he—”
“He has no immunity. He did not ask for it.”
“No, he hasn’t,” Ethan agreed. “And when we talk with him, I’m going to remind him of that fact.”
The men moved down to the lake. This was a preliminary visit to familiarize themselves with the murder site. Each knew that they would return, probably more than once. As Carlos looked out over the water, Ethan studied the resort perched on the crest of the hill. The account he had read last night was prominent in his mind. It was a story of wealth, excessive behavior and passions gone awry, the kind of story that Ethan had seen repeated many times. He hunched his shoulders, impatient with delay.
Carlos skipped a rock across the water. “It is very beautiful here,” he said, his accent as soft as his words. “It reminds me of a place I knew in Cuba, not far from my home. I was just a child, of course, but my father would often take me to the water and we would sit and talk. About nothing in particular...just talk.”
Carlos lapsed into a silence that Ethan didn’t break. He, too, remembered a time spent by the water, along the wharves of one of the two great rivers that formed a confluence at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Only for him there had been no father to sit and talk with. He’d had no father—at least, none that he knew. And the time he’d spent on the wharves had not been idyllic.
Ethan wrenched his mind from the past—from the scruffily clothed boy who’d stood out from those around him, the boy who had never fit in because he couldn’t act as irresponsibly as the others did, the boy who in the end had held himself aloof even though he’d ached to belong.... “Let’s go check out the lodge,” Ethan said in a clipped tone. “And this potting shed we’ve heard so much about.” Then he turned away, from the lake and from his memories.
* * *
AMANDA WORKED through her lunch break. Peter had given her a few helpful directions and then had gone back to Lake Geneva. He was expecting a call from his literary agent that afternoon and didn’t want to miss it. When she had questioned him as to whether he was trying to sell another volume of his memoirs, he had avoided a direct answer and escaped as quickly as he could.
With a mystified smile, Amanda had set to work, and soon was immersed in sorting through the precedent-setting cases and rules of law that she would use in writing her brief for Judge Griffen on the defendant’s right to counsel. She hadn’t expected to be doing this. She hadn’t expected an objection to her relationship in the case.
Margaret’s granddaughter. She didn’t feel like Margaret’s granddaughter. She didn’t feel as if Margaret deserved to be any relation at all. For the family, the woman had been nothing but trouble.
Liza had grown up oversensitive to the fact that she looked so much like the hell-raising party girl from the past, and since people rarely lost an opportunity to speculate on the similarity of their behavior, Liza had eventually begun to act like her, more in a twisted sort of rebellion than because she was like her grandmother. Liza was spirited, but there was no meanness in her.
And Jeff...Jeff had married a woman just like Margaret, as selfish and as insensitive as a rhino. The family had tried to talk him out of it, but Jeff had been well and truly under her spell. Because of a secret fascination with Margaret? The marriage had ended and Jeff had pretended that it didn’t hurt. But Amanda knew that it did.
Then there was their mother. Alyssa had never gotten over Margaret’s abandonment of her as a child. Now it turned out that Margaret hadn’t abandoned her after all, but had planned to; she had left a note. Same difference in the end. Die, walk out...their mother was still scarred for life.
Amanda’s thoughts moved on to the person most hurt by Margaret’s thoughtlessness: Judson. She remembered the pain that burned deeply in his eyes and remembered that throughout her childhood she had acted the fool many times in order to make her grandfather laugh.
For herself, Amanda once had thought she’d escaped untouched. She didn’t look like the Ingalls women—tall, leggy blondes. She looked like her father, Ronald Baron. So did Jeff, except for his inheritance of their grandfather’s commanding nose and chin. Yet she now knew that she had not escaped. For her, fate had played a delaying game. It had waited to spring her grandmother on her at a later date—to be exact, forty-two years. It was no wonder Amanda felt nothing except annoyance with the woman. Margaret was as much a troublemaker dead as she had been alive.
And Ethan Trask thought it unfair that she should represent the man accused of murdering Margaret? If anyone, it should be she! She resented the woman, just as she resented the assistant attorney general’s intimation that she had planned some kind of wrongdoing.
Ethan Trask...
Amanda’s fingers stopped on the pages of one of her law books as unwanted feelings fought their way into her consciousness. She had tried to ignore it earlier, but beneath all her outrage had lurked something else, the fact that on some core level, she found Ethan Trask extremely attractive. She felt herself growing steadily warmer. Then a tap on her door rescued her from further discomfort. A second later, her grandfather poked his head through the opening. “Amanda, honey?” he said. “Tessie told me to come right in.”
Amanda’s greeting was a little more enthusiastic than it normally might have been. She jumped up to give her grandfather a hug.
Judson smiled bemusedly as he patted her back. “I realize the situation is bad, but is it this bad?” he teased.
Amanda didn’t want to let go of her grandfather’s solid strength as memories of her childhood once again stirred. She’d had two men in her life then, her grandfather and her father. She had lost her father, a fact that remained like a huge gaping hole in her life even after ten years. She didn’t want to lose her grandfather, too. She didn’t think he would live very long in jail.
She made herself step back, more because she didn’t want to frighten him than because she was ready. She forced a smile. “No, it’s not that bad,” she assured him. “Only a minor bobble or two.” She hesitated, then plunged in. “Ethan Trask wants me off the case. He’s going to file a motion with the judge. He doesn’t like it that I’m both your and Margaret’s granddaughter.”
Judson’s still handsome features settled into a frown. “Can he do that?” he asked.
“Not without a fight...and I’m going to give him one. That’s what I was doing just now, working up my argument.”
Judson glanced at her loaded desk. “Would you like me to come back later? I can always find something to do at the plant or the lab.”
Amanda shook her head. “No, this is fine.” She showed him to a chair. Her grandfather still held himself with a quiet kind of dignity, but the past year had taken its toll. It was hard for him to ignore the rumors that flashed about town, to ignore the fact that people he had known all his life might think he had killed his wife. Hard to realize that people he had helped could turn against him. His face contained many more lines than it had before; his shoulders slumped, particularly when he didn’t feel on show. Amanda’s heart went out to him. He put on a brave front for the family, especially Alyssa. He didn’t want any of them to worry. But how could they not worry?
Amanda settled behind her desk and folded her hands on top of her paperwork. “This is something we have to deal with, Granddad. First, if I’m disqualified, we have to find you a new lawyer. Possibly Peter could be persuaded...or he might recommend someone.”
“I want you, Amanda.”
