Household Gods

nobody had heard of chimneys.

Her voice-mail tape was close to maxed out. She’d have to ask Cyndi to fill her in — she even had a good pretext: some of her business had been taken over by other people in the firm.

Why, she thought in a pause between messages, Cyndi was her Julia in this world. She hoped, at least, that Cyndi didn’t feel like a slave, or feel she needed manumission.

It took her a moment to remember how to use her computer, but her password came right back to her: justkim, the first syllables of her children’s names. It wasn’t secure, it was much too easy to guess, but if she’d been more paranoid she might never have remembered it. Once the system came up, she found herself as inundated with e-mail as with voice calls and paperwork. Most of the e-mail was intraoffice, and most of it was personal: sympathy notes at first, some from surprising people, and then get-well wishes. She had more friends here than she’d thought. It touched her, made her eyes prickle and her throat go tight.

So many cards, so many flowers, so many good wishes. She took a deep breath and set them aside to savor later, and turned to the in box. She’d pick up where she left off, she resolved. Right… here. She reached for the top folder in the stack.

But she’d reckoned without the rest of the world. Once word had spread that she was back, everybody and his third cousin from Muncie came by to say Hello and Glad you’re feeling better. Hardly any of them stayed more than a minute or two, but a minute here and two minutes there added up to a good many minutes altogether.

She wasn’t the slightest bit startled when, toward midmorning, Gary Ogarkov poked his head into her office. He looked as if he expected her to throw something at him, and probably something sharp.

His expression was so nervous, she started to laugh. “Come on in,” she said. “I won’t bite, I promise.”

“No?” He didn’t sound convinced. “I wouldn’t blame you if you did.” But he slid in and sat on the edge of the chair she kept for clients.

Nicole looked at him and sighed. “Gary, it’s over. It happened the way it happened. This isn’t the end of the world. I’m not starving” — I’ve done that — “or sleeping in my car.” Even if it might be more comfortable than that bed over Umma’s tavern.

Gary eyed her a little dubiously. “You’re taking it really well,” he said. “I guess when you set a partnership against your health, it’s not such a big thing after all. But even so…” His voice trailed away.

“That is part of it,” Nicole agreed. Part of the rest, she realized, was the emotional distance her time in Carnuntum had given her. And part was an insight she’d also gained on the other side of time: the distance between bad and worse was a lot greater than the distance between good and better. Winning the partnership would have been better. What she had was still pretty decent.

Fortunately, Gary Ogarkov didn’t ask her to elaborate. Like everybody else in the world, he worried about himself and his own concerns first. And a good thing for her, too, all things considered. “I felt terrible about the way things turned out, and then I was afraid…” He stopped again.

Afraid you tried to kill yourself because I got the partnership and you didn’t. Nicole had no trouble filling in the blanks. Such things happened. Sometimes they made the news. More often, they spread along the attorneys’ grapevine. After all, lawyers made their living by writing and talking. What else would they do for entertainment but gossip?

“I didn’t try to kill myself,” Nicole said firmly. “If my doctor doesn’t understand what went wrong, don’t expect me to” — even if I do, don’t expect me to say so — “but it wasn’t that, believe me.”

He spread his hands in a gesture of surrender. “All right, all right. I believe you. I’m glad. And I’m glad you’re back, and I’m glad you don’t hate me. I wouldn’t have blamed you if you did.”

He looked very boyish when he worried — and he was worried. She wasn’t altogether sure she’d reassured him, either. She soothed him a bit more, reflecting as she did it that it was a good thing he didn’t spend a lot of time in court. His opponents would have read altogether too much from his face.

Finally he seemed to realize that she was busy, or trying to be. He pushed himself to his feet, dipped his head — it was almost a bow — and fled back to his own desk. It was still the same one, she couldn’t help but notice. She’d have thought he’d have moved into the rarefied expanses of partner country by now.

So maybe, she thought, her absence had disrupted the firm just a little bit. Then she shook her head. No, of course not. The mills of the firm ground exceedingly fine, and ground exceedingly slow. Gary would get his new office in the firm’s good time, and not a moment sooner.

She shook herself and wrenched her mind back to the work she’d been trying to do all morning. Just about four memos down the stack, yet another visitor tapped lightly on the doorframe. She let out a grunt of annoyance. Best wishes were all very well, but so was getting some work done. That was what she was here for, wasn’t it?

But when she looked up, she wiped the frown off her face in a hurry. Sheldon Rosenthal stood in the doorway of her plain, plebeian office, attache case in hand, looking the very model of the modern founding partner.

“It’s very good to see you back, Ms. Gunther-Perrin,” he said, cool and precise as always. “We were concerned about you, especially in light of the circumstances.” So: he’d been wondering if she’d popped a handful of pills, too.

She kept her voice civil, but annoyance gave it an edge it might not otherwise have had. “Circumstances don’t have anything to do with it,” she said. That was a lie, but it wasn’t a provable lie. “Life would be a lot more convenient if you could pick and choose when you were going to get sick.”

“So it would,” Rosenthal said dryly. He didn’t wait to be invited, but stepped right into the office and swung the attache case up onto Nicole’s desk. It landed with a solid thump. Obviously, he hadn’t brought it along as a dignified prop. He snapped open the solid brass locks and lifted out a thick sheaf of papers. “Now here is something you may find interesting.”

Nicole stared at it. She didn’t find it interesting. She found it formidable. Saying as much to the head of the firm didn’t strike her as the best thing she could do. “What is it?” she asked, hoping she sounded interested rather than wary.

“Among other things, the environmental impact statement on a parcel of land somewhat north of here,” Rosenthal answered. “I want you to analyze that statement and the other documents you will find here, and to give me an opinion as to whether development is likely to be allowed to go forward if a litigant seeks to block it in the courts.”

“Sounds a lot like what I was doing with the Butler Ranch project,” Nicole said.

“There are similarities, yes,” Rosenthal said imperturbably. “The expertise you acquired through working on that project is one of the reasons I’m assigning this one to you.”

“I see,” Nicole said, in lieu of screaming, You son of a bitch! Had she truly been lying unconscious for six days, she would have screamed at him, she had no doubt of that at all. A year and a half in Carnuntum had taught her a new degree of patience, and a degree of self-preservation, too.

It hadn’t taught her not to keep her thoughts in check. If he’d liked her work on Butler Ranch so well, why hadn’t he made her a partner on account of it? But she’d been away long enough to cool the outrage she’d felt right after Rosenthal shafted her — and to show her there were a hell of a lot worse things than working in a law office.

On the strength of that, and after a few seconds’ pause to get her voice under control, she asked, “Are we representing the developer here, or someone who is thinking about trying to stop him?”

“An extremely professional question.” Did Sheldon Rosenthal sound the least bit surprised? Maybe he did. Maybe he’d dropped this project on her desk to see if she would lose her temper, or to try to make her lose it. That would have given him the perfect excuse to let her go.

But she’d refused to give it to him. He scratched his chin along the edge of his neat little beard. “Perhaps it would be best if you did not know the answer to that. I want the analysis to be as nearly disinterested as possible.”

Nicole took time to think about that — time in which he stood there, waiting in apparent patience. “All right,” Nicole said at last. Rosenthal made a certain amount of sense. Lawyers were by trade advocates, hired guns. If she knew which way he wanted the analysis to come out, she’d slant it that way. As it was, he could go to the client, whoever the client was, and say, Here’s exactly why you can, or maybe, why you can’t do what you want to do with this land.