regulars who prefer courtroom drama to afternoon
television. The young man sat three rows in front of
the third woman, but a current seemed to run between
them. No doubt this was the divorcing couple sched-
uled to follow the Harris hearing. The fourth woman
was unfamiliar to me.
In her anger, Mrs. Harris spoke with a good old
Colleton County twang like someone raised on a local
farm. I didn’t know much about the Harrises except by
hearsay, but I gathered that she had worked right along-
side her husband back when he was out in the fields,
plowing and planting and growing the produce that was
now sold in grocery chains from Maryland to Maine.
There might be diamonds on her big-knuckled fingers
and those might be real pearls around her neck, but this
was clearly someone who had spent her youth in hard
work and plain dealing.
She turned to glare accusingly at the woman seated
alone on the last bench in the courtroom. “I don’t want
The woman returned her glare with level eyes that
were vaguely—arrogantly?—amused. Wearing jeans and
a chocolate brown turtleneck sweater, with a fleece-lined
beige leather jacket draped over her slender shoulders,
she lounged against the armrest at the end of the bench
and seemed completely at ease. From where I sat, she
59
MARGARET MARON
looked to be my age—late thirties. She wasn’t classically
beautiful, yet there was something that made you take a
second look and it wasn’t just the flaming red hair that
flowed in loose waves to her shoulders.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Harris. This is a public hearing.”
She wasn’t the first person to cringe at the realization
that what had been private was now going to become
public knowledge, but her animosity was so palpable
that I had a feeling that the redhead back there must
have played a starring role in the disintegration of the
Harris partnership.
Mrs. Harris flounced back around in her chair and
I nodded to her attorney. “Call your witness, Mr.
Taylor.”
As expected, that witness was Denton Lee, an execu-
tive at Dobbs Fidelity Trust and one good-looking man.
Dent’s a few years older than me but even though he’s
a distant cousin by way of my former law partner, John
Claude Lee, I hadn’t known him when I was growing
up, so I was devastated to come back to Dobbs and dis-
cover that the most stone-cold gorgeous man in town
was happily married and the father of two equally beau-
