“Silverbacks,” she muttered.
“Right. I knew it was a term for male gorillas. A law firm full of silverbacks, where large, aging males would call the shots, and you would be the most junior member of the firm. People would try to call you Amy. You said that, as a beginner in a big law firm you’d never get to do anything but scut work, and that you’d probably choke to death on your own rage.”
A. P. Hill nodded. “I know. I still feel that way.”
“Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven, you said.”
She looked around the shabby office and scowled. “I didn’t mean it quite so literally.”
“Well, one thing you can say for this place: it doesn’t intimidate the clients.”
“No. It probably makes the prospect of prison seem less awful, too.”
“Unpretentious. That’s us.”
“I wish we had something to be pretentious about! Bill, we have to get out of here. I know that this place was all we could afford when we graduated, but we’re doing better now, and we ought to be representing a better class of clients. We’ll never get them if we stay here. I think it’s time we looked for more suitable quarters.”
“Sure. Fine. Whatever,” Bill said cheerfully. “Just find the place, and tell me when to start packing. I can be ready on a day’s notice. Less, even. I kept the cardboard box in the coat closet.”
“That’s just it. I don’t have time to look for property. I’m in court in Richmond beginning this week, remember? I’m always up to my neck in case work. I thought maybe you could go.”
Bill turned to stare at his partner. “You want me to buy a building? Me? Didn’t I find this place?”
“Well … talk to a Realtor. See what’s out there.”
“What did you have in mind?”
“Tara.” Edith Creech, their legal secretary, stood in the doorway, cordless phone in hand. “If you want pretentious, you ought to buy one of those run-down old mansions and fix it up. It would look great to clients. It would give them the impression of an old, established firm.”
“Sounds expensive,” said Bill.
“Well, if you get a big enough place, you could convert the upstairs rooms into apartments for yourselves. That way you could channel your rent money into an investment in the business. It would probably be cheaper anyway.”
A. P. Hill nodded. “That might work. We’d pay more for office rent, but we’d save money on housing. It would be nice to have a kitchen on the premises. We could save a fortune on lunches. And an exercise room! We’d have to look into the tax implications, of course.…”
Bill looked at Edith with interest. “Are you holding the telephone for any particular reason?”
She gasped. “Lord, I completely forgot! Long-distance call for A. P. Hill. Someone called Purdue.”
A. P. Hill looked puzzled and held out her hand for the phone. “It can’t be her. What can she want? I’ll be in my office,” she murmured and hurried away.
Edith looked at Bill. “She doesn’t usually get flustered. What was that about?”
Bill sighed. “Voice from the past.” He reached for his jacket. “An old friend from law school. At least I think they were friends. It’s hard to tell. They had a rivalry going that gave the rest of us headaches.”
“A school rivalry, huh? Who won?”
“Too close to call. They both graduated in the top five. A guy named Anthony Chan finished ahead of them, but they didn’t seem to care about that. They were out to beat each other. It was personal. If Purdue is calling to say that she’s been elected governor of Tennessee or something, it could get dicey around here. Things may start bouncing off walls. And if she’s coming to visit …” He looked around the office, picturing a visitor’s reaction to their less-than-luxurious premises. “We have to impress her, or life won’t be worth living in Powell’s vicinity. I think it’s Realtor time.”
“Realtor? Already?” Edith blinked. Normally Bill took longer than that to decide which doughnut he wanted. “Don’t you want to read the newspaper ads? Shouldn’t there be more discussion about what sort of place you’re looking for?”
“Powell may be a while on the phone. And I know what she’s like after a session with Purdue. I think I’ll get out of here. Tell her where I’ve gone.”
“Right. You’re going to buy an office.”
“I guess. I’m going to do some serious looking, anyhow. See what’s available. Do you really think we ought to get a big house for an office and live in the upstairs?”
Edith shrugged. “That’s what the Queen of England does.”
A. P. Hill sat down in her leather desk chair and closed her eyes, wondering when she had lost control of the day. It could be some other Purdue, though. Yeah. Sure. Maybe she’d heard about the rats’ nest office and was calling to sneer. Mustering calm, she said, “Powell Hill speaking.”
“So it is,” cackled the voice on the other end of the line. “Pollyanna of the Virginia Bar. How’s it going, kiddo? Still practicing law in Mayberry with your St. Bernard puppy?”
“Bill and I are doing fine, Purdue,” said A. P. Hill evenly. “Thank you so much for asking.” She knew that the other high fliers in law school had regarded her partnership with Bill MacPherson as an act of charity, but she wouldn’t stand to have him criticized. He might lack ambition—or ruthlessness—but he had his good points, too. He was honest, loyal, hardworking, and kind. Maybe he trusted people more than was wise, but A. P. Hill thought that she might be bitter and cynical enough for both of them. After a lifetime of driving ambition, being partners with Bill MacPherson was … peaceful. She could have done worse.
P. J. Purdue had been one of the brightest students in their class, but she had a wild streak that boded ill for the sober profession of law. She could be recklessly brilliant, but she hated the methodical, painstaking preparation and research required for the practice of law. Still, Purdue’s grades had been two-hundredths of a point higher than A. P. Hill’s. She was surprised to find that after all this time the fact still rankled. “How are you, Purdue?” she said, trying to sound briskly cheerful. “Still in criminal law?”
The laugh again. “You could say that. Are you being tactful, or what? Tell me: How many of our old buddies have called you lately to talk about me?”
“Called about you?” A. P. Hill couldn’t keep the bewilderment out of her voice. “P. J., I haven’t heard from you—or about you—in ages. What’s going on?”
A pause. “You mean you really don’t know?”
“Know what?”
The voice on the other end of the line chuckled softly. “Stay tuned. News may travel slowly in Virginia, but I’m sure it’ll filter through the time warp eventually. We may even make a television news channel. Stay tuned.”
“P. J., what—”
“I just wanted to tell you this, kiddo. This is more fun than practicing law. Y’hear? A lot more fun.”
“What—” But before she could frame a question, A. P. Hill heard the click of a telephone receiver being replaced. P. J. Purdue had vanished again.
She was still sitting there with the phone in her hand when Edith came in to see if she had finished talking.
“Runs the batteries down if you leave it off the hook too long,” Edith said, taking the cordless phone back to her desk. “Is anything the matter? You look like somebody hit you over the head with a parking meter.”
A. P. Hill nodded slowly. “Purdue does that to people.”
“Yeah, I heard she was an old friend of yours.”
“Something like that. I wonder why she called me?”
Edith’s eyebrows rose. “Well … didn’t she tell you?”
A. P. Hill shrugged. “Oh, no. Purdue never does things the easy way. She’s going to make me find out.”
The realty company was located in a large old house, which had evidently been a private home, until rezoning and urban sprawl had changed the neighborhood to a collection of car lots and fast-food places. The h
ouse still sat in its oak-shaded lawn, but the backyard was now a parking lot, and the interior of the house had been carved up into a dozen tiny offices.
Although the parking lot was nearly empty, Bill MacPherson still had trouble deciding where to put his car. All the spots seemed to be allocated for the Realtors themselves: Diamond Realtor of the Year, Agent of the Month, Gold Key Lister (whatever that was), and Top Seller—Commercial. He didn’t see any spaces marked CUSTOMER, so he parked against the split-rail fence at the far end of the gravel lot and walked twenty yards or so to the door.
Bill had hoped the walk would give him time to formulate some sort of opening speech about what he was looking for, but nothing sprang readily to mind, so when the door was opened by a pretty young woman in a red blazer, he blurted out, “I’m looking for a house. Are you a Realtor? Have you ever seen Gone With the Wind?”
The woman hesitated for less than a heartbeat, long enough to size up the nice-looking young man in the well-cut jacket and the power tie. Then she said, “I’ll get the keys. We can talk on the way.”
It’s like being back in college, thought Elizabeth MacPherson as she lugged her suitcase down the tiled hallway, following the white-coated attendant who would lead her to room 305, her home for the next month. She took a deep breath and studied her surroundings. Just like college. Same dorm smell, same lighting, same feeling of apprehension. Only here, instead of encountering fellow students, you were going to meet crazy people. That turned out to be true of college, too, of course. At least here they were up front about it.
Elizabeth was pleased to find that she was nervous—the sensation of feeling something was a novelty after weeks of numbness. Then she remembered why she had come: an image of Cameron filled her mind, and she pushed it away again. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. The feelings were gone. All of them.
“You shouldn’t have any trouble settling in,” the attendant told her. He was a jovial-looking fellow with a round face and lively eyes. “You’ll be in a two-person room, but you’re the only occupant at the moment. Your hallmates can show you the ropes, though. Laundry procedure, where the drink machine is, stuff like that.”
“I don’t feel like socializing,” said Elizabeth. “I’d rather be left alone.”
He nodded cheerfully. “Dr. Freya thought you might. She said to tell you: ‘No way.’ You’ll be getting a roommate in a day or so.”
“But I’m a voluntary patient. I’m here for depression.”
“Okay.” His tone suggested that it was all the same to him. He would believe anything a patient cared to tell him. If she had said she was a Martian exchange student, his response would have been the same.
“You’re not going to put me in with a crazy person, are you?”
There was a long pause in which Elizabeth could imagine sarcastic answers being framed and then discarded. Finally he said, “We don’t have dangerous patients here. That we know of, anyhow. Just nonviolent types. You’ll be fine.”
Elizabeth thought about arguing the point. She could call Dr. Freya and plead her case for privacy, but all that would take energy, and an amount of interest in her own immediate future that she could not quite muster. That’s why she was here, wasn’t it?
Her escort pushed open the door. “Nobody here yet. Your neighbors are probably in the TV lounge. Well, make yourself at home. If you need anything, there’s always folks around.”
Elizabeth nodded and trudged inside, slinging her suitcase on the twin bed nearest the door. She gave the attendant a halfhearted wave as the door swung shut behind him. She inspected the room and found that, instead of the prisonlike surroundings she was expecting, which would have suited her mood of despair, she was trapped in one of those back-in-college dreams that always end with a panic attack as you try to take the final exam in a course you had never attended. In Elizabeth’s panic dream the quiz was always in trigonometry. She wondered if real trigonometry exams looked anything like the one in her dreams. If she actually took a course in trig some day, would the nightmare go away, or would the exam simply change to … say … Sanskrit?
The room was the standard setting for the back-to-college nightmare. There was the tile floor, matching twin beds with identical brown cotton bedspreads, chests of drawers built into the wall, sliding-door closets, two wooden study desks with an old straight-backed chair drawn up to each one, and one long window in a beige cinder-block wall. The view was of green lawn and shade trees. Just like college. Only this time she was majoring in grief.
At least she would have a few minutes of solitude before more medical personnel appeared. She opened her suitcase to put her clothes away. It was filled with casual clothes in muted browns and navy (what did a newly widowed woman pack when she was being committed?), and there on the top of the pile, in a leather case the size of a playing card, was a picture of Cameron Dawson on the deck of the boat, smiling into the camera, with his back to the sea and beyond it the cliffs of Scotland. Elizabeth picked up the photograph and looked at it for only a moment before she stuffed it into the top drawer under a pile of underwear. Why did the photo have to show the sea? She couldn’t bear to look at it. No use dwelling on it, she told herself. What was the point of trying to come to terms with bereavement if you were just going to wallow in memories. Best to put it away.
Elizabeth MacPherson sat down on the bed and wondered what she was going to do with the rest of her life.
The house-hunting expedition had moved at such a pace that Bill MacPherson had forgotten to be nervous. The pretty young real estate agent, whose name was Holly Milton, had bundled him into her car before he’d had a chance to say much more than his name, and now they were speeding through downtown Danville, apparently en route to Tara. Given a chance to study her as she drove, Bill decided that she was one of those society types who was doing real estate more or less as a hobby. He always had the feeling when he spoke to members of the southern aristocracy that they were communicating in some sort of code. On first meeting him, society types would be all gush and grins, but then after no more than ten minutes’ conversation, a marked civility would creep into their manner, the subtlest shading of distance that said, “You’re nice, but you’re not one of us, are you?” The difference in attitude was so slight that he would be hard-pressed to describe it to anyone for fear of being laughed to scorn, but he knew it when he saw it. It had just happened again. Bill wished he knew what the password was—not that he wanted to be “one of them,” but just so he didn’t have to wonder about it any more. Anyhow, Holly was being perfectly friendly, and if she realized that he could think of nothing to say to her, she gave no sign.
Holly seemed to know half the lawyers in town, although she had a unique way of classifying them: not as criminal or corporate, or prosecution vs. defense, but town house or subdivision, farm or condo.
“Now I wouldn’t have picked you as a Tara type,” she was saying as she sailed through the second yellow stoplight in a row. “You know—antiques, gardening, five-year subscription to Colonial Homes. Chinese import porcelain in a stripped French pine cabinet. I wouldn’t have guessed that at all.”
Bill’s idea of gardening was picking the dead leaves off his Christmas poinsettia until around Groundhog Day, when it finally succumbed to neglect. The only thing he owned that might be considered antique was unfortunately organic and lay forgotten in a plastic container in his refrigerator. He decided not to share these facts with the Realtor for fear of discovering what sort of house she would envision for him.
“You’re right,” he said. “I’m not into colonial anything or gardening techniques. I couldn’t decorate a shoe box. It’s my partner, really. My law partner,” he amended, correctly interpreting the look on the young woman’s face. “She thinks it would be good for our … our corporate image to have a picturesque old mansion for the law practice. And we thought we could live upstairs. A good investment, you know. Probably loads of tax benefits.”
“Mmm,” said Holly Milton
, peering at him over the top of her sunglasses. “So this was your partner’s idea, but she sent you out to look at houses?”
“She’s in court this week. She stays busy, and I have some free time for the next day or so, so she thought that I could go out and see what’s on the market. I can make recommendations. Well, anyhow, I can take photocopies of property ads back to her.”
Holly Milton smiled. “You certainly picked the right day to go house hunting! A purchase agreement fell through, which put a great house back on the market as of this morning. I’ll make it easy for you. This is the perfect house. It’s just what you need for a law practice. You’ll have to see it to believe it. It’s just outside the city limits, so you’ll save a bit on property taxes, and it is just beautiful. Or it will be—with some restoration work. Let me tell you about it.…” Holly Milton spent the rest of the drive reeling off statistics of square footage, number of bathrooms, fireplace locations, and other amenities calculated to make prospective buyers salivate.
“And you could have note cards printed up with an artist’s rendering of the house on the front. That would set such a tone for your firm. And corporate Christmas cards! A photo of the house with snow in the yard and Christmas decorations on the windows. Perfect!”
“I’ll mention it,” Bill promised, silently resolving to have nothing to do with such schemes. “How old is the house? Is it historic?”
“I’ll tell you all about it when you see it,” the Realtor promised. “We’re coming up on it now, and I want you to focus on that all-important first impression.”
She swung into a long paved driveway leading into a grove of pines and sprawling maple trees that shielded the house from view. As the car emerged from the canopy of leaves, Holly stopped just in the curve where the house would be framed in the car’s windshield. “There!” she whispered in theatrical tones. “Isn’t it heaven?”
The PMS Outlaws: An Elizabeth MacPherson Novel Page 2