Acts of Love (35 page)

“Okay, sweetie. Why don't we just stop for some ice cream first?”

He made a U-turn in the first available driveway and headed back toward Hardison, stopping when he came to a squat gray shack a few miles from town. They were the only people inside the dingy store. He bought them both sugar cones, chocolate chip for her, coffee for him, and they ate them in the heat of the car, too busy licking to talk. Before they drove off, he spit on a tissue and wiped the brown speckles from his daughter's chin, as he had seen Ann do a thousand times.

 

I
T WAS ONLY
long after he had gotten back to his apartment that Ted finally placed the strawberry scent of Ali's skin. It was just the way Sandy had smelled.

 

F
ISK
, who normally worked out of a large corner office with an enviable view of the Capitol Building in Albany, had rented a temporary suite above Farrar's Fine Jewelry Shoppe on Main Street for the duration of the trial. Though he had been there for only two months, he had managed to give the two small rooms the Old World mien, all mahogany and Persian rugs and leather-bound books, that he had adopted after a brief flirtation with minimalism and dauntingly constructed Italian couches. Ted, looking around from his burgundy leather chair across from Fisk's enormous desk, grew uneasy, as he always did here, at such an effortless and convincing illusion of permanence. Fisk, in not particularly subtle ways, made it clear that he found Hardison, if not precisely beneath him, certainly beneath his carefully cultivated tastes. Where, after all, was he supposed to eat?

“Try the fish fry at the Lutheran church next Sunday,” Ted suggested. “It's much better than the potluck the Episcopalians put on.”

Fisk looked at him, expressionless. He still had a hard time deciphering when Ted was being sarcastic and when he was not. He had always prided himself on his scrupulous reading of his clients, just as he boasted of his accuracy in picking and eliminating jurors, reading the lines on their faces, the way a leg was crossed, the set of a mouth, for potential malignancy. His concern with a client's guilt or innocence was usually of great interest to him only as it pertained to the construction of the case, but the fact that he could not read Ted with his usual certainty annoyed him. Like a lover who punishes the other for what he himself no longer feels, he found himself annoyed with Ted over the most inconsequential of comments, and his own efforts to hide this—from himself, from Ted, from the jury—were consuming an energy that could have been much more productively spent elsewhere. He straightened his notes once more and turned away from his glowing computer screen. “You're going to have to go over this with me again, Ted,” he said.

“It's simple. All I'm saying is that I want you to call Ali last.”

“Why don't you leave the procedural questions to me?”

“Last time I checked, it was
my
life that was on the line,” Ted retorted.

“If you want me to defend you properly, you're going to have to let me do my job.”

“Fine. But you're going to have to trust me on this one. Call Ali last.”

“There might be a problem, no matter when we call her,” Fisk said carefully.

“What problem?”

“I phoned your sister-in-law the other day to set up a time for her to bring Ali in to speak to me.” Ted shifted in his chair. “And,” Fisk continued, “she said Ali refused to come into the office.”

Ted didn't respond.

“I have no authority, you understand, to force the girl to talk to me. But despite what you may want, I'm not in the habit of putting witnesses on the stand unless I know what's going to come out of their mouths. You got me?”

“Let me worry about that.”

“That happens to be precisely what you're paying me to worry about.”

“I know my daughter better than anyone. I know she'll be okay, but she needs more time.”

“Time to what?”

“Never mind,” Ted said. “Put me on next if you have to, I don't care.” He rose abruptly from his chair. “Just wait for Ali.”

Fisk pursed his lips. “Fine,” he answered shortly.

As soon as Ted had gone, Fisk propped his feet up on the desk and stared out his second-story window. It may have been Waring's life on the line, but it was Fisk's career. The only reason he had taken this case to begin with was the publicity it would surely garner. Losing because of a client's ill-considered wishes hadn't been part of the plan. Unfortunately, he wasn't sure he had a choice about calling the kid to testify. It was still his best shot. He knocked the toe of his polished shoe against the windowpane in frustration as he saw Ted emerge from the building and walk alone down the wide, tree-lined street, his stride long and impatient, his head bent as he turned a corner and disappeared from view.

Fisk pulled down his feet and returned to his notes as a tattered pickup truck clanked noisily down Main Street, stopping at the light with a wheezing moan.

 

O
FTEN AT WORK NOW
, her back stiff from curving over the keyboard, the words and paragraphs would blur before her eyes, become meaningless. Worse, she found herself frequently misreading words—“dead” for “head,” “stable” for “unable”—so that she misunderstood the intent of the material and had to reread it numerous times, shaking her head to loosen the fog. She wondered dispassionately if this was the beginning of “losing one's mind.”

Estelle had once confided that it was like heat waves some days, that everything before her seemed to undulate and shimmer. She smiled as she told Sandy, as if sharing a secret treasure.

Sandy bit her lip and began again at the top of the paragraph. “The Hardison town council has made its final recommendation for a new police chief to replace…”

Gorrick's desk was empty, had been empty all afternoon, though the court was not in session.

“…Stanley Hanson, whose retirement goes into effect on Tuesday. Mayor Quinn is expected to announce the appointment of Dave Kylie tomorrow at noon.”

She looked up to find Ray Stinson watching her from his open door. When he caught her eye, he motioned for her to come.

“How are you?” he asked as she settled into the chair before his desk.

“I'm fine. Why? Do you have any reason to think I'm not fine?”

“I have reason to think that anyone in your position might be less than fine.”

“In my position?”

“I didn't call you in here to fence with you, Sandy.”

“Why did you call me in?”

“Because I'm concerned about you.”

“Don't be.”

Ray smiled. “It bothers you, doesn't it? That someone might worry about you.”

“It doesn't bother me. There's just no reason for it.”

“Okay. My mistake. In that case, how's the investigation into the waste dump going? I thought I'd have that a week ago.”

“You'll have it soon. It's more involved than I had first realized.”

Stinson nodded and leaned back in his chair precariously. “So. How are you and Gorrick getting along?”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Just what I said. How are you two getting along?”

“We have no reason to get along or not get along. We're parallel lines, you know?”

Again, he smiled. “You never give an inch, do you? Well, I suppose that can come in handy. Look,” he said, turning serious, “I just want you to know that I realize how difficult this all is, the paper reporting on the trial, your family. I'm not apologizing, but I am aware that it is not an ideal situation.”

“I don't think it's an ideal situation for the future of the paper,” Sandy answered crossly.

“What do you mean?”

“Have you thought about the direction the
Chronicle
is going in with this stuff?”

“This stuff?”

“The personal nature of the reporting, the sensationalism. We didn't used to be that kind of paper.”

Ray took a moment before responding. “As a matter of fact, I
have
thought about it. And I believe we are walking a fine line, but at the moment, we are doing a pretty good balancing act. Sandy, we have to report on this trial. It's news.”

“You're making it news.”

“No, I don't believe that. I think we are being quite successful at keeping it as straight and factual as possible. I've said no to a number of the more personal directions we could have gone in.”

“What directions?”

“It doesn't matter.”

“Gorrick,” Sandy spit out. “I can just imagine what he'd want to print.”

Ray leaned forward. It was true that he'd had to rein Gorrick in at times, but his ambition was good for the paper, his copy was sharp and smart, and newsstand sales had gone up considerably since the trial coverage had begun. “As I said, if you are uncomfortable here, I would understand.”

“You're asking me to take a leave again?”

“Only if you want to.”

“I don't. This is what I do.” For the first time, her voice grew edgy, the closest to panicked he had ever heard. “This is what I do, Ray,” she repeated.

“Okay, then.”

She took a deep breath and leaned back in her chair. “What is it? You're reading manuals on male sensitivity lately?”

He laughed. “Just do me one favor,” he said, suddenly serious once more.

“As long as it doesn't entail holding hands with strangers and sharing how I really feel.”

“You're driving the fact checkers crazy. You used to be so accurate with your quotes and dates.”

“I still am.”

“No,” he said, “you're not. Be more careful.”

She nodded. She still flushed at the slightest criticism of her work, whether it came in person or from an editor's blue pencil. “Is that all?”

“Yes.”

She rose and started for the door.

“When
you
run the paper, you can rethink the direction, as you so kindly put it,” Ray said.

She looked at him curiously, but he had already returned to the layout on his desk.

 

I
T WAS
4:30 when Julia picked Ali up from the after-school art group that met in the auditorium two afternoons a week. They had been working on collages, and Ali clutched a large piece of poster board adorned with various bits of colored construction paper. “What is it?” Julia asked.

Ali switched the board to the other hand, away from Julia. “Nothing.”

“I want to see it.”

Ali handed it over reluctantly, and Julia stopped walking to hold the paper up before her. A blue oval seemed to be a lake. There were four figures seated by its edge—a family. The mother's hair was made of brown curling ribbons that sprang from the board and into Julia's hands.

“It's the picnic we went on. Mommy and Daddy and us. Remember? In the summer at the lake?” Ali said.

“I don't remember,” Julia replied. She handed the artwork back to Ali, and the two resumed walking home. They had gone only a block when they heard a voice behind them.

“Julia,” Peter Gorrick exclaimed as he caught up with them. “Hi. How are you?”

“Fine.” She kept walking, her eyes straight ahead, her face flushing, tipped down a millimeter.

He matched them step for step. “Aren't you going to introduce me to your sister?”

“This is Ali,” she said churlishly.

Peter smiled and held out his hand. “Peter Gorrick. I'm a friend of your sister's. She's told me a lot about you.”

Ali looked at him cautiously and held out her hand, warm and small in his. She withdrew it quickly.

“Can I buy you ladies a soda?”

Ali looked at Julia, who quickly answered, “No. We have to get home. Come on, Ali. We're already late.”

“How about tomorrow, then?”

“I don't know. We have a lot of things to do.”

Gorrick watched as Julia put her arm around Ali's back and hurried her away after barely muttering goodbye. He would have to try again, approach sideways, diagonally.

“Who was that?” Ali asked as they rounded the corner to Sandy's house.

“No one. Don't you remember what Mommy used to say? You shouldn't talk to strangers.”

“But you talked to him.”

“Never mind, Ali. You should just listen to me more.” She got her key from her knapsack and opened the front door. Sandy had taken to leaving the lights on for them, finding the thought of them entering a dark, empty house unpleasant, and Julia, who had been learning about energy conservation in class recently, flicked them off. When she looked up, Ali was already halfway up the stairs.