States of Grace, Mandy Miller [uplifting novels .txt] 📗

“You couldn’t swing a cat in here,” is what Faith would say if I ever let her see the place. The thought of the grande dame of Palm Beach slumming here makes me smile. When she and my late father, Percy Danforth Locke III, shipped me off to boarding school in the hinterlands of Massachusetts, Faith insisted on paying double for my housing so I could have my own suite. As an only child, I’d been looking forward to having a roommate, someone to stay up late with talking about boys and painting our nails, but Faith’s phobia about my sharing a bathroom with a stranger put the kibosh on that.

I power up my laptop and, within a second or two, a screed of email messages appears. No question, the internet at The Hurricane’s first-rate—it’s the only thing that is—and, while grateful, I do question why, given almost everything else in the joint is either on its way to decrepitude or already non-functional. The only explanation I’ve ever come up with is that Vinnie likes internet porn a whole lot.

I change into one of Manny’s old T-shirts, the only thing of his I have left, and flip on the news to combat the deafening silence.

Another murder in Liberty City, another drug bust in Overtown, another local politician arrested for taking bribes. Just another day in South Florida.

Unhitching Oscar from my stump, I glance over at a flashing Breaking News banner on the screen. Oscar drops to the floor with a thud and my entire universe pinholes until all I can see is the face of Gretchen Slim—statuesque blonde, former beauty queen, and the last straw that broke my marriage to Manny.

“Mrs. Slim! Mrs. Slim! Why did your daughter shoot Brandon Sinclair?”

I stab the remote at the TV to jack up the volume.

“My daughter Zoe is one-hundred-ten-percent innocent,” Gretchen says, staring straight into the camera, doe-eyed, as a bevy of reporters jostle for real estate below her on the steps of the Broward County Jail. Microphones on long booms poke up at her, camera flashes illuminate the windowless fortress behind.

“Mrs. Slim, how is Zoe doing? Has bail been set? What was your daughter’s relationship to the victim?” The questions come rapid-fire, but Gretchen doesn’t respond. Just dabs at her eyes with a tissue. She’s wearing a cream colored, boxy Chanel suit, no doubt a calculated choice to tone down her curves and add a dash of old money and propriety, although she has neither.

I grab the laptop and Google “Slim” and “murder.”

“Oh. My. God.”

More than one hundred search results. Story after story from local and national news outlets. Zoe Slim, the only child of Anton Slim, plastic surgeon to the stars, and his wife Gretchen, a former beauty queen and runner up in the Miss Florida pageant, has been arrested for the brutal killing of Brandon Sinclair, a beloved guidance counselor at St. Paul’s Preparatory School.

My heart thuds as my husband’s lover declares, “As I have already said, my daughter is innocent.”

“My daughter had nothing to do with the murder of Mr. Sinclair,” she says, her tone moving up the octave on its way to what, I assume, will be a full-blown crying fit.

Another question catapults out of the crowd. Gretchen cups her ear and points at a man in the front row. I recognize him as the reporter from the Sun Sentinel assigned to the courthouse beat.

“Do you keep a gun at home?”

“I wouldn’t answer that if I were you,” I warned TV Gretchen.

Gretchen recoils, a manicured hand pressed to her ample chest.

“A gun? Of course, I don’t have a gun.” she says, before dissolving into tears and wobbling off to a waiting limousine on a sky-high pair of Christian Louboutins, black patent leather with red soles, identical to the pair still sitting on the floor of my closet on Idlewyld Isle.

I turn off the TV and climb under the covers, my thoughts pinballing between, This is just what I’ve been waiting for, and Only shameless hacks chase cases.

Then again, Percy, a Navy man, named me Grace, a.k.a. “Amazing Grace” after Grace Hopper, the first female rear admiral in the U.S. Navy. Percy loved to quote her—“It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to get permission.”

But, lying in the dark, I wonder how much forgiveness is left out there for me.

Chapter 3

I hesitate outside Starbucks, jaw tightening at the distasteful prospect of capitalizing on a mother’s misfortune, even if it is the mother who stole my husband when I was in jail. But with few options and even fewer dollars to my name, not to mention a tenuous grip on my Florida Bar card, I remind myself career-making cases don’t come along every day. And when they do, I’m in no position to let my feelings or law school ethics get in the way. As a prosecutor, the inventory of cases had been self-sustaining, but now I need to hustle which, today, means hustling my soon to be ex-husband and his lover.

The moment I heave open the door, a blast of arctic air hits me in the face, dousing what little fire was fueling my I-can-do-this pep talk, leaving me chilled to the bone and praying for Manny to be a no-show.

Inside, the caffeinating of the day is well underway, the ebony jet fuel required to turn the wheels of life spewing from spigots like gargoyles appended to the colossus of an espresso machine. A production line of baristas orchestrates every drink, adding each ingredient in order lest the caffeine gods strike the contraption dead. Heart in my throat, I pick my way through office workers nibbling on scones and talking into phones crooked between neck and ear. I catch a snippet from a gaggle of women in yoga pants about how it’s better to get Botox than leave things be, unless, of course, you bite the bullet and go for the full face lift.

Not in this lifetime, no matter how much my