Courthouse Steps

Liza had grown up oversensitive to the fact that she looked so much like the hell-raising party girl from the past, and since people rarely lost an opportunity to speculate on the similarity of their behavior, Liza had eventually begun to act like her, more in a twisted sort of rebellion than because she was like her grandmother. Liza was spirited, but there was no meanness in her.

And Jeff...Jeff had married a woman just like Margaret, as selfish and as insensitive as a rhino. The family had tried to talk him out of it, but Jeff had been well and truly under her spell. Because of a secret fascination with Margaret? The marriage had ended and Jeff had pretended that it didn’t hurt. But Amanda knew that it did.

Then there was their mother. Alyssa had never gotten over Margaret’s abandonment of her as a child. Now it turned out that Margaret hadn’t abandoned her after all, but had planned to; she had left a note. Same difference in the end. Die, walk out...their mother was still scarred for life.

Amanda’s thoughts moved on to the person most hurt by Margaret’s thoughtlessness: Judson. She remembered the pain that burned deeply in his eyes and remembered that throughout her childhood she had acted the fool many times in order to make her grandfather laugh.

For herself, Amanda once had thought she’d escaped untouched. She didn’t look like the Ingalls women—tall, leggy blondes. She looked like her father, Ronald Baron. So did Jeff, except for his inheritance of their grandfather’s commanding nose and chin. Yet she now knew that she had not escaped. For her, fate had played a delaying game. It had waited to spring her grandmother on her at a later date—to be exact, forty-two years. It was no wonder Amanda felt nothing except annoyance with the woman. Margaret was as much a troublemaker dead as she had been alive.

And Ethan Trask thought it unfair that she should represent the man accused of murdering Margaret? If anyone, it should be she! She resented the woman, just as she resented the assistant attorney general’s intimation that she had planned some kind of wrongdoing.

Ethan Trask...

Amanda’s fingers stopped on the pages of one of her law books as unwanted feelings fought their way into her consciousness. She had tried to ignore it earlier, but beneath all her outrage had lurked something else, the fact that on some core level, she found Ethan Trask extremely attractive. She felt herself growing steadily warmer. Then a tap on her door rescued her from further discomfort. A second later, her grandfather poked his head through the opening. “Amanda, honey?” he said. “Tessie told me to come right in.”

Amanda’s greeting was a little more enthusiastic than it normally might have been. She jumped up to give her grandfather a hug.

Judson smiled bemusedly as he patted her back. “I realize the situation is bad, but is it this bad?” he teased.

Amanda didn’t want to let go of her grandfather’s solid strength as memories of her childhood once again stirred. She’d had two men in her life then, her grandfather and her father. She had lost her father, a fact that remained like a huge gaping hole in her life even after ten years. She didn’t want to lose her grandfather, too. She didn’t think he would live very long in jail.

She made herself step back, more because she didn’t want to frighten him than because she was ready. She forced a smile. “No, it’s not that bad,” she assured him. “Only a minor bobble or two.” She hesitated, then plunged in. “Ethan Trask wants me off the case. He’s going to file a motion with the judge. He doesn’t like it that I’m both your and Margaret’s granddaughter.”

Judson’s still handsome features settled into a frown. “Can he do that?” he asked.

“Not without a fight...and I’m going to give him one. That’s what I was doing just now, working up my argument.”

Judson glanced at her loaded desk. “Would you like me to come back later? I can always find something to do at the plant or the lab.”

Amanda shook her head. “No, this is fine.” She showed him to a chair. Her grandfather still held himself with a quiet kind of dignity, but the past year had taken its toll. It was hard for him to ignore the rumors that flashed about town, to ignore the fact that people he had known all his life might think he had killed his wife. Hard to realize that people he had helped could turn against him. His face contained many more lines than it had before; his shoulders slumped, particularly when he didn’t feel on show. Amanda’s heart went out to him. He put on a brave front for the family, especially Alyssa. He didn’t want any of them to worry. But how could they not worry?

Amanda settled behind her desk and folded her hands on top of her paperwork. “This is something we have to deal with, Granddad. First, if I’m disqualified, we have to find you a new lawyer. Possibly Peter could be persuaded...or he might recommend someone.”

“I want you, Amanda.”

Amanda’s hands tightened. “I know. But if that’s not possible, we’ll have to find someone else. We’d appeal the decision, of course, if it went against us. But a decision on such an appeal probably wouldn’t be handed down until after the trial. Not unless you want to put off the trial for a number of months so that the appeals court has time to issue a decision.” Amanda stopped when she felt her grandfather stiffen. “I know. You want to see the end of all of this. So do I. So we go back to filing our appeal while the trial is held. If you lost the case, but we won the appeal, you’d have to stand trial all over again...this time with me as your lawyer.” Her grandfather’s face whitened. “That’s not something we want, Granddad, not either of us. If I were some kind of high-powered defense attorney, I’d say yes...we’d go for that. But I’m not.” She sighed. “What I’m trying to say is...if I get disqualified, I think you should find another lawyer. Someone with more experience than me. Someone we could be sure of—”

Her grandfather broke in softly, “I still want you, Amanda.” Judson Ingalls was a stubborn man.

Amanda murmured, “Let’s face that decision when we need to. It’s still down the road, and we may not even come to it.”

Judson smiled. “That’s right. I think you’ll win, to begin with. There’ll be no need for an appeal. This Ethan Trask...he isn’t infallible, is he?”

“No...” Amanda replied slowly.

“No,” Judson repeated, satisfied.

From experience, Amanda knew when it was time to retreat. She moved to another subject, one she had resisted bringing up before. But they couldn’t put it off any longer. “Proceeding on that assumption...Granddad, I know you don’t like to talk about anything concerning Margaret, but under the circumstances, if I’m to defend you properly, you’re going to have to talk to me. You’re going to have to treat me as if I’m a stranger. You have to be honest with me. Not keep anything back. Tell me things you’d never tell anyone else, particularly a member of the family. Warts and all, I have to know. Is that understood?”

Judson’s white head bobbed.

Amanda continued, “Anything you tell me will be privileged information. It will go no further than your defense team.”

“I understand.”

Amanda relaxed slightly. Her grandfather could sometimes be prickly. At least they had gotten this far.

“Where do you want me to begin?” Judson asked.

“I suppose the night Margaret disappeared.”

A muscle pulled at the side of Judson’s jaw. “We had an argument. I already told the police that.”

“What was it about?”

“Money, her running around with other men, the way she ignored Alyssa...”

“When did the argument start?”

“That morning. It ran on into late evening. It would stop and start. She was having a party—one of her constant parties. They’d go on for days. People were around that I didn’t know...didn’t want to know!”

“When did you see her last?”

Judson was silent. Finally, he said, “About six or seven o’clock. She had some kind of special evening planned with her friends. They were going to play a new game—I don’t know what kind. I didn’t ask. I sure as hell wasn’t going to play!” He paused again, becoming lost in the past. “She told me to get out. She told me she hated me. So I went.” A wealth of feeling lay beneath the flatness of his words. Amanda, who knew her grandfather well, could sense his suffering.

“Where did you go?” she asked.

“Out. I walked beside the lake, I don’t know for how long. A couple of hours? When I got back—”

“Did anyone see you while you were walking?”

Judson shook his head. “No.”

“Go on,” Amanda encouraged.

“When I got back...she was gone. I found a note on the mantel. It said she was leaving.”

“What happened then?” Amanda prompted.

Judson looked down at his hands. “I—I went a little berserk. I picked up a perfume bottle and threw it across the room. It broke some things on Margaret’s dressing table...bottles, dusting powder, face creams. It made quite a mess. Then I—” He stopped.

“Then you...what?” Amanda pressed, her voice husky.

“I cried,” he admitted simply. “Like some kind of huge baby, I just stood there and cried.”

Answering tears formed in Amanda’s eyes, but she quickly blinked them away. If she expected her grandfather to divorce himself from their relationship and talk to her, she couldn’t behave in a manner that would inhibit his confidences.

“Then what?” she asked.