Heat Wave (10 page)

“That’s the spirit.” He smiled, but the
smile didn’t warm his eyes. They remained steady on her,
questioning. “How will you fight it?”

“I know a good lawyer.”

***

Caleb had told her to come to his office.
His air conditioning must be working.

As she drove through town to the building
that housed Chase, Mullen and Solomon, she took deep breaths. This
was business. Not a dinner. She would pay for Caleb’s services in
legal American tender. Not that she knew what his services might
entail. Could he make the video disappear? She doubted it.

She felt…
violated
. More than her tenure was at
stake. A bad thing had happened to her on the beach last Sunday.
She had to accept some responsibility; it had been her decision to
unfasten the top of her bikini so she could avoid a tan line. But
that decision—a pretty common one among the women she knew—should
not have resulted in…

She shuddered. A
video
.

She parked at the curb in front of his
building and strode inside, holding her head high as Henry had
instructed her to do. Inside the building, the receptionist sat at
her computer, squinting at the monitor, but she turned at
Meredith’s entrance and offered a smile.

“I’m Meredith Benoit. I’m here to see Caleb
Solomon.”

“Please take a seat.” The
receptionist gestured toward the waiting area. It was much more
basic than the elegant waiting area at the firm where her father
and brother worked. That was a much larger firm, of course, in a
much larger city. Located in a classic downtown building, the entry
featured plush velvet furniture, crystal chandeliers, and brocade
drapery. It could have passed as a movie set for
Gone With the Wind.

Caleb and his partners seemed less
interested in impressing their clients with their décor than
impressing them with their legal prowess. The chairs were
utilitarian, the carpeting a rugged neutral gray, the windows
dressed with accordion-pleat shades. But the place had air
conditioning. Her arms prickled with goosebumps as her skin
adjusted to the drastic change from the sticky air outside to the
cool atmosphere indoors.

The receptionist pressed a button and
announced Meredith’s presence into her headset. She listened for a
moment, then nodded and smiled at Meredith. “Follow me,” she
said.

Like the waiting area, Caleb’s office was
utilitarian. No flourishes, no fancy furnishings. A large oak desk
took up much of the room, with several chairs arrayed around it.
Several seascapes hung on the walls, along with framed diplomas
from Yale University and Harvard Law School. His educational
pedigree was certainly prestigious.

He stood at his desk in his shirtsleeves,
his jacket draped over a hook on the back of his door. Was his
smile at her entrance a few ticks brighter than the sort of
greeting a lawyer gave a client? Meredith wasn’t sure.

No, there was nothing remotely personal in
his smile. She was reading her own feelings into it—specifically,
the feeling that he would be able to solve this problem for her,
the way he’d solved the police citation. “Have a seat, Meredith,”
he said, gesturing toward one of the chairs across the desk from
his own.

Nothing personal in that, she noted, trying
to assure herself this was a good thing. She settled into a chair,
folded her hands in her lap and noticed fresh goosebumps sprouting
along her upper arms. Caleb’s desk was neat. To the right side of
his blotter stood a flat-screen monitor, below it a keyboard, with
wires snaking through a hole in the desk’s surface. A
leather-trimmed blotter occupied the center of the desk, atop which
sat a few manila files and a couple of pens. To his left was a
console phone, next to it his cell phone.

He resumed his seat and continued to smile
at her. His smile was patient and gentle, not the hungry-shark
smile she associated with aggressive lawyers. He was obviously
waiting for her to speak, and she tried to. But a lump of emotion
clogged her throat—fear, mortification, anger, and yes,
disappointment that she found herself in the company of this sexy
man only because she needed him to bail her out of another legal
problem. She couldn’t seem to force the words around it.

After a minute, he broke the silence. “A
video,” he said.

She nodded.

“Of you at the beach?”

The lump grew larger. She was afraid she
might choke on it. She tried to swallow, but it continued to swell,
like a balloon inflating. And she did something worse than choke.
She started to cry.

Bawling in front of Caleb was quite possibly
even more humiliating than knowing that a video of her running
topless after her attacker on a public beach might be spreading
virally through the high school. Her vision blurred with tears, a
low sob clenched her vocal chords, and she turned from him, groping
in her purse for her handkerchief.

She heard the scrape of a drawer being
opened, but didn’t dare to look at him. She couldn’t see anything
with her handkerchief pressed to her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she
mumbled, her voice sounding faint and reedy.

“No, that’s all right.”

Through the blur of her tears, she saw him
rise and circle the desk to her side. He sat on the chair next to
hers and gathered one of her hands in his. Her other hand clutched
her soggy handkerchief.

“What is that?” he asked.

“What is what?”

“A lace handkerchief?”

She batted her eyes to clarify her vision,
then dabbed at her damp cheeks. “It’s not lace,” she said, shaking
out the square of white cloth with her initials stitched into one
corner in a swirly script. “Just plain linen.”

His hand was warm around hers, solid and
strong. She focused on his long fingers, his clean, square nails.
“I’ve got Kleenex here,” he said, nudging a rectangular box of
tissues closer to her. He must have pulled the box from his desk;
that had been the drawer sound she’d heard. “People sometimes cry
in this office,” he explained.

He was still holding her hand. She wondered
if he held the hands of all the other people who cried in his
office, the clients for whom he kept a box of tissues at the ready.
She wanted to believe this hand-holding was for her alone, but that
was a silly thing to think. He was merely trying to console a
distraught client.

She eased her hand from his and attempted a
smile. Then she busied herself smoothing out her soggy
handkerchief, folding it in half and then in half again. He said
nothing as she fussed with the linen. Was carrying a handkerchief
that unusual? She’d been raised to think it was what well-bred
young ladies did. Rebel or not, she’d learned a few things about
propriety while growing up in Savannah.

Although he was no longer holding her hand
and she was no longer weeping, he remained where he was, on her
side of the desk. “Tell me about the video,” he said. “Have you
seen it?”

She shook her head. “One of my colleagues
did. He said a bunch of kids were watching it on someone’s cell
phone in the cafeteria at lunchtime. He said he deleted it from
that phone. But I’m sure it’s on other people’s phones.”

Caleb nodded. “Did he tell you what was on
it?”

She fussed with the
handkerchief some more to avoid looking at Caleb. She was truly
embarrassed—by everything. “
I’m
on it,” she answered. “Running on the beach
without my swimsuit top. Henry didn’t go into detail. He didn’t
want to upset me.”

“But here you are, upset.”

“Of course I’m upset! A high school full of
teenagers is gawking at my naked breasts!”

He shifted slightly in his chair, leaning
back a bit, as if her blunt words were some sort of accusation.
“The video will probably just circulate for a day or two, and then
everyone will move on to something else and it’ll be
forgotten.”

“No. It won’t be forgotten.
I’m their
teacher
.” She didn’t add that the school principal seemed to think a
significant number of the school’s students had crushes on her.
“It’s just—so wrong, Caleb. I was minding my own business on
Sunday. I was only trying to avoid a tan line for a stupid
bridesmaid dress for my cousin Mary Jean’s wedding. The next thing
I know, someone is dumping ice on me. And then someone is
videotaping me. It’s like I’ve been victimized twice. And I don’t
like being a victim.” She was pleased to hear the grit return to
her voice. No more sobbing. She was too angry to cry. “It’s
wrong.”

“So.” Regarding her thoughtfully, he tapped
his fingertips together. “Do you want to bring charges against the
kid who dumped the ice on you?”

“I don’t know who he is,” she admitted. “I
chased after him, but the sun was glaring and I didn’t really see
much of him. His back. A baggy knee-length swimsuit. Bare feet. I
think he had on a cap. I should add that his chest was fully
exposed.” She bristled at the double standard that allowed men but
not women to parade topless in public. “Two hundred boys at the
high school fit that description.”

“Two hundred boys aren’t on the video,”
Caleb pointed out. “If we could view the video—or if this colleague
of yours could view it for us—maybe we could determine who
assaulted you. I could file a police report.”

“A police officer witnessed the whole
thing,” she reminded him. “Officer Sikorsky.”

“Sulkowski.”

“Excuse me. Sulkowski. He was there. He saw
it. He seemed to think I was at fault.”

“I could talk to someone higher up,” Caleb
said. “I’ve had dealings with officers several rungs above
Sulkowski in the hierarchy.”

“And they would press charges on my
behalf?”

“Maybe.”

She studied his face, trying to gauge his
opinion of this strategy. He didn’t seem terribly enthusiastic. But
if he’d thought it a bad idea, why would he have suggested it?

He answered her question before she could
ask it. “If you bring charges against the kid who dumped ice on
you, you run the risk of making a mountain out of a molehill. You
run the risk of making the video relevant and popular far longer
than it might otherwise be. If you lie low for a few days, people
may forget about it. The half-life of a social network video is
pretty short. There’s always something newer, funnier, weirder, or
whatever to buzz about. If you bring charges, you guarantee that
this video will be the only thing the students talk about for the
next month.”

“But if I do nothing, I’m just…” She sighed.
“A victim. And I won’t get tenure.”

“Maybe the best course would be to talk to
whoever oversees the tenure decision. Who’s your boss at the high
school?”

“Stuart Kezerian. The principal. He’s a ham
shy of a Sunday dinner. If he finds out about the video, my career
at Brogan’s Point High School is dead.”

“A ham shy of a Sunday dinner,” Caleb
repeated with a chuckle. “Is that a Southern expression?”

She checked herself before blurting out
something defensive. He wasn’t making fun of her, she realized. He
was trying to cheer her up.

He glanced at his wristwatch, then stood.
“Tell you what,” he said. “It’s about five o’clock. Let me buy you
a drink. We’ll discuss this thing and figure out a good way to
defuse it before it wreaks havoc with your career.”

He might or might not hold the hand of every
weeping client. Meredith doubted he bought a drink for every
weeping client—but then, she’d bought him dinner. Theirs was not a
strictly by-the-book attorney-client relationship.

Not that it was a
relationship.
It had
better not be. Right now, she needed an attorney more than she
needed a relationship.

She needed a drink, too. “Okay,” she
said.

Gus wasn’t endowed with an abundance of
talent, but what talent she possessed served her well as a
bartender and business owner. She could multitask. She had a memory
like flypaper—anything that flew near it stuck fast, never to
escape. She could win a tough negotiation and leave her opponent
convinced he’d gotten the better end of the deal. She could add
long columns of numbers in her head, although thanks to her
computers, that was no longer a necessary skill. She could keep
track of everyone who entered her establishment, remember what they
ordered, how much they ordered, and how much they owed—even when
the place was packed with customers, the way it was now.

She also had a flair for basketball.
Standing six feet tall, she’d been recruited for the varsity girls’
team in high school and continued playing through college. She
still liked to play, and on rare occasions she would take an
evening off to shoot hoops in the adult rec league over at the
Community Center. Her basketball skill didn’t help her much at the
Faulk Street Tavern, except for when she wanted to dispose of a
piece of garbage without walking to one of the trash bins behind
the bar. She could wad up a paper towel or a napkin or the lead
seal from a bottle of wine and swish it straight into a bin from
anywhere along the bar. Two points, easy. Sometimes three
points.

She recognized most of the people in the bar
on this bustling Friday evening. Some were regulars, and some she
knew simply from having lived in Brogan’s Point since her parents
had brought her home from the hospital at the ripe old age of two
days and a couple of hours. Even as she took orders, wiped down the
counter, told her wait staff to hustle, and swerved back and forth
past Manny Lopez, her capable assistant behind the bar, she never
lost track of who was doing what, and where they were doing it.

Right now, Frank Olveida, who handled
inventory at Kreske’s Auto Supplies and never added a labor charge
when he installed new wipers or a new headlight bulb on Gus’s car,
stood before the jukebox, digging through the pockets of his baggy
jeans for a quarter. A dime would buy a person a single song, but
most people fed the machine quarters, which purchased them three
songs, granting them a five cent discount. Sliding a coin into the
slot didn’t allow a person to choose the songs, though. The jukebox
played whatever it wanted, as long as the song was old enough to
have been released as a vinyl single. No CD’s in the jukebox, no
digital files. Just good, old fashioned records, and heaven only
knew what records were in there. No one could figure out how to
open the machine. No one serviced it. Gus was able to access the
coin box, and once a month she emptied it out and donated whatever
cash was in it to a charity. Last year she’d donated a total of
nearly a thousand dollars to the afterschool programs Nick Fiore
ran on a shoestring at the Community Center. This year, she’d been
donating to a fund the town had created to help fishermen
contending with the new restrictions the federal government had
placed on them. Overfishing and environmental problems had caused a
sharp decline in the supply of cod, and a lot of operators were
struggling.