The Choice (26 page)
Sandy looked at the cold stove. She didn't have a meal in mind, but she had leftovers in the refrigerator.
“Not yet. I may warm upâ”
“No, you're not. Get in your car and come over. It will take you exactly eight minutes if you don't get stuck at the red light on Poplar Avenue. Rick is having dinner with his boss, and I'm here alone. I've got the makings of the best salad you've ever seen, but it will be a work of art if your hands get involved. All I need to complete it is Roquefort cheese. You can pick some up for me at the store.”
“I'll change and be on my way.”
“Change? That outfit you had on when I saw you walking a few minutes ago was nicer than what I wore to the dentist's office this morning. Of course, if I had your figure, any clothes would look better on me.”
“You look great, and remember, you've had three children,”
Sandy said.
“And I'm glad I did, but that's not helping me fight the bulges that seem to pop out in all the wrong places.”
J
eremy Lane placed a new photograph on the credenza in his office. In the picture his wife, Leanne, and their two children were standing barefoot in a mountain stream. Leanne was looking down at the children, who were squealing with delight as the chilly water rushed over their feet and crashed against their ankles. Ten-year-old Chloe's sandy hair hung to her shoulders. Five-year-old Zach's wide-open mouth revealed several missing teeth. Leanne's face, framed by dark hair, showed a mother's delight in the presence of happy children.
Jeremy positioned the photo beside a more formal family portrait of Jeremy and Zach wearing identical blue sport coats and Leanne and Chloe in matching dresses. It was a corny photo, but that only made Jeremy like it more. A grainy picture of Jeremy as a little boy in front of his parents' home near Charleston was propped on the corner of his desk.
The phone buzzed. It was Deb Bridges, his secretary/legal assistant.
“Have you checked your e-mail?” Deb asked.
“No, I haven't even turned on the computer yet.”
“I'm not trying to ruin your coffee, but you need to see what came in from the lawyers on the other side of the Grosvenor case.”
Jeremy sat in the burgundy leather chair that had been a gift from his mother when he left the district attorney's office to open his own practice. He swiveled to the side and turned on his computer. He scrolled down to the subject line,
Grosvenor v. Alcott Business Systems, et al
., and opened the file. He'd been electronically served with a motion to compel discovery. A hearing on the motion was set in Fulton County Superior Court in downtown Atlanta. Jeremy quickly read the motion. Deb came to the office door and leaned against the doorframe. The auburn-haired secretary was in her midforties. A pair of half-frame reading glasses hung from a chain around her neck.
“Did you read this?” Jeremy asked.
“Every word.”
“This is bogus. We filed answers to all the interrogatories and requests for production of documents last week.”
“But you didn't give them what they really wantedâdetails about the termination of Mr. Grosvenor's consulting contract with the company in Virginia.”
“If they want that information, they're going to have to go to Virginia and take depositions. When that happens, the CFO of the Virginia company is going to hurt them.”
“Or so you hope.”
“Oh, he'll hurt them. I just want that information to come out after I depose Alcott's regulatory compliance officer and get him nailed down on the record.” Jeremy looked up from his computer. “Prepare a notice to take the deposition of Gregory Sexton, the compliance officer. Set it for the afternoon of the hearing on their motion in Atlanta. If they refuse to make him available, I'll file a countermotion to compel his appearance and ask the judge to hear it at the same time as the motion to compel.”
“Sounds like you're going to war.”
“I knew that going in.” Jeremy turned back to the computer screen. “But what Alcott did to Mr. Grosvenor was wrong, and if I can survive summary judgment and get this case in front of a jury, there's a chance for a decent verdict.”
The lawyers on the other side of the Grosvenor case fired their legal missiles from ninety miles away in a fancy office tower in Atlanta. The advent of computer legal research, with its virtually unlimited resources, had leveled the battlefield between big-city lawyers and small-town practitioners. A lawyer like Jeremy, who knew the right questions to ask the search engine, could compete with any law firm in the country.
A half-empty cup of black coffee grew cold as Jeremy checked and reviewed the appellate decisions cited in the motion to compel. Only one case gave him concern, and the problem it raised for his position made him shake his head. This was going to take some serious digging. The phone buzzed again.
“Did you forget your appointment with Larry Bishop?” Deb asked.
Jeremy glanced at his watch.
“Yes. Call the Blackwater and tell Bobby to be on the lookout for a gray-haired man in his early sixties who's not from Tryon.”
Jeremy grabbed his jacket from a small closet in the corner of the office and quickly checked his appearance in the mirror on the back of the closet door. His sandy hair was slightly darker than his daughter Chloe's, but they had matching blue eyes. At five foot nine inches tall, Jeremy still had the sinewy strength that had made him a successful wrestler in high school. Leanne jokingly held his hand tight when they went for walks on the beach because she didn't want a bikini-clad female to get the idea he might be available.
“I'll be back by eleven for the conference call in the Dobbins case,” he said to Deb as he passed her desk.
“I'm typing the memo right now,” she replied. “It'll be on your desk waiting for you.”
Jeremy's office was on the ground floor of a two-story office building located two blocks from the courthouse. Other tenants in the building included a two-person accounting firm, an investment adviser, a real-estate lawyer who spent most of his time in the courthouse deed room, and a child psychologist. Jeremy and the accounting firm occupied the prime spaces on the ground level. When he had a deposition involving multiple parties or lawyers, the accountants let Jeremy use their conference room.
Jeremy stepped into the crisp air of the late fall morning. The Blackwater Coffee Shop was several blocks away on South Avenue, the main street through the center of town. Tryon wasn't large enough to attract a national coffee franchise, so Bobby Miller, the owner of a sandwich shop, created his own. Skeptics doubted local residents would pay several dollars for a flavored cup of coffee, but Bobby had proved them wrong, and the Blackwater did a brisk business.
Jeremy opened the door of the shop and saw Larry Bishop sitting in a corner chair reading the
Wall Street Journal
. A cup of coffee and a thin pastry were on a small round table in front of him. Like Jeremy's father, Bishop was a Vietnam War veteran who had served in the air force and went on to become a pilot with a major U.S. airline. The two men rode the wave of high salaries for commercial pilots to their highest point before deregulation and airline bankruptcies eroded the wage scale so that many pilots were paid like glorified bus drivers. Jeremy shook the distinguished-looking man's hand.
“Sorry I'm late,” Jeremy said. “I was caught up in some research on a big case.”
“No problem,” Bishop replied in a rich Charleston accent. “The owner set me up with a cup of Blue Mountain java and this flaky bit of sweet stuff. He's got a great concept going here. Did you mention our conversation about trying to franchise this place in other small towns? I can think of several spots where it would take off.”
Since his retirement, Larry Bishop had been a successful business investor.
“Yes.” Jeremy waved to Bobby, who was behind the counter, and called out, “The arabica, please.”
“Was he interested in expanding?” Bishop asked.
“He told me that if his son comes back to work for him after college, he'll consider it. Bobby doesn't want business to cut into his deer-hunting time. His sandwich shop was popular, but he didn't want the hassle of running two businesses at once so he shut it down.”
The owner brought over Jeremy's coffee and handed it to him. It was black as a moonless midnight.
Since Jeremy's father's death from a stroke three years earlier, Bishop had made a point of stopping to see Jeremy every time he was near Tryon. Today he was on his way to Atlanta to play golf and had landed his small private plane at the tiny county airport that was not much more than a strip of asphalt in an empty field. The airport manager loaned Bishop a car so he could drive into town to see Jeremy.
“How was your flight?” Jeremy asked.
“Clear and smooth. The avionics on my new plane are topnotch. It practically flies itself.”
Jeremy took a sip of the coffee. It was strong and bitter.
“Kip and I saw your mother last weekend,” Bishop continued. “We went out to eat at a new place on Sullivan's Island not far from the condominiums we bought last year. The condos have been renting great. Your mother's unit is cash-flowing with extra to spare.”
“Leanne and I want to take the kids there during the off-season this winter.”
“You'll like it. Oh, and your mother had her latest houseguest in tow. The poor girl thought boiled shrimp were a delicacy. She must have eaten two dozen.”
Jeremy's mother had been providing temporary housing for unmarried pregnant girls since Jeremy's younger sister left home for college. Most of the girls were referrals from a local crisis pregnancy center, but several churches were aware that Ruth Lane had a furnished efficiency apartment over the two-car garage beside her home.
“How old was the girl?” Jeremy asked. “I've not talked to Mom about her.”
“Sixteen, but she looked thirteen,” Bishop said, shaking his head. “The girls your mother takes in look younger and younger.”
“Cara's mother was barely seventeen when she was born,” Jeremy said, referring to his younger sister, who was also adopted. He took another sip of coffee. “Did my mom mention that Cara is interested in finding her birth mother?”
Bishop, who was about to pick up his pastry, left it on the plate.
“No, she didn't. What's going on with that? You have the best mother on the planet. Why in the world would Cara want to run off and try to find someone who didn't want to keep her in the first place?”
“Don't be too hard on her. She's just curious. Before she did anything, she talked it over with Mom and reassured her of how she felt. And you nailed one of the reasons Cara gave me when we talked about it. She wants to know why her mother didn't, or couldn't, keep her.”
Bishop grunted. “She doesn't have to look far. Based on the girls your mother takes in, it's easy to see why sixteen-year-old girls don't keep babies. And your dad treated Cara like a princess. I doubt she's secretly related to European royalty.”
“You're probably right, but she's got the itch. I think losing Dad so suddenly is part of it too. Mom and I are concerned she'll be hurt, but Cara is an adult. She'll be twenty-six in February.”
“Are you helping her?”
“Not much. Since she was placed by an adoption agency in Virginia, I checked the Virginia open-records statute and gave her the number of an outfit that helps connect adoptees with their birth parents. I'm not sure if she's called them, but I think she will.”
Bishop ate a bite of pastry and took a sip of coffee.
“Have you thought about trying to find your mother?”
“No.” Jeremy shook his head. “I think it's more of a girl thing. I'm not curious about facts that don't have any current relevance.”
“You sound like a lawyer.”
Jeremy smiled. “When I look at Chloe's blond hair and blue eyes, I know where they came from. She's exhibit A from my gene pool. Where I got the genes in the first place doesn't really interest me.”
The two men stayed in the coffee shop chatting for another thirty minutes. After Jeremy checked his watch a second time, Bishop stood up.
“I get the message. I'm retired, but you're just getting started and need to get back to work.” He leaned forward and pointed to the owner of the shop. “Work on Bobby. If we can franchise this place, there will be an equity stake for you as a finder's fee. We'll start with three locations, double that every year for five years, then sell out.”
“I'll see what I can do. Thanks for stopping by. It means a lot.”
Bishop shook Jeremy's hand and patted him on the back.
“Your dad would be proud of you.”
“Mom says he is.”
“Oh yeah,” Bishop said with a wave of his hand. “She talks about heaven like it's in the next room. That's one area I leave to her and Kip. They huddle together and discuss the Bible and pray. Sometimes I think they're praying for me.”
Jeremy smiled. “That makes three of us.”
S
andy stood near the front entrance to the school waiting for Maria. It was 7:40 a.m., and Maria was ten minutes late. A puff of black smoke announced the arrival of Rosalita's car. She pulled to the curb, and Maria got out. The girl looked to the right and left as she walked toward Sandy.
“Are you okay?” Sandy asked.
“No. I had a fight with my father. He did not want me to come to school, so I ran to Rosalita's house. She brought me.”
“Why didn't he want you to come to school?” Sandy asked as she held the door open.
“The baby,” Maria replied cryptically.
Sandy didn't ask a follow-up question. The story, as bad as it might be, would come out soon enough. It shouldn't happen in a school hallway.
Carol Ramsey's office was in a suite close to the school's main office. The Rutland school system employed three counselors: two at the high school and a third who split time between the high school and the local middle school. Carol's door was cracked open, and the dark-haired, slightly overweight guidance counselor was sitting at her desk when Sandy tapped lightly.