Glass House (16 page)

“The yield might be low.” Dumont was biting
his lower lip. “It’s not so large, you know. It is not so very
large.”

“It
is
large. And we’ll get at least
fifty percent,” Lefevre whispered. Grinning now, he patted Dumont’s
shoulder. “Fifty percent, Julien, and perhaps sixty. The stone will
cut cleanly, and the color widens my eyes.” He laughed. “We have
seriously underpaid.”

Dumont forced his own smile, then warmed as
he felt it take hold.

“I’ll work with Martin on a cleave,” he
said. “We’ll discuss the cut with him, and he’ll separate, and he
and I together will cut.” He was hardly listening himself.
A
pear and two rounds
, was repeating in his head.
Necklace and
earrings, a pear and two rounds.

Lora

When she drove at night on country roads,
she watched closely. Her eyes scanned the pavement in front of her,
side to side and as far forward as she could see. She looked for
movement certainly, but she also watched for flecks of colored
light. Small and glowing bits of green or orange showed the animals
staring back, blind and frozen or scared and ready to dart into the
road.

Lora Alexander grew up in rural Kansas, so
she knew that peculiar lesson. Her father instilled it in her when
she was a little girl, she in the passenger’s seat, he in the
driver’s, his elbow cocked onto the window ledge and one finger
slung on the wheel’s lower rim to steer. She soaked that bit of
wisdom up, along with all the others, and she forever paid heed to
the things he said because they made sense and, probably more so,
because they were delivered by someone she couldn’t imagine ever
was wrong. So she watched the road closely as she drove.

Despite the care in that, though, she had
the rest of her father’s driving habits, too. She drove with one
hand on the wheel, just like he did, the other one hugging the
car’s roof line or fiddling with a radio or doing whatever other
fidgety thing it could do. She wore a seatbelt inconsistently, and
not at all for long stretches of time. Her father’s well-worn
wisdom had come with a couple careless traits after all.

It was her necklace that night. Right hand
steering, Lora by habit was running the smooth, gold and diamond
texture of it between her left forefinger and thumb. Counting each
bump of a stone. Twisting it slightly, every inch or so.
Straightening it, pulling it, thinking to herself on it, like the
prayer beads of a rosary.

At that particular moment, she was thinking
she should get earrings to match, but she knew she could never
afford something like that. And the truth was that she shouldn’t
even wear the necklace anymore. It was too much flash, with too
many bad associations. Her mother got on her every time she saw
Lora wearing the thing, and Lora knew she was right, but she wore
it just the same. She’d gone through enough that she figured the
necklace was a sort of compensation for her. The only kind she’d
get.

Lora was at the middle part of those
thoughts, thinking back to her mother’s most recent comment on the
necklace, when she saw but didn’t really register the headlights
behind her. She only glanced in the rearview, caught the lights,
and slowed a step to let him pass if he wanted to.

That’d be fine. Slower is safer. Daddy
again. Elbow out the window. Smile on his face. Teaching his
daughter.

Lora was focused ahead, just coming to the
part where she was thinking the necklace was her only real payoff
for getting involved with Jeremy Waldoch, and the car was closer
before she knew it. She slowed, and her brow wrinkled in confusion
when the other car slowed with her. She accelerated, and the
headlights behind her lagged a little bit back before surging
forward to keep the pace.

Lora straightened in the seat. She put both
hands on the wheel. She stared at the road ahead, then checked the
mirror, then the road again.

In the few seconds she had to consider it,
she knew she could either slow down and maybe pull over, or she
could speed up enough to beat her follower to the next small town.
That first choice was based on hoping the driver would simply pass
her if she stopped, and she hesitated at the gamble in it. The
second was a race and nothing more, and it was the choice she
preferred.

When Lora accelerated, she did it quickly.
She pressed the pedal hard toward the floorboard. The engine
roared, and the car jumped an instant later, rushing forward as the
speedometer needle swung higher.

The gap between the cars widened enough that
Lora reached for her seatbelt. She grabbed at the buckle hanging
against the window and pulled the belt across her chest. Blind to
where it fastened, she steered the car at almost ninety miles an
hour while she tried to fit the belt’s latch into place.

The car behind her was closer when she
looked in the mirror. She fumbled the seatbelt more. The metal
buckle clicked against plastic but didn’t find the slot, and she
released it. The belt snapped back across her and cracked against
the window.

She didn’t see the bend in the road in time.
She was familiar enough with where she was to know what was coming,
but the soft turn from east to southeast was on her before she
realized it. The darkness, the speed, the worry at the lights in
her mirror. All of it pushed the image of the road away for a
second too long.

Lora’s car crossed the oncoming lane and
shot off the shoulder on the road’s far side. It was airborne for a
dozen feet, then landed in a ditch, pitching Lora into the steering
column. Still traveling almost sixty miles an hour, the car lipped
the ditch’s edge and vaulted again, this time more steeply, and it
rolled slightly to the left.

Lora heard and felt the crunch of the car
twisting over and then falling onto its top. It landed hard, in a
pond, and she fell to the roof. The windshield fractured like a
sheet of ice struck with a hammer. Looking at it in a crumple
behind the car’s compacted front end, her only thought was to
wonder why the water beyond the glass was at the top of the window,
not the bottom.

Why was that?

She tried to reach for the door handle but
couldn’t make her arm move. She tried to see what might be pinning
it down but couldn’t shift her neck, either. So Lora started to
scream, and it came out as a small and feeble cough. Even that cut
off when she heard the words come in a slow, deliberate drawl.

“Good Christ, little lady.” It was a man’s
voice. “Now you don’t got a place to go.” A pause. “No place at
all.”

She felt more than saw a hand reaching
toward her. It was at, then around, her neck.

“So I’ll be gettin’ this back. Then we’ll
just say goodbye.”

Night
Call

Megan didn’t go into the office the day
after the deposition. After her walk home, she’d sat on the porch,
watched the policeman pick off unwary speeders, and downed a
tumbler and a half of the Johnnie Walker Blue. That wasn’t enough
to make her drunk, but it drained her to a drowsiness that,
together with the events at the depo, pushed her into bed without
even a change of clothes.

She didn’t have to go in anyway. Most of the
file was already at the house.

There was more than enough to work on, and
she woke early to get to it. She showered and dressed with the case
on her mind. She ate dry toast, drank black coffee, and pretended
to scan the newspaper while working Jeremy Waldoch’s problems over
in her head.

By seven, she was deeply into it, pages
spread across the dining room table that Ben’s mother had given
them when they moved into the house. The table was enormous –
a cherry-wood room filler, with three extra leafs that were always
in place because there was nowhere else to put them, and Megan
littered the length of it with paper that stretched so far around
the table that she was walking as much as she was writing.

She started by poring over documents and
reading through notes, writing down anything that came to her
attention. She did it longhand, filling a legal pad in an hour and
retrieving three more. She stacked those and carried them with her
as she circled the materials, dipping into the paper on the table
when things caught her eye, and searching back through it when
digging for some particular piece she knew she’d seen before.

It was a fishing expedition. A guided one,
to be sure, but an expedition nonetheless. She figured she knew the
basics – the fundamental facts and allegations, the
he
said, she saids
. But the rest of it, all the stitches for
knitting those facts into some sort of defense, was still unformed,
which meant she still had to find a way to shape it.

Megan was writing out a constant scribbling
of thoughts to find a theme for defending Waldoch at trial, while
squeezing in anything that fit as potential responses to the new
information from his deposition testimony. By the afternoon, she
filled the three pads she’d collected and was working on two more,
adding a lengthy cast of characters and three flow charts that
connected those people. Associations and conversations were drawn
out on lined paper, showing combinations and ties built on some
things she knew and others things she supposed.

She had four outlines of different potential
arguments and themes for defending her client in
Landry v.
Waldoch & DMW Holdings
. Three other outlines had reached
various points of completion before she crumpled them and tossed
them aside. The balled-up pages were strewn around the living room
behind her, with a couple miscellaneous pages on the porch, where’d
she sat in the middle of the day and continued writing around bites
of a quick lunch.

She went through two drafts of opening
statements – one and a half, if you counted closely and
disregarded the rambling scratches of swear words she’d written out
during a particularly frustrating few minutes. The pages from both
statements were also scattered about, cast off as she moved on past
the early ideas included in them.

It was nine at night, almost ten, when she
found herself on the porch again. The policeman hadn’t appeared and
set up his speeding trap on the street in front of the house. At
least not yet.

All her filled legal pads formed a small
pile not quite two inches high. The stack included her thoughts on
whatever she’d seen when combing through the papers at the table,
along with the notes she took in Waldoch’s deposition the day
before. She’d been through those notes a half dozen times already,
and she was going through them again. Though she’d written them
herself, the words were starting to blur as the evening set in and
the work and lack of food brought her tiredness back. The feeling
draped over her, her eyes narrowing as she pushed fatigue away and
squinted to concentrate.

She was at the crucial point in the
deposition – the questions about the necklace to Lora
Alexander and earrings to Kathy Landry, along with the involvement
of Samuel Chilcott in reclaiming the gift to Landry – when she
shut her eyes. She sighed. She closed the pad she held. She
breathed in, deeply and slowly. The sound of Paul McCallum’s blunt
and level voice was coming back to her. A statement he’d made and a
question that followed as Waldoch waited beside her.

She told me about a man named Samuel
Chilcott. Do you know Mr. Chilcott by chance?

Megan didn’t know about the gifts. She
certainly didn’t know about a felon who was working for her client.
But Waldoch knew those things. He’d known all that and more.

Megan flung the notepad in a flying spin
across the porch. It hit hard on the screen door, the pages
fluttering like a bird shot mid-flight as it dropped to the
floor.

The ring of the telephone came at the same
time, and Megan started at hearing it. She felt instantly stupid
and childish, as though an alarm had gone off, catching her in her
act of frustration.

She shook her head, stood, and moved into
the house. When she lifted the receiver, the voice on the other end
was a surprising one.

“Paul McCallum, Megan.” It was a flat
response to her
hello
. She thought he wouldn’t continue at
first, that it’d only be his name, but he went on. “I suppose I
shouldn’t be too startled,” he said. “Given everything.”

“Startled by what?”

“You mean you haven’t heard?”

Her breath caught and she wasn’t sure why.
There was something in his voice. Something resigned and shocked,
but also angry.

“Heard what?” she asked cautiously.

“I got a call from Claire Alexander,”
McCallum said. “You remember Claire?”

She did. During the trial of Lora
Alexander’s claims against Waldoch, Megan had met Lora’s mother
Claire briefly, in one of those passing-in-the-hallway moments
where people act cordial and friendly even when they’re not. There
were introductions all around, with handshakes and
nice to meet
yous
. Waldoch was particularly charming, in a gracious and not
overbearing way. Megan remembered being afraid to let him speak,
for fear he’d praise Lora to her mother and say how wonderful she
was, even while they were arguing in court that her termination was
appropriate and nothing wrong was done by them.

He didn’t do that. He was courteous and
respectful. While the group moved down the hall –Alexander’s
family, together with Waldoch and Megan – Jeremy asked polite
questions and sounded interested in the answers. Megan was certain
that he would have gone on for some time if she’d let him, but they
came to the elevator and she took the opportunity to pull him away
as Claire got in and disappeared, all of them giving nods and
smiles right up to the door closing.

The verdict came two days later, with
judgment for Waldoch and DMW. Megan remembered the look on Lora
Alexander’s face more than anything. It was crushing, a mix of
red-faced pain and emotion that was pushing out tears she wouldn’t
let fall. But Megan also remembered Lora’s mother.