Free A Matter of Mercy by Lynne Hugo Page A

land.” The attorney put up two fingers of each hand to bracket engaged in illegally farming his land in imaginary quotation marks. “Do you need time to think about this?”
    Rid couldn’t contain himself. “As opposed to just committing suicide here in your office?” He’d worn his newest jeans, the unfaded dress ones, a clean plain white T-shirt and deck shoes. The outfit was his equivalent of a tuxedo. He felt ridiculous and furious that Pissario—or anyone else—should bring him to his knees this way when nothing else had. Before Tomas could humiliate him, he forced himself to look at the lawyer directly and say, “I apologize. That was uncalled for.”
    David Lorenz shook his head. “Look, it’s all right. You’ve got every right to be upset. You’ve just got to realize that I’m on your side here, and what we’ve got to do is research, strategize and present a hell of a case. You men are going to have to put emotions away for us to do that or we’ll waste a lot of time. It’s time you’re paying for. Presuming , I mean, that you decide to fight this. You can walk away, you know. Go do something else.”
    Rid sensed that Mario was about to blow. He put his hand up and out to the side where Mario sat, a warning. “That’s not an option,” Rid said.
    From behind his desk, David Lorenz glanced warily at Mario. “I assume you feel the same way?”
    Tomas slid his own voice into the available space. “Yes, sir, he does. We all do.”
    “Well, then, we’ll proceed. I’ll need a ten thousand dollar retainer to get started. Our first step is to prevent an injunction that would stop you from working your grants while this thing makes its way through the courts. It could take years. I hope you’re prepared for that.”
    Rid had never gone there in his mind, considered maybe they could be shut down, stopped from working at all. Each of them had thousands of dollars lying in the shallows of the harbor. All their nursery stock, all their maturing and ready-to-harvest shellfish. All their trays, their nets, their cages. His stomach roiled. His peripheral vision picked up Mario twisting his cap.
    Tomas wiped one side of his face with his gnarly hand, a narrow gold wedding band part of the flesh. “Yeah. Okay. We’ll need to get that together for you.”
    Rid allowed himself to look at Mario on the way to looking over at Tomas. Mario’s eyes glittered unnaturally and for a moment Rid thought a dangerous rage was about to erupt. It was that hard to imagine tears.

Chapter 6

    In the weeks that followed, Caroline carried around the hope Rid would call like a sand dollar in a zippered pocket. Not that he’d asked for her number, but it was in the book. It wasn’t like he didn’t know her mother’s name, even if he thought she might be using a married name, which she wasn’t. She’d resumed her own Marcum name before the divorce was final. Not that he’d asked about that, either.
    She watched him surreptitiously through the big windows near Eleanor’s bed as he came and went from his grant at low tides. Surreptitiously not because he could see her from that distance, but because Eleanor watched her as sharply as Caroline wished she could watch Rid, so she could not. And it wasn’t actually Rid she watched anyway, but more his truck. She had to actually see the truck arrive to be able to track his movement out to his grant. Otherwise, the figures looked too much alike from a quarter mile, and, lacking any discernible border, one patch of sandy bay bottom littered with oyster cages looked exactly like the next.
    He didn’t call. The first few days were hardest, but then Eleanor was worse—sicker, weaker, more pain—and Caroline stiffened herself by stuffing hurt and sadness in a bag of anger. So I’m lonely and scared here became a muttered Fuck you , Rid when she walked down onto the beach at mid- or high tide. If Elsie or a respite care giver were there for Eleanor at low tide, she went into town