He gave a shake of his head like he could not believe I was thinking either of those things.
“How long did I spend,” I asked, “thinking everything was fine with you? And where did that get us?”
He shoved his laptop over to me and folded his arms across his chest.
I opened it and typed his password—sharing it with me was part of our deal—and the website he’d been on appeared. It was some veterinarian’s page about how to tell if your dog has arthritis. The other tabs were home remedies for arthritic dogs and how to make your pup more comfortable.
I felt like such a heel.
He took the laptop back without a word, opened it up, and hunched over it. It reminded me of how as a kid he’d made forts around his breakfast bowl with cereal boxes.
“Noah, I’m sorry,” I said. “Jackson’s in trouble, and it’s making me worry about both of you.”
“Worrying’s one thing,” he said, tapping away, not looking at me. “Big Brother’s another. I ain’t going to live under a microscope. Either you start trusting me or I got to move out.”
That made all the fight go out of me. I tried to think of a way to ask him not to, but the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth. Before I could get them to, Squatter tottered into the room. I picked him up and set him on my lap.
Noah said, still not looking at me, “That site said to massage his hips.”
It felt like a ridiculous thing to do, but I gave it a try. Squatter seemed happy about it.
After a while, Noah said, “What’ll happen if Jackson gets arrested? You’ll help him, right?”
I still didn’t have it in me to explain the financials. We’d lost our house in Charleston, lost just about everything, and helping his friend would mean struggling through probably another year before I could even begin trying to put the fires out.
Instead I stuck with the facts. “I just came from the police station,” I told him. “I was looking into it.”
He glanced at me, gave me a nod, and looked back at his screen.
That glance stuck with me. It’d been a long time since I’d seen any kind of approval in his eyes.
7
Thursday, June 20, Evening
The next day, with Roy’s work done by lunch, I tried to read up on marketing my law practice. Jackson’s predicament kept me from concentrating, so I called a friend in Charleston to see what he could tell me about getting a public defender and whether he knew anything about the PDs down in my county. I’d hoped to be able to give Mazie and Terri some intel on that, but what I learned wasn’t exactly encouraging.
I decided to leave early and stop by the trailer park Karl’s brothers lived at to see if I could find out what they’d told the police. It was on the other side of the same marsh Mazie’s place looked over. As I drove past the beat-up wooden sign reading “Sheep’s Lodge”—for reasons lost to time, that’s what this park was called—I had flashbacks to drunken high-school parties I’d attended here. The place did not look to have come up in the world since then.
An older woman using a walker was shuffling down the side of the only paved road. I pulled alongside to ask her if she could remind me where the Warton brothers lived.
She glared at me. “Who’s asking?” A stray breeze tossed her gray hair, and I noticed, above her right ear, a single pink curler that she seemed to have forgotten.
“Uh, it’s Leland Munroe, ma’am,” I said. “Pleased to meet you. I seem to recall they’re off to the left up there, but I can’t remember which street exactly and didn’t want to intrude.”
My politeness, and maybe also the beater I was driving, seemed to convince her I wasn’t a process server or the tax man or whoever she wanted to keep out. She pointed the way.
When I turned up the third dirt road to the left, I spotted Tim Warton in a lawn chair nursing what looked like a forty-ounce bottle of beer. He had on a dirty white tank top. His brother Pat was setting on the top step of their porch. When I got out and slammed my car door, Pat hauled himself to his feet and went inside without a word. Tim just took another draw on his beer.
As I trudged across the gravel between me and him, Tim pulled a phone out of the pocket of his shorts and held it up. “I’m Livebookin’ you!” he called out. “You’re on camera, and I know my rights!”
“Yessir,” I said. “Afternoon, Mr. Warton. I ain’t here to interfere with your rights whatsoever.”
“You law enforcement?”
“No, sir. Name’s Leland Munroe. I’m a local attorney. I heard about your brother Karl, and it’s a damn shame. My condolences.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. I waited for the flash of brotherly grief across his face, but none appeared. When he took another drink and then shifted to set the bottle on the ground, I noticed he wasn’t sitting in a lawn chair after all. It was wood, and handsomely carved. I thought I saw a mermaid twining around one of the rails behind him.
He settled back against the mermaid and asked, looking downright cheerful, “You think we got somebody we could sue? You one of them lawyers that don’t charge nothing unless you win, like on the TV?”
“Well, sir,” I said, “there’s cases where I can do a contingency, yes. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. By the way, that’s a mighty unusual chair you got there. I don’t believe I ever seen one like it.”
“Made it myself. Carved every detail.” He looked proud, and rightly so.
I gave a low whistle and said,
