Read Online Ladies' Night by Mary Kay Andrews - Free Book Online

penniless while he lived it up, funneling their marital assets into a dummy corporation. We had clear proof that he’d hidden assets, but Stackpole refused to hear a word of it. But because she finally had to go out and get a job to support herself and the children and eventually hooked up with a decent guy and allowed him to move in with her and the kids before the divorce was final, Stackpole decided she was an unfit mother. Gave the ex custody of the kids, forced her to move out of the house and sell it and split the proceeds with the ex, who was already a millionaire several times over.”
    Mitzi shook her head at the memory. “The ex didn’t even want the kids. He just didn’t want to pay her child support. It was brutal.”
    “How can a judge get away with that kind of thing?” Grace asked, horrified. “Can’t you report him or something?”
    “That’s not how it works, unfortunately,” Mitzi said. “We’re just going to have to hope for the best. We’ll lay out the facts; Gracenotes is your business, carries your name, and is written and photographed solely by you. By locking you out of your own Web site, Ben has essentially hijacked your name, which is trademarked, right?”
    Grace shook her head. “I was going to trademark it, but I just never got around to it. I guess I assumed Ben would take care of that.”
    “Unfortunate,” Mitzi said. She scribbled a note to herself. “All right, the good news is, at least we know what we’re dealing with.”
    “If that’s the good news, I don’t want to hear the bad stuff,” Grace said. She gathered her papers and went home to figure out her next move.

 
    6
     
    They’d gotten there early. The courtroom was half-full, and another hearing was still under way. Mitzi Stillwell led her up the right-side aisle and gestured at a vacant seat toward the front third of the room.
    Grace studied the judge, who sat erect in his high-backed chair, listening intently. He looked to be in his late forties, with receding strawberry-blond hair combed straight back from a high forehead, steel-rimmed glasses, and a long, narrow, unsmiling face. “Is that our judge?”
    “That’s Stackpole, in the flesh,” Mitzi said.
    “I thought he’d be older,” Grace said.
    “He was two years behind me in law school at UF,” Mitzi said. “And he was a pain in the ass, even then. But a politically connected pain. He was appointed to the bench at forty.”
    A uniformed bailiff, a young black woman with startling platinum marcelled hair who was standing at the side door to the courtroom, caught Mitzi’s eye and gave her a very slight shake of the head.
    “We gotta keep quiet,” Mitzi murmured. “Or he’ll have that bailiff toss us out.”
    *   *   *
    A lawyer standing at the table on the left front side of the room stood and spoke into a microphone. “Judge, we’d like the court to view this video my client shot of her husband, while he was terrorizing my client.” Grace couldn’t see the lawyer’s face, just the back of his balding head, and his neat, dark suit.
    An older woman sitting at the opposite table stood. “Your honor, we have not seen that video, so we’re going to oppose that being introduced into evidence.”
    The judge gave her a mirthless smile. “We’ll all see it together right now, shall we, Ms. Entwhistle?”
    “My client was deliberately goaded into an altercation by Mrs. Keeler’s boyfriend. For months now, she and Luke Grigsby have repeatedly violated the terms of their custody agreement by either delivering Bo hours late, or not at all, at times when my client was scheduled to have Bo.”
    “Well, Ms. Entwhistle, I don’t see where you’ve notified the court about that,” Stackpole said evenly.
    “No sir,” Ms. Entwhistle said. “My client was trying to keep things amicable and civil, for the sake of the child. On the day that video was shot, Bo was to have been dropped off at his father’s house before lunch. Mrs. Keeler was