The Tolling of Mercedes Bell: A Novel (5 page)

“Perhaps the carrier will see the light before the case goes to trial and we can settle it. Otherwise we’re going to trial, and if that happens we’re probably going to lose, and possibly lose big.”

“Why ‘big’?” she asked.

“Well, if Emily is truly an ‘eggshell plaintiff,’ meaning one with substantial damage from her personal history
before
the event which triggered her lawsuit, and if Soutane proves that Jason Greer’s and Milton Dailey’s actions were proximate causes, or triggers, of her irreparable undoing, then the jury has every reason to award her punitive damages. The fact that our client is dying of cancer doesn’t help either. His insurance could take a huge hit.”

Darrel spent the remainder of the meeting outlining what had to be done. Mercedes’s head was spinning when she left his office.

A
T THE END OF THE DAY,
she exited the back door of the building to the parking lot. Three shirtless carpenters were on the roof of the building next door. They were all wearing white hard hats and heavy leather tool bags strapped around their hips.

The summer she’d met Eddy in Colorado, he was working construction. The men at the sites were all young and tanned, hard-bodied and worked to loud rock ’n’ roll blaring on a boom box, just like the three above her on the roof. Outdoor construction is seasonal in the Rockies, where the winters were too harsh for framing, siding, and roofing, so Eddy had pursued indoor work while they plotted their escape to California. She thought of his tanned skin and wild streak.

She turned away from the construction crew and found her car. A loud whistle pierced the air behind her. She didn’t look up. Then came a second whistle, more prolonged and louder. She knew without looking that the three men had stopped work and were standing on the edge of the roof, waiting for her to react. She got into the car, rolled down the window, kicked off her heels, and started the engine. Glancing up, she saw them facing her with their tool bags swinging rhythmically, arms flailing, feet stomping like gogo girls in a review, dancing to a Bee Gees tune:
Whether you’re a brother or whether you’re a mother, you’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive ...

She laughed out loud and waved at them as she backed out of the parking space. Yes, indeed, she was staying alive.

“
T
hey’re back,” Julie, the receptionist, announced over the intercom. Lindsay and Simone stopped what they were doing and peered around the corners of their cubicles at Mercedes, who stood up and quickly applied some lipstick.

“Let’s hope the news is tolerable,” Mercedes said glumly. She had wanted so much for her first case to trial to be a winner, but that was not going to happen.

They joined the rest of the staff in the common area, just as Darrel and Stuart came around the corner, looking dour and carrying their big black trial briefcases. Darrel shook his head at Florida and stopped with Stuart in front of the assembled staff.

“I wish I had better news for you after all the hard work we’ve put in,” he said, “but the jury handed down a stunning plaintiff’s verdict. They awarded Emily Fredericks all the damages in her settlement demand and substantial punitive damages.”

A wave of dismay went through the room. Mercedes stood in back. He caught her eye as he continued.

“I’m very grateful to all of you. We knew going in that it would be
an uphill battle. We made that very clear to the carrier and did our best to settle the case, but things just don’t always work out the way we’d like. We appreciate all your effort. Let’s hope the next case turns out more to our liking.” He nodded to the group and went into his office.

Mercedes headed for the kitchen, where Caroline, the family law associate and her friend, caught up with her.

“It’s too bad Dailey’s carrier wouldn’t listen when they had the chance to settle,” Caroline said. “Maybe next time they’ll give Darrel more credence.”

Mercedes acknowledged her observation with a look, but said nothing. She opened a cupboard and pulled out the peppermint tea. Her hunch about Emily Fredericks had now been validated by the evidence and by a jury. She poured hot water into her cup.

Stuart appeared in the doorway. He’d taken off his jacket and loosened his paisley tie. His boyish face made him look younger than he was, and concealed his deep exhaustion.

“So Stuart, what happened?” Caroline asked him.

“Jack Soutane is what happened,” Stuart said wryly, shaking his head. “The guy has a silver tongue. He had the jury eating out of his hand from the opening statement.”

Mercedes recalled Soutane’s serene self-confidence in jousting with Darrel at the deposition. Not only did nothing faze him, he clearly relished the combat.

“And since our client is dying,” Stuart said, “he couldn’t attend the trial, couldn’t testify, and would have been a terrible witness anyway. I think the jury felt they had an opportunity to correct a wrong, and took full advantage of it. The only questions were how much damage and how much money. And then there’s Emily.”

“What do you mean?” Caroline asked. She had not worked on the case or met the plaintiff.

“She was telling the truth,” Mercedes said bluntly. “She was
already badly damaged before her boyfriend ripped her off and terrorized her. She really
was
unable to work, and she needed Mr. Dailey to do right by her.”

“That’s it in a nutshell,” Stuart said. “But you should have seen Soutane’s closing argument. Oh, my God, what a performance! He had one juror crying, two others with their heads in their hands, and even the judge had to avert his eyes at one point. The guy could sell snow to Eskimos.”

Mercedes felt bad for Darrel and Stuart, but glad for Emily Fredericks. Perhaps having money and vindication would help her make better decisions in the future, especially about men.

“We’re going out for drinks, if you’d like to join us. Mercedes, you especially should come. You spotted this before anyone else, at Emily’s deposition.”

“Thanks, but I have to pick up Germaine. And she’ll be all curious about what happened.”

“Wait—you haven’t told us how much the award was,” Caroline said to Stuart.

“Would you believe $750,000? And that’s tax-free.”

“Wow,” the women said in unison.

G
ERMAINE WAS WAITING AT THE
door when Mercedes arrived at the small private school, which had recently awarded the child a full scholarship. They drove back to the little pink house, their palace, which now had flowers and blooming bushes in the front yard where only weeds had grown the year before. Wind chimes hung from the eaves and tinkled in the breeze.

The perimeter of their small living room was lined with open boxes of books. There was no money for bookcases yet, but Germaine had new glasses. Her dark brown hair was in pigtails and she looked
very neat in her school uniform, none the worse for wear after a day at school. She skipped back to her room to change clothes. Mercedes bolted the front door, opened two windows, and retreated to her own room to change. She shed her heels, hung up her clothes, and pulled on jeans and a tee shirt.

Pink snapdragons from the front yard filled a mason jar on the kitchen table, where Germaine did her homework while Mercedes made dinner. She turned on the radio when Germaine finished her arithmetic; the driving energy of Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean” filled the room. Mercedes grinned and tried to moonwalk at the counter. Germaine, in socks, did several spins on the smooth linoleum floor as she set the table.

When the velvety black bean soup was hot, Mercedes ladled it into two bowls, spooned a generous dollop of yogurt onto each, and topped them with chopped green onions.

“Mama, is there really such a place as heaven?” Germaine asked between mouthfuls.

“I think what we have right here is pretty close,” Mercedes answered. “Why do you ask?”

“I was thinking of Mr. Dailey. He’s dying and now that the Fredericks lady is going to be rich, maybe he can go to heaven.”

“It would be nice if things worked that way, but we really don’t know, do we?”

“Do you think Daddy’s in heaven?”

Not hardly.
“Sweetness, I just don’t know. But I do think that everything is connected somehow, and that the universe is full of love, even in the midst of life’s sorrows. Just look at all that has happened to us, and how much help we’ve gotten since Daddy died, even from people who didn’t know us—Mr. Friedman, Ms. Kinsey, the people at your school who gave you a scholarship. That’s a lot of love.”

Germaine put a spoonful of hot basmati rice in her mouth and
chewed it pensively. “But what about the other people in our neighborhood? It doesn’t look like there’s much love for them.”

“I agree, and I don’t have an answer for that. But I do know there is true goodness all around, whenever we let ourselves see it. Things seem to happen for a reason, even really dreadful things.”

Germaine was not convinced, but she contemplated what her mother said.

“Now how about you finish up your homework, and then we’ll have another chapter of
Little House on the Prairie.”
They had recently checked out Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book from the library, and both were smitten.

Mercedes cleaned up the kitchen and pulled out the fixings for the next day’s lunches from the old white refrigerator. There would be just enough groceries to make it to Saturday, the day after payday.

Germaine bent over her book, her left elbow anchored on the table, her hand cradling her head, her eyes glued to the page. The new school was far more demanding, but she seemed to thrive on it. Her glasses had slipped slightly down her nose. Her lips moved as she read. She took notes in her notebook now and then. Germaine was going to make something of herself someday, Mercedes knew, if she could help her stay strong.

“I’m ready for the test tomorrow,” Germaine announced a short while later, closing her book with a flourish.

“Want me to test you a little?”

The girl shook her head. She was confident.

“Not at all?”

She shook her head again, more vehemently.

“Then the last little girl into the bath is a rotten egg!”

Germaine leapt to her feet and flew to her room to undress.

As they sat soaking in the tub, Mercedes thought of Stuart, Caroline, and Darrel, out celebrating the end of the trial, probably
well lubricated with liquor by now, airing the details. She wished she could be hearing it all, but being around alcohol had lost its appeal after life with Eddy. She could get the lowdown from Caroline tomorrow.

Mother and daughter got into their nightclothes and curled up on the sofa. Germaine’s clean pink face shone in the lamplight. She leaned her wet head against her mother’s old terry-cloth bathrobe as Mercedes put her arm around her.
Little House on the Prairie
lay on Mercedes’s lap, opened to the page where they had left off the night before. She read aloud, her voice rising and falling, speeding up and slowing down with the gripping story of Pa’s encounter with a pack of wolves that had surrounded him and his terrified pony, Patty.

They imagined they were living in a small log cabin on the bank of a peaceful creek—a cabin exposed to the wide expanse of prairie all around it, with no shutters on the solitary window and no door in the doorway. Their roof was the sheet of canvas that had covered their wagon on the journey west. They slept on a floor of dirt made smooth with a homemade broom. Their nearest neighbor was a bachelor, who lived in a cabin several miles away.

They had no electricity. Nothing traveled faster than a horse. Food was grown or killed by those who ate it, and everything was made by hand. Out on the prairie, a child had no school or friends. Ma cooked on an open campfire, washing dishes and clothes with water hauled up from the creek in a tin tub. She spread the clean clothes on the prairie grass to dry. Her foremost desire was a clothesline, and Pa’s was a well.

Suddenly, three loud cars roared around the corner near their house. One of the cars backfired. Or was it a gunshot? Germaine jumped at the sound. A neighbor’s front door slammed, and people were yelling on the sidewalk as the cars sped away. From the next block, police sirens sounded. Germaine and Mercedes looked at each other, and then at the dead bolt on their locked front door.