line, occupying half of two full spaces.
“But why would you do such a thing?” Joanna asked. “Why run that kind of risk?”
Angie sat with her hands gripping the wheel and with her eyes focused on some invisible middle distance. She didn’t answer for such a long time that Joanna wondered if she’d even heard the question.
“How could a man defend someone like that?” Angie asked at last. “How could he try to get him off? As far as I’m concerned, that makes the lawyer as bad as the father. Maybe even worse. The father could be sick or crazy, but the lawyer is just doing it for money, working for the person who has all the cards. The little girls are the ones who have nothing, no one to turn to. They’re the ones who need someone to defend them, to help them.”
As Joanna watched in dismay, Angie Kellogg’s face seemed to splinter into a thousand pieces. The words she had never been able to muster in her own behalf had suddenly erupted in defense of someone she didn’t even know, in defense of Holly Patterson.
While Angie sobbed brokenly beside her, Joanna finally recognized the linchpin of Angie’s past, a piece that had, until that very moment, eluded her.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered, horrified. “The same thing happened to you, didn’t it?”
Angie nodded. “And my mother wouldn’t even help me. Maybe she didn’t know at first, although she must have. But even when I told her, she didn’t lift a finger, didn’t make him stop.”
Since mid-September, Joanna had struggled to pull together the stray pieces of Angie’s history.
There had been a blank spot. She could never understand what had forced Angie out onto the streets from the time she was a child only a few years older than Jenny was now. And now that Joanna knew, now that she understood, she almost wished she hadn’t.
“Are you going to be all right?” she asked, reaching out to touch the distraught young woman’s arm.
Gradually, Angie regained her composure. The sobs diminished to hiccups and sniffles. “I’ll be okay,” she managed.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Angie,” Joanna said awkwardly, “I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”
Angie looked at Joanna with a questioning, side line glance.
“You mean you believe me?”
“Well, of course I believe you,” Joanna replied indignantly. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because, Angie said in a hushed, hesitant way. “The only other person I ever told was my mother and she called me a liar. Said I made the whole thing up. But I didn’t, I swear to God. And that woman whose father is dead, she probably didn’t make it up, either. I wanted her to win in court, that’s all. That’s why I got the lawyer drunk. You do understand that, don’t you, Joanna?”
“Yes,” Joanna said quietly, getting out of Angies car. “I believe I do.”
BURTON KIMBALL came to work that morning out of habit, because he had no idea what else to do with himself. He sat numbly in his office with the door closed, staring without comprehension at the stack of routine correspondence Maxine had left on his desk. No matter how long he looked at the top letter on the pile, he was unable to make sense of a single paragraph. It could just as well have been written in a foreign language.
It was as though the connections in Burton’s brain had been short-circuited by the knowledge that his father was dead, that he had been dead all Burton’s life. The whole time, the forty-odd years Burton had been waiting for his father to show up, longing for him to come home and reclaim his son, Thornton Kimball had been within ten miles of him, lying dead in the bottom of a hole with his skull crushed to pieces by a chunk of smoothed creek-bed rock.
Burton was living through his first morning without the comfort of his cherished childhood illusion. Burton Kimball was an orphan, had always been an orphan, but with the unveiling of that long-skeletonized corpse, his loss and grief was as new as if his father had died yesterday. In Burton Kimball’s heart, that was the truth.
It should have fallen to him, as the closest surviving kin, to plan whatever funeral service Norm Higgins deemed appropriate, but Burton was too emotionally paralyzed. He simply couldn’t cope.
Instead, he turned the whole thorny issue of arrangements over to Linda and fled to his office, where he sat in his chair and hid out.
Other things that should have commanded his attention barely seeped into his consciousness. The fact that Ernie Carpenter had dared question him with regard to Harold Patterson’s murder was driving Linda crazy, but it hardly mattered to Burton.
He was sorry about the death of Harold Patterson, the only “father” he had ever known. But what he was shaken by today was the sudden loss of that second, unknown father. He was amazed by the depth of the grief he felt. How could that old, scarred-over wound hurt so much?
When the phone on his desk rang, Burton jumped as though someone had just lobbed a rock through the window beside his desk. With a suddenly trembling hand, he picked up the receiver.
“Yes?” he said uncertainly, aware of the sudden catch in his throat.
“Sorry to disturb you,” Maxine Smith said softly, “but Rex Rogers is on the phone. He insists on speaking to you personally.”
“Rex Rogers. What does he want?”
“He didn’t say. Do you want me to put him through or take a message?”
“Take a message. I don’t want to talk to any body this morning, especially not Rex Rogers.”
“You want me to hold all your calls?”
