The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel (17 page)

Julian was still reading, drinking in every word. This was the same kid who had wandered the city with all his most important papers stuffed in a file. He had thrown them on my floor and then galloped off in a panic. Well, he was impetuous and emotional, but he’d been Raised Right, in the southern sense. He knew to put his napkin in his lap, to open doors for little old ladies, and to read contracts before he signed.

“It’s an intern form,” I said. “I need you to sign it mostly so privilege applies here.”

“Yeah. And this is a really good idea,” Julian said without looking up. “Today feels like good practice.”

“Practice? For what?”

“Like, so we can learn to work together,” Julian said. I opened my mouth to tell him this was only for today, but he was still talking. “We’ll have to, when we find Hana.”

I tried to make a noncommittal noise, but it came out like a hum in the midst of being strangled. He’d reset the angles, again.

He’d said
we,
as if he already had a place inside my nonexistent plans. As if he had the right to shape them. But he wasn’t in my tribe, much less in Hana’s.

This kid had grown up in suburbia, with a mommy and a daddy and a bike and probably a dog named Duke or Fido. He had three-quarters of a Berry College education and no frame of reference to imagine the world that Hana and I came from. He’d never set a toe into the places Birdwine would be looking for her. All we had in common were my mother’s genes, diffused by different men and scattered into each of us. He was demanding a piece of a kind of pie he’d never smelled or tasted.

He handed me the signed form. “Ready,” he said. He sounded downright perky.

I couldn’t think about this now. He was right. I had a job to do that was the very opposite of the lunacy he was proposing. I vivisected families; this orphan was asking how
we
could create the very thing that my life’s work was deconstructing. I shook my head at him and got out of the car, walking toward the job I understood.

He got out, too, following me to the wraparound porch. I forced myself to put aside his assumptions and focus. I rang the bell, smiling for the camera. I didn’t spot its small glass eye gleaming at me, but security cameras were what rich people had in lieu of peepholes. I could feel it, that faint electric charge that crept across my skin when I was being watched.

Oakleigh jerked open the door almost immediately, scowling. Her glance took in Julian, his legal pad and pen held at the ready, and dismissed him as something secretarial. She skipped hellos and introductions and went straight to bitching, even as the door swung wide.

“I don’t see why I have to talk to the cops. Clark’s the one who broke in here and started this. Can we make a counter-thingy, and get
him
arrested? He’s trespassing, moving and ruining my things—every day.” The lather of fear I’d heard in her voice on the phone was gone, transmuted into anger. Julian leaned back from the blast, eyes wide. She turned and stomped away, and we followed her into the vaulted foyer. “I changed the security code. Twice. What am I supposed to do now?”

“Change clothes,” I suggested. Her dress was red, and tight, and very short, worn with black boots that came up past her knees. There was a lot of slim, tan thigh showing between her hem and the boot tops, and as we followed her in, I caught Julian looking. He blushed bright pink and looked deliberately away. To be fair, I didn’t know many straight men who could have kept their eyes trained purely up toward heaven.

“I already changed. When I called you, I was in yoga pants,” she said, waving us forward. There was a sweeping staircase, and beyond that, a wide arch opened up into a great room. She angled to the stairs, climbed three steps, then paused and turned toward us. Almost posing. “Cops love this dress. Last month, it got me out of a ticket.”

“Mm-hm,” I said, hoping to all the gods we wouldn’t get a female cop.

Then she turned to the wall and jabbed her finger at a patch of nothing. “Look at this!”

“I see white paint,” I said. “This is Juli—”

“White?” Oakleigh interrupted, and now 10 percent of her rage was aimed at me. “It’s Polar Vanilla, which is a very warm cream. But can’t you see the square?” She jabbed at the wall again. Julian and I leaned in like a pair of paint-shade critics, and then I saw the faint shift in the color. A small rectangular patch shone a little brighter than the rest, and there was a tiny nail hole at the top. “What you don’t see is my Picasso sketch. And you don’t see it because Clark took it down and stuffed it in the liquor cabinet to make me think that it had been stolen. What are you going to do about it?”

Oakleigh was treating me like the help and Julian like furniture. Time to get my girl in hand. I made my face look blank and bored and held out my contract in two fingers. “Nothing, until you sign this. And I need that check.”

She rolled her eyes, but she came down and snatched the papers, then held out a peremptory hand toward Julian. He passed her his pen. She turned on her heel and stomped through the archway, leading us into the great room.

There a huge sectional sofa, ash colored and covered with an excessive number of black and white throw pillows, faced a fireplace big enough to roast whole pigs. Oakleigh walked around it to a Cheveret desk. She opened the drawer and pulled out a checkbook.

Julian was looking around the room with his arms tucked close to his sides.

“Relax,” I told him, sotto voce.

He shook his head and whispered, “If I break a vase, I’ll have to sell my car to replace it.”

Funny to see him so intimidated by this show of money. He’d been this way to a lesser extent at my office and my loft, but when I was growing up, the Bouchards’ suburban house would have looked downright ritzy to me.

“Oakleigh doesn’t seem to mind ruined things,” I said quietly, pointing to the picture hung above the fireplace. It was Clark and Oakleigh’s wedding portrait.

They stood together on a sweeping antebellum staircase, Oakleigh in a huge dress that made her look like a poufy haute couture meringue and Clark in a bespoke tuxedo. It was my first look at Oakleigh’s husband. Or bits of him, anyway. He was elegant and slim, with artfully tousled blond hair and a chiseled jawline—pretty much what I’d expected. What surprised me were his devil horns, his Hitler mustache, and the blood-red slanting demon eyes with slashed black pupils that obscured the top half of his face. Oakleigh herself had no face at all, just a jagged black scribble of ballpoint-pen ink. Her whole head had been annihilated with such pressure that the canvas had rips and scours.

“There,” Oakleigh said, tearing a check out of the book. She came across the room to join us, looking at the portrait. “Yes, you see? I shouldn’t have drawn on him like that, but at least I’d pulled it down and stuffed it in the closet. He wrecked my face and hung it right back up. I left it to show the cops.”

She handed me the check and the contract, both signed. The O in Oakleigh was huge, and the rest of the letters were as curly and fat as anime bunnies.

“Don’t sign things you haven’t read,” I told her, putting them inside my bag.

She flirted up a dismissive shoulder and said, “I thought reading my contracts was your job.”

“Fine. Next time I’ll put in a clause that gives me your immortal soul,” I said, and finally got a small smile out of her. I was giving her the benefit of the doubt by assuming that she had one.

Julian’s gaze caught on the sofa and his face lit up.

“Kittens!” he said, and went right to them. There were two, one black, one white, nestled up asleep in a fuzzy yin-yang that I’d taken for yet another throw pillow.

It wasn’t at all professional, and Oakleigh’s eyebrows shot to dizzying heights as Julian plopped onto her sofa and pulled them both into his lap. He looked up at me, grinning and oblivious, scratching at the black one’s ears. It burst into enthusiastic purring, and the white one yawned. Its eyes were bright blue. If Julian were my real intern or assistant, I’d be excusing us both and taking him outside to fire him right quick. But the sight of Julian snuggling fluffy baby things pulled me off my game. My heart rate jacked into that pulsing urge:
Find her
.

I heard myself saying, “I would have thought you were a dog person,” and Oakleigh’s disbelieving gaze widened to include me.

“Oh, yeah, for sure,” he said. “But who doesn’t like kittens?” He turned to Oakleigh. “What are their names?”

She snorted. “I don’t know. Blackie and Whitey? I got them yesterday, after Clark broke in yet again.”

Julian ran his fingernail across his pants seam. The black one heard the noise and pounced. Whitey had to see Blackie jump before he noticed the wiggling finger. He was probably deaf, like Henry.

I didn’t quite have myself in hand, and I couldn’t see the connection between home invasions and getting kittens. “Wouldn’t a Doberman be more to the point?”

“No, because Clark’s allergic to cats,” Oakleigh snapped.

She was still bristling because The Help was plonked on her sofa, playing with her baby animals. The odd part was that I bristled right back at her, even though she was a client, and Julian was out of line.

So this is what nepotism tastes like,
I thought. I found I didn’t mind the flavor.

“Oakleigh,” I said, sharp enough to reclaim her attention. “How allergic? Touch-a-cat-and-die allergic? Or cat dander makes him sneezy?”

“How would I know? I never saw him go around cats. He was
allergic,
” Oakleigh said, as if she were speaking to someone who was very, very slow. “He didn’t carry an EpiPen or anything. He did say being around cats made him miserable, so when he kept breaking in and ruining all my things, I got some.”

“What’s been ruined, other than the obvious?” I asked, glancing at the wedding portrait. I was skeptical that Clark had been in the house at all. I wouldn’t put it past Oakleigh to ruin her own things, hoping to make Clark look bad.

Oakleigh flushed. “It’s crazy. I got my hair cut, and when I came back, the Picasso sketch was missing. I thought maybe he’d done it before, when he emptied the safe, and I hadn’t noticed. I changed the security code anyway, and I went out to dinner. When I got home, the alarm was still set, but half my shoes were in the bathtub. The shower was running. Nothing suede survived. That’s when I found my sketch in the liquor cabinet. I changed the code again, and then yesterday, I went to pick up a ton of dry cleaning. I’d forgotten about it in all the chaos, and there was a pet shop next door. I went in and bought these kittens. While I was gone he—” She faltered, and her voice dropped to an outraged whisper. “I really, really think he peed into my makeup case. It’s made me crazy, wondering what else he may have peed in. I keep throwing out food, and I’m carrying my toothbrush in my purse now. So this morning, I went to Pilates, and while I was gone, he came and scratched my face out and rehung our portrait, and I don’t know what else yet. I’m scared to even look around. I’d left the dry cleaning draped over the banister. It was mostly his suits and his dress shirts. He must have grabbed it on the way out.”

“He would have seen the kittens,” I said, watching them tussling in Julian’s lap. “Why would he take clothes?”

“Well, the clothes were all still sealed up in those plastic bags. They looked fresh cleaned,” Oakleigh said. It was an interesting choice of words, to say they
looked
clean instead of simply saying that they were. She stared at the floor, and added, truculent. “Maybe he thought he’d better take them before they got all dandered up.”

I quirked an eyebrow up. “You meant for him to take them.”

“I didn’t say that,” Oakleigh said, now so disingenuous she might as well be scrubbing a toe against the floor.

Julian shot me a puzzled look, but I was as adrift as he was. I noticed his navy-blue pants were already showing white cat hair. I kept Henry brushed because so many of my clothes were black, and I still had to use a tape roller every time I left the house. But Blackie’s fur didn’t really show against the navy, I noticed, and then I understood. Oakleigh had picked these charming dander factories for their colors.

“You ran the kittens through his clothes,” I said, surprised. Julian looked surprised, too. “You ran the white kitten in and out the sleeves of his pale dress shirts. And then the dark one, you ran him through the suits. How many times?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Kittens are silly,” Oakleigh said. “Can I help it if they like to play tunnels?”

“Holy crap,” Julian said.

“And then you bagged the clothes back up and hung them where he’d see them, and you trotted off to Pilates.”

“I didn’t say that. But he shouldn’t have been messing with my things.” Her voice was prim and not without pride.

Now I believed that Clark was breaking in. People in contentious divorces blame their spouses for rain and hangnails and the chlamydia they know damn well they’ve gone and outsourced all on their own. But they don’t lay elaborate kitten traps for the ex if they are the one doing the sabotage.

If only she’d rehired me after the first break-in! I’d have set up nanny cams and caught him peeing in her makeup. What a lever that would be in settlement negotiations. The kittens were a vicious return on his serve, more interested in hurting him than protecting her belongings. That put her a good six steps up the crazy stairs from standard divorce behavior. A BANK case was usually selfish people trying to keep the largest stack of goodies as they tore each other up. But she’d put Clark in the hospital. Had she known how much it would hurt him? Maybe. If so, it was crazy-smart. If he’d wheezed himself to death on a fine coat of kitten dander, well. I’d like to see the DA that could get around reasonable doubt on that one.

“Do you think I’m in trouble?” she asked, sulky and so twee it was almost baby talk.

I shook my head. “Oakleigh, if I let you get arrested for revenge-kittening, I will personally eat my law license and become a fry cook, okay? When the police come, look as demure as you can in that dress and let me do ninety percent of the talking.”