Free The calamity Janes by Sherryl Woods Page B

small-town journalist.”
    “Aw, shucks,” Ryan mocked. “I guess Chicago and Atlanta must not have left any marks on you after all. You still struggling to figure out which spoon to use to stir your coffee?”
    Ford laughed despite himself. “Okay, wise guy, maybe we do have a few things in common. I don’t know her well enough to say. The odds are good that I never will.”
    “And that’s the way you want it?”
    “That’s the way it has to be, now especially.”
    “Because she’ll be handling Sue Ellen’s case?”
    “Exactly.”
    “I could fill in a few details,” Ryan offered. “Save you some time getting to know her.”
    Despite everything he’d just said, Ford craved more information. He still wanted to know what made Emma tick. She was as fascinating as she was aggravating.
    “I imagine what you see is what you get,” he said, waiting to see if Ryan denied it.
    “I suppose that depends on what you see. For instance, I doubt you know that she was a helluva shortstop.”
    “She played baseball? That game I saw wasn’t some sort of fluke?”
    “She played when we were kids,” Ryan confirmed. “On my team, as a matter of fact. I took a lot of teasing over that, until she started throwing people out andhitting everything that was pitched to her. Then everybody wanted her on their team, but Emma was as loyal as they come. She stayed with me.”
    “Did the two of you date?”
    “No way. She never looked twice at any guy in town. She had her goals all carved out for herself very early on. And they didn’t include getting married and sticking around Winding River.”
    “She was a snob?”
    “No, just driven. She had ambition, and she was determined to achieve her dreams. She didn’t intend to let anything hold her back.”
    Driven. Ambitious. Determined. All were words Ford would have agreed applied to Emma. But somehow they added up differently when Ryan used them. He turned them into compliments. It was obvious he admired and respected her. No, more than that, he genuinely liked her.
    Fascinating, Ford thought again. Maybe there was more to Emma Rogers than he’d wanted to believe. Thanks to this shooting tonight and her determination to represent Sue Ellen, he was going to have more of an opportunity to observe her. Maybe he’d invite her out to dinner, spend a little time with her, all in the interest of getting his story about Sue Ellen Carter, of course.
    Of course.
     
    At the pleadings of her friends and, most of all, persuaded by the glazed look in Sue Ellen’s eyes, Emma knew she had no choice but to go all the way through this as Sue Ellen’s attorney. Whatever hope she’d held that she could turn the case over to someone else afterthe arraignment vanished when she looked around for a likely candidate.
    Seventy-year-old Seth Wilkins, who’d been the only practicing attorney in Winding River for the past forty-five years, thought Sue Ellen ought to plead guilty to manslaughter and accept a reduced sentence.
    Emma was having none of that, not after she’d heard Sue Ellen’s story and talked to all of her neighbors. They had confirmed the frequency of the fights with Donny, the times the police had been called. There was a record of those 9-1-1 calls, which would add to her case, even if Sue Ellen had failed to press charges even once.
    “Mommy, are we gonna stay with Grandma?” Caitlyn asked eagerly when another week came and went and they hadn’t left.
    “For a while,” Emma told her. She had flown to Denver with the rest of the Calamity Janes to be with Cassie during her mom’s surgery, then taken the time to stop by her office to talk with her secretary and her associates and arrange for them to take over the most pressing appointments, at least for the next few days. Because of her workaholic tendencies in the past, all the partners had agreed that she deserved the time off.
    She studied Caitlyn’s hopeful expression. “Would you like that? Are you having fun