. . .
By the end of June, the soft-spoken man from Spokane had blended neatly into the fabric of Port Hancock society. After all, what was one more Indian to the whites, and another brother to the tribes? He was unassuming, minded his own business, and wasn’t out looking for trouble.
Word got around quickly, and people learned who he was and why he was there. But it didn’t matter. Many may not have liked that Lily was representing Lightfoot, but most of them liked Lily, and after they’d heard about the threats and the incidents with the red Silverado, they were glad she had protection and wished her no harm.
When he wasn’t shadowing Lily around, Dancer was making the acquaintance of all kinds of people in the community, not just those in Old Town, and even New town, but those around the county, as well.
“Just sizing up the enemy,” he told Lily. “How many. How diverse. How determined.”
“When do you sleep?” she inquired.
He laughed at that. “Learned a long time ago that four hours of good sleep a night is a lot better than eight hours of tossing and turning,” he told her.
Grace Pelletier put out the word that anyone messing with Dancer would answer to her, and he assured the local police that he was not there to step on any toes, or do anyone’s job for him. He was, he said, here for the sole purpose of seeing to it that Lily Burns made it to trial. To that end, he took her to and from work each day, escorted her wherever else she had to go, and kept his eyes and ears open in between. Once or twice a week, he dined with Lily and her father at their Morgan Hill home. The rest of the time, he partook of Miss Polly’s fare, which was quite good, and was included in the price of his room.
It didn’t take him long to realize that there really were two separate cities in Port Hancock, but they had little to do with geography. There was the one that waited impatiently for the Indian to have his day in court and be executed for his crime, and there was the one that believed Jason Lightfoot was being railroaded, and hoped against hope that truth would prevail.
Some of the latter hung out at The Last Call Bar & Grill down at the lower end of Broad Street. And there, John Dancer was a favorite.
Four
The school year ended the week after Memorial Day, as it always did, and now it was coming up on Father’s Day. As had become a tradition over the years, Lily’s sisters and their families, the Cahills from Portland and the Ingrams from Denver, had descended on the Morgan Hill house for the weekend, taking over the entire third floor.
Knowing that she would be spending most of her time at home for the next several days, Lily had given her bodyguard the weekend off.
“You have a bodyguard?” her eldest sister Janet Cahill inquired, when she overheard her father telling Diana that Dancer had gone home to Spokane and would, therefore, not be joining them for dinner on Sunday.
“Don’t even go there,” Lily told her.
“Did you just say Lily has a bodyguard?” her middle sister, Karen Ingram, questioned.
“What’s a body god?” seven-year-old Carly Ingram asked.
“It’s someone who guards you and keeps you safe,” her twelve-year-old brother Cody explained.
“But why would you have to have your body guarded, Aunt Lily?” nine-year-old Jack Cahill wanted to know.
“Your body has a god?” exclaimed Jimmy, his wide-eyed six-year-old brother.
“See what you started?” Lily said, making a face at Janet.
“It’s nothing, kids,” Janet told them. “Your aunt’s gotten herself involved in a difficult case at work right now, and she just needs someone to help her out for a while.”
That seemed to satisfy everyone but the twelve-year-old. “If you need protecting, Aunt Lily,” Cody whispered, “I can take care of you.”
Lily gave him a hug. “I have a client who isn’t very well liked in town,” she explained, “and that sort of thing can sometimes rub off on the people who are trying to help him.”
The boy nodded. “I stuck up for a kid in my class last year because some of the other kids didn’t like him,” he told her. “So they started to tease me.”
“What did you do?” Lily asked.
“I told them only sissies needed to tease other kids,” Cody confided. “Then I hung diapers on their lockers.”
Lily gave him a hug. “Cody,” she told him, “when you grow up, if you want to come live here in Port Hancock, I promise I’ll make you my Number One Bodyguard.”
“You better watch out, Aunt Lily,” the boy said, grinning broadly. “I just might do that.”
. . .
Dinner around the big mahogany table in the grand dining room was the same happy, noisy affair it had been when Lily was a child growing up in this house. She watched her father, smiling and laughing and chatting with his children and grandchildren, and realized, to her surprise, that she was also enjoying the moment. And the surprise was not just in realizing how much Carson Burns missed having his family around, but how much she did, too.
Becoming a lawyer had always been first and foremost on her mind, from the time she was a lot younger even than Cody. It wasn’t that she didn’t intend to marry and have a family one day -- it was that establishing her career had been the more pressing matter at hand. But now that college and law school were behind her, and her practice was firmly established, and in the fun-filled presence of her sisters and their husbands and their kids, Lily wondered if she had waited too long.
There had been boys in high school that she had liked more than just as friends – Jeff Nordlund, for one,
