“Well, don’t you worry about that. It doesn’t do anybody any good if you’re not one hundred percent certain.”
She looked at him, her heart suddenly thudding. “Like Dad was?” she said.
Trevor sat watching her. “How do you know he wasn’t certain?”
“Because he didn’t find evidence. Hard evidence. He found some boy with scratches on his face.”
“Yes,” said the lawyer. “But how do you know that boy didn’t say something to your father? Didn’t admit to it?”
“At gunpoint?”
Trevor almost smiled. Then he looked off toward a bookshelf that ran floor to ceiling, each shelf jammed tight with law books.
“A professor of mine used to say Justice is blind,” he said, “but she also can’t see worth a shit.” He turned back to her. Adjusted his glasses again.
“I guess I’m not sure what that means,” she said.
“It means,” he began, and stopped. Looking at her more keenly. “It means your dad loved nothing more in this world than you, Audrey. And he knew as well as anyone how the system works, and how it doesn’t work. And the clock was ticking, as you know. The clock was ticking.” He shook his head. “I believe he believed he was doing the best thing he could do as a man. As a father. And in my opinion that’s the only thing you need to remember about that. All right?”
She watched him. Then she nodded. “All right.”
“Good,” he said. “Now let’s get to what you came here for.”
HE READ IT aloud, glancing up to meet her eye from time to time, and when he was finished he folded his hands on top of it and sat looking at her.
She didn’t know what she was supposed to say, or do.
“I don’t think he had any savings,” she said. “I think he used everything to pay the hospital bills.”
“Yes, I suspect you’re right about that.”
“And there’s about ten unopened letters from the bank at home. I think about the mortgage.”
Trevor looked down at his desk and nodded. “There’s just nothing like illness to take everything a man’s got right out from under him. Illness and injury. No one is as ready for it as they think they are, and most aren’t even close to ready.” He looked up again. “Be that as it may, and however things shake out financially, Audrey, clearly nothing was more important to him than you finishing college and getting your degree.”
She nodded.
“And what about that boy,” she said.
“What boy?”
“The one he went down there and shot.”
“What about him?”
“Do you think he could go after the house, or anything like that?”
“You mean as compensation for damages?”
“Yes.”
“Possibly. I’m no expert in Iowa law, but I suppose he could get a judgment down there which could result in a lien against the property.”
“A lien?”
“Yes. Meaning, the amount of the damages would be due at the sale of the house.”
Audrey was silent.
“But I don’t think you need to worry about that, Audrey. He’d have to be one dumb buckaroo to go anywhere near a court of law, under the circumstances.”
“Or innocent.”
The lawyer smiled but said nothing.
She turned her father’s watch on her wrist until the crystal was faceup—its tick-tick sound now synced with the movements of its second hand—but when she let go it all slipped away again in a silvery, top-heavy slump. She’d already taken up too much of the lawyer’s time.
“Can I ask you one more thing?” she said.
“Of course.”
“I was just wondering—” she began. Then began again: “I was just wondering if you were involved with a case of his, from ten years ago.”
Trevor adjusted his glasses. “The Holly Burke case?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you mean professionally, as a lawyer?”
“Yes, sir.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“And he didn’t talk to you about it—my dad?”
“Not that I remember. A lot of people talked about it—everybody talked about it. But not your dad.” Trevor waited. “Why do you ask?”
That yellow hair, that long fine girl’s hair streaming in the fast water, just hanging in the light as Caroline swam against the current, as she fought to get back to the car, back to Audrey…
“Audrey?” said the lawyer, and she looked at him. She shook her head.
Through the door, or the walls, a phone began to chirp and then it stopped chirping and she could hear the woman, the secretary, speaking.
Audrey looked again at the photograph on the wall.
“How are the twins doing?” she said, and he turned to look at the photograph too.
“Costing me a fortune but doing great.” Smiling when he turned back to her, the smile of a father. He got to his feet. “I’ll walk you out,” he said.
29
HE’D DAMN NEAR missed it—not only the funeral but the news itself, all of it. He hadn’t watched the evening news in years, but for some reason, that Saturday—maybe it was those two girls, the Sutter girl and her friend; maybe there’d been some new development—he’d turned it on, and boom, there it was, the top story: Local ex-sheriff Tom Sutter dead at the age of fifty-one.
Son of a bitch.
He’d thought to call out to someone to come look at this but there was no one to call out to.
Three days later—just six days since he’d talked to Sutter outside the hospital in Rochester—Gordon got out his suit and he worked his tie into a knot at his throat and he wiped the dust from his shoes and he drove the van with its new heater core out to the funeral home and slipped in a few minutes late and took a seat at the back.
Old dusty church smell in the overheated room. Smell of bodies giving off heat, perfume, sweat. Thick smell of flowers. He saw profiles he recognized, backs of heads. Ladies sniffling into tissues. He did not expect to see Rachel Young in the crowd, or her son, and he didn’t.
The coffin was white oak with brass handles, flowers on the curve of the lid. The blown-up photo on the easel was his campaign picture from eight years back, when he’d had to run to keep his job. Before he lost all that weight.
Deputies and cops and sheriffs sat in their uniforms, Ed Moran among them, a sheriff down in Iowa now, and Wayne Halsey, Sutter’s replacement up here. Halsey taking the podium now to tell a quick story, with the mic pushed aside because he didn’t need a mic, and though the story had some laughs built into it, by the end Halsey had to wrap up and step away from the podium before his voice let him down. He was followed by Sutter’s older brother, John, a talky guy with a tanned face, telling about when they were boys, then young men, then men… and when he finally went back to his seat in the front row Gordon saw what he guessed was the back of the girl’s head. Dark, glossy hair combed down straight. More family seated to either side of her. Grandparents, maybe. He expected the girl to get up and talk but she didn’t. Finally the director walked to the podium and asked for the pallbearers to meet him at the side of the building.
Gordon sat in the van until the last of the cars and trucks and cruisers had filed out behind the hearse and then he pulled out of the lot and brought up the rear at a good distance, and when they reached the grounds he parked on the shoulder with a few other cars. The mourners ahead of him all took the path to the right but he turned left, following a path that had not been cleared, and when he reached the intersection of a third path he swept the snow from the iron bench there and sat and watched from that distance as the mourners gathered under the blue canopy, some taking chairs, the rest standing.