Free Pleasantville by Attica Locke Page A

too.”
    â€œIt might put folks at ease out there, if they had a better sense of what’s going on with the investigation,” Jay says. “I think there’s a hope that finding this girl might lead to answers about the other two, offer some peace for the families. Between the fires and this, Pleasantville could use some good news.”
    â€œHey,” Lon says softly. “I’m glad you called.”
    â€œMe too,” he says, hanging up.
    When he looks up, Eddie Mae is standing over his desk. She must have come in sometime while he was on the phone. She’s still wearing her overcoat, and she’s holding a stack of pink message slips in one hand and a Jack in the Box cup in the other. The bank called, she says right off, some problem with the line of credit for the Pleasantville case, and the Arkansas folks are at it again. The Pritchetts, plaintiffs ten through seventeen in the class action suit Jay filed against Chemlyne Industries in Little Rock, Jay’s last time in a courtroom, have been at each other’s throats since they took a deal–two days before Jay’s closing arguments, and against his strident counsel. The ones with any money left are constantly fighting with the ones who have long since gone back to being broke, albeit with shiny cars in their driveways and pounds of tenderloin in the deep freeze. “B. J. Pritchett wants to sue his brother Carl for defamation,” Eddie Mae says. “Something about a collection of NancyWilson records B. J. said he would buy off Carl and never did, and Carl going around town calling his brother a cheap son of a bitch. B.J. wants you to handle the matter in court. He’s got a five-hundred-dollar check already made out to you as a retainer.” She rolls her eyes.
    Jay sighs. He curses the day he ever set foot in Arkansas.
    Looking down at the desktop, where the newspaper is still open to the story of the missing girl, Eddie Mae cocks her head, staring, slantways, at the black-and-white photo of Alicia Nowell. “What’s it been now?” she says.
    â€œThree days.”
    â€œI’ll pray for her.”
    â€œWas there something else?” Jay says, folding the newspaper in half.
    â€œThat lady from the trailer park called again, the one out to Baytown. She and her neighbors, they’re still having problems with their water. She’s convinced something’s leaking out of the oil refinery down there, some runoff that’s tainting everything. It’s got so she won’t even cook with it no more.”
    â€œGive her the list of referrals.”
    â€œYou won’t even meet with her?”
    â€œNot taking clients, Eddie Mae, you know that.”
    She presses her lips together, quietly weighing whether this is the time to get into it with him. The one time she brought up losing a girlfriend to cancer, he’d quickly shut her down, not wanting to hear other people’s ideas of what they thought he was living through, or to turn grief into a contest, one he would always win. He could never bring himself to shame someone’s good intentions.
    â€œThat it?”
    â€œNo,” she says. Reaching into the pocket of her peacoat, she pulls out a small rectangle of paper, frayed at the edges. “I did like you said, looked this place up and down, everywhereexcept the conference room upstairs, which you said you’d go through.” Jay nods. “I didn’t notice anything missing,” Eddie Mae says. “But I did find this.” She holds out a business card.
    Jay takes it into his hands.
    On the blank side, he sees his own name, scribbled in pencil, followed by the address of his law office, 3106 Brazos. “You think he dropped it?” Eddie Mae says, meaning the young man who broke into the office on Tuesday night.
    â€œWhere did you find it?”
    â€œUnder the couch in the waiting room, just a few feet from my desk,” she says. “Wind