The lawyer's name was June Sloan. She wore brown shoes with rain spots on them, though Leah could not remember it raining.
There were things Leah knew she would be asked to do: remember, explain, sign where somebody pointed. There were things she would not be allowed to do, including decide when to leave the room. She had begun learning the difference in small humiliating pieces.
June put a pad on the table.
“Before we begin. Your daughter has separate counsel. I'm here for you.”
Leah nodded.
“I can't tell you how her case is going.”
“I want to know if she's all right.”
June looked at her. Not unkindly. “I know.”
Leah put her hands flat on the table. They had cleaned the cuts, looked at the swelling around her thumb, given her what could be given for a body that had been badly used. Her hands looked like work hands again, except that she had no work to put them to.
“Walt?”
“He's in the hospital. Alive.”
“His leg?”
“I don't know enough to tell you.”
That answer had become part of the furniture. A thing she was going to sit beside for a long time.
June uncapped her pen. “Rosa Pike's lawyer contacted me. She asked him to confirm that she turned over the bank proceeds she held. Twenty-seven thousand dollars. That's separate from the festival money.”
“She said she would.”
“She did.”
Leah shut her eyes for a moment. Rosa had made the little pile on the bed and decided where it would go. Somebody, somewhere, had finished a thing she said she would do.
“That doesn't settle the robberies,” June said.
“I know.”
The lawyer accepted the answer. She did not explain it again.
There were questions after that. Leah answered some, paused over others, learned how a sentence could be true and still need to be said carefully. June did not ask her for a story about being a mother. Leah was grateful, though she would not have known how to tell her why.
June turned back a page. “The old case is a separate question. There are limitations issues we need to look at in your particular circumstances. Don't assume that means all the conduct is beyond questions, and don't confuse it with what happened this weekend.”
Leah nodded. This weekend was enough to fill the pad between them.
Near the end June put her pen down.
“Nell Sutter spoke to my office.”
Leah looked up.
“She wanted you to know the wage records are finished and the accountant has copies. Denny's taken work elsewhere. She has too.”
Nell had told her. In the parking lot opposite the miniature-golf course, with the dispatch phone in her hand. Hearing it from June made it no more or less finished.
“The vehicles?”
“The wagon and the flatbed are being held. We can discuss the rest when I know more. I don't want to make promises about the business.”
Leah looked down at June's shoes. The little rain spots had dried into pale edges. Outside it might still be raining, or the sun might have come back. She couldn't tell from here.
“Nell's been there eleven years,” she said.
June waited.
“I put her purse hook under the desk. She used to put it on the floor and kick it every time she stood up. I made a hook.”
It sounded idiotic. A little thing on the wrong side of a much larger fact. But she could see the desk clearly, the phone, the chair where Kit used to sleep, Nell's purse hanging above the floor. She had thought if she knew where everything went, it would still be there when she came back.
“Is there something you want me to tell her?” June asked.
Leah swallowed.
“Tell her I heard.”
June wrote it down. Not a promise, not a list of tasks Nell could do for her. Four words.
When the meeting ended, Leah returned to the place where she was being kept. She sat on the narrow bed and tried to imagine the office without Nell in it. Her mind kept putting Nell back, one hand over the phone, telling somebody to wait.
There were other people there, other small noises, a woman trying to sleep with her face turned toward the wall. Leah could not remember the last time she had been in a room where nobody expected her to answer a ringing phone.
She sat with her hands between her knees until the picture changed. The office remained. Nell was gone.