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As her response was answered by a roaring tidal wave of boos, Raine’s attention drifted momentarily to an elderly woman sitting in an electric wheelchair. The woman was dressed in a navy blue fleece warm-up suit and high-topped sneakers bearing a red swoosh. Her white hair had been permed into puffs resembling cotton balls and her apple cheeks were ruddy from the cold. A black helium-filled balloon bearing the message
Shame
in bold red letters floated upward from a white string tied to the back of the chair.

Strangely, as Raine looked down at the elderly protestor, the white curls appeared to turn to salt-and-pepper gray, and the apple-round face morphed to a narrow, more chiseled one that was strikingly familiar. Impossibly, Raine could have sworn she was looking down at her grandmother.

She blinked, relieved when the unsettling hallucination vanished. It was not the first such incident she’d had in the past few months. But they seemed to be getting more vivid, and decidedly more personal.

“Excuse me?” she asked a reporter whom she belatedly realized had been speaking to her.

“Jeff Martin,
Wall Street Journal
.” The intense young man wearing wire-framed glasses impatiently reintroduced himself. “Would your client care to comment on the Gray Panthers’ latest press release claiming that by cutting off access to health care for retirees and their spouses who are not yet qualified for Medicare, the defendant—and you, by association—are risking the lives of our nation’s grandparents?”

This question was followed by a roar from the crowd. When the fanciful vision of Ida Lindstrom’s disapproving face wavered in front of her eyes again, Raine shook her head to clear it. Then forced her uncharacteristically wandering mind back to the reporter’s question.

“No offense intended to the Gray Panthers, but not only is that accusation an overstatement of the facts of the case, it’s blatantly false, Mr. Martin. My client”—she purposefully avoided using the reporter’s negative term
defendant
—“offers one of the most generous retirement packages in the industry.”

The boos intensified. Protesters shouted out rude suggestions as to what Odessa Oil—Rex Murdock in particular—could do with its retirement package.

“But Odessa Oil also has a responsibility to its stockholders, many of whom are those same retirees.” Determined to make her point, Raine doggedly continued, fighting back a drumming headache as she raised her voice to be heard over the crowd. “The decrease in crude-oil prices worldwide has left the company with no option but to discontinue free health-care benefits to those who opt for early retirement. As a federal court has determined today they are well within their rights to do.”

The boos reached the decibel of the jackhammer that had begun pounding away inside her head. The placards were waving like pom poms at a football game. Someone in the crowd threw an egg that broke at Raine’s feet, spattering her black suede Italian pumps with bright yellow yolk and gelatinous white. The attack drew enthusiastic applause from the coalition of protesters even as two of the cops waded into the crowd to find the assailant.

“You’ve given it your best shot, Raine. But these folks are flat-out nuts.” Murdock had to yell in Raine’s ear to be heard. “We’re like Crockett and Bowie at the Battle of the Alamo. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

The icy wind picked up. The adrenaline rush of her courtroom victory had begun to wear off. Fearing that the next egg—or something even more dangerous—might hurt more than her shoes, Raine was ready to call it a day.

With two of New York City’s finest clearing a path, Raine and the others began making their way to the black stretch limousine double-parked in the street beside an
Eyewitness News
van. They were pursued by the pack of reporters who shouted out questions like bullets from automatic rifles. Without waiting for the uniformed driver to get out of the car, one of the minions rushed to open the back door.

The limo, boasting two televisions, a fully stocked bar, and wide leather seats, was the height of comfort. The first time she’d ridden in the lush womb on wheels, Raine had felt exactly like Cinderella on her way to the ball. Today, although she’d never considered herself even a remotely fanciful woman, Raine imagined she could actually hear her grandmother’s voice.

“Never forget girls,” she’d instructed Raine and her sister on more than one occasion while they’d been growing up under her Victorian slate roof, “it’s a lot easier for a camel to get into heaven than a rich man.”

The saying was only one in her grandmother’s seemingly endless repertoire of malapropisms. The last time Raine had heard it had been six years ago, the weekend she’d graduated from law school, when she and her grandmother had shared a grilled-porta-bello-mushroom-and-feta-cheese pizza at Harvard Law’s Harkbox Café.

She glanced out the tinted back window at the protesters, watching them grow smaller and smaller. While the men rehashed the trial, Raine wondered why she didn’t feel like joining in the conversation.

She should be jubilant. After all, she was the one who’d brought Odessa Oil into the firm in the first place, which had bolstered her reputation as a rainmaker. Today’s verdict should put her on the fast track for partner in one of the largest, most prestigious law firms in the country. It was precisely what she’d been working toward for years, ever since she’d grabbed hold of the brass ring that had landed her a summer intern job at Choate, Plimpton, Wells & Sullivan. It was her personal Holy Grail and it was finally in sight.

She was intelligent, articulate, a former member of the oldest, most respected law review in the country, and currently a successful litigator who’d put the tiny northwestern town of Coldwater Cove, Washington behind her. She was a winner in a city that lionized victory. She had a three-thousand-dollar-a-month apartment furnished in sleek Italian leather, brass, and marble, and since the firm paid the tab for hired cars to drive their attorneys home at the end of the admittedly long workdays, she hadn’t stepped foot on the subway since her arrival in New York.

Life was nearly perfect. So what the hell was wrong with her?

Raine rubbed her cheeks to soothe tensed facial muscles and sat up straighter in an attempt to untangle the knots in her back muscles. When the simmering flames began burning beneath her ribcage, she took out the ever ready roll of antacids and popped two into her mouth.

She’d become more and more restless these past weeks. And, although each night she’d fall into bed, physically and mentally exhausted, she’d been unable to sleep. She’d conveniently blamed it on the gallons of coffee she’d drunk while preparing for the trial, but if she were to be perfectly honest, her uncharacteristic distraction and anxiety, laced with a vague feeling of discontent, had been stirring inside her even before she’d begun preparing Odessa Oil’s appeal.

As she chewed on the chalky tablets, which were advertised to taste like mint but didn’t, Raine decided that her only problem was that she’d been working too hard for too long. After all, one-hundred-hour workweeks were common for those trudging along the yellow brick road to partnership. Especially litigators, who tended to do the lion’s share of the firm’s traveling.

At first, after escaping the grinding poverty of law school, she’d been excited by the prospect of seeing the country at the firm’s—or, more precisely, the clients’—expense. She’d looked forward to the frequent-flier perks attorneys at smaller firms could only dream about: being met at the airport gate by a uniformed driver holding a sign bearing her name, automatic hotel upgrades, and first-class airline tickets.

In reality, most of the time the only part of the country she was able to see was from thirty-thousand feet in the air. During visits to clients’ cities, she tended to spend her entire time in airports, hotels, and office conference rooms and jet lag had become a way of life.

But life was filled with trade-offs, Raine reminded herself with a stiff mental shake as the limousine wove its way through the snarl of midtown traffic. And unlike so many others, hers came with a six-figure salary, health, life, and disability insurance, a 401(k) plan, bar association dues, and in the event she were ever crazy enough to try to juggle a demanding career and motherhood, paid parental leave.

She just needed a breather, she assured herself as she felt the familiar steel bands tighten around her head. She reached into her briefcase, took out a bottle of aspirin and swallowed two of them dry as she’d learned to do over the past months. On afterthought, she swallowed a third.

A short break to recharge her batteries would be just what the doctor ordered, she considered, picking up her thoughts where she’d left off. Perhaps it was time to take that long-overdue vacation she’d been planning—and putting off—for years. The one where she’d spend several sun-drenched days lounging beside a sparkling blue tropical lagoon while handsome hunks delivered mai tais and rubbed coconut oil all over her body.

This time the image that floated into Raine’s mind was not one of her grandmother, but of herself, clad in a floaty, off-the-shoulder sundress emblazoned with tropical flowers. Not that she owned such a romantic dress, but this was, after all, a fantasy, so Raine wasn’t about to quibble. She was strolling hand in hand with a drop-dead gorgeous man on a romantic, moonlit beach.

Music drifted on the perfumed night air as he lowered his head to kiss her. His mouth was a mere whisper away from hers when the rude blare of a siren shattered the blissful fantasy.

This time she was really going to do it, Raine vowed as a fire engine roared past the limo. While the others continued to gloat, she took out her Day-Timer and made a note to call a travel agent.

As soon as she cleared her calendar. Sometime in the next decade, she amended as she skimmed the pages filled with notations and appointments. If she was lucky.

Coldwater Cove

T
he continual drizzle finally drove the reporters back into their vans and the cops into their units. The sky over Puget Sound was as dark as a wet wool blanket and fog curled thickly around Ida Lindstrom’s house. Jack telephoned the girls again, as he’d been doing every thirty minutes. When the only answer was a busy tone, he figured the damn phone was still off the hook.

It was nearly supper time. Concerned that they might be getting hungry—who knew how much food they had in the house?—Jack had decided to try to talk them into answering the door again when the cellular phone inside his Suburban trilled. Hoping it was Shawna Brown, who appeared to be the spokesperson for the trio, he scooped it up on the second ring.

“O’Halloran.”

The silence on the other end told him what he already knew—that his tone had been too brusque. He dragged his hand down his face and tried again. “This is Sheriff O’Halloran. Is this Shawna?”

“No,” the young female voice answered after another hesitant pause. “It’s me, Daddy. Amy,” she added as if he had another daughter he might possibly confuse her with.

A jolt of parental concern struck like lightning. “What’s wrong, honey?” She’d gone over to his mother’s house after school as she did every day. Having called earlier to explain his situation, he knew his mother wouldn’t be letting Amy call unless it was important. “Where’s your Gramma?”

“She’s in the kitchen. Making cookies.” Another pause that tested his patience. “The kind with the M&Ms in them.”

“I see.” He looked out the rain-streaked windshield at the house. The lights that had been turned on inside were blurred by the filmy curtain of fog and mist. He kept his voice mild, even as concern was replaced with mild exasperation. “Is there some special reason you’re calling, Amy?”

“Yes.”

Jack told himself that he should know better than to ask a six-year-old a
yes
or
no
question. “Can you tell me what it is?”

“I was calling about Puffy.”

“Puffy?”

“My Nano Kitty.” Unlike her father, Amy didn’t attempt to conceal her exasperation. “The one you said you’d take care of for me,” she reminded him.

Since the electronic pet had been banned from the first-grade classroom yesterday, Jack had agreed to keep it in his pocket. He’d also promised to tend to it while Amy was at school. If he’d known ahead of time just what that entailed, he might not have been so willing.

“Puffy’s doing just fine, darlin’.”

“Have you been feeding him?”

“You bet.” If today was any example, the damn virtual cat ate more often than any real cat.

“Did you play with him?”

“Yep. We played chase the mouse not more than ten minutes ago.” According to the instructions, a neglected Nano Kitty was a sad kitty; a sad kitty could become ill, requiring even more attention, including regular doses of virtual-kitty antibiotics.

“Oh. Good.” Her obvious relief made him feel guilty for having considered, on more than one occasion today, tossing the damn gizmo into Admiralty Bay. “I was worried you might forget and accidentally let Puffy die.”

“I promise, Amy, I won’t let Puffy die.” Since he hadn’t been able to make that same promise when her mother had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer four years ago, Jack had every intention of keeping his word now. Even if his surrogate parenting of an electronic kitten was proving a source of vast amusement for his fellow cops.

“Okay.” That matter seemingly settled, she turned to another. “Uh…I was wondering, Daddy…”

Yes, Amy?” He managed, just barely, to keep from grinding his teeth.

“Well, I was wondering…if I could maybe watch one of the tapes. Not the whole thing. Just a little bit.”

He suspected she wasn’t referring to
Pocohantas
or
The Little Mermaid
, but rather one of the videotapes Peg had made when she’d accepted the fact—long before he had—that she was going to die. What had begun as a simple love letter to the child she’d be leaving behind had evolved into a legacy of maternal comfort and advice.

The tapes—an amazing one-hundred-and-six hours of them—were tucked away in Peg’s cedar hope chest with other personal memorabilia as a legacy for the daughter she would never see grow to womanhood.

“I was thinking maybe Gramma and I could drive over to our house after we finished baking the cookies. Just for a little while,” she cajoled prettily when he didn’t immediately answer.

“You know the rules, honey. You and I always watch the tapes together.”

It had been what Peg, concerned about her daughter’s possibly fragile emotional state, had wanted. And Jack was not about to let her down.

He couldn’t count how many times during the past two years he’d wanted to tell his first and only love about some new event in Amy’s life—like when she’d lost her first tooth and had left cookies and chocolate milk out for the tooth fairy, or last December when she’d played the part of a reed piper in her kindergarten’s performance of
The Nutcracker Suite
and had insisted on keeping her stage makeup on while the two of them had celebrated afterwards with Ingrid Johansson’s blueberry waffles at the Timberline Café.

Her first report card; her first sleepover, which he’d discovered was ill-named since the four little six-year-old girls certainly hadn’t done much sleeping—so many firsts Jack knew Peg would have given anything to share.

“But Daddy—”

“Don’t whine, Amy,” he said automatically. It was a new stage she’d entered into, not nearly as appealing as the previous ones and he hoped it would be short-lived. “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you practice reading your new Dr. Seuss book, and I promise we’ll go out for burgers, then watch a tape together tomorrow night.”

“Okay,” she agreed with an instant acceptance he sure would enjoy receiving from the teens inside Ida’s house. “I’ll go read it to Gramma while she bakes the cookies.”

“Good idea,” Jack agreed. “Hey, Amy…whose little girl are you?”

She giggled as she always did whenever he asked that question. “Yours, Daddy,” she answered on cue.

“Love you, Pumpkin.”

“I love you, too, Daddy.” She gave a smacking kissing sound.

Jack gave one back, then hung up and dialed the house again, only to receive another busy signal. Next he called Papa Joe’s Pizza Emporium and ordered two pepperoni-and-mushroom pizzas—a large for the girls and a medium for himself. He didn’t know what they’d prefer, but figured since they were still refusing to talk with him, they could damn well eat whatever he ordered.

Then, frustrated, and fearing he wasn’t going to make it to his mother’s house in time to pick up his daughter, take her home and tuck her into bed, he went back out in the slanting, icy rain that was now falling like needles and strode toward Ida’s front door.

New York City

The victory celebration took place high above the city, in a mahogany-paneled conference room overlooking Central Park. The mood was unrestrained, bordering on jubilant, as the cream of the legal profession celebrated yet another battlefield victory.

Champagne flowed, Waterford decanters of Scotch and brandy had been brought out, and even Oliver Choate, senior partner and founder of Choate, Plimpton, Wells & Sullivan, who usually remained ensconced upstairs in his executive suite, had joined the revelry.

“To the little lady of the hour.” Murdock lifted the glass of Jack Daniel’s the firm had begun stocking when he’d first become a client. “The toughest—and prettiest—litigator in the business,” he boomed out. “The sharp as barbwire lady who managed to save our collective hairy asses.”

“You have such a way with words, Rex,” Raine murmured, earning a laugh from the others.

“Well, now, darlin’, that’s why I pay you the big bucks to do the talkin’ for me.”

More laughs. More corks popped, more brandy poured, more martinis shaken.

It was Oliver Choate’s turn to toast. “To Raine. Choate, Plimpton, Wells and Sullivan’s Wonder Woman.”

“I’m hardly Wonder Woman,” she demurred. “It was, despite the dollars involved, an uncomplicated case.” Since much of litigation consisted of smoke and mirrors, Raine had become adept at setting up smoke screens to protect the firm’s clients. But the
Retirees v. Odessa Oil
suit had been a text book example of the Golden Rule taught in her second-year Law and Economics class: He who has the most gold rules.

“You’re right,” Murdock agreed. “Wonder Woman’s not quite right. Linda Carter looked real cute in that skimpy red, white, and blue outfit, but she didn’t have your ball-busting, take-no-prisoners attitude.” He skimmed a look over her, from the top of her head down to her egg-stained Bruno Magli pumps. “I know. That spunky gal on the TV show set back in olden times. The one with the big—”

“Breastplate,” Oliver cut Murdock off before he could use the
T
word they all knew he’d intended. “And the
gal
you’re referring to is Xena,” he said, revealing himself to be a man of surprisingly eclectic tastes. “Warrior Princess.”

“You got it,” Murdock agreed.

Oliver lifted his glass again. “To our very own Warrior Princess.”

The others followed. Even, Raine noticed, Stephen Wells, managing partner of the firm, which was mildly surprising since she and Stephen had bumped heads on more than one occasion. Raine had been at the firm less than a week when she’d realized that Wells was one of those stuffy dinosaurs who, if given the choice, would have never permitted women to enter these hallowed legal halls.

But that was before today. Before she’d proven that she could do anything any of the male attorneys could do. And she’d done it wearing high heels. Breathing in the heavy ether of admiration, Raine took a sip of the champagne. In contrast to the rain that had begun to fall, it tasted like sunshine on her tongue. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows the entire city appeared to have been laid at her feet.

It was a moment to be savored. To tie up in pretty ribbons and tuck away in her memory, like the prom photographs and dried corsage petals her sister Savannah had Scotch-taped into floral-covered scrapbooks back in high school. Raine had never gone to a prom. The closest she’d come to teenage romance was the snowy December night her junior year of high school right after she’d gotten her braces off when she and Warren Templeton, a worldly senior and president of her debate team, had been parked out by Lake Quinault. It was the memorable night Raine had learned how to French-kiss.

Cigars were pulled out of a Honduran-mahogany humidor and passed around. Smoke filled the room as the conversation shifted from a rehash of the court case that had taken months of twenty-hour-days to prepare and a mere three weeks to present, to where to eat lunch. They were arguing over which steakhouse to go to—the mood was unanimously carnivoristic—when Raine’s secretary stuck his head in the door.

“I’m sorry to interrupt, but you have a phone call, Raine.”

“Tell whoever it is that Raine’s off the clock until tomorrow morning,” Stephen Wells instructed curtly, not giving Raine a chance to respond.

“The caller says it’s an emergency.”

“Who is it, Brian?” Raine asked.

“She refused to give her name.” Having worked long enough at the firm not to be intimidated by the managing partner’s irritation, Brian Collins ignored Wells’s scowl. Raine suspected that being the only one who understood the Byzantine filing system he’d set up didn’t hurt, either. “But the area code on the caller ID is from Washington.”

“Perhaps it’s the President,” James Sullivan suggested.

“Calling to offer Raine the Attorney General’s job,” Rex said.

More laughter.

Raine found nothing humorous in this news. Especially since she suspected the call was coming from Washington State, and not the nation’s capitol.

“I’ll take it in my office.” As her headache spiked again, she put her glass down on the table. Promising to return as soon as possible, she escaped the smoke-filled office. The heels of her pumps sank into the plush pewter carpeting as she made her way down the curving staircase to her office.

“I smell like a damn pool hall,” she muttered. “The only problem with winning is it gives the partners an excuse to pull out the stink sticks.”

“It’s a guy thing,” her secretary said. “You may be able to hold your own on the playing field with the big boys, Raine, but there are some things you’ll just never understand.”

“I prefer to think of myself—and all women who are sensible enough not to want dog breath and smelly hair—as a superior life form.”

“You probably are. But I’ll bet you don’t have nearly as much fun. By the way, your caller is a kid. She sounds like a teenager, perhaps sixteen, seventeen. She wouldn’t tell me what the problem was. All she’d say was that it was an emergency and she had instructions to call you. I didn’t think you’d want me to share that with the others upstairs.”

“No.” A chill skittered up Raine’s spine. Her grandmother wasn’t a young woman. If anything had happened to her…“Thank you, Brian.” Raine managed a vague smile for the young man who kept her life so well organized.

She went into her office, sank down in the swivel leather chair she’d splurged part of her end-of-the-year bonus on, and took a deep breath as she looked down at the blinking orange light. Then, spurred by apprehension, she pressed the button. “Hello. This is Raine Cantrell.”