Saul drove his electric wheelchair out and around the counter. He’d started doing that after the failed surgery left him mostly paralyzed. If I’d had to guess, I would have said that he didn’t like feeling hidden and small. He hadn’t specifically told me that, but he had mentioned casually at one point that, when Mr. Kristoffersen finally decided to sell him the business, the first thing he planned to do was remodel the store to drop the counters down. He didn’t want to spend the next fifteen to twenty years of his working life dealing with counters that were too high for a man in a wheelchair.
“Nice to see you again, Nicole. Are you dropping off or picking up?”
“Picking up.” The words stuck a little in my throat. Hopefully Russ wouldn’t be too angry at me. “For Russ.”
He wheeled back around. “Something did come in almost a week ago now. I left a couple messages for Russ. I was starting to worry his number had changed.”
My suspicions had been right, then. His doctor prescribed him something new, and he was avoiding it, either because of the cost or because Russ was a bit of a hypochondriac who was more afraid of the side effects of medication than of the condition the medication was meant to treat.
Saul bent forward to look through the drawers of prescriptions ready for pick-up, and his head disappeared from view. “I hear you decided to stay in Fair Haven rather than moving back to DC,” his disembodied voice said.
If I wasn’t certain it was impossible, I would have thought Fair Haven residents were telepathic with how effectively they were able to spread news. “We did. It was a joint decision between Mark and me.”
“What do you plan to do here for a job?”
It was an innocent enough question, but I’d been personally wresting with it for so long that, whenever someone else asked, it felt almost accusatory, like they thought I was either going to go on unemployment when I should be working or I was going to steal a job from a local who didn’t have other options. Most people who asked didn’t mean either of those things. In fact, most people who asked saw me as a local now and hadn’t wanted me to leave Fair Haven. I still felt censure in the question because it seemed like I should have it figured out by now.
Saul straightened up, a white bag in his hand. He set it in his lap. I must have hesitated too long in answering because the look he gave me said he realized it wasn’t as simple a question as it seemed.
“Small towns tend to be nosy. If gossip were an Olympic sport, we’d take the gold. You don’t have to feel pressured to tell me anything you don’t want to.” He tilted his head to the side. “Though if you’re prescribed a new medication, I would recommend you tell me about any other medication, vitamins, or herbal supplements you might be on.”
I chuckled. I hadn’t consciously thought about it, but once he acknowledged the small town your-business-is-my-business mentality, I couldn’t help wondering if part of my reticence to discuss it with anyone was that whatever I said would find its way around Fair Haven before I even got home. I could count the number of people I’d confided in on one hand.
Dr. Horton’s was a bit of a community hub. In the summer, I’d passed by no fewer than four retirees sitting at the patio tables on the sidewalk out front, gossiping and drinking coffee. Saul probably knew more about what went on in this town than almost anyone else, but he seemed more like a bartender who heard it all but kept it to himself. At least, he’d never discussed anyone else’s business with me when I came in. Maybe as a pharmacist, he had a greater respect for privacy.
He held out the bag. “I’ll go over the instructions and side effects with you, but would you let me give you a piece of advice first?”
The fact that he bothered to ask won my approval. I nodded.
“If you can do the career you love, you should. Too many people never get that chance.” He pointed with one finger over his shoulder, toward his back. He smiled, but it was the kind people gave when they hoped it would cover up what they were really feeling. “I didn’t.”
As long as I’d been in Fair Haven, Saul had always worn a back brace and walked with a walker, even before he’d ended up in a wheelchair. He’d also always seemed to enjoy his job. I hadn’t considered that his life had ever been radically different or that he’d once wanted to do something else.
Most people probably didn’t know how much he still wished he had been able to do that something else. He was a master at small town living. He’d learned how to truly hide what he didn’t want anyone else to know. I bet I wasn’t the only one he’d managed to fool.
I was a good actress when it came to dealing with witnesses and potential suspects, but I couldn’t maintain a mask like that for the rest of my life.
More than that, I didn’t want to. “I’m considering going back to practicing law. It’s what I did in DC. But there are…obstacles.”
“All I’m saying is make sure you do whatever it takes to have no regrets one day,” Saul said.
He’d hit on exactly what worried me most. Before I gave up on a career as a defense lawyer, I needed to either find a way to make my career as a lawyer work, or I needed to find a way to learn to love working at Sugarwood just as much as I loved practicing law.
Right now, both seemed about as likely as finding a unicorn roaming my sugar bush.
5
For the rest of the day and most of the next, I kept expecting to hear from Chief McTavish that he’d charged Clement with Gordon Albright’s murder. Even while I was eating the maple syrup nougat and maple syrup truffles Nancy had created for us to start selling online, and even while I was holding my little godson Noah, my mind kept drifting back to Clement’s case.
I was out in the bush with Russ, overseeing the yearly clean-up of underbrush, fallen branches, and downed trees, when my phone rang. I immediately stopped moving. There was a reason we used old-fashioned walkie-talkies when working in the sugar bush. Cell phone signals were sporadic and unreliable. If this was Chief McTavish calling to tell me they’d arrested Clement, I didn’t want to miss the call.
It was Anderson’s number on my screen.
“I hear you’re trying to muscle in on my business.” His tone started out serious, but he couldn’t hold it together. By the end of the sentence, it was clear he was teasing.
“That might be true if I wanted to keep the case. You should be paying me a commission for finding you a new client.”
“What’s the case?” he said, all jocularity gone from his voice.
I filled him in.
He whistled. “I heard about a murder at the museum on the radio. They hadn’t released the victim’s name yet. Are you thinking he’s lying about not knowing what happened?”
I didn’t. As crazy as his story sounded, I believed Clement. He seemed genuinely confused and distraught. Plus, he’d have no reason to lie to me about his guilt or innocence. Confidentiality guaranteed he could tell me exactly how he’d plotted to kill Gordon and then how he’d carried it out, and I wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about it.
The only reason I could tell Anderson was that we’d signed a consultancy agreement so that he could pick my brain on cases without violating his own client’s confidentiality. There’d been language in it that allowed me to do the same. I hadn’t thought I’d need to exercise the option so soon.
“I read up on his medical condition a little, and I think he’s telling the truth.”
“Then I don’t understand why you want to pass this case along to me. He seems like exactly the kind of client you’re willing to defend. If he turns out to be guilty, he’ll want to plead out.”
Maybe the cases I worked could be more varied than I thought. While it wasn’t common, sometimes people who’d committed a crime did want to confess. I could help those people as well because they weren’t trying to hide their crime. Like Bonnie, Toby’s original owner. I’d negotiated a fair plea deal for her, and I visited her every month. I even brought her pictures of Toby.
If Clement was willing to make a deal if it turned out he was guilty, then there wasn’t an ethical or moral reason I couldn’t represent him.
“And,” Anderson said, “my case load is packed. I can’t take on another client right now. I’m already working evenings and weekends. I don’t even have time to interview candidates for adding another lawyer to the firm.”
I didn’t want to hand Clement over to a stranger. Most lawyers would think he was lying. Anderson probably only believed his story because I said I did. “If this goes to trial, with all the evidence against him, he’ll need a lawyer who’s great in the courtroom. That’s not me.”
