The Sweet Hereafter

Mitchell Stephens, Esquire

Angry? Yes, I’m angry; I’d be a lousy lawyer if I weren’t. I suppose it’s as if I’ve got this permanent boil on my butt and can’t quite sit down. Which is not the same, you understand, as being hounded by greed; although I can see, of course, that it probably sometimes looked like greed to certain individuals who were not lawyers, when they saw a person like me driving all the way up there to the Canadian border, practically, saw me camping out in the middle of winter in a windy dingy little motel room for weeks at a time, bugging the hell out of decent people who were in the depths of despair and just wanted to be left alone. I can understand that.

But it wasn’t greed that put me there; it’s never been greed that sends me whirling out of orbit like that. It’s anger. What the hell, I’m not ashamed of it. It’s who I am. I’m not proud of it, either, but it makes me useful, at least. Which is more than you can say for greed.

That’s what people don’t get about negligence lawyers — good negligence lawyers, I mean, the kind who go after the sloppy fat cats with their corner offices and end up nailing their pelts to the wall. People immediately assume we’re greedy, that it’s money we’re after, people call us ambulance-chasers and so on, like we’re the proctologists of the profession, and, yes, there’s lots of those. But the truth is, the good ones, we’d make the same moves for a single shekel as for a ten-million-dollar settlement. Because it’s anger that drives us and delivers us. It’s not any kind of love, either — love for the underdog or the victim, or whatever you want to call them. Some litigators like to claim that. The losers.

No, what it is, we’re permanently pissed off, the winners, and practicing law is a way to be socially useful at the same time, that’s all. It’s like a discipline; it organizes and controls us; probably keeps us from being homicidal. A kind of Zen is what. Some people equally pissed off are able to focus their rage by becoming cops or soldiers or martial arts instructors; those who become lawyers, however, especially litigators like me, are a little too intelligent, or maybe too intellectual is all, to become cops. (I’ve known some pretty smart cops, but not many intellectual ones.) So instead of learning how to break bricks and two-by-fours with our hands or bust chain-snatchers in subways, we sneak off to law school and put on three-piece suits and come roaring out like banshees, all teeth and claws and fire and smoke.

Certainly we get paid well for it, which is a satisfaction, yes, but not a motivation, because the real satisfaction, the true motivation, is the carnage and the smoldering aftermath and the trophy heads that get hung up on the den wall. I love it.

That’s why I spent most of six months up there in Sam Dent, practically becoming a citizen. Not my idea of a winter vacation, believe me. But anytime I hear about a case like that school bus disaster up there, I turn into a heat-seeking missile, homing in on a target that I know in my bones is going to turn out to be some bungling corrupt state agency or some multinational corporation that’s cost-accounted the difference between a ten-cent bolt and a million-dollar out-of-court settlement and has decided to sacrifice a few lives for the difference. They do that, work the bottom line; I’ve seen it play out over and over again, until you start to wonder about the human species. They’re like clever monkeys, that’s all. They calculate ahead of time what it will cost them to assure safety versus what they’re likely to be forced to settle for damages when the missing bolt sends the bus over a cliff, and they simply choose the cheaper option. And it’s up to people like me to make it cheaper to build the bus with that extra bolt, or add the extra yard of guardrail, or drain the quarry. That’s the only check you’ve got against them. That’s the only way you can ensure moral responsibility in this society. Make it cheaper.

So that winter morning when I picked up the paper and read about this terrible event in a small town upstate, with all those kids lost, I knew instantly what the story was; I knew at once that it wasn’t an “accident” at all. There are no accidents. I don’t even know what the word means, and I never trust anyone who says he does. I knew that somebody somewhere had made a decision to cut a corner in order to save a few pennies, and now the state or the manufacturer of the bus or the town, somebody, was busy lining up a troop of smoothies to negotiate with a bunch of grief-stricken bumpkins a settlement that wouldn’t displease the accountants. I packed a bag and headed north, like I said, pissed off.

Sam Dent is a pretty town, actually. It’s not Aspen or Vail, maybe, and it sure isn’t Saint Bart’s or Mustique, where frankly I’d much rather have been at that time of year, but the landscape was attractive and strangely stirring. I’m not a scenery freak like my ex-wife, Klara, who has orgasms over sunsets and waterfalls and not much else, but once in a great while I go someplace and look up and see where I am, and it’s unexpectedly beautiful to me: my stomach tightens, and my pulse races, and this powerful blend of fear and excitement comes over me, like something dangerous is about to happen. It’s almost sexual.

Anyhow, the town of Sam Dent and the mountains and forests that surrounded it, they gave me that feeling. I grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, and have spent my entire adult life in New York City. I’m an urban animal, basically; I care more about people than landscape. And although I have sojourned in rural parts quite a bit (I’ve spent months at a time in Wounded Knee, in eastern Washington, in Alabama, where I won a big asbestosis case, in the coalmining region of West Virginia, and so on), I can’t say the landscape of those places particularly moved me. They were places, that’s all. Interchangeable chunks of the planet. Yes, I needed to learn a whole lot about each of them in order to pursue my case effectively, but in those other cases my interest in the landscape was more pragmatic, you might say, than personal. Strictly professional.

Here in Sam Dent, however, it somehow got personal. It’s dark up there, closed in by mountains of shadow and a blanketing early nightfall, but at the same time the space is huge, endless, almost like being at sea — you feel like you’re reading one of those great long novels by whatsername, Joyce Carol Oates, or Theodore Dreiser, that make you feel simultaneously surrounded by the darkness and released into a world much larger than any you’ve dealt with before. It’s a landscape that controls you, sits you down and says, Shut up, pal, I’m in charge here.

They have these huge trees everywhere, on the mountains, of course, but down in the valleys and in town, too, and surrounding the houses, even outside my motel room; they’ve got white pine and spruce and hemlock and birches thick as a man, and the wind blows through them constantly. And since there’s very little noise of any other kind up there — almost no people, remember, and few cars, no sirens howling, no jackhammers slamming, and so forth — the thing you hear most is the wind blowing in the trees. From September to June, the wind comes roaring out of Ontario all the way from Saskatchewan or someplace weird like that, steady and hard and cold, with nothing to stop or slow it until it hits these mountains and the trees, which, like I say, are everywhere.

What they call the Adirondack Park, you understand, is no small roadside park, no cutesy little campground with public toilets and showers — I mean, we’re talking six million acres of woods, mountains, and lakes, we’re talking a region the size of the state of Vermont, the biggest damn park in the country — and most of the people who live there year round are scattered in little villages in the valleys, living on food stamps and collecting unemployment, huddling close to their fires and waiting out the winter, until they can go back outdoors and repair the damage the winter caused.

It’s a hard place, hard to live in, hard to romanticize. But, surprisingly, not hard to love — because that’s what I have to call the feeling it evokes, this strange combination of fear and awe I’m talking about, even in someone like me.

That wasn’t what I expected, though. When I first drove up there, the day after the school bus went over, I was astonished by what I saw. Upstate New York, to me, had always been Albany, with maybe a little Rip Van Winkle, Love Canal, and Woodstock tossed in; but this was wilderness, practically. Like Alaska. Suddenly, I’m thinking Last of the Mohicans. “Forest primeval,” I’m thinking. America before the arrival of the white man.

I’m driving along the Northway above Lake George between these high sheer cliffs with huge sheets of ice on them, and I look off to the side into the woods, and the woods come banging right back at me, a dense tangle of trees and undergrowth that completely resists penetration, and I start hoping my car doesn’t break down. This is not Bambi territory. It’s goddamn dark in there, with bears and bobcats and moose. Ten thousand coyotes, I read in the Times. Sasquatches, probably.

Of course, it was dead of winter then, that first time, and there was five or six feet of snow over everything, and daytime temps that got stuck below zero for weeks in a row, which only made the woods and the mountains more ominous. Trees, rocks, snow, and ice — and, until I turned off the Northway and started down those narrow winding roads into the villages, no houses, no sign of people. It was scary, but it was also very beautiful. No way around it.

Then I began to see the first signs of people — and I mean poor people here. Not like in the city, of course, not like Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant, where you feel that the poor are imprisoned, confined by invisible wire fences, lifelong prisoners of the rich, who live and work in the high-rises outside. No wonder they call them ghettos. They ought to call them reservations.

Up here, though, the poor are kept out, and it’s the rich who stay inside the fence and only in the summer months. It’s like Ultima Thüle or someplace beyond the pale, and most of the people who live here year round are castoffs, tossed out into the back forty and made to forage in the woods for their sustenance and shelter, grubbing nuts and berries, while the rest of us snooze warmly inside the palisade, feet up on the old hassock, brandy by our side, Wall Street Journal unfolded on our lap, good dog Tighe curled up by the fire.

I’m exaggerating, of course, but only slightly, because that is how you feel when you cruise down these roads in your toasty Mercedes and peer out at the patched-together houses with flapping plastic over the windows and sagging porches and woodpiles and rusting pickup trucks and junker cars parked in front, boarded-up roadside diners and dilapidated motels that got bypassed by the turnpike that Rockefeller built for the downstate Republican tourists and the ten-wheeler truckers lugging goods between New York City and Montreal. It’s amazing how poor people who live in distant beautiful places always think that a six-lane highway or an international airport will bring tourists who will solve all their problems, when inevitably the only ones who get rich from it live elsewhere. The locals end up hating the tourists, outsiders, foreigners — rich folks who employ the locals now as part-time servants, yardmen, waitresses, gamekeepers, fix-it men. Money that comes from out of town always returns to its source. With interest. Ask an African.

Sam Dent. Weird name for a town. So naturally the first thing I ask when I register at a sad little motel in town is “Who the hell was Sam Dent?”

This rather attractive tall doe-eyed woman in a reindeer sweater and baggy jeans was checking me in, Risa Walker, who I did not know at the time was one of those parents who had lost a child in the so-called accident. I might not have been so flippant otherwise. She said, “He once owned most of the land in this town and ran a hotel or something.” She had that flat expressionless voice that I should have recognized as the voice of a parent who has lost a child. “Long time ago,” she added. Like it was the good old days. (Good for Sam, I’ll bet, who probably died peacefully in his sleep in his Fifth Avenue mansion.)

She gave me the key to my room, number 3, and asked would I be staying longer than one night.

“Hard to say.” I passed her my credit card, and she took the imprint. I was hoping that tomorrow I’d find a better place in town or nearby, maybe a Holiday Inn or a Marriott. This motel was definitely on the downhill slide and had been for years — no restaurant or bar, a small dark room with scarred furniture and sagging bedsprings, a shower that looked as if it spat rusty lukewarm water for thirty seconds before turning cold.

It turned out there was no other place in town to stay, and as I needed to be close to the scene of the crime, so to speak, I ended up staying at the Walkers’ motel throughout those winter and spring months and into the summer, every time I was in Sam Dent, even when things got a little ticklish between me and Risa and her husband, Wendell. It never got that ticklish, but when the divorce started coming on, I was giving her advice and not him. Throughout, I kept the room on reserve, not that there was ever any danger of its being taken, and paid for the entire period, whether I used it or not. It was the least I could do.

The most I could do for the Walkers was represent them in a negligence suit that compensated them financially for the loss of their son, Sean. And that’s only part of it, the smaller part. I could also strip and hang the hide of the sonofabitch responsible for the loss of their son — which just might save the life of some other boy riding to school in some other small American town.

That was my intention anyhow. My mission, you might say.

Every year, though, I swear I’m not going to take any more cases involving children. No more dead kids. No more stunned grieving parents who really only want to be left alone to mourn in the darkness of their homes, for God’s sake, to sit on their kids’ beds with the blinds drawn against the curious world outside and weep in silence as they contemplate their permanent pain. I’m under no delusions — I know that in the end a million-dollar settlement makes no real difference to them, that it probably only serves to sharpen their pain by constricting it with legal language and rewarding it with money, that it complicates the guilt they feel and forces them to question the authenticity of their own suffering. I know all that; I’ve seen it a hundred times.

It hardly seems worth it, right? Thanks but no thanks, right? And I swear, if that were the whole story, if the settlement were not a fine as well, if it were not a punishment that, though it can never fit the crime, might at least make the crime seem prohibitively expensive to the criminal, then, believe me, I would not pursue these cases. They humiliate me. They make me burn inside with shame. Win or lose, I always come out feeling diminished, like a cinder.

So I’m no Lone Ranger riding into town in my white Mercedes-Benz to save the local sheepherders from the cattle barons in black hats; I’m clear on that. And I don’t burn myself out with these awful cases because it somehow makes me a better person. No, I admit it, I’m on a personal vendetta; what the hell, it’s obvious. And I don’t need a shrink to tell me what motivates me. A shrink would probably tell me it’s because I myself have lost a child and now identify with chumps like Risa and Wendell Walker and that poor sap Billy Ansel, and Wanda and Hartley Otto. The victims. Listen, identify with the victims and you become one yourself. Victims make lousy litigators.

Simply, I do it because I’m pissed off, and that’s what you get when you mix conviction with rage. It’s a very special kind of anger, let’s say. So I’m no victim. Victims get depressed and live in the there and then. I live in the here and now.

Besides, the people of Sam Dent are not unique. We’ve all lost our children. It’s like all the children of America are dead to us. Just look at them, for God’s sake — violent on the streets, comatose in the malls, narcotized in front of the TV. In my lifetime something terrible happened that took our children away from us. I don’t know if it was the Vietnam war, or the sexual colonization of kids by industry, or drugs, or TV, or divorce, or what the hell it was; I don’t know which are causes and which are effects; but the children are gone, that I know. So that trying to protect them is little more than an elaborate exercise in denial. Religious fanatics and superpatriots, they try to protect their kids by turning them into schizophrenics; Episcopalians and High Church Jews gratefully abandon their kids to boarding schools and divorce one another so they can get laid with impunity; the middle class grabs what it can buy and passes it on, like poisoned candy on Halloween; and meanwhile the inner-city blacks and poor whites in the boonies sell their souls with longing for what’s killing everyone else’s kids and wonder why theirs are on crack.

It’s too late; they’re gone; we’re what’s left.

And the best we can do for them, and for ourselves, is rage against what took them. Even if we can’t know what it’ll be like when the smoke clears, we do know that rage, for better or worse, generates a future. The victims are the ones who’ve given up on the future. Instead, they’ve joined the dead. And the rest, look at them: unless they’re enraged and acting on it, they’re useless, unconscious; they’re dead themselves and don’t even know it.

If you want to know the truth, in my life, in my personal life, that is, though my ex-wife, Klara, is the apparent victim (all you have to do is ask her), the true victim is my daughter, Zoe. Not me, that’s for sure. Because, though I may have lost her, Zoe’s not literally dead. At least not that I know of. Not yet. The last time I heard from her she was out in L.A., walking around like a tattooed zombie with one of her purple-haired zombie boyfriends.

She’s my only child; I loved her more than I thought was humanly possible. Certainly more than I’ve ever loved anyone else. I’ve told my story — it’s a compulsion, I guess — to friends and strangers and even to shrinks, all of whom feel sorry for me, if you can believe that, which is a way of feeling sorry for themselves, I’ve learned; I’ve attended Al-Anon meetings and ToughLove workshops for parents and spouses of addicts, where they promote a kind of spiritual triage (“Mitch, chill out, man, you’ve got to learn to separate from your child,” they say, while you watch her drowning before your eyes); and I’ve spent more time talking to Klara in the last five years than in the entire fifteen years we were married — I’ve done everything the loving father of a whacked-out drug-addicted child is supposed to do. I’ve even done a Rambo and kicked a few doors off their jambs and dragged Zoe out of filthy rat-infested apartments, garbage heaps with satanic altars lit by candles in a goat’s skull on a TV in a corner; I’ve locked her up in rehab hospitals, halfway houses, and the Michigan farms of understanding relatives. Two weeks later, she’s back on the streets. New York, Pittsburgh, Seattle, L.A. The next time I hear from her, it’s a phone call scamming for money, money supposedly for school or a new kind of therapist who specializes in macrobiotic drug treatment or, sobbing with shame and need, a plane ticket home (that’s usually the one that gets me). I send the money, hundreds, thousands of dollars; and she’s gone again. A month or two later, she’s calling from Santa Fe — same scam, same format, different details: an acupuncturist specializing in treating drug addiction, a registration fee for a culinary arts school in Tucson, and if those stories don’t work, she breaks back to the old plea to let her come home to New York and let’s solve this problem together, Daddy, dear Daddy, once and for all, if I’ll just send the plane ticket and money to get her stuff out of hock, etc. By now, of course, I realize that if I don’t send money, she’ll raise it some other way, dealing drugs or pornography or even hooking. It’s like I’m in the position of having to buy her clean needles to protect her against AIDS. Forget protecting her against the drugs. Forget healing her mind.

Five years of this, and what happens? You get pissed off — believe me, enough rage and helplessness, your love turns to steamy piss. Of course, long before Zoe dropped out of boarding school and hit the streets, I was pissed off — it’s in my genes, practically — but she’s succeeded in providing me with a nice sharp focus for it, so that, except when I’m burning myself out on something like the Sam Dent school bus case, I’m dizzy and incoherent, boiling over, obsessed, useless — mad. I’d rather be a cinder than a madman. But there’s no way I’ll let myself become a victim.

That guy Wendell Walker, who with his wife, Risa, owned the motel I was staying at, the Bide-a-Wile — he surprised me. At first, I pegged him as a permanent loser, one of those guys who love their own tragedy, who feel ennobled and enlarged by it. But of all the parents in Sam Dent who had lost a child when the bus went over, he turned out to have the least interest in remaining a victim. Except for Wanda Otto, maybe. We’re talking about the parents of some fourteen kids here, some of whom, like Billy Ansel, lost more than one child, so actually we’re talking about a list of only eight families in all. Of which, in those first few weeks before the case took off, I was able to interview five who had not already signed up with another attorney, which put them off limits to me, or who were not talking to anyone at all, like Billy Ansel, and even him I eventually got to. In a way.

And there was the girl Nichole Burnell, who survived the wreck; she was going to be the linchpin of the case, an all-American teenaged beauty queen whose life was ruined by her injuries and by the trauma of having survived such an ordeal. A living victim is more effective with a jury than a dead one; you can’t compensate the dead, they feel. That’s how I planned to present her; luckily, it was how her parents viewed the event too. She had been their destiny, their glory: for their future, they had nothing but her future, and since it had been taken from her, it had been taken, as they saw it, from them as well: so now they were out for blood. One way or the other, they were going to continue to use her to get what they thought was their due.

Fine by me. I had my agenda too. In spite of the injuries, Nichole Burnell looked good, she talked good, and she had suffered immeasurably and would for the rest of her life. A beautiful articulate fourteen-year-old girl in a wheelchair. She was perfect. I could hardly wait to see the other side depose her.

Wendell Walker, on the other hand, when I first met him, seemed utterly defeated, gone, a dark hole in space. Useless, even to himself. I had chucked my stuff in my room and wandered back out to the motel office, to get directions to where the bus had gone over and to check out some of the local response to the event — to start work, in other words — but also to see if there was someplace in town where I could get a decent meal. It seemed unlikely, but you never know about these small towns. I once found a terrific barbecue shack in Daggle, Alabama.

The office was gloomy and dark, cold as a meat locker; behind the counter, a door leading to what I took to be the apartment where the proprietors lived was open a crack, and a skinny band of light fell across the linoleum floor of the room. I thought I was alone, but when I walked up to the counter, looking for a bell or something to signal the woman who had checked me in, I saw a figure there, a large, heavyset man in a straight-backed chair, sitting behind the counter in the darkness as if in bright light, looking at his lap as if reading a magazine. It was a strange position, alert but frozen in place. He looked catatonic to me.

“Sorry, buddy,” I said. “I didn’t see you there. How’s it going?”

No answer; no response whatsoever. He just went on staring down at his lap, as if he didn’t hear or see me. One of those country simples, I thought. Inbreeding. Great. First local I get to talk to, and he turns out to be an alien. “The boss around?” I asked.

Nothing. Except that his tongue came out and licked dry lips. Then I recognized it: I’ve seen it a hundred times, but it still surprises and scares me. It’s the opaque black-glass look of a man who has recently learned of the death of his child. It’s the face of a person who’s gone to the other side of life and is no longer even looking back at us. It always has the same history, that look: at the moment of the child’s dying, the man follows his child into darkness, as if he’s making a last attempt to save it; then, in panic, to be sure that he himself has not died as well, the man turns momentarily back toward us, maybe he even laughs then or says something weird, for he sees only darkness there too; and now he has returned to where his child first disappeared, fixing onto one of the bright apparitions that linger there. It’s downright spooky.

“I’m sorry, bud,” I said to him. “I just arrived here.”

Still no response. Then he stirred slightly, turned his soft hands over, and placed them on his knees. He was wearing a Montreal Expos sweatshirt and loose khakis, a fat guy, slump-shouldered, not too bright-looking.

Suddenly, he said, “Are you a lawyer?” His voice was low but thin, flattened out, like a piece of tin. He still hadn’t turned to face me, but I guess he’d taken my measure already. What the hell, I suppose I looked like a lawyer, especially up here, especially now. Something like this happens, people expect to see lawyers crawling around. Guys in suits and topcoats.

“Yes, I’m a lawyer.”

“A good one?”

“Yes, sure. One of the best,” I said.

Slowly he turned toward me and in the dim light examined my face. “Well, good. I need a lawyer,” he said, and when he stood up, his large soft body tightened, and surprisingly the man looked very tough to me, like a fist, and I said to myself, Well, well, I damned near misread this guy entirely. “Come inside,” he said. “My wife and I want to talk to you.”

I reached into my pocket, drew out a card, and handed it to him, and he accepted it without a glance, like a bellhop taking a tip, and placed it facedown on the counter. With the other hand, he swung open the door to their quarters, washing the office in domestic light, and walked straight into the living room beyond, where I saw the woman in an easy chair, watching television with the sound off.

I followed him into the small room, and we three sat and talked for several hours, and all the while they watched the soundless television, never once looking at me or each other. Creepy, yes, but at the time it seemed entirely appropriate, even necessary, to our conversation.

This was a happy start for me, a lucky break. The Walkers were classically pissed off. Both of them. They wanted revenge, which was useless to them, of course — they weren’t going to get it, but they didn’t know that yet. And as I later learned, they wanted money, not as compensation but because they had been broke for so long and had always wanted it.

I learned from them that first night in town a lot of what the newspapers hadn’t yet told me — the names of the other parents whose children had been killed, the usual route of the school bus, the condition of the driver when she picked up their son, Sean, the weather, the exact spot where the bus went off the road, the origin and history of the sandpit it ended up in, and so forth.

It seemed clear that the bus driver, Dolores Driscoll, was a dead end; she was probably only doing exactly what she had done for years, and besides, she herself had no real property or earning power to attach and was a popular woman in town to boot, a nondrinker with a crippled husband she supported. Not the kind of person you want to sue for negligence. The deep pockets, I knew, were going to be found in the pants worn by the state, the town, and the school board, or, more precisely, by their insurance companies. I explained that to them.

I asked them who else might be willing to join in a suit.

“I don’t know,” Risa said, her eyes still on the flickering screen of the TV. The Cosby show, which I hate. Ozzie and Harriet in blackface. “Nobody’s much talked about it yet. Although there’s been a lot of lawyers in town, I heard. A couple of them checked in here today. But they seemed—”

“Too young and too old,” Wendell said. “One or the other. Too goddamn eager.”

I knew the types. I explained that the best people to enter the suit were people who were unlikely to sign on with lawyers such as that. No, I said, what we needed were folks who, like them, were intelligent and articulate, who came across as sensitive, loving parents, people with a solid family life, with no criminal background or history of trouble in town. Good neighbors I wanted, decent hardworking people like themselves, I said, laying it on a little.

“Well, okay, there’s Kyle and Doreen,” Risa said. “The Lamstons. Up on Bartlett Hill. They lost all three of their kids. After everything they’ve been through. Especially Doreen.” Risa was at that stage where every now and then she didn’t believe that she had lost her child; she thought that maybe it had only happened to other people in town.

“Kyle’s a drunk, a belligerent drunk,” Wendell said. “Nobody likes him. He’s trouble.”

“Belligerent, you say. Is he a known wife-beater?”

“Yeah, a wife-beater,” he said. “I’m afraid so. A ‘known’ one. He’s that all right.”

“All right, there’s the Hamiltons. Joe and Shelley Hamilton.”

Wendell said, “Anybody knows that guy knows he’s been stealing antiques from summer houses and reselling them to dealers in Plattsburgh for years.”

I was starting to like this man, Wendell Walker. He looked like a pushover, but he had an attitude. In the middle of a wrecked life, drowning in sadness, he was still able to hold his grudges. He’d probably kept them locked up inside himself for years, feeling guilty, and now for the first time in his life he believed he was entitled to lay about him. His wife, though, was more conventionally linked to other people, a good-looking, once sexy woman who still courted her neighbors’ good opinions and attention. She was trying to put the best possible construction on things, even if it meant lying to herself.

Wendell, though, he didn’t give a damn. Not anymore.

They went on down the list of parents, most of them dismissed by Wendell out of hand, as his resentments and grudges and old injuries, one by one, surfaced and got expressed.

“Sonofabitch owes over fifty thousand bucks in unpaid bills to the bank and half the businesses in town, and he’s about to lose his house and cars….”

“She’s over to the Rendez-Vous or down to the Spread Eagle every night and has slept with every drunk in town at least twice….”

“The Bilodeaus and the Atwaters are all inbred. They’re so dumb they don’t know Saturday …”

And so on down the line, with Risa reluctantly concurring. Until they got to the Ottos, Wanda and Hartley, who had lost their adopted son, an Indian boy named Bear. Wanda was pregnant, they were smart people apparently, college educated, even, had moved to Sam Dent a dozen or so years ago from the city and had made a respected life here as craftsmen.

“Yeah, well, I bet they’re pot-smokers,” Wendell grumped.

“You don’t know that.” Risa lit a cigarette, as if in defiance.

“They ever been busted?” I asked, and lit one myself.

“No,” Risa said.

“Not to your knowledge is what you mean,” Wendell shot back. I wondered if he knew that his wife was probably having an affair with somebody.

I made notes and let them continue. I especially liked the part about the adopted Indian boy and Wanda’s pregnancy. It was possible she’d lose the baby over this. That happens. The pot business I’d check out later. (It turned out to be nothing, of course. At least no record. Local suspicion was all.)

It was Wendell who mentioned Billy Ansel. Risa kept silent, and I figured he was the guy she was having her affair with. That could be trouble, so I put an asterisk next to his name; but otherwise he was almost too good to be true. Ansel was a widower, much admired in town, a Vietnam vet, a war hero, practically. And he had lost his two children, who were twins. Also, he had actually witnessed the event; he’d been following the bus in his truck on his way to work that morning and had helped remove the victims. He’d know, by God, that his kids were dead. No denial there.

The bus, Wendell said, had been hauled back to Ansel’s garage. “I went to school with him,” Wendell added. “I guess he’s maybe the most liked man in this town. And he knows it. And likes it. But what the hell, that’s all right, I guess. He drinks,” he added. “But mostly at home. Otherwise, no flaws.” I watched Risa, who watched her hands. Double asterisk.

“What about the kids who survived the accident? Some of them were injured pretty badly, I understand. Any of them whose parents you think might be willing to join you in this?”

Risa, as if relieved not to be talking about Billy Ansel any longer, rattled off the names of half a dozen families, including the Burnells, Mary and Sam, whose daughter Nichole was in the eighth grade, president of the class, queen of last fall’s Harvest Festival Ball. “A potential Miss Essex County, or even a Miss New York,” Risa said wistfully. “I’m serious.” Nichole was in the hospital in Lake Placid with a broken back, still unconscious, as far as they knew. Her parents, they agreed, were poor but honest, churchgoers. Pillars of the community, Wendell noted sarcastically. Her father, Sam, was a plumber; her mother sang in the choir. Nichole had been everybody’s favorite babysitter.

It was a promising start. I retrieved a contingency fee agreement form from my room, explained the terms and got the Walkers to sign it, and went out in search of a burger and beer, which I found at the Rendez-Vous, a tavern located practically across the road from the motel. Very convenient. I didn’t even take the car; just strolled over. Turned out the burger wasn’t bad.

There was no one in the place who looked local, other than the bartender and the waitress. I guess everyone was at home watching TV to see if they were on the news. But I wasn’t the only customer. A couple of sharks in double-knit suits — Wendell was right: too old and too young, too eager — sat at the bar watching the Knicks clobber the Celtics, while a few guys whom I took to be reporters, in leather jackets and stone-washed jeans, trolled back and forth among the booths in back, talking shop and feeling superior to one another and to the town, practicing for the assignment that would bring them the Pulitzer. The reporters who cover these backcountry cases, even when they’re stringers for the Plattsburgh Press-Republican or something, always try to look as if they work for Rolling Stone or The Village Voice.

No way I was going to sit with the sharks at the bar, though, in spite of the Knicks game, so I took a booth in a far corner, just beyond the reporters, and ate alone, working up my notes. I was off and running. Happy. More or less.

The next morning (I was right about the shower, by the way, and the bed was like a hammock made of wire, the room as cold as a fishing camp in Labrador), I drove over to the town of Keene Valley, ten miles to the southeast, where the bartender at the Rendez-Vous had told me there was a diner, the Noonmark, that served a decent breakfast and sold out-of-town newspapers. It was a pleasant drive. The snow-covered mountains loomed above the village, dwarfing it, making the buildings seem puny and temporary. Thin strands of wood smoke curled from the chimneys of the houses and disappeared into clean air. The sun was shining, the snow looked downy soft, the sky was a huge blue bowl, and according to the Lake Placid radio station, it was five degrees below zero. This place looks good in winter, but believe me, you want to observe it through the windshield of a warm car.

After a large country breakfast of pancakes and bacon among citizens who shook their heads sadly while they pored over the news accounts of the disaster in the village next door, I drove back to Sam Dent, where I found the Ottos at home — if you want to call it that. I couldn’t tell if it was a DEW-line radar station or a house. They lived in a dome, definitely homemade, covered with wood shingles and half set into the side of a hill, with odd-shaped windows, diamonds and triangles, arranged in no pattern that I could discern from outside.

They didn’t exactly welcome me in. Hartley Otto answered the door, and a huge black stupid-looking Newfoundland bounded past both of us and started barking ferociously at my car as if I were still inside it. The dog was enormous, but the car looked like it could handle itself. There are certain domestic animals, oversized and undersized dogs in particular, that ought to be granted extinction. Horses too, now that we have tractors.

Hartley Otto was a tall, scrawny man in his early forties with a patchy beard and long graying hair tied in a ponytail with a twisted pipe cleaner. In his union suit, baggy dungarees held up with old-fashioned galluses, and high-topped working shoes, he looked more like an Appalachian hillbilly than an aging hippie, but that was the desired effect, I suppose. It was political. His gaunt face was prematurely lined, and he had dark circles under intelligent blue eyes and clearly had not slept much, if at all, in the last two days. I wondered if he’d be willing to get a haircut for the trial.

I stood silently in bright snow-reflected sunlight on the steps at the doorway for a few seconds and let him look me over. I’ve learned not to rush these things. Then I said, “Risa and Wendell Walker, they told me you might be willing to talk to me.”

“Oh,” he said. Just that, as if I’d told him it might soon snow. Though he was all sinew and bone, he looked fragile — as though a friendly clap on the shoulder would send him falling to the floor in a clattering heap.

“I apologize for coming over unannounced like this, Mr. Otto, but the Walkers said you would understand. I know it’s a bad time, but it’s important that we talk.”

“Yes, well, all right,” he said.

I took off my gloves, stuck my hand out, and said my name; he accepted my hand limply into his and let me shake the thing, as if it were an ear of corn. The guy’s gone, I thought, he’s off with his kid. I hoped his wife would turn out to be the angry one.

Usually, that’s all you need. The angry partner carries the defeated partner, who hasn’t the energy to argue against even the idea of a suit, let alone the actuality, which of course, once it’s under way, provides its own momentum. You do need one of them fueled by anger, however, especially in the beginning; two defeated parties tend to reinforce each other’s lassitude and make lousy litigants. The attorney often ends up fighting his own clients, especially near the end, when it gets down to dealing out the last cards, and the out-of-court settlement offers get made and refused. I wanted a mean lean team, a troop of vengeful parents willing to go the route with me and not come home without some serious trophies on our spears. Hartley Otto was lean, but he didn’t seem very mean.

He made a feeble gesture, inviting me inside, and I entered, bumped aside by the dog, who had apparently given up trying to scare my car. The place smelled like wood smoke and applesauce. There was no pattern to the windows from the inside, either, although I couldn’t imagine how you’d fit symmetrical windows into the building without breaking up the structure altogether. It was that kind of design. The light fell from above in a soft and diffuse wave that was actually pleasant, if a little disorienting at first. Mostly what you saw out the windows were treetops and blue sky, like looking up out of a cistern. I guess they felt safe living in there. I would’ve felt trapped.

It took a few seconds to adjust to the hazy gloom of the interior, which, when you looked away from the windows, turned out to be more like the inside of an enormous tepee than a cistern. It was a large two-story space divided into several smaller chambers with sheets of brightly colored cloth — tie-dyes and Indian madras — that had been hung from wires. On a low brick platform in the center of the main chamber I made out a large steel wood stove; the dog had flopped next to it like a shot buffalo.

A few feet from the stove, sitting cross-legged on a huge overstuffed cushion like a Bedouin chieftain, was Wanda Otto, her face darkly intelligent, eyes narrowed with suspicion and intolerance. She was clearly ready to go to war. My kind of woman.

“What’d you say your name was?” Hartley asked me.

“Mitch Stephens.” I drew out a card and gave it to him. He read it with deliberation and handed it to his wife, who swiftly passed her eyes over it and set it on the floor next to her. I felt like Meriwether Lewis sent out from Washington to treat with the Indians.

“The Walkers sent him by,” Hartley said in a voice that sounded the way a sheet of blank paper looks. He moved around behind his wife and sat on what appeared to be a stool but was in fact a cushioned tree stump with a birch-stick back attached. Except for numerous large pillows scattered around the room, all the furniture was made of wood that still resembled trees, mostly birch, roughly cut and unfinished, with the bark left on. Twig furniture, they call it, made to look as if it grew in the woods in the approximate shape of a chair or table or set of shelves, and all you had to do was drag it home, strip off the leaves and lop off a few branches here and there, and voilà. Some people like that stuff, and they pay a lot of money for it.

“You want a cup of tea or something?” he asked me.

I said tea would be fine and took the liberty of shucking my topcoat. “All right if I sit down for a few moments, Mrs. Otto? I want to talk with you. Same as I talked to the Walkers last night.” I was wearing a suit, tieless, still dressed Manhattan style, which I regretted, but it was all I had brought with me. I promised myself that when I came up to Sam Dent a second time (and I was sure by now that I’d be making a lot of trips up here), I’d stop at EMS first. Flannel shirts, green wool pants, clodhoppers, down vest — the Adirondack look. By then, of course, it wouldn’t much matter; everyone would already know I was a New York lawyer. When in Rome, however.

Wanda pointed at a nearby pillow, and I quickly took it. The twig chairs and stumps didn’t look very comfortable anyhow. Besides, I wanted to get down near the floor, where she was, and look her straight in the eye. Let Hartley hover overhead, out of it, making tea. We were going to deal, this lady and I, the Indian chief and the white man.

“I’m a lawyer,” I said.

“I see that.” She was large-breasted, square-shouldered, with long dark hair that hung in a thick braid down her back. She wore a floppy print blouse that emphasized her pregnant belly rather than hid it, and a long wool skirt and moccasins, and her volume seemed greater than her weight — she looked as though she was terrific on the dance floor and bossy in bed. A heavy turquoise and silver amulet hung on a thong at her throat. She had big strong-looking hands, nearly as large as mine, and thick wrists with half a dozen silver bracelets on each, and there were several heavily embossed rings on her fingers.

The woman was deeply into the Indian trip, more so now, no doubt, than usual, probably into chants and meditation, sweat lodges and omens. I figured she was Jewish, Great Neck, Long Island, NYU, class of ’72, psych major, with a couple of years of social work and art classes at the New School, where she had met Hartley the Lutheran woodcarver, a draft evader from Wisconsin or someplace. They probably found this place on a camping trip. (Turned out I wasn’t far off. I had Wanda pegged exactly, but Hartley had come from South Dakota; they bought this land with money borrowed from Wanda’s father when they were crafts counselors at a nearby socialist summer camp and built the house the following year. I learned all this later, of course.)

“You know the Walkers, Risa and Wendell,” I said.

“Yes.”

“They speak highly of you.”

“Good. Will they speak highly of you?”

“I think so. Especially when I have won their case for them.”

“So they have hired you.”

“Yes.”

“I see. Their child has died, and they have gone out and hired a lawyer because of it.”

“Yes. Although my task is to represent them only in their anger, not their grief.”

“That’s how you understand your job? To represent anger?”

“Yes. You are angry, are you not? Among so many other things.”

She pursed her lips thoughtfully and remained silent for a moment. The dog had started to snore. Hartley had disappeared behind a curtain, and I could hear water running into a kettle, which surprised me — I’d imagined melting chunks of ice or maybe a hand pump, not a faucet and sink. They probably had a microwave oven and a food processor back there.

“Yes,” she said, expelling her breath. “Oh, yes, we are angry. Among so many other things.”

“That’s why I’m here, Mrs. Otto. To give your anger a voice, to be a weapon for you.”

“Against whom?”

“Against whoever caused that bus to go off the road into the sandpit.”

“I see. You think someone, a person, caused the accident.”

“There is no such thing as an accident.”

“No. No, there isn’t. You are right about that. But how will you know who caused this accident that took our son from us?”

“If everyone had done his job, your son would be alive this morning and safely in school. I will simply find out who did not do his job. Then, in your name and the Walkers’ and the name of whoever else decides to join you, I will sue that person and the company or agency he works for, I will sue them for negligence.”

“I want that person to go to prison for the rest of his life,” she declared. “I want him to die there. I don’t want his money.”

“It’s unlikely anyone will go to prison. He or his company will have to pay in other ways. But pay they will. And we must make them pay, Mrs. Otto, not to benefit you in a material way or to compensate you for the loss of your son, Bear, which can’t be done, but to protect the child you’re carrying inside you now. Understand, I’m not here to speak just for your anger. I’m here to speak for the future as well. What we’re talking about here is our ongoing relation to time.”

“I see.” And I think she did. The Walkers had seemed more muddled in their motives. The money promised by the lawsuit meant a lot to them, of course, but in a greedy childish way, and certainly more than they were willing to admit to themselves or reveal openly to me. The Walkers were poor and in debt, and their poverty had bugged them for years, and it seemed even more unfair to them now, with their child gone, than before. But Wanda Otto, and her husband too, never struck me as having any selfish interest in the money; they cared only about its handy capacity to function as punishment and prohibition. They were too lost in their Zen Little Indians fantasy to be wholly believable, maybe, or as reliable as the Walkers were, but I admired them nonetheless.

Hartley had returned bearing a mug with a tea bag in it. “Let it steep a minute,” he said. “You want milk?”

“No. A little sugar, though.”

“We only have honey,” he said.

“I’ll take it straight.”

“Well, Mr. New York Lawyer, what you’ve been saying makes sense,” Wanda said to me. “Not much else in this world does.” Then to Hartley, “We should hire this man to represent us. That way we won’t have to deal with any of the others. He can advise us on how to talk to the reporters too. You’ll do that?” she asked me.

“Yes. Certainly. For now, though, you should refuse all interviews. Say nothing to the press, nothing to any other lawyers. Refer everybody to me.”

“Are you expensive?”

“No,” I said. “If you agree to have me represent you in this suit, I will require no payment until after the suit is won, when I will require one third of the awarded amount. If there is no award made, then my services will have cost you nothing. It’s a standard agreement.”

“Do you have this agreement with you?”

“In my car,” I said, and, not without difficulty, stood up, almost spilling my tea. I’m not used to sitting cross-legged on the floor. “I’ll just be a minute. You should talk without me, anyhow, before you sign it,” I added. Also, I needed a cigarette, and I hadn’t noticed any ashtrays: the house was cluttered with small figurines and strange clay baskets that looked as if they were made to hold the spirits of ancestors rather than cigarette butts and ashes.

I stepped outside, coatless, still bearing my mug of tea, and the dog followed me and promptly pissed on the front tire of my car and took off down the road. I dumped the tea onto a snowbank, making my own mark. Then I got inside the car, where it was still warm, and lit a cigarette.

I felt terrific. My mind was off and running, switching options and tracking consequences like a first-class computer. Everyone has a specialty, and I guess this is mine. For twenty-five years now, and for three different firms, even after making partner, I’ve been the guy who handles these disaster negligence suits. I could pull away from tort cases and just handle the white-shoe stuff if I wanted — I’ve got the name and face for it — or I could quit the practice altogether, move permanently out to the house in East Hampton and maybe teach a course or two at Fordham; but I won’t. Nothing else provides me with the rush that I get from cases like this. There is a brilliant hard-edged clarity that comes over me when I take on a suit for the Ottos and the Walkers of the world, an intensity and focus that makes me feel more alive then than at any other time.

It’s almost like a drug. It’s probably close to what professional soldiers feel, or bullfighters. The rest of the time, like most people, I muddle lonely through my days and nights feeling unsure, vaguely confused, conflicted, and aimless. Put me onto something like this school bus case, though, and zap! all those feelings disappear. Nothing else does it — not illicit sex, not cocaine, not driving fast late at night on the wrong lane of the highway, all of which I’ve tried. Nothing.

When I think about it, the only other event in my life that I can remember even coming close to giving me the same rush, the same hard hit of formalized intelligence, happened nearly twenty years ago, on the coast of North Carolina, when Zoe was two years old and we were renting a summer place way out on the Outer Banks. Klara and I were tight then, especially over Zoe; we still thought we had a future together, the three of us. Later, it would be only two of us with a future together, me and Zoe, or Klara and Zoe; then one of us, me alone, Klara alone, and who knows now about Zoe’s future? Fission in the nuclear family. It’s got a short half-life.

Klara had put Zoe down for her afternoon nap, and she and I were sitting out on the deck reading and watching the tide come in. I heard Zoe start to fuss and went in to check her; it was hot, North Carolina hot, and the house wasn’t air-conditioned; I figured the heat had wakened her early. But when I saw her I was horrified — she was standing in the rented Portacrib, her red face sweating and swollen like a melon, with a pathetic froglike smile sliced across it. I touched her bare shoulder gingerly: she was feverish, her skin as hot as I’d ever felt it. I grabbed her up, rushed her out to the kitchen, and splashed water on her face, shouting for Klara to call the doctor, I think she’s been bitten by an insect or something!

In that splendid isolation there was no doctor — or rather, there was only one, and he was off fishing in the Gulf Stream for yellowfin tuna. The nearest hospital was in Elizabeth City, forty miles inland, across the Great Dismal Swamp on a narrow, badly paved road. Zoe’s face, arms, and legs continued to swell, although she seemed not to be in any pain or even discomfort. Klara took her in her arms and continued washing her body down with cold water, searching in vain for signs of a bite — snake or spider, I knew it mattered which — while I frantically dialed the hospital.

I finally got a doctor on the line; he sounded young, Southern, but cool. Instantly, he surmised that there was a nest of baby black widow spiders in the crib mattress. “They have to be little babies, or else with her body weight she’d be dead,” he said. “You’re way out there in Duck, eh? If Dr. Hopkins has gone fishin’, then you’ll just have to rush her here. I’m alone here and can’t leave. There is a good chance you can get her to me before her throat closes, and then we can control the swelling with insulin,” he said. But keep her calm, he told me, don’t excite her. “Is she more relaxed with one of you than the other?”

“Yes,” I said. “With me.” Which was true enough, especially at that moment. Klara was wild-eyed with fear, and her fear was contagious. I was a better actor than she, that’s all. Zoe loved us equally then. Just as she loathes us equally now.

“All right, then, you be the one to hold the child in your lap, Mr. Stephens, and let your wife drive the vehicle. And you better bring a small sharp knife along with you. Do you have one that’s clean? You don’t have time to sterilize it properly.”

I said yes, my Swiss army knife. Clean and sharp. But what the hell for?

“Use the small blade,” he said, and then he explained how to perform an emergency tracheotomy, told me how to cut into my daughter’s throat and windpipe without causing her to bleed to death. “There will be a whole lot of blood, you understand. A whole lot.”

“I don’t think I can do that,” I said, but I heard my voice go flat and toneless as I spoke, as if I were already doing it.

“If her throat closes up and stops her breathing, you’ll have to, Mr. Stephens. You’ll have a minute and a half, two minutes maybe, and she’ll probably be unconscious when you do it. But listen, if you can keep her calm and relaxed, if you don’t let her little heart beat real fast and spread that poison around, then you just might make it over here first. You get going now,” he snapped, and hung up.

I relayed the bit about keeping her calm to Klara, but nothing about the knife, and without explanation said that she should drive while I held Zoe, which relieved her, I think. Then we took off down the long sandy beach road to the bridge and over the causeway to the mainland, speeding west through the swamp toward Elizabeth City. It was an unforgettable forty-five minutes. Throughout, I was neatly divided into two people — I was the sweetly easy daddy singing, “I’ve got sixpence, jolly, jolly sixpence, I’ve got sixpence to last me all my life,” and I was the icy surgeon, one hand in his pocket holding the knife, blade open and ready, the decision to cut unquestioned now, irreversible, while I waited merely for the second that Zoe’s breath stopped to make the first slice into her throat.

I can’t tell you why I connect that terrifying drive to Elizabeth City over two decades ago to this case in Sam Dent now, where children actually died, fourteen of them, but there is a powerful equivalence. With my knife in my hand and my child lying in my lap, smiling up at me, trusting me utterly, with her face swelling like a painted balloon, progressively distorting her features into grotesque versions of themselves, I felt the same clearheaded power that I felt during those first days in Sam Dent, when the suit was taking off. I felt no ambivalence, did no second-guessing, had no mistrusted motives — I knew what I did and what I would do next and why, and Lord, it felt wonderful! It always feels that way. Which is why I go on doing it.

In the case of the drive to Elizabeth City, as in so many of the suits I’ve since undertaken, it turned out that I did not have to go as far as I was prepared to go. But this is only because I was indeed prepared to go all the way. I was at peace with myself and the world, and consequently Zoe, too, stayed calm and placid, her tiny heart beating slowly, normally, even after I ran out of songs and had to go back to the beginning of my repertoire, which usually irritated her; she almost fell asleep at one point.

Klara raced into the hospital lot, drew up at the emergency room entrance, and I stepped out of the car and calmly carried Zoe inside, where the doctor and two nurses with a gurney and an IV hookup awaited us. Five minutes later, her swelling had started to recede. By evening, the three of us were back at the beach, watching from the deck as the sun set behind the dunes and out near the eastern horizon the red sky streaked the sea in plum and cobalt blue. We had removed the mattress from the crib as soon as we got back from the hospital and, unsure of what to do with it, had tossed it into a patch of witchgrass beside the deck; but that night I built a driftwood fire on the beach and burned the thing, and Zoe slept with us.

Now in my dreams of her, and I dream of her frequently, Zoe is still that child in my lap, trusting me utterly — even though I am the man who secretly held in his hand the knife that he had decided to use to cut into her throat, and thus I am in no way the man she sees smiling down at her, singing ditties and rondelets and telling stories of owls and pussycats.

And sometimes when I wake, for a few moments I’m like Risa Walker and Hartley Otto and Billy Ansel and all those other parents whose children have died and who have been unable to react with rage — the dreamed child is the real one, the dead child simply does not exist. We waken and say, “I can’t believe she’s gone,” when what we mean is “I don’t believe she exists.” It’s the other child, the dreamed baby, the remembered one, that for a few lovely moments we think exists. For those few moments, the first child, the real baby, the dead one, is not gone; she simply never was.

After explaining to the Ottos the contingency fee agreement, which, like the Walkers, they quickly signed (once they realized it would cost them nothing up front), I returned to my car and drove along Bartlett Hill Road from their house back into town, following the route of the school bus, which took me past all the houses of the families who had entrusted their children to it. A morbid drive, but it gave me some insights and let me usefully imagine the event, despite the different weather and time of day. So that when I passed the town dump, pulled out onto the Marlowe road, and headed down from Wilmot Flats, I saw that wide snow-covered bowl open up before me and naturally picked up speed, as the driver of the bus must have, and my attention momentarily left the roadway altogether, as hers must have, and took in the marvelous view of valley and village, snowy mountains and deep blue sky, and I almost missed the place where the bus had gone over, where there remained all kinds of signs of the disaster — the broken and trampled roadside snowbank and the state police barriers still up, the tracks of trucks and ambulances, of snowmobiles and crowds of rescue workers on the embankment and the snow-covered ground around the water-filled sandpit below. The pit, although it had frozen solid again, was now an ice crater of sorts, with huge gray wedges and chunks sticking out of the new ice and lying along the bank like the walls of a building destroyed by a bomb.

I parked my car a ways beyond the scene and slowly walked back along the highway to it. No other vehicles in sight. The sun was bright, and a steady breeze was blowing out of the valley below, hissing in the trees and sending the powdery snow across the pavement in tiny fantails. It was definitely ghostly out there, but I’ve visited hundreds of scenes like this and can recreate the tragic event in my mind without being distracted by the atmosphere of the aftermath.

I saw where the bus had gone through the low three-cable guardrail and noted that it had been a relatively new rail, properly installed. On the other side of the highway, the posts were rusted near the base from the salty runoff; soon those rails, too, would have to be replaced. But, regretfully, Dolores Driscoll hadn’t gone through over there; she’d snapped off the new poles here on this side, half a dozen of them, dragging the cables with her. From my point of view, the best thing you could say about the new guardrail was that it was utterly incapable of stopping or even diverting a fast-moving bus.

Beyond the broken guardrail, the embankment fell off precipitously, and the angle between the road and the line that ran from the road to the point where the bus had entered the sandpit below was twenty or twenty-five degrees. No way the bus could have cut that sharp an angle unless, when it left the road and broke through the guardrail, it was speeding, or damned near speeding. A hundred yards farther down the road, at a point directly opposite the sandpit, the drop was gradual. If the vehicle had gone off there, no matter how fast it had been going when it left the road, it wouldn’t have traveled the several hundred feet down the slope to the sandpit: the impact of the guardrail and then the snowbank and the field of deep snow beyond would have stopped the vehicle first. Up above, though, all you had, after the guardrail and the snowbank, was free-fall.

It was inescapable — when the bus left the road, it had been moving pretty fast. And because of the drop-off, once through the guardrail, the bus was gone. There was no way for the driver to have kept it from going down the steep embankment and into the sandpit, even at that oblique an angle, without having immediately, deliberately, flipped it over on its side, which would have kept it out of the sandpit, at least. But what kind of driver could have pulled that off? Not the kind that’s terrified of losing the lives of children, that’s for sure. Not Dolores Driscoll.

I stepped over the rail opposite the sandpit and made my way down the trampled slope to examine the site up close. A chain-link fence surrounded the pit, most of it flattened now, smashed first by the plummeting bus and then by the rescuers. It had been a sturdy six-foot fence with a wide gate that no doubt had been padlocked. I thought, if one hot summer night some teenaged kids climbed over that fence to skinny-dip and one of them drowned there, the town would be negligent for not having drained it. That’s a case I could win, despite the fence. But that, I had to note, was not the case I was chasing here. What I had here was fourteen kids on their way to school one winter morning dying in a sandpit a hundred yards off the road. They did not get there on their own. Concentrate on how they got there, I decided.

Which presented certain problems. Unless I could establish that the driver of the bus, this Dolores Driscoll, had been safely under the speed limit when she came down the highway that morning, there was no way I’d be able to blame the town or the school district or the state or anyone else with deep pockets for negligence. To nail them, I’d have to defend her. I’d have to defend her even if the brakes or some part of the steering had failed. No matter what the immediate cause of the crash, I’d still have to establish that at the time it left the road the bus was being driven in a proper way and at a safe speed for the conditions.

I damn sure did not want to go after Dolores Driscoll, and, for somewhat different reasons, neither did my clients. Never mind that her pockets weren’t an inch deep; she was well-liked, sober, hardworking, from an old respected Sam Dent family, sole support of her crippled husband, and she’d been driving local kids to school safely for more than twenty years. Worse, the parents viewed her as having been victimized just as much as they were themselves, and a jury would agree with them. “Poor Dolores,” Risa had said. “She must be destroyed by this.”

My case would have to be built on the assumption that Dolores Driscoll was not at fault. The lawyers opposing me would simply hope to prove the opposite and go home early and type up their bills.

Two ways to establish the speed of the bus at the time it left the road, I figured: use the testimony of the driver and, more important, use the testimony of the sole witness, Billy Ansel. Which meant, of course, that he could not be one of my clients. Or anyone else’s, for that matter. For him to testify that Dolores had been driving under the speed limit (and I couldn’t even be sure of that yet), he could not be in a position to profit from his testimony. But with his impartiality established, I could then begin to hope that Ansel had in fact clocked the bus from behind with his truck and that neither of them had been traveling at more than fifty-five miles per hour. If he had not actually monitored the speed of the bus from behind, then I would have him testify as to his own safe driving habits — which, when challenged, I could support, if not verify. It would still be self-serving testimony, of course, but it would be enough for a jury that was inclined to believe him and did not want to blame Dolores Driscoll anyhow.

My first task, though, was to keep him impartial. Keep him clean. It would be easy to make him resist signing on with me, but I’d also have to help him resist the impulse to sign on with any of the double-knit sharks that were cruising these waters. I was sure he’d been contacted already, but my best guess so far was that he’d rebuffed them. Assuming that what I’d been told of him by the Walkers and the Ottos — that he had holed up in his house alone and was staying drunk — wasn’t just village gossip. Drunks don’t sue.

Originally, I’d decided that this guy, drunk or sober, was going to require some careful seduction. I myself had not planned to approach him until after the others had been turned down; let them seed the idea of a negligence suit, was my strategy, and then let me come along with my homework done and several of his more respected friends and neighbors in tow and all ready to file notices of claim, and the guy would sign on, I was sure.

Now, however, everything was different. Now I had to turn him off me, and in such a way that no other lawyer could get to him instead. This wasn’t quite ethical, of course; maybe not even moral. Necessary, however — legal triage.

I’d planned to give Ansel another few days before making direct contact, but that seemed too risky now. Better hit on the guy soon, or better yet, talk to him this evening at his house, late, especially if he’s into drinking. Give him a genteel nudge that pisses him off more afterwards than at the time of delivery, and he’ll want to kill the next lawyer he talks to, I figured.

There was no point in contacting any additional parents until I’d first brought Ansel’s testimony under my control and had answered the question of how fast the bus was moving when it went through the guardrail. So I went to work on the other aspects of the case — checked the state police in Marlowe, the county seat, to find out who had arrived at the scene first; stopped by the county mapping office for a look at the pitch and height of the highway and adjacent roads and lands; that sort of thing — gathering data, mainly, for later.

That night, after the blue-plate special at the Noonmark over in Keene Valley (ham and macaroni and cheese — kiddie food, but at least there weren’t any lawyers or journalists eating there), I drove out to Ansel’s house, which was up on Staples Mill Road. I passed the house by and parked a short ways beyond it with my lights out, thinking I’d reconnoiter a bit before approaching the man in person. It was a lovely moonlit night, the snow a pale blue color under it, the trees black against the snow. And cold — I didn’t even want to know the temperature.

I got out of the car and walked slowly back toward the house, a large well-maintained stone-faced colonial that looked recently renovated, with sharply cleared paths and driveway, two-car garage, breezeway — like a dentist’s house in the suburbs. The only lights on were in the room adjacent to the breezeway, apparently the kitchen, and from the road where I stood, next to the mailbox, I could see him through the large picture window, seated at the table, alone.

Jesus, he looked sad. Tousled dark hair, shoulders slumped, elbows planted on the table, a single glass and a half-empty bottle in front of him — the picture of permanent depression. Gone to where he thought his kids had gone. If I’d wanted the guy for a client, I’d have been worried.

Suddenly, he stood up and turned and faced out the window, looking across the snow-covered front yard right at me. I froze and stared back at him. Nothing else to do. I remember that for several seconds we seemed to be gazing at one another, me in moonlight at the side of the road, him in the soft light of his kitchen a hundred feet away, neither of us moving a muscle. We were like mirror images of each other, but who knows if he saw me at all, or, if he saw me, what he thought he was looking at? Maybe all he could see was himself reflected off the window glass, a muscular bearded guy in his late thirties in a plaid flannel shirt and khakis; and saw nothing of the tall skinny fifty-five-year-old guy shivering outside in his camel-hair coat. It was a weird moment, though. As if we were long-lost brothers, separated early and passing by accident decades later, not quite recognizing each other, but then, for a second or two, something — something — clicks.

The moment passed. Ansel turned away from the window and poured himself another drink: it looked like straight whiskey. He sat heavily back down at the table, and I quickly walked back to my car. He’s too drunk to talk to tonight, I thought; probably wouldn’t even remember it in the morning. The aftereffect of what I had to say to him was more important to me than the immediate effect. I think I was rationalizing, though. Scared.

I decided to drive back to the motel by way of Ansel’s garage in town, which was where they’d hauled the wrecked bus. I wanted some pictures of the vehicle while I could still get them, even if I had to take them at night with a flash. In a day or two, I knew, once I’d filed notices of claim, the bus was likely to disappear.

I pulled into the garage lot and drove around to the rear, where there were seven or eight different vehicles parked and stowed, including the school bus, which was pretty smashed up, although not as badly as I’d expected. Most of the windows toward the rear were gone, kicked in by the divers, probably, but the vehicle was basically intact, probably even salvageable — a repair job that I did not think Billy Ansel would be taking on.

I took maybe twenty pictures, from all sides and even a few through the windows, and had just got back into my car and started the motor, when I saw a pickup truck enter the lot. It was Ansel’s. I kept the motor running but the lights off and watched, as he drew up behind the bus and after a few seconds stepped out of his truck. To my surprise, he walked steadily and didn’t look especially drunk. A little crazy, maybe, which was okay; but not drunk. In the glare of his headlights I watched him walk over to the driver’s side of the bus, where he stopped by the window and stood looking up at it for a long time, as if talking to someone inside.

Finally, he turned away from the bus and moved back toward his own vehicle. I decided to speak to him. I wasn’t scared of him anymore. The timing and locale couldn’t be better. It was invasive but not intrusive.

I got out of my car and crossed the lot toward him.

“You work for Ansel?” I asked him, as if I didn’t know who he was.

“I am Ansel.”

I moved closer and in a low voice said, “I’m sorry about your children, Mr. Ansel.”

“You are, eh?” He was already combative.

“Yes.”

We stared directly into each other’s eyes. The old staredown.

He broke first and said, “I take you to be a lawyer,” which let me counterpunch, which is how you control these things.

“Yes, I am an attorney. My name is—”

“Mister, I don’t want to know your name.”

True enough, but he was damn well going to learn it anyhow. “I understand,” I said.

“No. No, you don’t understand.”

“I can help you.”

“No, you can’t help me. Not unless you can raise the dead,” he declared, moving away from me and getting into his truck.

I quickly handed him a card. “Here. You may change your mind.”

He read the card and then passed it back, looking me straight in the face, but distracted somehow, as if memorizing the card.

Fine by me. I stared him back.

“Mr. Mitchell Stephens, Esquire, would you be likely to sue me if right now I was to beat you with my hands and feet?” he growled. “Beat you so bad that you pissed blood and couldn’t walk for a month? Because that is what I’m about to do, you understand. Whether you sue me or not.”

Lawyers sue; he’d made the connection. And suing is bad; he’d taken his stand. In what I hoped was a slightly weary but kindly tone, because I did not want to sound in the slightest defensive, the way I knew those other lawyers would react when he started threatening them, I said, “No, Mr. Ansel. No, I wouldn’t sue you. And I don’t think there’s anyone in this county who would even arrest you for it. But you’re not about to beat me up, are you?”

He paused, reconsidering. “No, I’m not going to beat you up. Just don’t talk to me again. Don’t come around my garage, and don’t come to my house or call me on the telephone.”

The rest was finish work. “You may change your mind. I can help you,” I said.

“Leave me alone, Stephens. Leave the people of this town alone. You can’t help any of us. No one can.”

“You can help each other. Several people have agreed to let me represent them in a negligence suit, and your case as an individual will be stronger if I’m allowed to represent you together as a group.” This was no longer the hook I’d originally planned it to be; now it was merely a way for him to feel morally superior to his neighbors, which, of course, would keep him clean for me later on, when I put him in front of a jury.

“My ‘case’? I have no case. None of us has a case.”

“You’re wrong about that. Very wrong. Your friends the Walkers have agreed, and Mr. and Mrs. Otto, and I’m talking with some other folks. It’s important to initiate proceedings right away. Things get covered up fast. People lie. You know that. People lie about these things. We have to begin our own investigation quickly, before the evidence disappears. That’s why I’m out here tonight.” I showed him my camera.

He looked at it with disgust. “Our children aren’t even buried yet,” he said. “It’s you — you’re the liar. Risa and Wendell Walker, I know them, you’re right, but they wouldn’t hire a goddamned lawyer. And the Ottos, they wouldn’t deal with you, for Christ’s sake. You’re lying to me about them, and probably to them about me. We’re not fools, you know, country bumpkins you can put the big-city hustle on. You’re just trying to use us. You want us to pull each other in,” he announced, getting it nicely wrong.

Smiling at his minor triumph, he shut the door of his truck, backed the vehicle up and turned, then drove quickly from the lot. The truck fishtailed as it hit the road and turned left, heading toward the west end of town. Where the Bide-a-Wile Motel was located; and Risa Walker. I did not have too much trouble imagining the conversation that would take place between them there. Husband Wendell I was certain, would not be a party to it. Poor sap. I liked Wendell. I did not like Billy Ansel.

Things moved pretty fast for a while then. A lot of it was strictly procedural, the kind of search-and-destroy that precedes filing a notice of claim, where you’re essentially boxing off the defendants so that you can both narrow the terms and widen the areas of liability. I had some files and a fax machine shipped up from New York by UPS and set up a sort of office for myself in my room at the Bide-a-Wile. The Walkers seemed pleased by the arrangement, especially Risa; from their point of view, they now had a lawyer-in-residence. I wasn’t exactly on retainer, but I did end up advising them, Risa in particular, on a few matters other than their negligence suit, which I was now attempting to aim at the State of New York, for not having installed sufficiently strong guardrails along that especially dangerous stretch of roadway, and at the town of Sam Dent, for not having drained the sandpit. And I was contemplating a suit against the school board, for having permitted Dolores Driscoll to service her school bus herself. I figured, cast as wide a net as possible and catch whatever fish you can in it.

As a defendant, the driver was out of bounds, of course, but I was now considering making even her a plaintiff, since, if she was not herself responsible for the accident, she might be shown to have a cause for action for emotional distress. What the hell, it was worth a try. It’d make an interesting precedent. Also, I might be able to run it backward: it would be that much harder for the state, town, and school lawyers to lay the responsibility for the accident on her if she was one of the parties suing them for negligence. In an important way, the whole case rose or fell on the question of Dolores Driscoll’s liability, and it was a question I’d just as soon not get asked at all. At least not without a few roadblocks.

The funerals started the next day, all over town, going on for several days, for three or four children at a time, and naturally I planned on staying away. Out of decency, but strategy as well. It doesn’t hurt to be the only lawyer in town who doesn’t come off as a buzzard.

The town was beginning to formalize its response to the tragedy. There had appeared one morning fourteen tiny crosses out at the crash site, which turned out to be the work of schoolchildren, at the instigation of the school board. So much for separation of church and state. A memorial service for the victims, announced in the local weekly newspaper, was scheduled to be held the following week in the school auditorium, where the state representative from the district, the school principal, and half a dozen area clergymen would intone. Money was being collected, ostensibly for the families of the victims (although the exact purpose of the money was a little vague — funeral expenses for some, medical expenses for others, I supposed), in glass jars at all the local businesses, even at the Noonmark Diner over in Keene Valley. TV viewers from around the country were sending contributions — money, clothing, canned food, stuffed animals, crucifixes, and potted plants — all of which was being logged in and held at the school for eventual distribution. Even then I could see problems down the road with that, but it was none of my affair, so I just listened and nodded as Risa filled me in on the details. She was evidently quite touched by the generosity of strangers, and I saw no reason to disabuse her of it. Some people, when terrible things happen to them, take strength from believing that other people are better than in fact they are. Not me. I go in the opposite direction.

Actually, I knew that Risa’s increasing confidentiality with me, her evident need to talk to me as frequently as possible, was her way of leading up to a conversation about how to divorce Wendell. I doubt she knew that herself then, but it was surely on the agenda. The death of her son had eliminated the one reason she was married to the boy’s father.

I still hadn’t taken the measure of Dolores Driscoll, however, so when Risa told me that the woman was showing up at all the funerals, sitting way in the back and then disappearing at the end of the service, only to reappear down the road at the next one, I decided to break my rule and take in a funeral myself, then head back to the city for a few days. I had several other cases that I’d left hanging and needed attention.

That morning at the motel, however, the phone in my room rang, and it was Zoe, out of the blue, after three months of silence, and it caught me completely by surprise, or I doubt I’d have handled it as badly as I did.

“Daddy, it’s me!” she’d said. Her voice was full of the usual phony enthusiasm, but it was dead, dead as the kids in their caskets.

“Zoe! Jesus!” I’d been shaving, and I snapped off my electric razor and sat down on the bed. It was like getting a call from a ghost. Every time I think my period of mourning is over, she calls to remind me that I haven’t really started yet.

“Hi! How’re you doing? Where are you? Where’s five one eight? I got this number off your phone machine.”

“Yeah, well, I’m … I’m surprised to hear from you. I’m on a case, upstate, in the Adirondacks.”

She said that was very interesting, and for a minute I gabbled on about the case, the motel, the town of Sam Dent, like we have these conversations, any conversation, all the time. Finally, I was able to stop myself, and I said, “Zoe, why are you calling me?”

“Why am I calling you? You’re my father, for Christ’s sake! I’m not supposed to call you?”

“Oh, Jesus, Zoe. Please, for once, let’s talk straight.”

“Fine. That would be terrific. I called Mom, and all she wanted to know was had I grown my hair back yet and what color was it, so I hung up. What do you want to know?”

“Well, to be perfectly honest, right now I want to know if you’re high.”

“You mean, Daddy, am I stoned? Do I have a needle dangling from my arm? Am I nodding in a phone booth? Did I score this morning, get whacked, Daddy, and call you for money”?

Trees, snow, mountains, ice. I could hear sirens, street traffic, a radio or TV newscaster in the background. I imagined some boyfriend behind her, sick and dying, smoking a cigarette, waiting for her to raise some money from her rich father. Who was I talking to? The living or the dead? How should I behave?

“God,” she said. “I don’t fucking believe it.”

“I’m sorry. I just need to know, if that’s possible. So I can know how to talk to you. So I can know how to act.”

“Just act naturally, Daddy,” she snapped.

The operator suddenly came on the line, instructing her to please deposit another two dollars and twenty cents for an additional three minutes.

“Where are you, Zoe? I’ll call back.”

“Shit!” she said. Then she hollered to someone, “What the fuck’s the number of this phone? It’s not here!”

“Zoe, just tell me where you are.”

“It’s this hotel, this … place. Where’s the goddamned number? I can’t find the fucking number.” The operator’s voice cut in again, repeating her instructions.

“Where are you, Zoe? Give me the name of the hotel; I’ll get the number from Information. What’s the address? You’re in New York?”

“Shit! It’s this pay phone. Yeah,” she said, and then the line went dead.

What do you do when this sort of thing happens? I’ll tell you what you do. You sit still and count slowly to ten, or a hundred, or a thousand, however long it takes for your heart to stop pounding, and then you resume doing whatever it was you were doing when the telephone first rang. I had been standing in my socks and underwear at the bathroom sink, shaving. I went back to shaving. I was in the tiny village of Sam Dent, New York, in the middle of generating a terrific negligence suit. I went back to that. I’d planned to return to the city that day anyhow, and Zoe’s phone call hadn’t touched that. She was probably in a ratty, crack-infested single-room-occupancy hotel in back of Times Square, or had just been kicked out of one. And for all I could do about it, she might as well be in L.A. as New York.

I switched my mind onto the business at hand, which I could do something about. Breakfast at the Noonmark. Attending funerals. Dolores Driscoll. The need to sound her out before I got myself locked into this case.

There was only one funeral left, the service for the Catholic kids at St. Hubert’s Church, a small white woodframe structure out by the fairgrounds on the East Branch of the Ausable River, on Route 73, a few miles from town. The funeral was for the Bilodeau and Atwater kids, from Wilmot Flats, and there were five small open caskets up front, surrounded by flowers and miscellaneous plant life. There were maybe a hundred people attending, a sadly shabby crowd in their Sunday best, mostly somber young men with big Adam’s apples and weeping overweight young women with rotten complexions, and bunches of kids and babies in hand-me-downs, with red runny noses and slobbering mouths. The kind of crowd the Pope likes.

I recognized several lawyers, easy to spot in their suits and topcoats, checking out the scene for potential clients, and a couple of journalists with cameras dangling from their necks and notebooks in their hands, waiting for visible signs of grief. Dolores I spotted immediately, thanks to Risa’s description: late middle age, round face, frizzy red hair, a little on the plump side, and wearing a man’s parka and heavy trousers and boots. “You’d think she was a lesbian or something, if you didn’t know about her husband, Abbott, and her sons, who are all quite normal,” Risa had explained. I noted that Risa herself seemed to prefer men’s clothing, but said nothing. What the hell, it was probably just something between women, the way they compete with one another without having to acknowledge it.

I was standing by the door in a pack of late arrivals, still thinking about Zoe, I admit it, when I first saw Dolores. The tiny church was crowded, but she had half a pew at the back to herself, so I slid in next to her. Immediately four or five people followed and sat on my other side, filling the rest of the pew. It wasn’t too hard to see what the difficulty was — these people liked Dolores, she was one of them, and they felt as profoundly sorry for her as for themselves; but they also could not help blaming her and wanting to cast her out. They would have preferred that she simply disappear from town for a while, go and stay with her son in Plattsburgh or at least hide behind the door of her house with her husband up there on Bartlett Hill. They wanted her to stash her pain and guilt where they didn’t have to look at it.

But she wasn’t having any of that. Silently, with her head bowed, Dolores was plunking herself down in the exact center of the town’s grief and rage, compelling them by her presence at these funerals to define her. Was she a victim of this tragedy, or was she the cause of it? She had placed herself on the scales of their judgment, but they did not want to judge her. To them, she was both, of course, victim and cause; just as to herself she was both. Like every parent when something terrible happens to his child, Dolores was innocent, and she was guilty. We knew which, in the eyes of God and our fellowman, we were, despite the fact that most of the time we felt like both; but she did not. Denial was impossible for her, so she wanted us to come forward and do the job for her.

Toward the end of the service, when the short red-faced priest turned to the cross in the nave for a closing prayer and the pallbearers stepped forward from their front-row seats and took their posts by the caskets, Dolores suddenly stood and squeezed past me and the others in the pew. I followed her, excusing my knees as I worked my way to the aisle. From the foyer, I watched the woman hurry down the path to the road, then move rapidly past the hearses and the long line of parked cars. I broke into a run and caught up with her just as she reached a large dark blue van.

“Mrs. Driscoll!” I called. “Please!”

She turned and faced me, scared. “What do you want!”

“I can tell you, I can tell you whether you’re guilty or not.” I was out of breath; for her size, the woman moved pretty fast.

“Who are you? Who is it can do that? No one can do that.”

“Yes, I can. Answer me one simple question, and I’ll tell you if you are to blame.”

“One question?”

“Yes. When the bus left the road, Mrs. Driscoll, how fast was it moving?”

“I don’t know.”

“Approximately.”

“You said one question.”

“It’s the same question, Mrs. Driscoll. Approximately how fast?”

“The police already asked it.”

“What did you tell them?”

“You said one question.”

“Same question.”

“Fifty, fifty-five at the most, is what I told them.”

“Then you’re not guilty,” I said. “You’re not to blame. Believe me.”

“Why? Why should I believe you?”

“Listen to me, you poor woman. You didn’t do anything wrong that morning. It wasn’t your fault. I now know as much as anyone about what happened out there on the highway that morning, and believe me, it’s not you who are at fault.”

“Who, then?”

“Two or maybe three parties who were not there at the time,” I said, and I listed them for her. I told her my name and explained that I was representing the Ottos and the Walkers, people who liked and admired her and who believed, with me, that she was in many ways as much a victim of this tragedy as they were. I said that I would like to represent her too.

“Me? Represent me? No,” she said. “You can’t. I only said I was doing fifty, fifty-five. To the police; to Captain Wyatt Pitney, from the state police. Because that’s how I remembered it. But the truth, mister, is that I might have been doing sixty miles an hour when the bus went over, or sixty-five. Not seventy, I’m sure. But sixty is possible. Sixty-five, even. And I would say that to a judge, if some smart lawyer like you, only working for the other side, took it into his head to ask it that way. And, mister,” she said in a low voice, “let’s face it, if I was over the limit, no matter how you tell it, I’m sure I’m to blame.”

Yep. “But what if Billy Ansel insists that at the time of the alleged accident, you were going fifty-two miles an hour?”

“He knows that? Billy?”

“Yes. He does.”

“Billy said that?”

“If he does not volunteer to say so in court, I will subpoena him and oblige him to testify to that effect — if you’ll let me bring a suit in your name charging negligent infliction of emotional harm. It’s clear to me and many other people that you have suffered significantly from this event. And then, Dolores Driscoll, your name, your very good name, will be cleared once and for all in this town. Everyone will know then that you, too, have suffered enormously, we’ll have established it legally, and then you will not have to bear any of the blame.”

“Well, I’m not to blame!” she said. “I’m not to blame.” Her large round face crinkled suddenly, and she began to weep. I placed both hands on her shoulders and drew her toward me, and in a few seconds she was blubbering against my chest. Peering over her head, I watched the caskets come out of the church, one after the other. The pallbearers — uncles and older brothers and cousins of the kids inside the boxes — shoved the caskets into the hearses, and the somber black-suited guys from the funeral homes slammed the doors shut on them.

It was probably just as well that Dolores had her back to the scene. When the people coming out of the church saw us standing there, they stopped, many of them, and glared at us. And when they moved toward their cars and pickup trucks, they cut a wide swath around us, until finally we were standing there in the parking lot next to the church alone.

“Come out to the house,” she said to me, wiping her red swollen face with her sleeve. “What I want, you can tell my husband, Abbott, what you’ve told me. Abbott’s logical. Like you. But he’s more interested than you in doing what’s right. You’ll see. If he says I should do this, go to court and all, like you say, so my name can be cleared and like that, then I will. But if he’s against it, then I’m against it.”

I hadn’t planned on this, but I said fine, that made perfect sense to me, and agreed to follow her out to her house in my car. Yes, I suppose I had a few minor misgivings about having lied to her — I was a little worried that I wouldn’t be able to get Billy Ansel to confirm that she had been driving under the speed limit. It was a gamble, a calculated risk, but the odds were maybe ten to one that no matter how fast they were going when the bus went over, Ansel, for several reasons, would say to a jury, just as she had told the cops, “Fifty, fifty-five.” You have to gamble like this now and then.

‘Would you say fifty-two miles per hour, Mr. Ansel?”

“Yeah. Fifty-two, I’d say.”

“Would you say fifty-three miles per hour, Mr. Ansel?”

“Yeah. It might have been fifty-three. No more, though.”

“At that time, Mr. Ansel, and under the weather conditions and road conditions that prevailed at that time, the time of the accident, and at that place on the road from Marlowe to the town of Sam Dent — a stretch of road that you, like Mrs. Driscoll, are extremely familiar with, are you not …?”

“Yeah.”

“Would fifty-three miles per hour have been a safe speed to be operating a school bus?”

“Objection!”

“Sustained.”

“I withdraw the question. I have no further questions of the gentleman, Your Honor.”

Piece of cake, on a plate.

Dolores and her husband, Abbott, lived near the top of Bartlett Hill Road in a large foursquare white house with a wide porch in front and a big unpainted barn in back, with nothing but dense woodlands beyond. From the porch you had a great one-hundred-eighty-degree view that included The Range, as they call it, from Mount Marcy to Wolf Jaw. A million-dollar view. For the area, it was an old house, and it had fallen on bad times. In the late 1800s, Dolores’s grandfather had been a successful dairy farmer, she told me as we stood in the driveway before going inside. He’d built it himself from trees cleared off this land, and her father and then she herself had been raised in it. Back then, Dolores said, even in her father’s day, these forested mountains were alpine meadowlands. “It was like Switzerland,” she said, “although I can’t say what Switzerland’s like.” Now, for miles, straight to the horizon, you saw nothing but trees — hardwoods, mostly, and hemlock and pine — and if it weren’t for the occasional old stone wall sinking into the leafy ground, you’d think you were in the forest primeval.

Abbott Driscoll was a shriveled guy in a wheelchair; he’d had a stroke a few years before, and his whole right side had blinked out. He had long thinning white hair, bright blue eyes, and soft pink skin, and he drooled a little and sat canted to one side, like a baby in a high chair.

Although he seemed bright enough, his speech was seriously impaired, and I could make out only about half of what he said. Most of the other half Dolores translated, whether I wanted her to or not. He spoke in these odd cryptic sentences that didn’t really mean a whole lot to me but to Dolores were like Delphic pronouncements. I guess she loved the hell out of the guy and heard what she wanted to hear.

I sat at the kitchen table opposite him, while Dolores took what appeared to be her customary position behind his wheelchair, where she rubbed his shoulders affectionately and now and then stroked his hair back.

It was a brief interview, mainly because I did a lot more talking myself than I normally do. I was still distracted by the business with Zoe. Essentially, I repeated what I had told Dolores outside the church, but said it at least three times, with a slight variation each time, as if I was cross-examining myself. I felt slightly out of control.

Abbott mostly gargled and sputtered, interrupting me occasionally with stuff like “Blame … creates … gabble-gabble … ” and “Cluck-cluck-cluck … lives … longer … than … spe-lunk.” Which Dolores, with modest downcast eyes and a small knowing smile, translated as “Blame creates comprehension” and “A person’s name lives longer than her lifetime.”

Yeah, sure, Dolores. Whatever you say. I merely nodded and continued talking, as if he’d said something I totally agreed with or had asked me to repeat myself. Yackety-yak: out of sync, out of character. Finally, I reached the end of my spiel one more time, and because this time he said nothing, no mysterious oracular pronouncements, just a drooling silence, I was able to stop, and for a few seconds all three of us were silent and apparently thoughtful.

There was a crackling fire in the kitchen wood stove, but that was the only sound. The house was warm and weathertight and smelled good, like baked bread. Most of the furniture was either homemade or yard sale stuff, twenty and thirty years old, repaired over and over with string, wire, and glue, but still sturdy, still serviceable. I waited. I wanted a cigarette, but it didn’t look as if either of them smoked, especially him, so I just patted the pack in my shirt pocket for comfort.

Then Abbott spoke. He twisted his face around his mouth the best he could and pursed his lips on the left side as though he were sucking a straw and in a loud voice said something like “A down … gloobity-gear … and day old’ll … find you … innocent … if a brudder … lands … gloobity first….”

And so on and so forth. I was guessing, but it sounded like the old guy was ready for action. All I could read was his face, however, which was bright and open and smiling as he talked, not angry and vengeful, the way I like it. It was the longest speech he’d made so far, but to tell the truth, I hadn’t the foggiest idea of what words, or even what language, he’d used for making it. Serbo-Croatian, maybe.

Dolores knew, though. She smiled and said to me, “You heard what Abbott said?”

“Yes, I heard. Can you make it exact for me, though? I think I missed some of it. You know, a word or two.”

“Certainly. Glad to. What Abbott said was: The true jury of a person’s peers is the people of her town. Only they, the people who have known her all her life, and not twelve strangers, can decide her guilt or innocence. And if Dolores — meaning me, of course — if she has committed a crime, then it’s a crime against them, not the state, so they are the ones who must decide her punishment too. What Abbott is saying, Mr. Stephens, is forget the lawsuit. That’s what he’s saying.”

“He is?”

“Yep.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Yep. I told you he was logical,” she declared. “He understands things better than most people. He understands me too.”

“That right?”

“Oh, yes. Abbott’s a genius.”

A genius, eh? A gibbering fool, is what I thought. From what I could see and hear, Dolores was the ventriloquist and Abbott was the dummy. And you can’t argue with the ventriloquist about what the dummy really said.

I got up from my chair, lit a cigarette, said my goodbyes, and I was gone. Not without a certain relief. It surprised me; I don’t usually give up that easily. I guess I had my reasons: the Driscolls were too weird to bring into a negligence suit, but they were also too weird to sue, which did not displease me.

The guy Abbott Driscoll, though, he gave me the creeps. Whatever his wife claimed he said or meant to say, I was sure he knew things that neither of us knew and was just playing cat-and-mouse with us, using his affliction to make us say and do things we might not otherwise say or do, so that we would end up showing him who we really were. Which might have been okay for her — presumably, she wanted him to know who she really was, but I didn’t. The guy would’ve made a hell of a lawyer if he could talk straight.

Well, you win some and you lose some, I said to myself. And this one was probably better off lost early than late. Down the hill and over to the west end of town I went, back to the Bide-a-Wile to pack. Halfway down the hill, I passed by the little handmade house in the pines where I’d been told Nichole Burnell lived with her mommy and daddy and two younger brothers and baby sister, and I thought for a second of stopping off there, just to put a scanner on the parents. But I was in a hurry to get back to the city now, and it was getting late in the day, so I let it go. I was sure I’d be back in a few days and could check them out then. The kid was going to be in the hospital for a long time anyhow. Apparently she was out of immediate danger, but they weren’t allowing her any visitors yet, so I wasn’t worried about the competition.

I pulled into the motel lot, and when I passed through the front office on my way to my room, Wendell stopped me.

“Phone message, Mitch,” he said, and he handed me a pink slip of paper. “Came in a few minutes ago.”

I remember it took me a few seconds to realize that I wasn’t reading my secretary’s name and number. It was Zoe, which Wendell had spelled Zooey, and there was a New York number, with the instruction to call back right away. Okay. Will do. I was on automatic pilot now. I knew she’d gone out and managed somehow to get high, swapping services for goods, no doubt, and, thus fortified, was ready to resume the enterprise she had begun earlier.

I went back to my room, sat down on the bed, and dialed. The phone rang only once, and she answered, apparently waiting beside it.

“H’lo?”

“Zoe? That you?”

“Oh, Dad, hi. Hey, listen, I’m sorry about this morning, I was really bumming, and this damn phone is all fucked up …,” blah blah blah, in a soft, accommodating voice that was all surface, a lid of sweetness and light over a caldron of rage and need.

I waited out the preliminaries, responding feebly but with caution, and in a few minutes we got around to the main event, as I knew we would, brought on by my asking a simple question, just as before. “Are you calling me for money, Zoe?” I asked.

She inhaled deeply, held her breath for a few seconds, then sighed. Real Sarah Bernhardt. “I’m calling,” she said, “because I have some news for you. Daddy, I’ve got some big news for you.”

“News,” I said, suddenly fatigued beyond belief.

“You don’t want to hear it?” I heard the lid on the pot start to wobble and jump.

“Yes, sure. Give me your news, Zoe.”

“You always think you know what I’m going to say, don’t you? You always think you’re two steps ahead of me. The lawyer.”

“No, Zoe, I don’t always think that.”

“Well, this time I’m two steps ahead of you!”

“Tell me your news, Zoe.”

“Okay. Okay, then. You won’t want to hear this, but I’m gonna say it anyhow. Dig it. I went to sell blood yesterday. That’s how it is. I’m in fucking New York City, where my father is a hot shit lawyer, and I’m selling my blood for thirty-five bucks.”

“This is not news, Zoe.”

“No, but this is. They wouldn’t take my blood.” Long pause. “I tested HIV positive.”

I said nothing; the blood, hers, surged past my throat into my face. I could hear the heavy slam of my heart. I was swimming in blood.

“You know what that means, Daddy? Do you? Does it register?”

“Yes.”

“AIDS, Daddy.”

“Yes.”

“Welcome to hard times, Daddy.”

“Yes, that’s one way of saying it.”

“Isn’t that a kick, Daddy?”

“Oh, Lord,” I said. “What do you want me to do, Zoe?”

“What do I want you to do?” She practically shrieked it. Then she laughed, a long high-pitched cackle, like an old madwoman, a witch on the heath.

“I’ll do whatever you want, Zoe.”

“Good. That’s really good of you. I was hoping you’d say that. I really was.” She laughed again, girlishly this time, a child who had tricked her grumpy old dad. “Money,” she said. “I want money.”

“What for?”

She laughed again. “You can’t ask me that. Not anymore. You asked me what I wanted. Not what I wanted it for. I want money.”

Suddenly, I was the man I had been twenty years earlier with the knife hidden in my hand, my child in my lap. “All right,” I said. “Fine. I’ll give you money. For whatever purpose.” I was the calm easy daddy singing our favorite song. I’ve got sixpence, jolly jolly sixpence, I’ve got sixpence, to last me all my life.

“I’ll come back down to the city this afternoon,” I assured her, “and I’ll give you as much money as you need.”

“Want!”

“Yes, want.”

We were both silent then.

“I can hear you breathing, Daddy,” she said.

“Yes. I can hear you breathing too.” I’ve got sixpence to spend, and sixpence to lend, and sixpence to take home to my wife, poor wife.

“I’ll come to your apartment,” she said. “Tonight. What time will you be there?”

“Oh, seven or eight, maybe sooner. It’s about six hours’ drive from here. I’ll leave here today, as soon as possible. How much … how much money do you want, Zoe?”

“Oh, let’s see. Give me a thousand bucks. For now.”

“For now.”

“That’s all I’ve got, Daddy. All I’ve got is now. Remember? AIDS, Daddy.”

“All right,” I said. I almost smiled agreeably into the phone. “I’ll meet you at my place, and we’ll talk, won’t we?”

“Yes. We’ll talk. So long as you have the money. Otherwise, I’m out of there, Pops.”

“Do you have the test? The blood test?”

“You don’t believe me!” she shrieked. “I get it — you don’t believe me, do you?”

“Yes. Yes, I do believe you. I thought, maybe, I thought I could get you to take another test. With a regular doctor, in case the first one was wrong.”

“You don’t believe me.” She laughed. “I like it even better that way. It’s better you don’t believe me but have to act like you do.”

“I do believe you, Zoe. You say you have AIDS, goddammit! I know what that means. Let me, for Christ’s sake, be your father!”

She began to cry then, which didn’t surprise me. And so did I. Or at least I sounded, to her and to me as well, as if I was crying. I was not, however; I was fingering the knife blade, testing its sharpness with my thumb.

“I love you, Daddy. Oh, God, I’m scared,” she sobbed.

“I love you too. I’ll be there soon, and I’ll take care of you, Zoe. No matter what happens, I’ll take care of you.”

I felt incredibly powerful at that moment, as if I had been waiting for the moment for years.

We finally hung up, and I quickly packed my bag and put my room in order. Zoe was right, of course. I did not believe her. I did not disbelieve her, either. In that way, this call was like a thousand others. There was one important difference, however. Until this moment, I had for years been tied to the ground, helpless and enraged by my own inability to choose between belief and disbelief. That first task, to eliminate one or the other — to free one limb so as to untie the other — had until now been denied me; because I loved her. Oh yes, I loved my daughter. And because I loved her, I could not know the truth and then act accordingly. Now, for the first time in all those years, I was in a position to know the truth — and then to act. Out of desperation, Zoe had freed me from love. Whether she had AIDS or was lying to me, I would soon know. Either way, I was free. She’d played her final card with me; she could no longer keep me from being who I am. Mitchell Stephens, Esquire.