Free Plum Gone: A Sonoma Wine Country Cozy Mystery (Sonoma Wine Country Cozy Mysteries Book 2) by A. J. Carton

know, in the head.”
    “And that didn’t happen?” Emma had asked. “I mean, you must have met a lot of very bright women over the years…”
    “Sure I did,” Jack readily replied. “But I didn’t let anything happen. I couldn’t. I couldn’t do that, you know, to Cara, to Fran. I loved them.” He squinted sideways at Emma. “And don’t get me wrong. Forty years of marriage doesn’t mean I was a saint. I was not always a good boy, Emma. Once in a while I played around. I just made sure it was never with anyone I was actually gonna fall for.”
    Emma had winced. She’d heard the excuse before. And by the sheepish look on Jack’s face when he spoke, she knew he understood that she did not approve. Nonetheless, at the time she’d appreciated his honesty, the heads up.
    “By the way,” he’d added before she could reply, “I’m not trying to excuse my conduct. And you can bet I’ve never told that to anyone else before.” He laughed again. “What is it with you, Emma? I feel like I can tell you anything.”
    Oh my , Emma now mused, remembering her response to his confession of infidelity. In that one statement, with the artistry of a con man, she now realized that he had sealed her confidence in him – in them. At that one moment, she’d felt sure she knew everything there was to know about Jack Russo.
    Now she realized just how wrong she had been. She’d been falling in love with a man she hardly new. A man who kept secrets from her.
    She stood up abruptly from her chair on the deck, gathered her mug and the plate of biscotti, and went inside. Time to get on with my life , she whispered to herself.
     
    That day, getting on with her life meant showing up at her Monday morning meeting with Steve Zimmer at the free legal clinic to discuss the Gomez matter. As she dressed, Emma mulled over the approach she would take. On the one hand, she wasn’t going to let her son-in-law, Piers, bully her into interfering with Steve’s lawsuits and jeopardizing her job.
    On the other hand, she was going to try to keep an open mind with regard to Steve’s proposed litigation. Maybe her son-in-law was right about settling the workers’ grievances. Maybe they were trumped up. As for the wrongful death action against Curt Randall? In her heart of hearts Emma simply was not convinced Curt Randall was a murderer.
    Emma decided to try to dress professionally that day. So Steve, her boss, would take her seriously.
    Fine for Steve to dress in shorts, wrinkled T-shirts and flip flops , she mused - the better to identify with his downtrodden clients. Steve was a member of the California Bar and a graduate of UC Berkeley’s prestigious Boalt Hall School of Law.
    Emma, however, was a paralegal. In the late sixties, many years before, she’d chosen to marry a lawyer instead of going to law school herself. Her father, a well known civil rights advocate, agreed with her choice.
    “It’s a man’s game, Emma,” he’d said. “Like baseball. The rules are made by men, for men. There’s no sense in a woman trying to play on that field. She can’t complete – at least not a womanly woman,” he added. “Women lawyers aren’t…you know…feminine.”
    Not “feminine.”
    Emma smiled. Her father was not a highly successful trial lawyer for nothing. He knew exactly where to land the knockout punch. After hearing her father’s comment, Emma fled law school like a stray escaping the pound.
    “Mark’ll go to law school,” her father had explained.
    Mark was Emma’s younger brother. At the time he was fifteen. Interested solely in wildlife and sixteen year old blondes.
    In fact, however, her father was right. Mark did go to law school. And hated it. He practiced law for five years. Then married a girl from Costa Rica and moved there to start a successful eco tourist lodge in the rainforest around Braulio Carillo National Park. He and Emma Skyped a few times a year. She tried to visit every two or three. Mark, however,