Southern Lights

Chapter 20

“I feel like Cinderella after the ball,” Alexa admitted to Jack the following week when he stopped by her office to give her some files.

“After the wedding in Charleston?” he asked as he sat down.

“No, after the Quentin case. I’m back to real life and human-sized cases. It’s a little tough after all that excitement.” He laughed.

“We’ll try to find you another serial killer sometime soon.” But he felt the same way. They dealt with a lot of routine cases, not just big ones. And most of the time it was tedious work.

He had just left her office when the phone rang on her desk, and she picked it up herself. Her secretary was out to lunch. There was a deep voice on the other end that she didn’t recognize.

“Counselor?”

“Yes, Alexa Hamilton here,” she said officially.

“Senator Baldwin,” he said, equally so, and then laughed.

“Are you showing off, Senator? You outrank me.” It was a bold thing to say to him since she hardly knew him, but she knew he had a sense of humor.

“Absolutely, and yes, I do. I’m in New York for two days and wondered if you’d like to have lunch.” He was as straightforward as any northerner and didn’t beat around the bush.

“That would be fun,” she said, smiling.

“Are you very busy these days?” he asked her.

“Not busy enough. I’m buried in paperwork.”

“How disappointing.” He suggested a time and place for lunch the next day, sounded rushed and hung up. She was startled by the call, but he might be a good man to know, and he was certainly interesting to talk to. She had no idea why he had called her. He hadn’t flirted with her at the party, and she liked him. He seemed like a bright, amusing person.

She had a minor court appearance the next day, and took a cab uptown to the restaurant he had suggested. It was a chic, busy Italian bistro with good food, that she’d been to before, but not in a long time. He was waiting at a table when she arrived, looking at some papers, and slipped them back into his briefcase. He had a town car and driver waiting outside.

They talked about everything from politics to law to his children, who were twenty-one and twenty-five. His twenty-one-year-old daughter was at UCLA and loving it, and his twenty-five-year-old son was in London, with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He had recently graduated from NYU, at the Tisch School of the Arts. He said his daughter wanted to be a doctor, everyone else in the family was literary or artistic, including their mother, who he said was somewhat eccentric but great fun. He spoke of her like a sister. Alexa hadn’t reached that point yet with Tom, and probably never would. But at least they had finally reached a good place. Tom had come to say goodbye to her and Savannah the day after the wedding. He looked depressed and hungover, and she felt sorry for him. But not sorry enough to want him back.

Alexa said that she and her daughter were leaving for three weeks in Europe right after the sentencing in the Quentin case on July 10th. It was still two weeks away.

“I’m going over too,” Edward Baldwin said easily. “I use my ex-wife’s house in the South of France, in Ramatuelle. It’s near Saint-Tropez, but not as crowded. I’m going to Umbria after that. I’ve rented a villa. Where will you be with your daughter?” He was interested in her and friendly, but she didn’t have the feeling that he was pursuing her, and she liked that. Maybe they could be friends.

“Paris, London, Florence, and maybe something in the South, like Cannes or Antibes. I haven’t been in a long time, but this is a graduation present for my daughter and we had kind of a tough spring. I had to send her away for four months during the trial and before. She was getting threatening letters, from the defendant. He was doing it to unnerve me apparently, I learned later, and it did.”

“How awful.”

“Yeah. It was pretty scary. That’s how she wound up in Charleston with her father. I had nowhere else to send her.”

“Have you stayed close since the divorce?” He had assumed she had the same kind of relationship with her ex that he did. Alexa laughed and shook her head.

“We didn’t speak for ten years. And he hardly saw his daughter, until February. But the last four months changed all that, so I guess it was a blessing for us all, except his wife.” She decided to give it to him in a nutshell. “Simply put, he got dumped by his wife, who abandoned him and their two boys. He married me, everybody was happy, and his first wife came back seven years later, I got dumped, and he went back to her. And his mother helped. I’m not from the South, his first wife is. All very simple. So I came back to New York, became a lawyer, and lived happily ever after. I have one daughter from that marriage, and two stepsons I love and just saw again for the first time in ten years, one of whom was the groom at the wedding. And my ex has a very cute ten-year-old who was the vehicle wife number one used to get him back.”

“Let me guess,” Edward Baldwin said with a look of disapproval. He didn’t like the story, although she told it lightly and with a touch of humor, but he could see the hurt in her eyes. “And now they hate each other, and he wants you back.”

“Something like that.” Alexa nodded. “I’m not interested. It’s all over for me.”

“It sounds like a bad southern novel,” Edward Baldwin commented. His divorce had been simple and clean. His wife left him, but he didn’t blame her, and they were still friends. She had done it nicely. “Do you hate him?” He looked curious as he asked. He wouldn’t have blamed her if she did. Hearing the story, he disliked him. He despised men like that.

Alexa didn’t hesitate this time. “No. Not now. Something healed it for me when I went back there, and saw him, and how weak and pathetic he really is. He betrayed me, but ultimately he betrayed himself, and now he would betray her. I don’t hate him now. I feel sorry for him. But I was pretty angry for a long time. Ten years. That’s too long to carry a grudge. It’s heavy lifting.” She had discovered that the hard way, and realized it when she finally set it down.

“You never remarried?” She laughed at the question and shook her head.

“Nope. I was too hurt. And too busy with my work and my daughter. I’m happy like this. I don’t need more than that.”

“Everybody needs more than that. I do too. I just don’t have time. I’m too busy taking political junkets to Taiwan and Vietnam, keeping my constituents happy, and playing the political game in Washington. It’s fun. But it doesn’t leave time for much else.” They both knew that wasn’t true either. There were lots of married senators-most of them, in fact. For whatever reason, he didn’t want to be married again either. They had that in common. They were both afraid of something, getting hurt or commitment. And he didn’t have the excuse of a nasty ex-wife who had screwed him over, since he said they were good friends and got along. He was obviously alone by choice. He had said in the course of lunch that he was fifty-two years old. And had been divorced for twenty. That was a man who either liked to play a lot or was afraid of getting tied down. Either way, Alexa thought he’d make a fine friend.

Eventually, he paid the check, and she thanked him for lunch. She hailed a cab to go back to work, and said goodbye to him in front of the restaurant. She had given him her card, and was surprised when he called her on her cell that afternoon.

“Hello, Alexa, it’s Edward.” His deep voice and southern accent were easy to recognize.

“Thanks again for lunch. It was fun.”

“I enjoyed it too. I just had a thought. I’m having dinner with my ex-wife tomorrow night and her husband, and I wondered if you might like to meet them. She’s a wonderful person.”

“I’d like that very much,” Alexa said. She gave him her address, and he said he’d pick her up at eight. She was startled when she hung up, and didn’t even know what to say to Savannah, so she said nothing. She just got dressed for dinner the following night, and put on a black suit that she usually wore to court.

“What are you all dressed up for?” Savannah asked her as she came out of her bedroom. She was going to the movies with friends.

“I’m having dinner with a senator and his ex-wife.” Even saying it sounded absurd.

“You’re what? What senator?” Savannah didn’t know of any that her mother knew.

“Senator Edward Baldwin, from South Carolina.” Savannah vaguely remembered hearing that he was at the wedding but hadn’t met him. Luisa had been bragging about him.

“Did you meet him at the wedding?”

“Your father introduced me. He’s very nice. Just as a friend. He followed the Quentin case on TV.”

“So did the whole country.” She looked at her mother more closely then. “Is this a date?” She was stunned. Her mother hadn’t said a word.

“No. Just a friend,” Alexa repeated. She looked blank.

“What’s with the ex-wife?” Savannah looked suspicious, and her mother laughed.

“They’re good friends.” And with that, the doorman buzzed the intercom in the apartment and told her that there was a car waiting for her downstairs. She kissed Savannah, picked up her purse, and ran out the door, as Savannah stood staring after her and then rushed for her cell phone. She called her New York grandmother immediately, and Muriel answered on the first ring.

“Hi, cutie.” She could see that it was Savannah. “What’s up?”

“Red alert. Holy shit. I think Mom has a date.”

“How do you know? With who?” Muriel was immediately interested.

“She got dressed up, and she was having dinner with a senator she met at Travis’s wedding, and his ex-wife.”

“His ex-wife?” That sounded strange to her. “They’re friends,” Savannah said in a conspiratorial tone.

“What senator?”

“Baldwin, from South Carolina.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Muriel said, and they both burst into gales of excited laughter.