Judith Tarr - Household Gods

Fortunately, Gary Ogarkov didn’t ask her to elaborate. Like everybody else in the world, he worried about himself and his own concerns first. And a good thing for her, too, all things considered. “I felt terrible about the way things turned out, and then I was afraid…” He stopped again.

Afraid you tried to kill yourself because I got the partnership and you didn’t. Nicole had no trouble filling in the blanks. Such things happened. Sometimes they made the news. More often, they spread along the attorneys’ grapevine. After all, lawyers made their living by writing and talking. What else would they do for entertainment but gossip?

“I didn’t try to kill myself,” Nicole said firmly. “If my doctor doesn’t understand what went wrong, don’t expect me to” — even if I do, don’t expect me to say so — “but it wasn’t that, believe me.”

He spread his hands in a gesture of surrender. “All right, all right. I believe you. I’m glad. And I’m glad you’re back, and I’m glad you don’t hate me. I wouldn’t have blamed you if you did.”

He looked very boyish when he worried — and he was worried. She wasn’t altogether sure she’d reassured him, either. She soothed him a bit more, reflecting as she did it that it was a good thing he didn’t spend a lot of time in court. His opponents would have read altogether too much from his face.

Finally he seemed to realize that she was busy, or trying to be. He pushed himself to his feet, dipped his head — it was almost a bow — and fled back to his own desk. It was still the same one, she couldn’t help but notice. She’d have thought he’d have moved into the rarefied expanses of partner country by now.

So maybe, she thought, her absence had disrupted the firm just a little bit. Then she shook her head. No, of course not. The mills of the firm ground exceedingly fine, and ground exceedingly slow. Gary would get his new office in the firm’s good time, and not a moment sooner.

She shook herself and wrenched her mind back to the work she’d been trying to do all morning. Just about four memos down the stack, yet another visitor tapped lightly on the doorframe. She let out a grunt of annoyance. Best wishes were all very well, but so was getting some work done. That was what she was here for, wasn’t it?

But when she looked up, she wiped the frown off her face in a hurry. Sheldon Rosenthal stood in the doorway of her plain, plebeian office, attache case in hand, looking the very model of the modern founding partner.

“It’s very good to see you back, Ms. Gunther-Perrin,” he said, cool and precise as always. “We were concerned about you, especially in light of the circumstances.” So: he’d been wondering if she’d popped a handful of pills, too.

She kept her voice civil, but annoyance gave it an edge it might not otherwise have had. “Circumstances don’t have anything to do with it,” she said. That was a lie, but it wasn’t a provable lie. “Life would be a lot more convenient if you could pick and choose when you were going to get sick.”

“So it would,” Rosenthal said dryly. He didn’t wait to be invited, but stepped right into the office and swung the attache case up onto Nicole’s desk. It landed with a solid thump. Obviously, he hadn’t brought it along as a dignified prop. He snapped open the solid brass locks and lifted out a thick sheaf of papers. “Now here is something you may find interesting.”

Nicole stared at it. She didn’t find it interesting. She found it formidable. Saying as much to the head of the firm didn’t strike her as the best thing she could do. “What is it?” she asked, hoping she sounded interested rather than wary.

“Among other things, the environmental impact statement on a parcel of land somewhat north of here,” Rosenthal answered. “I want you to analyze that statement and the other documents you will find here, and to give me an opinion as to whether development is likely to be allowed to go forward if a litigant seeks to block it in the courts.”

“Sounds a lot like what I was doing with the Butler Ranch project,” Nicole said.

“There are similarities, yes,” Rosenthal said imperturbably. “The expertise you acquired through working on that project is one of the reasons I’m assigning this one to you.”

“I see,” Nicole said, in lieu of screaming, You son of a bitch! Had she truly been lying unconscious for six days, she would have screamed at him, she had no doubt of that at all. A year and a half in Carnuntum had taught her a new degree of patience, and a degree of self-preservation, too.

It hadn’t taught her not to keep her thoughts in check. If he’d liked her work on Butler Ranch so well, why hadn’t he made her a partner on account of it? But she’d been away long enough to cool the outrage she’d felt right after Rosenthal shafted her — and to show her there were a hell of a lot worse things than working in a law office.

On the strength of that, and after a few seconds’ pause to get her voice under control, she asked, “Are we representing the developer here, or someone who is thinking about trying to stop him?”

“An extremely professional question.” Did Sheldon Rosenthal sound the least bit surprised? Maybe he did. Maybe he’d dropped this project on her desk to see if she would lose her temper, or to try to make her lose it. That would have given him the perfect excuse to let her go.

But she’d refused to give it to him. He scratched his chin along the edge of his neat little beard. “Perhaps it would be best if you did not know the answer to that. I want the analysis to be as nearly disinterested as possible.”

Nicole took time to think about that — time in which he stood there, waiting in apparent patience. “All right,” Nicole said at last. Rosenthal made a certain amount of sense. Lawyers were by trade advocates, hired guns. If she knew which way he wanted the analysis to come out, she’d slant it that way. As it was, he could go to the client, whoever the client was, and say, Here’s exactly why you can, or maybe, why you can’t do what you want to do with this land.

“Do you think you can have this on my desk a week from today?” he asked.

Nicole nearly let go regardless of all her combat training in circumspection. But her resolve held. She was able to say with a reasonable degree of aplomb, “I’ll try. If I weren’t coming back from being sick, I’d be sure of it. But with everything else backed up a week and more — “

Rosenthal cut her off with a chopping gesture. “This has priority. If everything else has waited for you to return, it can wait a little longer.”

Nicole drew a deep breath. If the founding partner said Hop! the wise frog didn’t ask How high? till she was already on the way up. “All right,” she said. “In that case, I’ll have it done on time.” Or die trying.

“Good,” Sheldon Rosenthal said. “I’ll look forward to seeing what you do with it.” His nod was as carefully wrought as everything else about him. “And let me say once more, I am very glad to see you back in good health.” Without even waiting to hear her dutiful thanks, he nodded one last time, turned and headed back to the eminence of the seventh floor.

He’d left the attache case, brass fittings and all. Nicole refused to run after him like a flunky. She’d send somebody up with it later. For now she closed it and set it aside, pausing to stroke the fine leather. Then she turned back to her desk, took another deep breath, and started skimming through the documents the case had carried. The sooner she knew how brutal this job was going to be, the better.

As she read through the papers, she felt how long she’d been away, even more than she had with her kids. Time after time, she remembered the outline of the legal points she’d made in the Butler Ranch report, but not the details. And the details were what mattered, because the outline fell to pieces without them.