Enright Family Collection (7 page)

Welcome back. India rotated her neck in a full circle to unkink it and glanced at the clock. Eleven-forty. The night had gone by in a blur. It was too late to call Aunt August and Corri. She would have to call them first thing the next morning. She packed three files into her already overstuffed briefcase. Frowning when she could not get the brown leather satchel to close, she pulled out one file, tucked it under her arm and hoisted her shoulder bag over her head to hang from her neck, thereby freeing up both hands for carrying.

The hallway was darkened except for the lights over the doors and the exit sign. Walking past the double doors leading to the annex housing the city morgue always gave India a severe case of goose bumps, and tonight was no exception. Her heels made muffled popping sounds on the old tiled floor as she struggled down the hallway to the elevator, where she pressed the button for the lobby with an index finger. The old lift groaned as it slowly ascended, reminding her once again that the slowest elevators in Paloma were, in fact, in City Hall.

“Can I give you a hand there, Miss Devlin?” Paul, the night guard, who pronounced her name
Dev-a-lin
, rose from his wooden chair, which stood right next to the elevator, halfway between the front and back doors of the building.

“Oh, I’ll make it to the car if you can open the back door for me.”

“Certainly, Miss Devlin.” He nodded and walked briskly, with purpose and importance, to the back door, his heavy ring of keys clanging loudly in the silent building.

“Thank you.” India smiled at him gratefully as he held the door open for her to pass through. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

“I’ll just wait here till you get to your car.” Paul stood on the top step, his right hand on his gun, as if daring some unseen felon to jump out at India. As she reached her car, he called to her across the quiet night: “Miss Devlin …”

“Yes?” she called back as she hit the security button on her key ring to open the car door with a “beep.”

“I was sorry about what happened to your brother.”

“Thank you, Paul. So was I. Thank you for remembering him.” India opened the rear door on the driver’s side and threw her heavy bundles onto the seat and slammed the door. She slid in behind the wheel and turned the key. Waving to Paul, the silent, shadowy sentinel who still watched from the top step, she pulled out of the parking lot and onto the rain-slicked streets of the city that had been her home for the past five years.

Paloma was a city on the mend. At one time it had been a busy manufacturing center, but the textile mills moved south and those days were long past. Concentrated efforts begun ten years ago to revitalize the downtown area, however, had met with some success. The shopping district was coming back to life, the new shops having been joined by a variety of cultural attractions and fine restaurants; a music hall built at the turn of the century today served as a popular venue for plays as well as concerts. Over the years the university had grown on the north side of the city, bringing with it a well-endowed library and a highly regarded museum of natural history.

Driving through this, the oldest part of town, India rechecked the locks to reassure herself that all the doors were secured. It was dark and it was late, and this was not the best place in the city for a young woman to be driving alone. Old City had stubbornly refused gentrification and had seemed to decline as rapidly as other parts of the city had improved. There were pockets of Paloma that resembled a war zone, where crime was so common it was rarely reported. India always felt relieved when she reached her street, which was several blocks beyond Old City and on the fringes of a section of Paloma known as the Crest, a totally renovated area that had caught the fancy of upscale buyers ten years ago and was now the fashionable place to live.

India’s townhouse was narrow and three rooms deep, three stories high. She had seen similar homes in Philadelphia some years before, but there they were called “Trinities.” Here in Paloma they were known as “treys.” Everest Place lay as still as a sleeping child as she pulled up to the curb, grateful to find her usual parking space in front of her house empty and waiting for her return. The slamming of her car door echoed through the neighborhood, a rude interruption in the night silence. She unloaded everything at once, piling suitcases amid work files on her front steps so that, once inside, she would not have to venture back out onto the deserted street. Unlocking the front door, which swung without a sound into the small foyer, she tried to step over the mail, which had been propelled through the mail slot for the past week and now littered the entire floor of the entryway. Some pieces had made it all the way into the living room, she noted wryly.

Dumping the suitcase onto the floor at the foot of the steps that led to the second floor, she returned to the front door and retrieved the rest of her belongings, kicking envelopes, catalogs and other assorted mail out of the way. She turned on the light nearest the sofa, scooped up the mail and dropped it on the table in the entry. It could all wait until tomorrow. Tonight she was too tired to read another word.

The light on her answering machine blinked incessantly. Too many messages to listen to now. The morning would be soon enough, she decided with a shrug as she turned the key in the deadbolt lock on the front door. Dragging the suitcase up the steps, she sought the peace of her bedroom, where she had created a little getaway of sorts for herself. She turned on the overhead light and sighed. It was good to be home. Tonight she was exhausted, the emotions of the past week having taken their toll on her mind and her body. Every inch of her craving sleep, she all but crashed face first onto her bed. Tomorrow she would read her mail and listen to her messages and call Aunt August. Tonight she would, for a while, put aside her work and all it entailed, all the dirty, ugly things that people do for reasons no sane person could ever comprehend, and she would lose herself to sleep.

The rude buzzing of the alarm awakened a reluctant India at six. Through barely opened eyes, she took in her surroundings and was surprised to find herself, not in Devlin’s Light, as she had been in her dreams, but in Paloma. Instead of the faded yellow daisy wallpaper of her old room on Darien Road, this room was painted white, as was the furniture. The carpet was softest plush blue, the curtains a blue and white stripe. Across the foot of the white iron bed rested a blue and white floral comforter, which coordinated perfectly with the bedskirt, pillow covers, sheets, and a lightweight summer blanket. From the small wingchair right inside the door tumbled an array of pillows, all made by August from the hand-embroidered linens India had begun collecting as a young girl.

India rolled over and looked at the clock, groaning when she realized that she did, in fact, have to obey its command. She swept her hair from her face and tottered into the bathroom across the hall and turned on the shower, hoping it would revive her. It did.

She dressed hastily for work, pulling on a somewhat casual, totally comfortable pantsuit of soft gray and white pinstriped linen, since it was not a court day and she did not need to “dress.” That would come on Monday, with the start of the Thomas trial. Before closing the closet door, she checked to make certain that her favorite dark blue suit was clean. Smiling to herself when she saw that it was, she closed the door. She always wore that suit—her lucky suit—on the first day of a trial. She had never lost a case when she delivered her opening statement wearing that suit. India wasn’t going to take any chances. The suit was a go for Monday.

Breakfast was a cup of coffee in the car and a bowl of fruit at her desk, lunch was less. Before she knew it, it was four o’clock and she still had two more briefs to read and respond to. Roxanne Detweiler, the inhabitant of the cubicle next to India’s, stuck her curly dark head through the doorway at seven-twenty and asked, “Want Chinese? Herbie is calling in an order.”

Lost in thought, India nodded affirmatively.

“What do you want?”

Not raising her head from the file spread across the top of
the desk, Indy replied absently, “Pepperoni, mushrooms, whatever you’re having.”

Having seen India so immersed in her work in the past, Roxanne grinned devilishly.

“You want a little sweet and sour bat wings on that, Indy? Maybe a side of frog toes and fried slugs?”

“Sure, Roxie.” India waved a hand indifferently. “Whatever.”

“What’s she want? Herbie’s waiting.” Singer poked Roxanne in the back.

“Get us an order of hot and spicy chicken and an order of rice noodles with oriental vegetables and some steamed dumplings.”

Roxanne folded her arms across her chest, well aware that India had no clue that someone was in her office. There was a joke circulating around the D.A.’s office that you could rob India’s office of everything except the file she was working on at that moment and you’d most likely get away with it.

“India has been like that for as long as I’ve known her,” Roxanne once told the rest of the staff. “She has the enviable ability to block out everything and totally focus on the business at hand. She did it in college, she did it all through law school, and she’s still doing it. She says she tries to hear the person’s voice when she’s reading a statement, to see the scene as the victim did, to hear what they heard and feel what they felt.”

“Spooky” was the consensus of India’s colleagues, but every one of them agreed she was the best at what she did. Her uncanny ability to block out what she considered irrelevant might be responsible for a good part of that success.

It wasn’t until Roxanne called over the partition to tell her that her phone was ringing that India heard it. Searching through piles of papers, she finally located it and picked up the receiver.

“Oh, hello, Aunt August.” India’s eyes sought the small desk clock. It was almost seven-thirty. “Oh, Aunt August, I am so sorry. I meant to call last night but it was so late when I got home, and then this morning just sort of got away from me and before I knew it …”

“I understand, India.” Aunt August, as always, went straight to the point. “However, there is someone else to be considered now.”

“Corri. Oh, damn, I meant to call her …” India dragged her hand through her hair and sighed deeply, berating herself for the oversight.

“She’s right here, Indy.” August handed the phone to Corri.

“Indy?” The sweet little girl voice poured like liquid sunshine through the wires.

“Hey, sugar.” India tried to think of some excuse for not having called in the morning, as she had said she would do. “Corri, I meant to—”

“It’s okay, Indy. Nick took me fishing,” she announced.

“This morning?” India relaxed. Corri wouldn’t have been home if she had remembered to call.

“No, this afternoon. To make me feel better.”

Ouch.

“Did you feel badly because I forgot to call?”

“I just felt sad because you weren’t here. But Darla said that after you put the bad guys in jail you’ll come home.”

“Darla is right, sugar.”

“Indy …”

“What, Corri?”

“Do you have to put away all the bad guys, or just a few, before you can come home?”

India smiled. “Just the ones that get caught in Paloma. I doubt anyone could put away all the bad guys.”

“You could,” Corri said confidently. “Ry said you were the best prostitutor in Paloma.”

“That’ss ‘prosecutor,’ Corri.” India laughed, and through the phone line, she could hear August laughing too. “Say the word, so you’ll remember it correctly.”

“Posse-cutor.”

“That’s a little better, but you still need some practice. Maybe you’ll have that down pat by the time I come home.”

“When will that be? Tomorrow? It’s the weekend.”

“I’m afraid not, sweetie. I have to get ready for Monday. I have a lot of reading to do between now and then.”

“But when the bad guy’s in jail, will you come home?”

“You can bet the ranch,” India told her.

Corri giggled. “We don’t have a ranch.”

“Oh, you’re right. Well then, you can bet the dunes.”

“Will it be next week?”

“Next week might be a little too soon.”

“That’s what Nick said. He said he thought it might take a while. He said this was a really bad man and it might take a while for everyone to come in and tell the judge just how bad he is.”

“Nick is a pretty smart fellow.”

“He is, Indy. Oh, he said to say hi for him when I talked to you. So hi from Nick.”

“Tell him hi back.”

Roxanne called over the intercom that dinner had arrived.

“Listen, Corri, I’m going to go and have some dinner.” India was suddenly starving.

“We had dinner,” Corri told her. “We had fish that Nick and I caught. Aunt August let him stay for dinner. And Ollie and Darla and Jack too.”

“You must have caught a lot of fish,” India noted somewhat wistfully, imagining them all in the Devlins’ old kitchen, crowded around Aunt August as she worked miracles with an old black iron griddle and some freshly caught fish. Her mouth began to water at the thought of it. “Is he still there? Nick?”

“No. He left to drive Darla and Jack home. Ollie is sleeping over with me. Tomorrow Aunt August is taking me and Ollie to the library for the story hour.”

“That sounds like fun. Call me tomorrow night and you can tell me all about the story, okay?”

“Okay. I will.”

“Now put Aunt August back on the phone,” India instructed.

“You did miss a lovely dinner,” August told her. “Corri and Nick caught a couple of blues that would have knocked your socks off.”

“I am sorry I missed it.” Mentally, Indy amended her earlier fantasy. Bluefish would have been stuffed with a savory stuffing—cornbread, perhaps, or maybe sage—and wrapped in foil and baked in the oven to the perfect degree of flakiness.

“And we all missed you,” August told her. “Nick asked for your phone number. I didn’t think you’d mind if I gave it to him.”

“Not at all,” India said, playing with the cap from a Bic pen. “He promised to get me a list of Ry’s acquaintances from Bayview and from the Save the Bay group.”