Джон Гришэм - A Time for Mercy

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WITH HER JAWS wired together, Josie found it impossible to chew food, so her last lunch at the hospital was another chocolate milkshake through a straw. After which she was required to sit in a wheelchair as they rolled her out of the room and down the hallway. Eventually, she and Kiera and two orderlies exited through the front door and got into the car of Mrs. Carol Huff, who had volunteered to do the driving because she owned a four-door Pontiac. Pastor Charles McGarry and his wife, Meg, were there for the release, and they followed Mrs. Huff in their little import out of Tupelo and back to Ford County.

The Good Shepherd Bible Church had a narrow sanctuary that was pretty and timeless. Years after it was built, one of the many congregations added a two-story wing across the back, a less than handsome annex with classrooms for Sunday school upstairs and a small fellowship hall and kitchen on the first floor, next to the office where Pastor McGarry prepared his sermons and counseled his flock. He had decided that the church would offer the use of a classroom to Josie and Kiera as a short-term apartment, with access to the downstairs toilet and the kitchen. He and the deacons had met three times in extra sessions since Monday to try to find a place for the family, and a classroom in the back of the church was the best they could do. One member owned a rental home that might be available in a month or so, but that member also relied upon the income from it. A farmer had a barn/guesthouse but it needed some work. There was the offer of a camper, but McGarry waved it off. Josie and the kids had recently survived a year in one.

The church had no wealthy people, the type who owned multiple homes. Its members were retirees, small farmers, middle-class working folks who were doing well to scrape by themselves. Other than love and warm food, they had little to offer.

Josie and Kiera had no other place to go and no family to turn to. Leaving the area was out of the question because of Drew and his problems. Josie did not have a bank account and had been surviving on limited cash for several years. Kofer had demanded two hundred dollars a month for rent and food, and she had always been in arrears. The original arrangement had been based on plenty of sex and companionship in exchange for food and shelter, but the intimacy had not lasted long. She had no credit cards and no credit history. Her last paycheck from the car wash was for $51 and a convenience store owed her $40 more. She was not sure how to collect and not even sure if she still had the job there, though she was assuming the worst. At least two of her three part-time jobs were gone, and her doctor said she could not look for work for at least two weeks. There were relatives in south Mississippi and Louisiana but they had stopped taking her calls years earlier.

Charles showed them to their new quarters. The air was thick with the smell of freshly cut wood and new paint. Shelving had been installed above the bunk beds, and a portable television was on a bottom shelf. There was a rug on the floor and a fan in the window. The closet was filled with hand-me-down shirts, pants, jeans, blouses, and two jackets that the church had collected, cleaned, and pressed. There was a small refrigerator, already stocked with cold water and fruit juice. In a cheap chest of drawers there were new undergarments, socks, T-shirts, and pajamas.

Downstairs in the kitchen, Mrs. Huff showed them the larger refrigerator, filled with food and bottles of water and tea, all at their disposal. She showed them the coffeepot and filters. Charles gave Josie a key to the rear doors and invited her and Kiera to try to make themselves at home. The deacons had decided that two or three men would make the rounds each night and make sure they were safe. The ladies had put together a meal schedule for the next week. A retired schoolteacher named Mrs. Golden had volunteered to tutor Kiera in the church several hours a day until she caught up, and until they, whoever “they” might be, made the decision about her returning to school. Half the deacons thought she should return to the junior high in Clanton. The other half believed that would be too traumatic and that she should be homeschooled in the church. Josie had not yet been consulted.

Mrs. Golden used her contacts at the school to obtain a set of replacement textbooks for Kiera. The others had either been burned by Earl Kofer, as he claimed, or they were in the house and could not be retrieved. New ones would be required. Kiera was in the eighth grade, a year behind where she should be, and was still struggling to keep up with her classmates. Her teachers considered her bright, but with her chaotic family and unstable past she had missed too many days of school.

Drew was in the ninth grade, two years behind, and not gaining momentum. He loathed being the oldest kid in his class and often refused to reveal his real age. He didn’t realize his luck in arriving late to puberty and looking no older than the other boys. Mrs. Golden had gone to the high school and talked to the principal about Drew’s academic quandary. Obviously, he couldn’t take classes from the jail, nor did the school have a tutor on its payroll. Any efforts to intervene would take a court order. They decided to let the lawyers worry about that. Mrs. Golden did notice the principal’s reluctance in doing anything that might help the defendant.

As they were leaving the church, Charles and Meg promised to pick up Josie and Kiera at nine the following morning for the trip to town. They needed to fetch their car, and they were desperate to see Drew.

Josie and Kiera thanked everyone profusely and said goodbye. They walked to a picnic table next to the cemetery and sat on it. Once again their little family was separated and one step away from being homeless. But for the goodness of others, they would be hungry and sleeping in the car.

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JAKE WAS SITTING at his desk, staring at a stack of pink phone messages that Portia and Bev had taken that morning. So far that week he had spent about eighteen hours working on behalf of Drew Gamble. He rarely billed by the hour because his clients were working people and indigent defendants who couldn’t pay, whatever the bill, but he, like almost all lawyers, had learned the necessity of tracking his time.

Not long after Jake began to work for Lucien, a lawyer across the square, a likable guy named Mack Stafford, represented a teenager who’d been injured in an auto accident. The case wasn’t complicated and Mack didn’t bother recording his hours since his contract gave him a contingency of one-third. The insurance company agreed to settle for $120,000, and Mack was all set to walk off with a fee of $40,000, a rarity not only in Ford County but anywhere throughout the rural South. However, since the client was a minor the settlement had to be approved by the chancery court. Chancellor Reuben Atlee asked Mack in open court to justify such a generous fee for a rather straightforward case. Mack did not have a record of his hours and failed miserably in convincing the judge that he deserved the money. They haggled for a while and Atlee finally gave Mack a week to reconstruct his time sheets and submit them. By then, though, he was suspicious of the lawyer. Mack claimed he charged clients $100 an hour and that he had invested four hundred hours in the case. Both numbers were on the high side. Atlee cut them both in half and awarded Mack $20,000. He was so incensed he appealed to the state supreme court and lost 9–0 because the court had ruled for decades that sitting chancellors have unfettered discretion in just about everything. Mack finally took the money and never spoke to Judge Atlee again.

Five years later, in perhaps the most legendary act of criminal and ethical misconduct by a member of the local bar, Mack stole half a million dollars from four clients and skipped town. To Jake’s knowledge, not a single person, including Mack’s ex-wife and two daughters, had ever heard a word from him. On really bad days, Jake, as well as most lawyers in town, dreamed of being Mack and roasting on a beach somewhere with a cold drink.