Karin Slaughter - A Faint Cold Fear

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“That’s probably best,” Nan said, glancing at Lena’s neck. Lena had not looked in the mirror this morning, but she could imagine how bad she looked. The cut on her cheek felt warm, like it might be infected.

Nan said, “I’ll be back at lunchtime, around one. We’re going to start inventory next week, and I need to get some things done.”

“That’s okay.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to come to school with me? You could stay in the office. No one would see you.”

Lena shook her head. She did not ever want to return to campus again.

Nan scooped up her book bag and a set of keys. “Oh, I almost forgot.”

Lena waited.

“Richard Carter might drop by.”

Lena muttered a curse that Nan had obviously never heard from a woman.

Nan said, “Oh, my.”

“Does he know I’m here?”

“No, I didn’t know you were going to be here. I gave him the key last night at dinner.”

“You gave him the key to your house?” Lena asked, incredulous.

“He worked with Sibyl for years,” Nan defended. “She trusted him with everything.”

“What does he want?”

“To go through some of her notes.”

“He can read Braille?”

Nan fidgeted with her keys. “There’s a translator at the library he can run it through. It’s going to take him forever.”

“What’s he looking for?”

“God knows.” Nan rolled her eyes. “You know how secretive he can be.”

Lena agreed, but she thought this was odd behavior even for Richard. She would find out what the hell he was up to before he even got near Sibyl’s notes.

“I’d better scoot,” Nan said. She pointed to the cast on Lena’s wrist. “You’re supposed to keep that elevated.”

Lena raised her arm.

“You’ve got my number at school.” Nan indicated the keypad. “Just press the ‘stay’ button if you like.”

“Right,” Lena said, though she had no intention of setting the alarm. A spoon clanging against a frying pan would be more effective.

“It gives you twenty seconds to close the door,” Nan said. Then, when Lena didn’t respond, she pressed the “stay” key herself. “The code’s your birthday.”

The pad started beeping, counting down the seconds Nan had to leave through the front door.

Lena said, “Great.”

“Call me if you need me,” Nan told her. “Bye!”

Lena closed the front door and locked the bottom latch. With one hand she dragged a chair over and propped it under the knob so Richard couldn’t surprise her. She pulled aside the curtain and looked out the little round window in the door, watching Nan back out of the driveway. Lena felt stupid for breaking down in front of Nan last night, but part of her was glad that the woman had been there. She was finally understanding after all these years what Sibyl had seen in the mousy librarian. Nan Thomas wasn’t that bad after all.

Lena grabbed the cordless phone off the coffee table on her way to the kitchen. She found the Yellow Pages in the drawer by the sink and sat at the table. The ads for lawyers took up five pages, each one of them colorful and tacky. Their headlines beseeched those suffering from car accidents or sucking off disability to call RIGHT NOW for help.

Buddy Conford’s ad was the biggest one. A picture of the slick bastard had a cartoon balloon coming out of his mouth with the words “Call me before you talk to the police!” written in fat red letters.

He answered on the first ring. “Buddy Conford.”

Lena chewed at her lip, reopening the cut. Buddy was a one-legged bastard who thought all cops were crooked, and on more than one occasion he’d accused Lena of using illegal methods. He had busted a few of her cases wide open on stupid technicalities.

“Hello?” Buddy said. “All righty, counting to three. One . . . two . . .”

Lena forced herself to say, “Buddy.”

“Yep, you got ‘im.” When she did not say anything, he prompted, “Speak.”

“It’s Lena.”

“Come again?” he said. “Darlin’, I can barely hear you.”

She cleared her throat, trying to raise her voice. “It’s Lena Adams.”

The lawyer let out a low whistle. “Well, I’ll be,” he said. “I heard you were in the pokey. Thought it was a rumor.”

Lena kept enough pressure on her lip to cause pain.

“How’s it feel to be on the other side of the law now, partner?”

“Fuck you.”

“We’ll discuss my fee later,” Buddy said, chuckling. He was enjoying this even more than she had imagined he would. “What are you charged with?”

“Nothing,” she told him, thinking that that could change at any minute, depending on what kind of day Jeffrey had. “This is for somebody else.”

“Who’s that?”

“Ethan Green.” She corrected herself. “White, I mean. Ethan White.”

“Where’s he at?”

“I’m not sure.” Lena closed the phone book, sick of looking at the cheap ads. “He’s charged with some sort of parole violation. The original charge was bad checks.”

“How long’ve they had him locked up?”

“I’m not sure,” Lena said.

“Unless they have something solid to charge him with, they mighta already cut him loose.”

“Jeffrey won’t cut him loose,” Lena told him, certain of that one thing. He only knew Ethan White from his rap sheet. He had never seen the good side of Ethan, the side that wanted to change.

“There’s something you’re not telling me here,” Buddy said. “How’d he end up on the chief’s radar?”

Lena ran her fingers along the pages of the book. She wondered how much she could tell Buddy Conford. She wondered if she should tell him anything at all.

Buddy was good enough to know what was coming. “If you lie to me, it only makes it harder to do my job.”

“He didn’t kill Chuck Gaines,” she said. “He wasn’t involved in any of that. He’s innocent.”

Buddy gave a heavy sigh. “Honey, let me tell you something. All my clients are innocent. Even the one that ended up on death row.” He made a disgusted sound. “ Especially the one that ended up on death row.”

“This one’s really innocent, Buddy.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe we should do this in person. You wanna swing by my office?”

Lena closed her eyes, trying to visualize herself out of the house. She couldn’t do it.

Buddy asked, “Something I said?”

“No,” Lena told him. “Can you come here instead?”

“Where’s here?”

“I’m at Nan Thomas’s house.” She gave him the address, and he repeated the numbers back to her.

“It’ll be a couple of hours,” he said. “You gonna be around?”

“Yeah.”

Buddy said, “I’ll see you in a couple.”

She hung up the phone, then dialed the number at the police station. She knew that Jeffrey would do everything he could to hold Ethan in lockup, but she also knew that Ethan was well aware of how the law worked.

“Grant Police,” Frank said.

Lena had to force herself not to hang up the phone. She cleared her throat, trying to make her voice sound normal.

She said, “Frank? It’s Lena.”

He was silent.

“I’m looking for Ethan.”

“Yeah?” he grumbled. “Well, he ain’t here.”

“Do you know where—”

He slammed the phone down so hard the sound echoed in Lena’s ear.

“Shit,” she said, then started coughing so violently she thought her lungs were going to pop out of her mouth. Lena went to the sink and drank a glass of water. Several minutes passed before the coughing fit passed. She started opening drawers, looking for some cough drops to soothe her throat, but found nothing. She found a bottle of Advil in the cabinet over the stove and shook three capsules into her mouth. Several more came out, and she tried to catch them before they fell on the floor, smacking her hurt wrist against the refrigerator in the process. The pain made her see stars, but she breathed through it.