Cottage by the Sea (2 page)

   Meanwhile, her husband had been cheerfully indulging in a long-term affair even as Blythe was flying back and forth to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to witness a courageous old lady slowly surrender her life in the log bedroom at the Double Bar B.

   Blythe reflected on the previous seven months with a bitterness so potent, she was prompted to open her purse and search for a Valium.

   Christopher Stowe's Wife Number One was about to emerge from this meeting with a couple of million dollars deposited in her bank in her own name. And Blythe was under no illusions that, when that happened, anyone in this town would waste a tear on her.

   She could even predict that these same tabloids, spread out in garish profusion on the table in front of her, would in the future run breathless stories favorably chronicling the next chapter in Christopher Stowe's glamorous life.

   "What's she crying about?" her so-called friends would say behind her back. "She ended up with plenty of pocket change out of that divorce!"

   
Don't they get it?
she wanted to scream. The truth was, unless people had been through the nightmare she had endured, they couldn't comprehend, as Blythe certainly did now, that there wasn't a figure you could name that could ease or erase the moment when…

   
Stop it!

   She mustn't think about all that. She simply couldn't afford to relive the last time she'd laid eyes on Chris and his lover. If she did, she knew with absolute certainty that she was capable of murder.

   "Look, Lisa," Blythe said curtly, pointing to the tabloids spread out on the conference table. "Do whatever you have to do. I just want this over with."

   Returning to the judge's anteroom, the two women watched through the window as several off-duty LAPD officers in the employ of Blythe's husband climbed down from their motorcycles and cleared a path through the crush of mass media vying for their sound bites from film land's wunderkind.

   
Doesn't turning forty this year take you out of the Whiz Kid
category?
Blythe asked silently.

   Perhaps winning the Oscar put a director in the Permanent Genius pantheon so no one cared anymore how Christopher Stowe treated the "little people," including his wife. Ex-wife.

   Blythe felt Lisa's shoulder gently nudge her own.

   "Well, at least Chris's Grand Passion stayed at home," her attorney murmured, sounding relieved.

   "You mean I should be thankful for small favors?" Blythe replied, feeling the knot that had resided in her stomach these last seven months turn over on itself.

"You are a citizen of the United Kingdom?" the judge inquired politely to one of those assembled in his private chambers.

   "I am."

   "And you have permanent legal-resident status in the United States?'

   "I do."

   "And you have lived in the state of California as an alien

legal resident for some ten years, is that correct?"

"It is."

   Christopher Stowe offered quiet, authoritative answers regarding how he proposed he and his wife sort out the complicated skein that had become their personal and professional lives these last eleven years. His rounded British baritone was the product of voice lessons taken before he had dropped out of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art fifteen years earlier.

   Blythe's wooden chair was placed so near her husband's as they sat across the desk from the balding Judge Hawkins that their elbows nearly touched. She saw how the magistrate in charge of this "dissolution" nodded pleasantly each time the famous director answered a question. And with each response Christopher further established his right to end his marriage and boot her out of their illustrious independent production company under the no-fuss, no-muss divorce system in her adopted state.

   Back in Wyoming, the way her husband had behaved, Blythe probably could've shot him in the heart and been acquitted.

   "And do you attest that the documents I have before me represent any and all such financial holdings and real estate in the United States?" Judge Hawkins continued.

   "I do."

   "And you are prepared to divide them equally with your wife, as outlined in your proposed property settlement?"

   "I am. More than equally."

   On paper, Blythe knew, it appeared utterly fair. In fact, thanks to the Golden State's legendary community-property laws, the
Stowe vs. Stowe
financial settlement paid her liberally to walk away from her handsome British movie-mogul husband—if she would walk away quietly and divide things

mostly along the lines Christopher wanted.

   The celebrated Mr. Stowe was to remain in the fivethousand-square-foot house that his wife had designed and decorated on Bristol Drive in Brentwood. He also retained his pale-blue Bentley and, no doubt, their circle of powerful friends and acquaintances in the film industry. In other words, Blythe could reasonably assume that his life would stay exactly as it had been—and hers would be totally changed. Nicely furnished… but the pits.

   Christopher hated colloquialisms like that, she remembered. "So common, darling!" he had chided her whenever she unwittingly revealed her origins as a child of the Wild West or fell into her "Wyoming slang-and-twang," as he called her more colorful speech patterns. "Remember… we speak the language of Shakespeare!"

   In Stoke-on-Trent? she wondered. After all, her husband's father had been a kiln supervisor at the Royal Doulton chinaware factory.

   
Give it a rest, Chris,
she thought savagely, and then felt as if her own venom were oozing directly into her veins. She took another deep breath and slowly exhaled again, wondering if it was possible to swallow another Valium without water.

   Then she mentally shook herself. In the immortal words of Grandma Barton, it was time to Cowboy Up.

   
Stop your sniveling, gal, and get it together.

   Her gaze fell on her husband's naked ring finger, and she wondered, suddenly, if it was true that unrelenting anger and longing for revenge could cause cancer or heart attacks. As Blythe's eyes moved up Chris's arm to the sleeve of his impeccably tailored silk-and-cashmere sport jacket, Judge Hawkins continued to recite the various aspects of their negotiated divorce and property settlement.

"There are no children of this marriage?" he inquired.

"Correct," Christopher said curtly.

   Blythe shifted focus from Judge Hawkins's right hand as he ticked off the items that would determine her future. She looked directly at Christopher. Their eyes met briefly, and he looked away. During the last five years of their marriage, she had begged him to agree to start a family, but he'd argued persuasively that their Tinseltown lifestyle wasn't compatible with raising children.

   "We work such bloody long hours, Blythe," Chris had countered with his customary wall of patient logic. "It wouldn't be fair to the child—plus it would complicate your life enormously!"

   As she confronted him face-to-face for the first time in months—a woman of thirty-five whose biological clock had started to give off alarm bells—a grinding fury began to displace her grief over how they'd come to be in this place, at this time, taking these steps to end their marriage and their partnership.

   For weeks now, she'd heard the rumors. Rumors that nearly choked the life out of her.

   "Mr. and Mrs. Stowe," the judge was intoning as he removed his half glasses from the bridge of his nose and looked across his desk at them both. "Is there no possible avenue for reconciling this marriage?"

   Blythe could see Christopher shifting uncomfortably in his chair. Then she heard the attorneys behind her rustling their file folders.

   "I'm afraid a reconciliation is out of the question, Your Honor," replied Christopher gravely, his cultivated British accent interrupting the long silence. "You see, my fiancée and I are expecting a child and—"

   "Then it's true?" Blythe exclaimed, swiveling in her oak chair to face the man she had taught to drive L.A.'s freeways when they were graduate students together at UCLA. "You made a baby! With my
sister! And you wouldn't make one wit
h me?" she asked, simultaneously incredulous and furious.

   Her raw accusations reverberated through the judge's chambers. Both attorneys sprang to attention, responding to the possible meltdown of their carefully crafted divorce settlement. Chris's lawyer smoothly addressed Judge Hawkins.

   "My client, unfortunately, finds himself irreconciled to this marriage. And, as you well know, Your Honor, California's no-fault system dictates that if one party sees no future for the marriage, it is, de facto, irreconcilable and may be legally dissolved."

   Lisa Spector stood to reply to her adversary.

   "If Mrs. Stowe wishes to review or contest various aspects of this proposed settlement in light of the punishing barrage of recent publicity garnered by her husband's outrageous and harmful behavior that may have severely damaged her ability to continue to earn her living as a production designer, that is, of course, her right!"

   "If so, Your Honor," Christopher's legal representative replied belligerently, "we would move to bifurcate the proceedings, and go forward with the dissolution. We could, of course, withdraw our very generous property settlement and go to trial to adjudicate the financial issues. May I further point out—"

   "Mrs. Stowe?" Judge Hawkins interrupted with a warning glance in the direction of both legal gladiators. He looked at her kindly. "What are your wishes in this matter?"

   "I'll sign," Blythe replied, her voice barely above a whisper.

   "What did you say?" Christopher asked tensely.

   "I'll sign!" she shouted, slamming her handbag on the floor.

   Her sister was pregnant. By Blythe's husband. Eleanor

Barton might look like a fey, gamine artsy-craftsy type, but she'd certainly grown up—finally—and paid her older sister and grandmother back. Big time. And in a fashion only she could devise. This most recent sordid revelation also explained why the press was in such a feeding frenzy today. They had learned somehow that Blythe Barton Stowe's sister was pregnant with Christopher Stowe's child—and Blythe hadn't known. Not for sure.

   Once again she felt herself floating in a surreal world, adrift in the emotional wreckage of the past half-year's shocking events.

   Lisa Spector rested a firm hand on her client's shoulder. Then she turned to address the judge. "As difficult emotionally as these unusual circumstances are for my client, Your Honor, she has thoroughly reviewed the terms of the settlement and is prepared to finalize the agreement. Aren't you, Mrs. Stowe?" she added.

   The Deal. Nothing was more important than The Deal in Hollywood, which then triggered everybody getting their share of the profits. Blythe slowly nodded her assent.

   Judge Hawkins turned the documents around on his desk and indicated a series of red X's that were flagged by yellow Post-it notes. Accepting a pen from the judge's hand, Blythe mechanically wrote her triple-barreled signature where she was directed.

   "And now you, Mr. Stowe."

   Blythe watched as Christopher ended their marriage contract and their personal and professional relationship in the fashion she had witnessed him terminating so many other agreements: with a mere stroke of a pen—and millions in the bank. In the course of the five phenomenally successful movies he'd made with her as the production designer, Chris had invariably been the one to institute damage control when something went amiss. And other people were always the ones who got damaged.

   Their exchange in open court was brief and businesslike. Then Blythe followed Lisa Spector out a side door without speaking to the man who had been the central figure in her life for more than a decade. A moment later she and her attorney were ushered down a deserted corridor. The bailiff politely held the elevator for them.

   "Take this down to the judges' special parking area on Level B," he directed, "I confirmed on the two-way… your driver should be waiting for you."

   An awkward silence hung in the air as the doors slid shut.

   "Suitcases in the car?" Lisa asked with forced cheerfulness. "Got your passport?"

   "Yes," Blythe murmured, wondering if she would always feel as dreadful as she did at this moment.

   "Are you sure you're up to staying in Cornwall— alone?" Lisa inquired carefully. "Isn't the place you're going awfully remote?"

   "I hope it's as isolated as a mesa on the moon," Blythe replied.

   "Well, yeah," Lisa agreed. "At least you'll be able to shake the press."

   "That's why I picked the place," Blythe replied. "My grandmother always claimed the Bartons of Wyoming had owned an estate centuries ago in a remote section of the Cornish coast. Chris and I talked about going there to research the connection, but there was never time. Now time is what I've got plenty of."

   "Now, where do you suppose the driver's got to?" Lisa said, obviously shying away from any further emotional entanglements with her fragile client. "Oh, there he is!" she exclaimed as the elevator doors parted, depositing them in the coolness of the concrete garage under the courthouse. "He's just caught sight of us too." Blythe was reassured to hear the familiar sound of her car's engine springing to life. "This should be just the escape you need, then," Lisa commented brightly. "Find your roots, just like on Ancestry.com!"