morning. I told her about meeting Emma, Regina’s sister, and how different from each other they seemed to be. We pondered the variability of DNA in siblings for a moment. Then, I showed her Regina’s will, or whatever it was, and waited while she read it.

  “I’ll be damned,” Sue said. “So, what do you think?”

  “I think you’ll be damned, too. You swear too much.”

  My comment elicited a snort and a much bigger cuss word, but didn’t succeed in distracting Sue from her question. Sponsors, like therapists and moms, have a bit of bulldog in them. Or in Sue’s case, a lot. She gave me the one-eyebrow-raised stare.

  “What do I think? I think it sucks. I hate it,” I answered. “And I hate that I hate it. I don’t want the extra responsibility, for one thing. And yes, I know that’s horrible of me—especially after everything Regina did for me.

  “I mean,” I continued, “she knew how screwed up I’ve been after Robert’s death and all the rest. I’m a mess, and I’m just getting my shit back together. Why would she choose me for this job?”

  “Why did she?”

  “I don’t know.” I stared out the window to the AA club. Regina had known I was an alcoholic; she was the only one at work who did. She also knew, better than anyone did, how ravaged my life had been just a few months earlier. Why had she chosen me?

  “She must have trusted you,” Sue said, breaking into my reverie.

  “But she trusted the women at the shelter more. I saw her with them. That shelter was her life. Why didn’t she appoint one of them?”

  “Maybe you should ask her lawyer,” Sue said. “And you could also ask her what happened two weeks ago that made Regina change her will.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  In answer, Sue pointed to the date on the document: Tuesday, September 2 of this year. Whatever had factored into Regina’s decision to appoint me professional executor had occurred very recently. Two weeks ago, as Sue pointed out.

  What the hell?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  After a night spent staring dry-eyed into the dark, I dragged myself out of bed. Siggy, my recently acquired cat, snuggled down in the warm curve of my pillow with a soft grunt. He watched with apparent incredulity as I stumbled around getting dressed in the dawning light. We are not morning creatures, Sig and I.

  I slapped a new nicotine patch on my back and set forth to seize the day, stopping for coffee twice on the twenty-minute commute. Between caffeine jitters and the pee-pee dance, I could barely manage typing the alarm code and opening the lock on the clinic door. Thankfully, the bathroom was just off the lobby and I made it in time to avert serious embarrassment.

  The clinic was empty. I knew better than to expect Bob before noon, and the rest of the therapists wouldn’t be in for another couple of hours. Lisa, our office manager, might be in before that, but I still had the place to myself for a while.

  Eerie.

  Without clients and coworkers, the place felt like a stage set: empty and devoid of purpose. The phrase “if walls could talk” came to mind, and I couldn’t shake a sense of the accumulated anguish that would be seeping out of the walls if that were true. I stopped off in the lounge to set up a pot of highly unnecessary coffee, before hurrying to Regina’s office.

  Bob had given me the master key, but despite my unease, I hesitated outside the door. A weighted sensation smothered my coffee jitters, making it hard to breathe. My heart thumped against the pressure. Heart attack? Regina’s ghost?

  Obligation.

  Forcing a deep breath, I walked in.

&nbs
p; Our offices were the same size and furnished with the same crap commercial furniture. Regina, however, had had nearly two decades to place her stamp. She’d filled her room with eclectic folk art, a few travel souvenirs judging by the I-Heart-Ireland coffee mug, and a profusion of small remembrances from clients—the kind that couldn’t be refused without hurt feelings, but which fell on the angels’ side of ethics.

  Even Regina’s flooring was symbolic. My clients traversed the standard brown-flecked industrial strength carpeting that ran throughout the clinic. Regina had brought in a handspun area rug—the faded pumpkin background backlit a curling tree in browns and greens: the Tree of Life.

  She’d re-covered the loveseat too. Across the back, someone had tossed a celery-colored afghan. It lay there, soft and warm, ready for the next person who, regardless of the current season, might be caught in her own winter of the soul. I picked it up, brought it to my face.

  Regina’s scent—as clean and crisp as fresh sheets snapping on the line—filled my head. Had she made this herself? The weave looked handmade, and I couldn’t find a label or tag anywhere. I folded the fabric carefully, setting it back on the loveseat. I’d need to find out who was entitled to Regina’s personal effects; I assumed her sister Emma, but I hadn’t gotten her phone number and didn’t know her last name. The lawyer would know.

  Setting my purse on her desk, I pulled out a notebook and my copy of Regina’s will. Feeling like an intruder, I sat at her desk, flipped to a new page in the notebook and made a list of people I’d need to call. Regina’s lawyer, definitely, and then Emma. Clotilde, the shelter director. I’d need to make sure she was aware of Regina’s will and make an appointment despite the fact that I’d never, ever wanted to set foot in the shelter again. Considering a fourth name, I debated with myself. Was I being silly? Overreacting? With a sigh, I wrote “Detective Blodgett.”

  Didn’t want to talk to him again either.

  It was too early to call any of them. I pulled out Regina’s client list and grabbed the nearest stack of files. I’d have to read each one carefully, reviewing the clinical progress notes before calling each one. It was time-consuming work, work that would require my full attention, my total commitment to people I’d never even met.

  This I could do.

  I busied myself checking Regina’s client list against the files piled on her desk, making notes, creating new lists dividing clients into tentative groups: those to be referred, those to invite to a grief support group, those who might need immediate attention and so on. The task was absorbing, which is why it took me several attempts at cross-checking a particular file with Regina’s client list to realize that it didn’t belong to the clinic. Didn’t belong in the clinic, for that matter.

  At first glance, it seemed like a typical manila file folder, although rather more beat up than usual as though recycled from a previous use. The stickers were different, too. Every office has its own system, using stickers or some other marking on the exterior of the file to indicate various information. Our clinic used colored circles to indicate activity status; a green circle meant an active client, red meant a closed case. We also had a system to indicate whether the client paid by private means or through an insurance carrier, and, if the latter, which?

  The file I held had none of these indicators and, in fact, the client’s name had been neatly handwritten in black ink on the label tab instead of printed on a computer-generated label. No case number either.

  I didn’t recognize the name—Tammy Long—although that didn’t mean much. If it weren’t for this situation I wouldn’t have known any of Regina’s clients’ identities. There were a half-dozen progress reports inside, all in Regina’s slanted, spiky handwriting. I paged past them, coming to the client info sheet clipped to the back of the folder. I was looking for information on the client but the first thing that caught my eye was the letterhead: a deep purple logo—three linked feminine figures protectively encircling a fourth—centered on the header with the agency name, Devlin House for Women, underneath.

  What was Regina doing with a shelter file here?

  It didn’t make sense. Standard practice holds that files are never removed from their parent agency, unless perhaps if they are to be archived at a separate, designated site. Regina knew this.

  A quick examination of the stack dredged up five more. Six files, in total, belonging to Devlin House that had no business being here in the clinic. Worse, only three of them were Regina’s own clients. One belonged to another therapist whose scrawled signature was both unfamiliar and illegible. Regina had taken them from the shelter, but for what purpose? It seemed so out of character. Regina followed rules. She may have bitched about them or, more likely, walked a picket line against them, but she wouldn’t have simply broken them without a very good—an overridingly important—reason.

  I sat back in the chair, thinking. There were too many unusual circumstances in Regina’s death, in the recent changes to her will, in this latest discovery for me to feel comfortable. Yet, what did I really know? The sister Regina had little contact with didn’t know she knitted? A couple of files had been misplaced? Perhaps Regina had absentmindedly placed them in her briefcase, brought them to this office. Maybe something was going on with her medically? Something that could account for her distractibility—if that’s what it was—and cause her to lose her footing or be disoriented resulting in a fall.

  Or I could easily be overreacting. I acknowledged that. On the other hand, I told myself as I gathered up the files and headed to the copy machine, another mysterious “something” had made Regina change her executor of many years to me as recently as a couple of weeks ago. I scanned the records as I fed them to the copier. The dates ranged from March 2007 to this August—all had been closed out. So whatever the reason for her keeping them, it wasn’t because they were current clients.

  I glanced at the clock. My coworkers would be straggling in any minute ready to start the workday. I didn’t want them to find me illicitly copying files from another agency. My actions were just as wrong as Regina’s taking them, and I’d never be able to explain the nebulous doubts that I was reacting to. I didn’t understand them myself.

  My other problem was where to hide them. I didn’t dare hide them in plain sight in the file room, something I’d tried once before with disastrous results. Hearing the front door open, I grabbed up the papers willy-nilly and fled back to my office. As I hastily reassembled the paperwork, I realized I should simply take the original files back to the shelter and leave the copies in Regina’s office. No one would know they were duplicates since I was the only one with access to both agencies. Hiding in plain sight. Again.

  What could go wrong?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Before I went to the shelter, I made two of the phone calls from my list. The first was to Regina’s lawyer, Ashley Perkins. I had a hard time reconciling the cute, perky name with my idea of a lawyer, but the no-nonsense voice fit. She spent seven minutes on the phone with me and probably billed Regina’s estate for an hour. But, then, therapists were among the first to invent the fifty-minute hour, so I shouldn’t judge.

  At any rate, she didn’t need any more time to confirm that yes, I was stuck being the executor and it meant all the duties that I thought it meant, and no, she had no idea why Regina felt the need to change the executorship two weeks ago. However, she did let me know that the previous executor, Lachlyn Brody, had held the spot for well over eight years. Listening to her strong, assured voice, I couldn’t bring myself to ask her if she thought Regina’s death might be something other than an accident. It seemed silly.

  The second call went straight to voice mail, a relief since I had no better idea of what to say to Detective Blodgett than to anyone else. Unless I came up with something more credible than Regina’s assumed non-knitting habits, I’d sound like some conspiracy nut. The suspicions that tickled my brain would sound crazy just as soon as I voiced them. Pondering that line of reasoning, I looked up “para
noid schizophrenia” in my DSM-IV just in case I’d fallen over the line already. It wasn’t reassuring.

  The drive to the shelter went all too fast despite my efforts to catch every red light. Instead, the fates sailed me through a long procession of green lights and got me there in record time.

  Devlin House, an immense, thrown-together duplex, sat at the end of a block of sleek office buildings and looked as misplaced as a dandelion in a rose bed. Despite being two stories, it appeared squat, slightly shabby, and in serious need of a fresh paint job. Shingles, too, when I looked a little closer.

  I rested my head back on the car seat and sighed. Time for a little pep talk. I was here in a professional capacity. I was here as the legal representative of a … Well, not a good friend, that was stretching it. But still, a legal representative. A professional. Definitely not a victim.

  It wasn’t working, but I pushed myself out of the car anyway.

  The door chimed as I entered the front door of the administrative side of the duplex. Midday, the shelter was quiet, the resident women at jobs or looking for them. Against my will, I glanced to the left, into the group counseling room. A former living room, its walls were painted a light spring green overlaid haphazardly with child-height scuff marks and small, white scars where folding chairs had been pushed back carelessly, gouging half-moons into the drywall. A wooden bookshelf filled with self-help, feel-good books, feminist tomes, and an entire collection of Dr. Phil’s words of wisdom had been placed against the back wall. Generic brand tissue boxes were placed on the floor in between every third chair or so, and a yellow legal pad rested on one of the chairs, waiting for the next line of notes to be filled in.

  I took a deep breath, trying to relocate oxygen to the areas of my body that needed it. A door shut behind me, and I twisted around. Not Clotilde, the director, although this woman was just as tall and exuded the same sense of efficiency. It took me a moment to recognize her.