Free Verdict in Blood by Gail Bowen

Wayne J. left, I followed him out. I’d decided to skip the meeting at the Faculty Club and concentrate my efforts on getting to the university in time for my first class. I backed the Volvo down the driveway, but as I turned onto the street, Wayne J. came over. I cranked down my window.
    “I forgot to say thanks,” he said.
    “For what?”
    “For letting me into your house. A lot of ladies wouldn’t have had the balls.” He realized what he’d said and grimaced. “Whoa,” he said, “that didn’t come out right.”
    “I took it as a compliment,” I said.
    He touched an imaginary cap. “That’s how I meant it.”
    I got to the university just in time to run to the Political Science office to check my mail and pick up my class lists. Rosalie Norman, our departmental administrative assistant, was lying in wait. She was dressed in her inevitable twin sweater set, this time the colour of dried mustard. As it had been every morning since I’d come to work at the university, Rosalie’s greeting was minatory.
    “It helps to let me know ahead of time if you’re not going to show up for a meeting. That way I don’t order extra at the Faculty Club.”
    Wayne J. Waters might have seen me as a lady with balls, but dealing with Rosalie always unmanned me. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Something came up at home. I hope you were able to find someone to eat my bran muffin.” I looked down at my class list for Political Science 110. There were 212 students registered, twice as many as usual. I held it out to her. “Rosalie, something’s wrong with this list.”
    She didn’t even favour it with a glance. Instead, she tapped her watch. “Well, you’re going to work it out yourself. When a person decides to come late, she can’t expect the rest of us to pick up the pieces.”
    The day continued to run smoothly. My hope that the problem on my list was clerical rather than actual was dashed as soon as I walked into my classroom. More than two hundred students were jammed into a space with desks for a hundred. A computer glitch had timetabled twosections of Political Science 110 together, and by the time I had separated the classes, half the period was over. In the afternoon, my senior class informed me sulkily that their text wasn’t in the bookstore. When I got back to my office, the telephone was ringing, but it rang its last as I unlocked the door. I checked my voice mail. My first two callers invited me to start-up meetings of organizations I had no intention of joining; my third caller was Alex, asking a favour. He had been phoning Eli’s school all day, but hadn’t been able to connect with Eli’s teacher. Now he had a meeting that would run all afternoon, and he wondered if I could get in touch with the school and fill them in. I hung up the phone and grabbed my briefcase. Suddenly I had a legitimate excuse to get out of the office early, and I snatched it.
    Gerry Acoose Collegiate was an inner-city experiment: an old secondary school that the community had convinced the Board of Education to give over to those who believed First Nations’ kids might thrive on a curriculum that reflected their cultural history and an attendance policy that took into account the realities of adolescent life in the city’s core. As I pulled up in front of the school, I thought about the new-model cars that lined the streets near my son Angus’s south-end high school.
    The students at Gerry Acoose weren’t kids whose parents handed them the keys to a Nova on their sixteenth birthday. These young people had seen a lot more of life than the shining-eyed innocents who clutched Club Monaco book-bags in the back-to-school ads. Among other innovations, G.A.C. had a program for teen mothers, and as I waded through the students lounging on the front steps, I passed a number of girls, barely into puberty themselves, who were clutching babies. The only student who reacted to my presence was a whippet-thin boy with shoulder-lengthhair,