Someday (Sawtooth Mountains Stories Book 2)

by Susan Fanetti

  She made a face. “Those girls don’t count. They were from a bad place.”

  That caught her mother’s attention. “What do you mean, hon?”

  Anya turned big round eyes on Emma. “Kendall said they’re terrists.”

  Logan set his silverware down and leaned in. “You mean terrorists? Honey, no. They’re just little girls.”

  “They had those things on their heads,” Kendall jumped in. “Bobby Orson said that’s how you know when you see a terrorist.”

  “Let’s find something nicer to talk about at dinner.” Morgan demanded with a loud sigh. “Your mother would never have had this at her table.”

  “Bobby Orson is an idiot, Kendall,” Wes replied, ignoring his father-in-law. “And a bully. That thing on their heads don’t mean they’re terrorists. It means they love God, I think. Like your Mama’s cross she wears. Don’t go ‘round spewing filth that came outta that nasty boy’s mouth.”

  “I saw it on the news, Daddy,” Anya said, trying to take her conversation back. “They’re from a war place. Afrastan.”

  “Afghanistan,” Wes corrected. “Baby girl, being from a place where a kind of people are don’t make you that kind of people. There are bad people and good people in every place, and mostwise, they all look the same. Even here in Jasper Ridge”—Anya gasped at that, and Wes put out a soothing hand—“but the thing is to stay close to the good people you know, and then you’re safe. Those girls did a good thing. Robots aren’t for boys or girls, and if you don’t try a thing, you won’t know if you like it. Work on that badge, and you’ll know what you think about robots.”

  Unhappy not to get the kind of support she wanted, Anya stuck her lip out and poked at the Brussels sprouts she didn’t like and was trying to avoid eating. For a while, the family was quiet, focused on their food and, if their minds were in the same place Logan’s was, thinking about the strange, stray ways a person’s worldview got formed.

  Or maybe that was just him, trapped alone in his current alien hellscape of self-reflection and crippling doubt.

  Heath reached for a dinner roll. As he smeared butter on it, he said, “You know that thing that was in the paper Monday, about Denny Whitt?”

  “Heath, hush,” Emma hissed. The sound had a frazzled bluntness. She considered it her duty—and she was right—to take the place their mother had had in the family, and, like their mother, she didn’t like heavy talk at mealtimes. With them just coming off one fraught topic, she was going to shut down any statement that had the slightest chance to be controversial or otherwise disturbing.

  What Heath had said certainly counted. Denny Whitt was the mastermind behind Brandon Black’s murder. He’d contracted a hit on the hapless idiot Black and framed Heath for it, all so he could make a play for Cahill land. They’d discovered the plot, and the way to get Heath clear of the murder charge, because Wes had been nosing around in the case files and seen something Honor’s team hadn’t noted as significant: the amount of gold in the Twisted C’s soil. Honor had taken that tiny wedge and pried the whole case wide open. Now Denny was doing hard prison time.

  And he’d been beaten nearly to death over the weekend. Like Heath, Whitt had been a wealthy, influential man. The case and murder trial had held the state in thrall for weeks, and the finale—in which Whitt had been exposed as the murderer and Heath had been set free—had been dramatic. Whitt’s beating had made the local news and put all that shit from last year back on everybody’s mind.

  “I’m not gonna say more about that,” Heath assured their sister. “But I tried to call Honor, see if I could get some more information about it, and I found out something weird.”

  His little brother now had Logan’s undivided attention. “About Honor? What?”

  “She doesn’t work at Bellamy White anymore. The person I talked to said she’s been gone since April.”

  He’d seen her in May. Logan thought back to that night: he’d picked up on a couple of weird things she’d said about her work, but had never made sense of them. Or of her uncharacteristic anxiety. Had she been fired? That would explain a lot about that night, and why she’d needed him even though she hadn’t. She had been vulnerable, even before some idiot had threatened her. But why the hell would her firm fire her? She was the best defense attorney in the whole state.

  “Huh.” Their father put another slice of meatloaf on his plate. “They’d be crazy to let her go. They say why she wasn’t there?”

  “I asked, but the person I talked to—whoever they gave her phone to, I guess, I didn’t get his name—wouldn’t tell me, or give me another number for her. I called the firm number, but the receptionist gave me the same runaround. I don’t know what happened, but she’s gone.”

  *****

  Logan didn’t even try to ignore that news. Once the house was quiet and everybody had headed back to their own house in the Cahill compound, he sat at the small desk in his room and got online. He’d stupidly deleted her personal contact info from his phone, but it only took him a few minutes to pin her down: ‘Honor Babinot, Attorney at Law’ had a website, and an office of her own. For a few seconds, Logan had thought that to be good news, but then he’d looked up her address and seen that she was nowhere near downtown. She had an office in a decidedly underwhelming area of the Boise Bench.

  Why would she have left the downtown penthouse luxury of Bellamy, White and Cohn for a sleepy strip mall in the ‘burbs? That was a crashing, straight shot down from where she’d been, and she’d just won that big case with the girl who’d killed her father. Another sure loser she’d turned into a winner. It didn’t make sense. There was no way that firm would give her up, and he couldn’t imagine a reason she’d give the firm up. So why in the hell had it happened?

  For about fifteen seconds, he told himself it didn’t matter. Honor had her life, he had his life, and they were both on their own. Whatever had happened to make her leave, or be sent from, BWC, that was her business.

  Yeah, right.

  By the time he turned in that night, he had made a plan.

  That night she’d called him, when he’d gone to ‘rescue’ her, maybe she really had needed him. Maybe she still did.

  Nothing else was different. It was still true that they couldn’t possibly merge their two wildly disparate lives and be happy together. It was still true that Logan didn’t know if he was even capable of love or commitment, and that the evidence suggested a firm no. It was still true that she was better than him in every conceivable way and he had nothing to offer her.

  But maybe he did. Maybe she needed him. Maybe he could ride in and do a little saving after all.

  PART THREE

  Chapter Nine

  The front door of the office rattled, and Honor’s fingers twitched over the keyboard as adrenaline flared through her body. She paused and stared at the open door leading from her private office to the front room. Then she heard the unmistakable scratch and jingle of keys and the sharp click of the lock turning—it was Debbie.

  She glanced at the time at the top of her screen. Shit, it was ten to nine. She had to get moving.

  A month after she’d launched this little business, Honor was just beginning to maybe believe she could make it work. As she settled in and became more familiar with the area, she understood that it wasn’t as downtrodden as it had seemed at first, when she’d stepped from the highest floors of one of the most exclusive business addresses in Boise into a vacant, neglected strip-mall rental. It was, overall, a sturdy working class neighborhood.

  Her office was small, but she and Debbie had made it look nice—they’d cancelled or returned much of the office furniture she’d ordered online in a panic during the first blush of her planning, and instead they’d spent a couple weekends scouring estate sales and thrift shops. Rather than personality-free pressed wood and vinyl, they had comfortable, eclectic pieces that made the front space look intentional and warm—and they hadn’t spent more money to do it. Her own office was furnished from her ho
me office, with a couple of more practical additions. From Wisconsin, her artist brother had shipped a few of his paintings for the walls.

  They’d made themselves a pretty nice place to come to work every day.

  And she was beginning to get clients. Not the kind of clients she’d had before, but, in some ways, she liked these people better. Being a criminal defense attorney was, for her at least, an exercise in moral relativism. Though there were clients and cases she actively avoided—she had never taken a case to defend someone accused of rape or any sexual violence, and she couldn’t imagine doing so unless she were absolutely convinced of the defendant’s innocence—she defended people who had, in fact, done terrible things, and she’d done so with a clear conscience, even when she’d won cases in which she was sure her client was guilty. Her moral conviction rested on the cause of justice.

  The system only worked if it was balanced. Of course it was not, in fact the scales tipped strongly toward power, but the only hope they had, as a civil society, was for people who believed in justice to do all they could to weight the scales toward balance. ‘Presumed innocent until proven guilty’ was a just premise. The entitlement of every accused to a vigorous defense upheld that premise. Honor saw her role there. She stood on the fulcrum of the scales.

  At Bellamy White, she’d defended a lot of very wealthy, very powerful people, and not infrequently had wondered if she was becoming part of the problem. That was one reason she’d done so much pro bono work: to balance her own scales.

  But honestly, she really enjoyed the challenge of finding a way to win a case she should not win. When she heard people moan about defendants ‘getting off on a technicality,’ she almost always took up that argument—getting off on a technicality meant that the prosecution, or law enforcement, had not done their job. No one should be held to a higher standard than the people whose responsibility it was to prove someone’s guilt. If they did it wrong, then it was worth a guilty person to going free to ensure that the technicalities protected innocent people from losing their freedom. The ‘technicalities’ were the checks on institutional power. A defendant ‘getting off on a technicality’ meant that the system was working, not that it was broken. The breach of that ‘technicality’ was the flaw.

  Here at her own little firm, she wasn’t a high-powered defense attorney. She’d had to branch out into general lawyering—helping people with traffic tickets and divorces and arguments with their neighbors—but the people she helped really needed her. They couldn’t pay much, and she was already starting to feel that, but the work itself was more interesting than she’d expected. Even working out a fence line dispute had its mystery to solve, and there was worthiness in being able to offer her expertise to people who’d otherwise be swallowed up by bigger fish.

  “Hey, boss,” Debbie called. There was something off in her tone. “You okay?”

  “I’m good. I came in early to prep the depo. Are you?”

  Her assistant appeared in the doorway. She held a large floral arrangement in a white plastic basket. It reminded Honor of a funeral arrangement.

  “What on earth is that?” She smiled as she asked, but Debbie didn’t smile back.

  Honor felt that kick of adrenaline again, and she closed her laptop. One thing about this tiny practice: she and Debbie were vulnerable. And they had cause to be worried about that. Honor in particular.

  “It was sitting on the sidewalk outside the door. There’s a card. It wasn’t in an envelope.” She carried the arrangement into the room, up to Honor’s desk, and held out the card.

  Honor didn’t take it. “It’s from him, isn’t it?” Tyler. Her own personal stalker. Since that shitty night about a month earlier, he’d come at her seven—now eight—times. Thus far, he’d been nothing like as threatening as that first night, but his very presence was a threat now.

  She stared at the flowers, half expecting him to somehow jump out of them.

  “I think so.” Debbie pushed the card toward her, and Honor finally took it from her fingers.

  I WILL WAIT. Written in black ink, all caps, each word underlined. No signature, but Honor didn’t need it.

  “I’ll call the cops,” Debbie offered.

  Honor had a temporary restraining order in place while Tyler was out on bail, but TROs were notoriously ineffective for a reason. This was the third time Tyler had broken it. The cops had talked to him both times before and apparently offered stern warnings, including the threat to have his bail revoked. But this, delivered to her work address, with no name on the card? Determining it was him with enough evidence to provide cause to confront him would take more work than the Boise police had time for.

  “I’ll call. They won’t do anything, but I want it at least recorded.” For when he did something worse and finally hurt her.

  Honor had some experience with people getting into her personal space and making threats, and though she understood the danger, she tried to keep some equilibrium about it—to be smart and cautious, but not let it take over her life. Three times in Boise before this year, Honor had had trouble—twice from victims of crimes for which she’d successfully defended the accused, and once from a client who’d been convicted. The first two had been nuisances more than anything else, but the latter had scared her badly and caused real hurt.

  A member of one of the few well established gangs in Boise, the OVers—who pronounced their name ‘oh-five-ers’ after the last two digits of the zip code in Caldwell, the suburban town in which they were based—had gotten fifteen years on a murder charge. That had been a win in Honor’s mind; the guy had absolutely done it, and there was security video of him committing the crime, but Honor had gotten the jury down to voluntary manslaughter instead—saving him from Death Row. But her client had been deeply unhappy nonetheless and had sent the gang to hurt her.

  They’d missed their mark, and beaten her neighbor instead, nearly killing her. After that, against the advice of just about everyone, Honor had gone to Kuna and found a way to talk her client down. It was that event that had prompted her to buy her apartment and put some real security between her private life and the people with whom her job brought her in contact.

  And still, Tyler had managed to get to her door.

  Debbie took the card from her and stuck it back in the plastic holder. “You have to get downtown. I’ll call.”

  “You’re right. Okay, thanks.” She nodded toward the stalker flowers. “Take a photo of that, and when they cops tell you they’re not interested in it, throw it out.”

  “The very second I can. And be careful while you’re out. Keep your eyes peeled. And I wish you’d get a gun.”

  “I don’t have time to get training. If I end up in a situation where I feel like I need to use it, I’m more likely to shoot myself or some poor bystander than him. No thank you.”

  Debbie sucked her teeth. “Well, I’ve got mine, and I’m ready to use it if I need to. I don’t like you going out on your own while this guy is loose.”

  “He’s going to stay loose, Debbie. Until he does something more than lurk and beg, there’s not much the cops can do.”

  “You don’t think it has to do with you? Cops aren’t exactly running your fan club, after all.”

  Defense attorneys and police officers rarely made good friends. Though they were both working in the same system, usually they were adversaries. Sometimes, that came off more like enemies. Especially when she won a case because the cops didn’t do their job.

  But Honor wasn’t as powerful an adversary anymore. Sitting here on the Bench, helping delivery drivers get speeding tickets off their records, she didn’t warrant cops’ suspicion so much.

  Then again, they had long memories.

  “I don’t think so. I know this drill. They can’t get in his face for something we think he did. Since that first night, even when he gets closer than he’s allowed, he’s been creepy more than anything else. His trial comes up next month, and we’ll have more evidence against him. Maybe he�
�ll get even get jail time if he keeps this up. We’ll make a record and move on with the day.” She stood and began to pack up her things. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Be careful,” Debbie said again.

  Though she actually was nervous when she was out on her own, for Debbie, she smiled and rolled her eyes. “Yes, Mom. I promise.”

  *****

  The deposition was for a personal injury case—she was deposing a doctor who’d run a stop sign and T-boned her client’s car. Both her client’s children had been in the back seat; one of them, an eight-year-old, was still in the hospital, with a broken back.

  The doctor was a client of Bellamy White. Not her client, but known to her. As she was to him. Sitting in a small conference room in the firm she’d left only weeks earlier, Honor had remained calm as the doctor managed to get several sidelong remarks about her decline in circumstances into the record. His attorney, an associate at BWC and her former colleague, had, thankfully, not tried to use that as leverage too overtly.

  Which was a good move. Smugness brought out her inner shark. She left that three-hour session in hell with a thirst for doctor blood. If his attorney had also been a jerk she might have actually fed on them both.

  Instead, she’d focused her need to feed on questioning the doctor until sweat ran down his temples and soaked his five-hundred-dollar haircut. There was some real satisfaction in sitting in the midst of what was now enemy territory, surrounded by opulence she’d once basked in, and making that rich bastard perspire.

  But on the drive back to the Bench, Honor turned Florence + the Machine up until the doors rattled, and, while Florence exhorted her to shake it out, she chanted the words that had become a mantra: My choice, my choice, my choice.