The River Burns (29 page)

“Mainly with myself, truth be told. To say that I suspected that I did not like winning might be true, to a point, although I didn't understand it at the time because, you know, I'm pretty damned competitive. Always have been. For a while that's all I had to go on, but I knew there was more to it. Ry, the only way I can explain this—not just to you, but even to myself—is step by step. I've done this before—explained it—with Mrs. McCracken. So I know how. Step by step. First, I was asking myself, ‘What's going on?'”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, what's going on with me? Tired of winning makes no sense. A preposterous idea, really. Borderline insane. I lived with the concept for a while because it's all I dredged up. Step two, it hit me that I still loved winning, just less so when I deserved to lose. That kept me going for a few days, mulling it over. In the past I'd won cases for clients who were assholes and it occurred to me to quit then, except that that seemed lame. Why let those types drive me out? I stayed on, but less happily. Step three, I found out I could win cases when the lawyers across the aisle were . . . thorough enough, and sufficiently anal-­retentive that it could be honestly argued that they did their job, they just lacked the mental
elasticity
to keep up. When I thought it over, a so-called unwinnable case sometimes was like taking candy from a baby.” She let her voice trail off.

“You weren't sufficiently challenged.”

She shook her head slightly, to indicate that that wasn't it either.

“I never wanted to be a lawyer in the first place,” Tara told him, her voice quiet now. “Took me a while to admit that, though. I just never decided on anything else. Daddy's profession became mine, by default, in a way. In school I found out that I enjoyed the law, a good portion of it anyway. And I'd always loved winning. Winning made me want to win again. I wanted a streak. Then I was home one night by myself. Relaxing, but feeling, I don't know, vaguely uneasy. To cheer myself up I had a drink, but I also spent time adding up what my billable hours and my commission for the big win were going to be, roughly. I would have to do that accounting in a few days anyhow. I started to calculate forward. What could I expect to earn over the next year, decade, and finally, over my lifetime? I looked at the final number. Then adjusted it to be more realistic, which brought it up even higher. Ry, it scared the living daylights out of me. And I wanted it. For the first time. The wealth. Oh yeah. The fame, too. Very cool. The power. Totally enchanting. And a tiny, wee, infinitesimal voice said to me—I can't stress how faintly that voice spoke, a microbe, as if it was an atom on life support—‘So, babe, it's now or never. What'll it be?'”

“You call yourself ‘babe'?”

“Sometimes.” Her deeper pause indicated that more was forthcoming, and from a depth. “I realized that it wasn't about winning or losing anymore, if it ever was. The thrill was gone, if it was ever really there. Here's the thing—I wasn't living any part of my life through my own choices. My life was hectic, but orderly. Lots of pressure, but safe. Mapped out. No chaos. Nothing rapturous. Failed relationships in part because they were never great and they couldn't be great because they could never be separated out from the career, to think otherwise was just silly. My life was my career. Period. Not only was I doing what I didn't particularly want to do, and never really chose to do, but I was being, day in, day out, a person I didn't want to be. My life wasn't working and it wasn't going to work. I finally saw that this was as good as it was going to get, it was built in, no escape routes anywhere. Truth be told—I wish I could claim otherwise—my flight wasn't part of some tirade against the law. I got the law. Being successful wasn't about winning and losing, and certainly it had nothing to do with right and wrong.”

“What else is there?” Ryan sipped from his water glass. “You've taken away the high road
and
the low road.”

“What's left is billable hours, Ry. And a tolerance for a level of boredom that could break an ascetic's will. Persevere and the whole deal gets even more boring. An old classmate of mine defended criminals. Not one who came to see him was innocent, he claimed. No such thing. I'm a big girl, I can accept that. But it began to dawn on me that that held true in my world as well. My job was to be an arbitrator between grievance and greed. I got that. Except, grievance was not located on one side of a case and greed on the other. They both commingled. The victimized were on the beaten-down side of certain actions, but they weren't themselves
innocent
, they were also
culpable.
Work this out, but it's not about winning and losing, or about being right or wrong, or justice and injustice, or even about being powerful or impotent. For me, it came down to figuring out how one aspect always mixed in with the other.” She'd been looking away, but sought his eyes now. “If you will, like fire on water, like a burning bridge. Doing what's wrong in order to alter the landscape and then trying to fix it. I was the bean counter, the one who rallied arguments in order to better obfuscate the truth, or to support the hour's lesser stupidity. I was the one who—
successfully
—represented this set of greedy bastards with a grievance against that set of greedy bastards with a gripe. And I was going against anal-retentive legal teams lacking the mental elasticity to at least make things interesting. So, yeah, after a long, dark night of the soul that lasted a week . . .” She let her voice trail off.

“You quit. Just like that,” Ryan said. Admiration tinged his voice.

She squinted a little, and the smile forming along the edges of her lips evident enough that he grew worried.

“You crazy?” Tara inquired. “You think I'd surrender my law career to a dark night of the soul? After all that torturous work? Get real, babe. That's not what happened.”

He knew he resided in the palm of her hand, desperate to have it all explained to him.

Tara used a pinkie finger to break the surface of her Grand Marnier, then moistened her lower lip with the fluid, and tasted it with her tongue. “When I did leave—and actually I never decided to leave, I just up and left—”

He settled back in his chair. “Up and left,” he repeated.

“Un-huh. How that happened is another story.”

“Oh, it's another story.”

“Which I'm not telling at the moment, do you mind much?” That teasing laugh again, but she quickly returned to being serious. “The hardest part about it, Ry, I didn't want my split, my flight, to be naïve. It had to be real. To feel real, anyway. I was throwing a big part of who I was down the drain, truth be told. I was so far removed from anything that felt real for so long, I guessed whatever I did had better be extreme. Toss everything away. Back to square one. Re-create it all. My very own personal end of the world. My very own personal rapture, even. That's what I was craving, in a way. Some sort of exceptional reality. Some sort of light. If not a rapture, then a rupture. A change.”

“So you hopped an old steam train to Wakefield.”

She smiled brightly, lighting up the room for him. “I'd have preferred a freight, riding the rods, but what can you do? I came in style. An old pickup took me from Halifax to Ottawa and when it broke down, lo and behold, there stood the Wakefield choo-choo.”

“So this was never your destination.”

“Yes and no. I was following a thread that indicated my destiny. Not exactly bread crumbs, but I'll say no more about it. But destiny, not destination, that's the key. That's what I was chasing. Complicated enough for you? I burned my bridges—pardon the reference, Ry—and here I am. A poor girl selling grandfather clocks to granddads. Cool, huh?”

Ryan found himself enamoured of her story, and it jived with his own scant investigation. Except she held back the most important part. Intuition told him that she wasn't giving that part up anytime soon. She trusted him with a few facts, but he had still to earn the more intimate, more privileged, information. And yet, when he received a modicum of encouragement from her, he chose to confront an issue head-on. He knew that she was lying, in part, and he found this rough to handle.

“What's wrong?” she asked.

He wasn't adept at hiding much from her. “Your father, my study showed, is a professor of microbiology in Halifax. He's not a lawyer.”

Guys trying to make her would have let that pass. She liked that he had the backbone to bring it up.

“Just checking, Ry. To see if you did your homework.” As he continued to stare at her, she chose to come clean, removing the tongue from her cheek. “Okay. I didn't mean my father. For a while, not that long really, I had a lover. He had a nickname. You know, a term of endearment.”

“An older man.”

She shrugged. “Somewhat. Whatever. It's in the past. He wasn't ancient. God, the look on your face. Is this a problem?”

Ryan deduced that she kept him working, that every hurdle led to another. He expressed at least a level of consternation in several gestures and expressions that might more commonly denote a stressful labour.

“That's not the problem,” he decided. “I don't think so anyway. I may have to see how it settles. But . . . your story would have led anyone to think, and me to think if not for my research, that you referred to your father. The reference made your career path seem more legitimate, in a way.”

First she smiled, then she placed both elbows on the table, intertwined her fingers, and rested her chin upon them.

“My career path remains,” she countered, “legitimate. But on the honesty ledger, are you so forthright and honest yourself at every turn?”

“It's early days as far as getting to know each other goes. I've been ripped in the past.”

“Your poor boring past,” she stated, once more throwing him off. “For God's sake, Ry, you're on a date. You want to criticize me for a figure of speech?”

“Calling your ex-lover ‘Daddy' is not a figure of speech.”

“Ryan, don't take this the wrong way or anything, but you're so full of shit, you reek.”

He laughed. Her knack. He'd not want to be opposing counsel in a courtroom with her, but if he was learning anything, it was to show no fear. “Okay, I'm curious. How do I take that the
right
way?”

“Ryan O'Farrell, true or false. If a murder occurred in this town, by law you would cede authority to the SQ. They would investigate, not you.”

She was waiting for an answer, so he said, “That's true.”

“With respect to any major crime, however, either the minister of justice would have to direct the SQ to take over the case, or the local police could choose to make a formal request for the SQ to do so. A request, by the way, they are not permitted to decline. I have not seen the justice minister on TV lately—”

“I made the request,” he admitted.

“Which means?” she probed.

“Which means what?”

“You did not merely lead me to believe—which was what I did with you, I admit, which is what you're so upset about—

“I'm not,” he began, and finished his thought, “upset,” but he was already conceding that he was exactly that. Upset.

“—but, Ry, you specifically told me that the SQ was obligated to take over the investigation of a major crime, that that was the case whenever the dollar value was so high. In other words, you lied to me. On only our second date. You lied. Not only a big lie but a really elaborate one, too. So, Ry, what do you have to say for yourself now, oh Mr. High and Mighty Bullshitter Cop?”

She feigned talking sweetly to him, yet he considered himself roundly condemned. “Yeah,” he said. “Well, that's true. I admit it. I lied.”

He felt stuck. He matched wits with her to this point in time, but now found himself bereft of a response. He was surprised and more than mildly relieved when she chose to bail him out.

Tara sat back, perfectly emulating his posture, one hand down on the chair, the other on the table. “Hey, Ry. I know what a pickle you're in. The town is waiting to see if you'll hang your own brother, and if you don't, they're prepared to lynch the both of you. Bringing in the SQ quiets the naysayers, and yet . . . if they know that you did it on your own, people will think that you acted to take yourself off the hook, that you sold your own brother down the river. Because, you know, that's pretty much what you've done, in a way. So instead, you made it look as though you have no choice. Of course, you want your brother to think that way, too, that you have no choice.”

“That's one side of it,” Ryan murmured. He was hanging on by a thread.

“And how can you explain to anyone,” she continued in a single stream, “let alone to me, that you're far more intelligent than that? Who knows in this town how smart you really are? Ry? How crafty? You keep that to yourself, don't you? Your dad says so anyway and I think he's right. If you tell people that you brought in the SQ because as the local authority you will remain an informed party, and from that position you're better situated to . . . oh, I don't know—help? . . . your brother? . . . well, why do that? Telling everybody your reasoning is never part of the plan, is it? People won't be able to keep up anyway, right? So you trust that you can tell your little fib and get away with it. As far as anyone can see, your hands are tied. The SQ is on the case. Nothing you can do about it. Trouble is, that means lying to me, too. How's that working for you so far?”

“You talk a lot,” he pointed out.

“So interrupt.”

He put up his hands, partially in surrender, partially to help mould a new idea. “Tara. Ah. How does this play out, do you think?”

She looked at the finger he was wagging back and forth between them. “You're talking about me and you? You're changing the subject? Now? I don't think so.”