The eye, though. The missing-eye thing was unfortunate.
The sunglasses did a good job of hiding it, but Gordon knew that behind the left lens there was nothing but a flesh-colored patch. Of course, Kelly would get a prosthetic eye, the best prosthetic eye money could buy, but still—the woman was missing an eyeball. You don’t bounce back from that, Gordon figured. There was no known cure for No Eyeball.
His lawyers did their best to put up a fight on his behalf but Gordon overruled them again and again. Kelly wanted the triplex on Park Avenue and planned to gut it. Done. She wanted the ranch they never went to in Sun Valley. Done. She asked for the place on St. John, and she undoubtedly expected Gordon to argue, since he’d managed to hold on to it through his three previous divorces. With a small, almost imperceptible gesture, Gordon indicated his wishes to his attorneys. The last time Gordon had been on St. John, he’d opened a drawer in the master suite and smelled a smell he hadn’t encountered in years, a smell he could only think of as the Smell of Elaine. It wafted up from the drawer paper and nearly floored him. So, St. John, Kelly could have it. Done.
The dollar amount they began to circle around was truly astronomical, so high that Gordon’s lawyers called for a short break and retired to a distant conference room to slow things down and to attempt to talk some sense into their overly accommodating client.
*
Lucy was out in the backyard, near the edge of the woods, watching Wyatt. It was snowing, and Wyatt was trying to build a shelter out of sticks. He was very excited about the snow, and he had it in his head that if he moved quickly enough, he could build a house that would keep out the snow.
“I’m going to sleep in the shelter,” said Wyatt.
“You better get lots of sticks, then,” said Lucy.
“You and me and Dada are going to sleep in the shelter.”
“Then you really need lots and lots and lots of sticks.”
Lucy pulled out her phone, but she couldn’t get cell service. She wasn’t sure if it was related to the snowstorm or something about the distance she was from the house, but she found it frustrating. She wanted to text Ben. Pretty much all Lucy wanted to do was see Ben, call Ben, text Ben, and think about Ben.
Susan Howard had filed for divorce. Lucy didn’t know the whole story, but Claire told her Susan had found some letters, love letters apparently, hidden in the back of Rowan’s Jeep. Secret love letters. It was a very old-fashioned way to break up. And according to that morning’s New York Post, Gordon and Kelly Allen were getting a divorce. That one was less of a surprise, but still.
These things always come in waves, Lucy thought. And then: They also come in threes.
There had been a tarot card reader at one of the Beekman PTA fund-raisers the year before. It was a ladies-only event, with Moscow mules and mojitos and finger foods and a handful of “super-fun things” the ladies on the committee had dreamed up, like an old-fashioned photo booth and a decorate-your-own-gigantic-wineglass station (You had me at merlot), and three tables dedicated to bunco.
There was a tremendous amount of planning that went into these fund-raisers, committee meetings and e-mail chains and food-prepping parties and team trips to the discount wine emporium, which is why the tarot card reader showing up unannounced struck everyone as such a surprise. Susan Howard was the chairwoman of the committee, though, and the tarot card reader was one of her middle-of-the-night brainstorms and she hadn’t bothered to run it past anyone else involved. The woman Susan found worked out of a storefront in New Paltz and she weighed about three hundred pounds and she either was or was not a genuine psychic.
The Good Christian Women of the town huddled in the corner of the room and whispered among themselves, oozing disapproval. There were only about twelve Good Christian Women in Beekman, but a lot more came out of the woodwork once you introduced the element of sorcery to a PTA fund-raiser. There was talk about how inappropriate it was, how the PTA should not be involved with this, how it was a community event, and maybe they should go ahead and get the karaoke started early.
Susan got more and more frantic as the charges of witchcraft and the dark arts began circling the local golf club’s dilapidated ballroom. “It’s just for fun! It doesn’t mean anything! I’m a Sunday-school teacher, you guys, I mean, give me some credit!
“Are you hearing this?” Susan had said to Lucy. “Have these women all lost their minds?” Even Claire, relatively reasonable Claire, was overheard saying, “Well, I would have put a stop to it if I’d had the chance, but this is the first I heard of it.”
“Please, just do it, Lucy,” Susan said. “For me.”
And of all the things Susan Howard was always pestering Lucy to do—judge the class scarecrow competition, make chili for the chili cook-off, man the Milk-a-Goat booth at the spring festival—this one seemed like the most painless. So Lucy paid her thirty-dollar donation and sat down across from the woman who either was or was not a psychic and watched as she shuffled cards and laid them out in the shape of a large cross and said a bunch of things Lucy could no longer recall. She remembered only one part of the reading, but it had stuck with her, and Lucy found herself thinking about it at the strangest times.
“You have a son,” the woman had asked Lucy. Stated, really.
“I do.”
“Just the one, right?”
“Yes.”
The woman turned over three more cards, all in a row.
“Your son has very strong karma.”
“What do you mean?” Lucy remembered asking. “Is that good or bad?”
“It’s neither,” the woman had said. “It’s just very, very strong.”
*
After Gordon and his team left the conference room, Kelly turned to one of her lawyers and said, “I want to hurt him.”
“So far he’s giving you everything you’ve asked for,” said Lawyer Number One.
“I realize that,” said Kelly. “What I’m asking you is, how can I hurt him?”
“He wants the child,” said Lawyer Number Two.
“Yes, according to the postnup you brought us, all he really wants is physical custody of your son, with you being granted essentially unrestricted visitation rights,” said Lawyer Number One. He flipped through the document and found the appropriate sections, running his finger down the text while he summarized it for her. “Not even essentially. You would have unrestricted visitation rights. He proposes purchasing an estate near the Eagle’s Perch so that you can be with Rocco whenever you want. The assumption, it seems, is that you could reside wherever you chose and be able to spend time in Beekman with your son, as much as you want, and at your convenience.”
“And I could fight that?”
“You never signed the postnup,” said Lawyer Number Two. “You can fight for whatever you want.”