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Eric slipped a set of keys from his pocket and stepped through the double doorway onto pristinecalacattamarble. He shook his head.Cottage.The place had sixteen rooms.As he set his bag down, his cell chimed, and his lawyer gave him the news that the divorce negotiations were not going well.
It came as no surprise.
“Please don’t run off to North Carolina again,” the attorney begged.
Eric ended the call, stripped out of his clothes and took a shower. He swore he still smelled like horse hide. Jack’s housekeeper brought him a tray of food worthy of a royal banquet, and after slapping a few slices of roast beef on a roll, he sent the rest back. Still on east coast time, he was asleep by eight.
****
Promptly at nine the next morning, Eric was shown to a conference room at his lawyer’s office. He tapped his fingers on the glass table as he awaited the grand entrance of hisdarlingwife. After the clock ticked thirty-five, fashionably late minutes, Bree glided into the room with her own lawyers in tow. Wrapped in body-hugging blue silk, she eased into a chair in the same genteel manner of a royal about to occupy a throne. A smile teased her lips, but Eric stared blankly though her. Wealth hadn’t changed his wife. It only heightened both her attitude and ambition.
After setting a briefcase on the table, her attorney opened it with a resonant click. “I have motions to have an independent auditor investigate Mister Laine’s interest in a company called Jewel Incorporated.” The attorney shook his head in a slow pivot like a parent about to lecture a child. “Its value appears to be in the millions, yet it wasn’t listed among your assets.”
Bree’s blue eyes glowed with satisfaction. Eric stared at the sapphire peeking from under feathery false lashes and jerked his head.When the hell did her eyes become blue?One more piece of plastic attached, inserted, or injected, anywhere in or on her body and she would melt in the sun. He pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed.It shouldn’t be this much trouble getting divorced from a blow-up doll.
Her lawyer cleared his throat with a loud hack. “Excuse me, Mr. Laine, any explanation? You’re listed as the chief executive officer of this company. Why wasn’t it listed?”
“I don’t own it.” Eric pointed at his wife. “And she knows it.”
The attorney, whose smug expression mirrored Bree’s, leaned back in his chair and tapped his pen on the papers. “This company was founded almost nine years ago, by you, Mr. Laine. Investments are made by you, and checks are signed by you. Yetyouwant us to believe you don’t own the company. The I.R.S. just loves digging into shell corporations.”
Both of Eric’s attorneys turned and looked wide eyed at him. Eric stood and splayed his hands on the glass table. He steeled angry eyes at Bree. “Jewel stands for Jenna Welles Laine. The assets belong to my ex-wife. After she left me, I took my name off the deed to the house we owned and some other property and set up a company in her name. Bree was my business manager back then. She knew all about it.”
“Is this true, Mrs. Laine?” her lawyer asked.
Bree flashed a smile of victory, her teeth shining white as tundra snow. “Mmm, I can’t say I remember that.”
“You won’t get away with this,” Eric warned. “Every penny in that company is accounted for, and it all belongs to Jenna. I gave up any claim to it long before you and I were married.”
Bree rose and placed her hands flat against the table to match his pose. “How can you be so ungrateful? Without me you’d still be living on tips or breaking your back swinging a hammer. After all I’ve done for you, how can you even consider giving money to the woman who left you?”
A fine line seemed to blur the boundaries between Bree’s sorrow and anger. It was impossible for Eric to read her expression. He didn’t doubt the sincerity of her heartache, but he knew she feared losing her place in the Hollywood hierarchy more than losing him. He also knew she fought dirty.
Her eyes narrowed to resolute slits. “If I have to play hard ball, I will. I’m not giving up on us. I’m not letting you go.” With her lawyers following, she swept from the room.
Eric dropped back down into his chair and tugged at his necktie so it settled in a loose knot below his throat. “She’s going to tie me up in court forever.”
One attorney riffled through papers in folders, while the other slipped his tablet from its sleeve and turned it on. “I’m going to need the accountant’s-copy of all the Jewel tax returns.”
Like anteing a bet in a poker game, Eric flipped a thumb drive onto the table. “All of last year’s financials, including Jewel, are on this, but it’s complicated.”
“Complicated?” one lawyer asked.
“Jenna left me. She ran away…disappeared actually. I’ve been investing the money from Jewel and sitting on the profits.”
The two lawyers, sharks who received truckloads of money to bring about the final and conclusive end of Eric’s union with Bree, raised their eyebrows. Both faces expressed the “dog ate my homework” cynicism of a teacher.
Frustrated, Eric shrugged. “C’mon, guys, you work for me. You’re supposed to be on my side.”
The attorneys looked at each other, then toward the window. They appeared to study the jagged hump of the L.A. skyline. They both drummed their fingers on the table, clearly stalling. The younger of the two eventually spoke. “Your wife has a valid point. The fact that your ex never received any dividends from Jewel makes it look like you’ve used her name to set up a dummy corporation to hide money.” He turned to his partner. “You used to be a corporate suit. How do we fix this mess?”
The older attorney shook his head as he scanned the thumb drive’s files on his tablet. He grumbled as if they had insulted his mother. “The logical thing would be to turn everything over to your first wife before Bree’s lawyers get some judge to freeze the account.”
Eric rubbed at his burning eyes, then pressed his fingers deep into the sockets. “I don’t know where my first wife is. I hired a detective years ago, but every time he got close to finding her, she disappeared. It took me a few years before I could admit I was one of the reasons she was hiding from the world.”
Slumping in his chair, he let his thoughts drift. The labor of forcing Jenna from his mind was futile. He was Sisyphus, rolling the boulder uphill only to be crushed by it again and again. “I never should have given up. I should have tried harder to find her.”
“Well you’d better try hard now,” both attorneys answered.
