I told the plaintiff, “I cannot order you to let your son’s grandparents maintain contact with him, but I would strongly urge you to be compassionate to them. No child can have too many people loving him.”
“Thank you, Your Honor,” said John Claude, and I thought I heard a faint trace of genuine appreciation in his pro forma words. Not that he hadn’t argued eloquently and diligently for his client. All the same, a little boy’s well- being had been up for grabs here and John Claude Lee was a grandfather, too.
The rest of the afternoon session was filled by another truancy, a child who had taken his father’s handgun to threaten another child who was bullying him, and a fourteen-year-old girl who wanted to go live with her father now that her mother had remarried.
Blessedly, I had no personal connection to a single one of the combatants.
CHAPTER 17
Florence Hartley,
On the way downstairs to meet Dwight shortly before five, I passed through the clerk of court’s office to drop off some papers and found Kayra Stewart and Nolan Capps trying to persuade our clerk of court to let them borrow the file on Martha Hurst’s trial.
Ellis Glover is tall and thin and completely bald except for a tonsure of straight white hair that circles a dome as shiny as any ivory billiard ball. Give him a monk’s robe and he’d even look like one with his hooded eyes and ascetic straight lips. A kindly monk, but an implacable one who was unmoved by arguments to remove documents from his safekeeping.
“They’re public records,” Kayra said. “We have a right to see them.”
“A right to see them,” Ellis agreed. “Not a right to take them home with you.”
“But you’re getting ready to close.”
“You can come back tomorrow,” he told them firmly, reaching for the thick files they carried. “We open at eight o’clock.”
As soon as they saw me, Nolan Capps put on that lost-puppy look he’d suckered me with last night. “Please, Judge Knott, couldn’t you sign these files out?”
I shook my head. “No way do I want to be responsible for that much paper.”
“Triage, then,” said Kayra briskly. She shuffled through the folders as if picking out the kings and aces from a deck of playing cards. “We’ll leave the trial transcript, the medical reports . . . take her deposition . . . take the witness statements . . . don’t need the search warrants . . . initial statements of responding officers . . .”
Over Ellis’s objections, she quickly winnowed the files down to a fraction of what they’d started with.
Ellis peered at me over his Ben Franklin half-glasses and his bald head gleamed in the ceiling lights. “Are you willing to be responsible for these?”
“It would appear so,” I said and signed on his dotted line. “But they come home with me. And this time, you two can buy the pizza.”
“Grandma and Miss Emily are making heavy hors d’oeuvres for tonight,” Kayra said guilelessly.
“That’ll take care of me, but what about you two and Dwight?”
“They told Nolan and me we could fix us a plate. We’ll fix him one, too. Unless you think he’d rather have pizza than Grandma’s sausage-and-rice balls or Miss Emily’s angel salad?”
“Nobody likes a smartass,” I told her. “See you out at my place.”
Dwight was waiting for me down in his office since I’d driven in with him that morning. His shift was technically over at four and my workday didn’t begin till nine, so each of us was inconvenienced by an hour, but somehow neither of us seemed to care.
“I forget,” he said as we walked out to his truck. “Your place or mine?”
“Mine,” I answered.
The late afternoon air was milder than it’d been this morning, and predictions were that the warming trend would continue for the next few days. Jacket weather instead of heavy parkas and thick woolen scarves. As we circled the courthouse, the streetlights came on, along with the Christmas lights festooned down the length of Main Street’s business district.
Dwight wasn’t thrilled when I told him he was in for another session with Nolan and Kayra, but the promise of Bessie’s sausage-and-rice balls mollified him a little. Even though he denigrates his mother’s party salad as girly froufrou, I notice he always takes a second helping. We swung past his apartment so he could pick up fresh clothes, and I helped carry some more cartons down to the truck. We were hoping to repaint my old bedroom by the weekend, then move Dwight’s bed in for Cal. When consulted the last time he was down, Cal had asked for “midnight blue,” which was, according to him, a cool color.
On the drive out to the farm, I described my lunch with Portland and how the baby was a little girl who was going to carry my name.
“What about Tracy’s baby?” I asked. “Was it Don Whitley’s?”
“We still don’t know. We sent his toothbrush and razor to the ME, but we don’t have an answer yet.” He glanced over at me. “Did you tell Portland Tracy was pregnant?”
“No.”
“No?” I couldn’t fault him for being skeptical. He knows how we confide in each other and he still turns slightly red every time he realizes she’s heard how good he is in bed. “You tell her everything.”
“Not when you specifically ask me not to. Besides, you threatened to put me on report.”
