forced blooms chapter 1

[figureofdismay]

It was Shiv's fault, in a way. She sent him a text one afternoon with a link to a news article, telling him that her old godmother – the one his father fired along with her husband sometime in their murky preadolescence and Shiv hadn't heard a peep from since she was twelve – was on trial for killing her husband. Good thing Dad ditched them, she'd said, prim, cold old bitch wasn't she? I bet she did it. Dad's lawyers are always fucking pit vipers.

He had to agree, it wasn't a stretch, going by the figures who worked in the in-house counsel’s office these days. Dad's replacement for Kellman was a tall, glittering eyed old snake called Jim Fitch who spoke with crisp precision and had never had a human emotion in his life. His second in command, the one often dispatched with a brace of NDAs and a will to intimidate when he or one of his siblings needed someone to clean up after them, was a narrow, stoney woman named Felicity Murdock, and the two of them hated each other's guts with a fervency usually reserved for the bounds of marriage. Fitch had never been married, as far as Roman knew, which wasn't far admittedly, and Murdock had been divorced twice, narrowly avoiding getting entangled with Logan both times – she was pretty in the skinny, icy, sharp jawed way Logan favored and she was consistently present, both of which made her an appealing target apparently – and Roman wouldn't have put it past her to bump off any of the above if it had suited her. After a particularly messy mess of his she'd had to clean up involving a personal trainer, an ex of his, some stalking (not his doing), and some light blackmail, Roman had in fact wondered if she might take a hit out on him just to make her life easier.

He kind of remembered Kellman, as Logan had always called him. He remembered a tortoise in a big glowing tank in the general counsel's office where he was sometimes allowed to visit when they were being shown off as young princes. He remembered when his father blew up at Kellman for God knew what in that already awful period around the divorce, which had been the end of Kellmans tenure with waystar and the family. Logan's ranting about it had lasted longer than Roman's school break. But he didn't really remember Gerri Kellman, the wife, the godmother, the assistant general counsel who had been thrown away with Kellman way back when.

The face of the woman in the news article was familiar, certainly. Blue eyed, blonde, with a heart shaped face and a slightly pursed mouth, small and neat in her spot behind the defense table. They'd dressed her demurely in a camel colored cardigan buttoned nearly up to the neck with small shell buttons and her shining hair was clipped softly back from her face behind both ears. She looked like an elementary school teacher from the 60s, like Marion Librarian if Marion had had heavy-lidded sex kitten eyes, an air of suppressed rage and had ever been done up for murder.

She'd been friends with Caroline, he thought, or friendly. The way his mother had been with most of the few women in the waystar circle back when she was still sort of trying to play the matriarch, bringing them along into her afternoons of drinks and cutting gossip, sly smiles, talk of horses and culture and little poisoned barbs passing over his head as he sat at his mother's side and fetched them drinks from the cart and nibbled secretively on the cakes and hors d'oeuvres the ladies often snubbed in favor of g&ts and cocktails. When he was very young, he remembered wanting to be included in these afternoons from the comfort of his mother's lap, and this has been allowed for a brief while – he thought that there had been fewer afternoon get togethers back then, though they had been more crowded – but before long she had told him that saccharine displays were unbecoming and that if he couldn't be a big boy and a little gentleman, he could go along to Nanny early. Usually, not long after he had done his party piece a time or two of the suave little man standing on his toes to fix the drinks and handing them out with a bow, the ladies would want to talk without little prying ears and he would be sent off back to the kid's quarters.

Some time around the time when he got a little taller and a little older and a little less adorable, so that having an elementary schooler dance attendance on a luncheon had become a little weird instead of cute, he had discovered a terminal curiosity about what the circle of women were saying after he was sent away and had developed a habit of going away when sent but sneaking back around via the butler's pantry and slipping under the heavy linen tablecloth of the console table buffet to keep listening to them laughingly fight and compare their indulgences. He'd learned less than he'd thought, given his distance from the gossipers and his lack of frame of reference, but he still learned plenty.

He remembered that Gerri Kellman used to come to those lunches, that he must have seen her trim ankles and her sensible pumps approach and retreat from his hiding spot. He's almost certain that she discovered him once, a sneaker toe sticking out and accidentally betraying him, tapped with the pointed toe of a small blue pump and then a hand lifting his shroud, the flash of a woman's face, or half of it anyway, as if she were the one peering under his skirt, pinky red lipstick and large, serious eyes. It made something heavy and cold settle on him, not so much the shock of discovery, but the weight of being looked at by an unsmiling, unscolding woman, perhaps one of the first strange women to look at him with assessing neutrality.

"Go play with your brother and sister while you still can," the woman had told him in a soft voice that was nevertheless not pitched for a small child the way mother's friends often did, "You'll be stuck in lunches like this soon enough, kid. We're not that interesting."

He thought with scorn that she should know that of course there was a reason he was bruising his tailbone sitting on the bare floor under a table instead of playing with them already, but he knew that his position was dangerous, that the kind of trouble he could be in if he was discovered by a real authority could go either way. The woman had dropped the tablecloth edge before he could decide what to do. He'd had a brief second of terror hearing his mother's voice call over to her in question, wondering if she'd sell him out, but she had only called back something about having dropped her napkin or her fork or something and getting a new one and Roman had listened to her footsteps click away. He'd taken the first covering crest of laughter and slipped away, and he hadn't ventured back on subsequent luncheons, the illusion of safe seclusion was gone, the curiosity and the vague embarrassment of his discovery had disrupted the game and sent him off in a new direction, and had given him for a little while a shiver of self awareness when he caught himself behaving or pretending to be even more a child than he was. It was a memory like a dream, both clear and unclear, brightened by being touched often, blue eyes and navy blue shoes and a flash of a big, square ring on a small hand and the smell of roses and gin from the table above, but doubted as well, almost too vibrant to be real.

Though that afternoon had come before St. Andrews, the great sinkhole that muddied his memories in a wicking, sucking bog all around it, he was almost certain that the woman who had noticed and dismissed him had been Shiv's godmother Gerri, the one currently on trial for feeding her husband, or ex-husband it seemed, a fatal dose of arsenic.

**

He stayed up all night chasing news clips and articles, after that first one. He read court summaries, and profiles of all the players. He read that Gerri had been denied bail, as a wealthy woman with no strong ties to the area, a well stamped passport and a quick legal mind she was deemed a flight risk. He saw that she and Kellman had never reproduced, and that though he was 8 years older than Gerri, he had become engaged to a woman of 26, who had recently become pregnant at the time of Kellman's death and had given interviews to reporters barely above tabloid dreck pushers about Gerri's deep and furious resentment of both her 62 year old fiancee's future happiness and the impending little bundle of joy. Stephanie, the little thing, who still wore widows weeds to the trial, black dresses bulging over the second trimester baby bump, had also made some predictably catty remarks about barren menopausal women and not knowing what you want until someone else has it instead. She pulled it off with enough ambiguous bite and youthfully, hormonally glowing head shaking and tear wiping that Stephanie came across as the distressed and wronged young woman who was only blowing off steam to anyone who would listen, but Roman knew media positioning when he heard it.

There was a also a clip of Gerri Boscowan – no longer Kellman after the divorce, in the first news piece Roman watched, of the bereaved ex-widow giving a short speech before the charitable foundation Kellman had established, legal literacy for the underprivileged, something beneficent to pin his name on. Even though Gerri had divorced the man 6 months before his death, she was still involved in the charity, enough to give a public eulogy at the memorial benefit.

She wasn't a tall woman, in fact she was half hidden behind the formal pedestal lectern. She wore a trim black sleeveless dress with a high boat neck that showed her long neck and sculpted collar bones and nothing more salacious, and kept her neat, pale hands folded together on the lecture as though giving herself comfort – or restraint. Her golden hair was brushed and waved back into a low chignon, very Grace Kelly, and she wore black pearl drops that swung gently as she glanced down at her remarks and up at the audience again. It was a short speech, rigorously inoffensive, grateful and regretful but not an outpouring of loss. She talked of Kellmans accomplishments, his pride at how far they'd come, that nothing had ever knocked him down until the last – at the time it was believed it had been appendicitis he'd put off seeking treatment for until it was too late, yet another example of his stubborn nature – and Gerri's continuing commitment to keep the charity going until a new head could be appointed. Her honey voice was steady, her sultry mouth was firm and those huge blue eyes stared ahead with piercing determination, and were not red and wet with tears over a lost friend, as she claimed he had become after the divorce. What's more she was beautiful and serious, the arches of her brows seemed to imply ironic knowingness and those stunning eyes and the careful tilt of her head, the set of her jaw all seemed to speak of a woman of many secrets all carefully submerged.

At the time last fall shortly after the death, this brief appearance, it would have seemed eminently appropriate, if a little dry for those in the audience who wanted to see what the ex wife and the new fiance made of each other aired in a formally public setting. Well judged, clear, and suited to the context in which it had been planned. In fact it had been summed up that way in an event recap in the society pages at the time, Roman found. After the discovery of the fact of the murder though, the video, in both muted 30 second loop and full 5 minute format, were cast in a new, calculated light. The court tv sensationalists – did Royco own them, too, Roman wondered, and if they did, who could they threaten to fire to get them to back off – used it to excellent effect, showcasing a cold woman, a scheming one, who hadn't even managed a briefly pathetic spectacle for the man's friends and donors a meer 3 weeks later. Certainly a woman like that could have done it, must have done it, the talking heads and the replaying clip inferred, how could an innocent be both so unashamedly lovely and so remote.

It was this very discordance that made Roman think she hadn't done it. He watched the full clip twice and then four more times with the sound of, working his eyes all around the edges of her – she was so beautiful and so proud, her gaze so sharp even though the lens that it was almost impossible to look at her full on until he'd acclimated, like plunging heedlessly into a scalding bath and feeling your skin and insides smart and recoil, and then thrill. He was hot all over, just looking at her, memorizing every quirk of her lips, the slight shrug of her shoulders, the slight softening of her expression as she turned away and started off the stage just as the clip cut off. He was sweaty, hot and furtive, feeling observed even though he was alone in his minimalist LA apartment, his heart pounding as if he was the one in the hot seat, or if not staring down the barrel at conviction himself, then the one being pursued by something painful and unrefusable.

Then he was gripped by a huge, overmastering certainty, all at once, like being forged and rearranged and awaking to find himself set into an enduring new shape, as if he had always been that way only he knew he’d never felt like this before. He pounded with a new sense of purpose, but he was also strangely focused. This woman was innocent, her defense was failing her, the judge was biased against her, and she was quite possibly the love of his life. He had to go home to New York, and he had to save Gerri Kellman-Boscowan, whatever it took – he had no idea how, google and personal experience had come up with nothing helpful. He could only hope money and a mania of belief would be enough.