know what kind of person she is. Obviously, since your call I’ve been trying to come up with a sensible answer. I’ll have to confess I didn’t know her well. She wasn’t a woman who invited intimacy. She was a very good student – older than most of the others and serious about her work. She was an accountant before she started law school, and she had an accountant’s approach to her studies: precise, painstaking, diligent. She did her homework. Her cases and notes for study were the gold standard. She prepared everything meticulously. She didn’t like surprises, a significant trait in a lawyer, and even as a student she was thoroughly professional.” Holly smiled. “Do you need more?”
“No,” I said. “That’s enough. It doesn’t fit.”
Holly’s eyes widened. “What doesn’t fit? Jo, on the phone you were vague about your reasons for wanting to talk about Clare, but I assumed they were professional.”
“In a way, I guess they are,” I said. “There are some questions about the way in which she left her last job.”
“At Falconer Shreve,” Holly said.
“So Clare did stay in touch with you.”
“Minimally. When she was approached by Falconer Shreve, I supplied a reference for her. She sent me a thank-you note when she got the job.” Holly picked up a chunk of quartz resting on top of a stack of journal articles. She turned the rock until the sun from her office window bounced off the quartz, igniting pinpricks of fire on its surface.
She stared at it meditatively. “And then, of course, at Christmas there was a card.”
I felt my pulse quicken. “You heard from Clare this past Christmas?”
Holly frowned. “In my books it wouldn’t qualify as hearing from her. She sent an electronic card – pretty enough, snow falling on a cabin – but I remember thinking it was uncharacteristic.”
“She isn’t the type of woman to send e-cards?”
“She isn’t the type of woman to send cards at all.” Holly narrowed her eyes. “Jo, what’s this all about?”
“There was something odd about the way Clare left Falconer Shreve,” I said. “Apparently she was content enough with her job and her life to talk about buying a condominium. Then out of the blue she just took off.”
“Without telling her firm?”
“No. I gather she told them she was leaving, but she didn’t give them notice. She just took off and let her colleagues deal with the mess.”
“She would never do that. Never. Never. Never.” Holly slammed the quartz down on her desk, then she smiled sheepishly. “Sorry about the dramatics. Old litigation lawyers are incurable.”
“You’ve convinced me,” I said. “But the fact is, Clare Mackey did leave Falconer Shreve.”
“Without an explanation?”
“No, there was an explanation. She’d found her dream job in Vancouver.”
“Bullshit. Clare’s not a liar, Jo, but if that’s her story, she might have been covering up a problem that had developed at Falconer Shreve.”
“The problem must have come up pretty suddenly,” I said. “I talked to a young woman Clare ran with every morning. The woman’s name is Anne Millar, and she says Clare was talking about putting down roots in Regina.”
“Maybe the person Clare planned to put down roots with had a change of heart.” Holly reached over and picked up her cordless phone. “And maybe you and I should stop speculating and just pick up the phone and ask Clare.”
“That would be logical,” I said. “But unfortunately no one seems to know where she is.”
Holly’s face darkened. “But that’s nonsense. Falconer Shreve would have a contact number and Clare must have had friends.”
“So far, Anne Millar seems to be the only friend who’s been concerned enough to ask any questions. When Clare didn’t show up at their regular running time, Anne went to Falconer Shreve and talked to one of the partners. He was the one who told her the dream-job story, but when Anne pressed him for specifics he – to use her word – ‘stonewalled.’ ”
“Which partner did she talk to?”
“Christopher Altieri.”
Holly winced. “I still can’t believe he’s gone. I was a year behind him in law school. He was one of the few truly moral human beings I’ve ever known. People always said he was the conscience of Falconer Shreve.” She straightened her shoulders and breathed deeply, the former litigation lawyer getting her second wind. “At any rate, Chris’s innate decency aside, he didn’t have anything to gain by stonewalling. If the situation is as you described it, Clare was the one who walked away. Falconer Shreve was the injured party.”
“That’s certainly how Delia Wainberg sees it,” I said. “When I broached the subject with her, she was still seething.”
“Why am I not surprised?” Holly said. “Delia was always a pistol, and her loyalties were primal. She would see what Clare did as betrayal.”
“But you don’t?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know the whole story.”
“Neither do I. That’s why I came to you.”
“And I was no help,” she said. “But I can point you to some possibilities.” She walked to her bookshelves, knelt, and began checking the spines on a number of green leatherette yearbooks. She pulled one out and flipped through until she found what she was looking for. “Clare’s graduating year,” she said. “One of the women in her Moot Team will know where Clare is. They were exceptionally tight.”
“What’s a Moot Team?”
Holly chuckled. “The students say they’re the law-school equivalent of varsity football, but with more bloodshed. Really, they’re just mock courts. Someone comes up with a hypothetical legal dilemma, and the teams come up with arguments and make submissions the way they would in a real court. The competition can get pretty cutthroat.” She handed me the yearbook. “Anyway, here are the Moot Teams. You’ll notice that Clare’s group takes the entire venture very seriously.”
Most of the students had opted to be captured in a moment of goofy high spirits: mugging for the camera or striking over-the-top formal poses. In one grouping, a petite female lounged Cleopatra-style on the outstretched arms of her three strapping partners. Clare’s group, all women, wore matching open-necked white blouses, smartly tailored dark suits, and the tight smiles of students who knew this photo was one more hoop they had to jump through before they could get on with the serious business of their lives.
Holly handed me the yearbook. The women’s names were listed under the photo: Sandra Mikalonis, Maggie Niewinski, Clare Mackey, Linda Thauberger. “I’ll e-mail the head administrator at the College of Law and tell her it’s okay for you to get the contact information. And Jo, when you find out what’s going on with Clare, let me know. If she’s backed herself into a corner somehow, I may be able to show her the way out.”
It was my cue to leave, but I didn’t pick it up. I stood in the doorway. “Holly, how well did you know the members of the Winners’ Circle?”
“Not as well as I wanted to,” she said, and her voice was wistful. “None of us knew them as well as we wanted to. Law school is a funny place – despite the august trappings, it’s like high school in many ways, cliquey. There are the jocks and the beautiful people and the brainiacs and the spoiled rich kids and the leftovers who band together because nobody else wants them. And, just the way they do in high school, everyone knows exactly who fits where. Everyone at this law school knew about the Winners’ Circle, and we all envied them.” Holly glanced at her watch. “If you have a moment, I can show you the way they were when I knew them first.”
“I have a moment,” I said.
Holly led me down the hall, past more photos of graduating classes, and opened the door to a classroom. The air in the room was stale with the smell of a closed-up room in summer. There were caricatures on the wall, likenesses of justices whose names I recognized from the long-ago newspaper stories. And there were yet more photos – older ones. Holly steered me towards the back. “There I am,” she said.
“You haven’t changed much,” I said. “Still a looker, as my friend Howard Dowhanuik would say.”
“Thank you. On the day before I fly off to an island where I plan to wear a bikini, albeit a modest one, I appreciate that.” Holly moved to the framed class photograph next to hers. “And here they are,” she said. “The members of the Winners’ Circle. There’s Chris. He was so beautiful – in every way.” She shook her head. “There
