'But this time, someone from here called you in New York to hire you.'
'That's right.'
'When you left you didn't tell me that.'
I sipped my coffee. 'I wasn't sure I was going to take it.'
'So? When you did take it, you called me to work on it. To work for you.' 'With.'
'No, for. If it was with, you'd have told me from the beginning. Even if you weren't sure.'
'I've turned down cases before,' I said. 'Without telling you.'
'And taken them. And I didn't care. But I thought things were supposed to be different now.'
'Am I supposed to consult you on every decision I make?'
'God, I knew you'd say that! No, and you're not supposed to play dumb again, either.' She pulled her legs in closer, wrapped both hands around her mug. 'This is a big deal, you working up here. You can't pretend it isn't.'
'I'm not pretending anything.'
She nodded, but I had the feeling it wasn't because she agreed with me. 'I think you did it for the same reason you didn't tell me about it or tell me who the client is.'
'What reason is that?'
Her eyes confronted mine. Her look was hard under the soft lamplight, but there was more than anger in it.
'Caring about you,' she said, 'is a big problem for me.'
I reached onto the side table for a cigarette. 'I'm not sure what that means, and I don't know how to answer it.'
'Before,' she said, 'when we just worked together, just sometimes, that was easy. Now, if we're supposed to be partners and .. . and maybe whatever, then I can't do it unless you really mean it too.'
'You think this has to do with that?'
'I know it does. You're used to working alone. You took a case up here and didn't tell me about it because you're not so sure being partners is a good idea. Maybe it's not, but if it isn't, then I can tell you right now that all that other stuff you've been saying you wanted all these years is a worse one.'
I put my coffee mug down on the side table without looking at it. I didn't have to look; years of sitting in this chair, reading, smoking, listening to music, had given me the measure of that table, of this room and everything in it.
'I don't know,' I told Lydia. 'If that's what I did I didn't mean to do it.'
'You didn't mean to, or you meant to but you just didn't know you did?'
Briefly, I met her eyes, then looked beyond them to the shadows gathering on the porch I'd built, the dusk starting its business of disputing the daylight's confident disposition of the facts of time, depth, distance.
'I don't know,' I said again.
'Well,' she said, 'you'd better figure it out. Because I'm not going down this road if this is what's there. I can still help it. So think about it.'
We sat in silence for a while, no sound but the crackle of logs in the stove, the hiss of a match as I lit another cigarette when the first was gone. I was beginning to think bourbon would have been a better idea than coffee when Lydia spoke again.
'Okay.' She surprised me with a grin. 'Anyway, you have this case and I'm here. So tell me about it.'
I told her. I went through everything that had happened since Monday, everything I thought had happened before. I told her what I was sure of and what I wasn't, what I was worried might be coming next. We talked the way we always talked, going back, forward, back again. I gave her everything, even things I didn't understand.
She sipped her tea, listened, asked a few careful questions. When I had said all I had to say she was quiet; then she asked, 'These people are very important to you, aren't they?'
'Tony and Jimmy ...' I began. Then I didn't know anything else to say besides 'Yes.'
'And Eve Colgate, too.'
'Eve, too.'
'And this place.' Her eyes moved over the room, stared into the woods, dark now beyond the windowpanes, then came back to me. 'Bill, can he really do that? Have your land condemned?'
I looked into the murky depths of my coffee, answered, 'I'm sure he can.'
'Is it worth it?'
I looked up, met her eyes. 'Jimmy didn't kill Wally Gould.'
'If you did what Sanderson wants,' she said, 'Jimmy would get arrested, but your land would be safe, and if he's innocent—'
'It wouldn't matter. Between Brinkman and Grice, Jimmy'd be sent up for life, if he lived long enough.'
'So it's worth it?'
'It's got to be.'
