Laurel Street
Scottsboro, 9:00 a.m.
The decision was made last night that they would start with her attorney. Rory was glad. He’d been oddly silent since her return. No visit, not even a phone call. It was time to confront him and demand an explanation.
Rory was thankful for a good night’s sleep. Something about knowing Chance was in the next room had put her completely at ease. She had known she was safe. This morning breakfast had been relaxed, not strained or uncomfortable. Really, she continued to be surprised by how easy he was to be around.
Shaking off the thoughts, Rory took a deep breath and readied herself for today’s agenda to begin. Maybe this would be the day they found something that helped her case. What better place to start than with the attorney who had defended her?
Gerald “Gerry” Patterson had been the only attorney in the area who would take Rory’s case. Since at the time she still had a job and some assets related to her marriage, she hadn’t qualified for a court-appointed attorney. But Mr. Patterson had, somewhat reluctantly, stepped up to the plate. Rory had surmised based on the tension sparking between her Aunt Lulu and Patterson that there was leverage of some sort. Leverage shewielded mercilessly. Lulu never said, much less explained, but Rory suspected the two had been involved at some point over the years.
Evidently Patterson had not wanted his wife to learn about whatever his and Lulu’s involvement amounted to. Whatever the case, the past had not been Rory’s concern at that moment. Her husband had been murdered, and no one had believed the truth she was telling them.
How did she make anyone believe her if there was no evidence? She had desperately needed someone capable of gathering their own evidence. Of finding what no one else did. But Patterson had turned out not to be that man. He had been and was still only a small-town attorney with little ambition, a secretary and a clerk currently enrolled in law school. Nothing wrong with small. She wondered sometimes if his lackluster performance had been more about nearing retirement or resentment that he’d been forced to take a case that would not gain him anything but trouble.
What she had needed—Rory glanced at the man who had just parked in front of the attorney’s office—had been someone like Chance Rader and the Colby Agency. But she hadn’t known at the time that the truth wouldn’t set her free. Foolishly, she had believed the facts would be uncovered and the bad guys would be caught and punished. Who in the world could possibly have believed for a moment that she would murder her husband?
Apparently a lot of people.
She had greatly underestimated the power of the Harris name. Not for her—a Harris by marriage only—but for her in-laws. Worse, in Rory’s opinion, why had Eudora and Anthony not wanted to find the truth? How could they possibly have been so convinced she was guilty?
Grief, she supposed. That level of grief did things to people. Obliterated common sense. Destroyed all reason and logic. Andmaybe the pain had been so all consuming that having it over was more important than the truth.
“You ready?”
Rory blinked and met his gaze. “Yes. I was just thinking.” She shook her head. “Sometimes I just can’t fully grasp how this happened.”
He smiled, the expression sad or resigned. “Bad things happen to good people. Sadly, more often than you think. But we are going to turn this around.” He tapped his temple. “The wheels are turning, and scenarios are forming.”
She dredged up a smile of her own. “Maybe I’ll get lucky, and we’ll go in this office and find out that my attorney—the one who took my meager life’s savings—will have come up with a few scenarios as well.”
Chance chuckled. “We can always hope.”
Rory got out of the car and met him at the sidewalk. The one thing the Colby Agency and Chance had given her already in the short period of their involvement was hope. Two years ago, she had lost all hope. She had felt so lost and forlorn, she hadn’t really cared what happened to her.
But she had new hope now. She was not going back to that prison, and she was not giving up on herself again.
The law office opened at nine. Chance opened the door for Rory at 9:02. They hadn’t made an appointment. Chance felt it was best not to give Patterson too much time to line up his excuses. Better to catch him off guard. Rory was only too happy to go along with the suggestion. She wouldn’t mind seeing a little uncomfortable squirming after how the man had failed her.
Reba Johnson looked up and smiled for Chance. “Good morning.” Then her gaze settled on Rory, and the smile faded. “Rory. You’re home. Gerry has been expecting to hear from you.”
Rory worked up a facsimile of a smile. “It’s good to be home. I’ve been expecting to hear from him as well.”
She should be nicer. After all, it was this office that found the issue that allowed her conviction to be overturned. Although it wasn’t her attorney who’d discovered the withheld evidence, it was his clerk. The law school student, Leonard Wade.
Rory glanced at the empty desk a few feet away from Reba’s. Apparently the secretary noticed. “Leonard is on vacation.” Her smile widened to something visibly fake. “He’d always wanted to go to Cancun. He and his girlfriend won’t be back for two weeks.”
Rory told herself his absence had nothing to do with the timing of her release. But she couldn’t help feeling that way. She remembered well the day Leonard visited her. He’d never done that before. The man, who was a year younger than Rory, had been vibrating with excitement. He’d found something, and with his boss, Patterson, out of town, he couldn’t wait for Rory to hear the news. He was certain the discovery was just the first step toward clearing her name.
Sometimes she wondered if she would have ever been told about the evidence the DA’s office had suppressed if Patterson had been in town. She disliked feeling that way, but she had suspected it was true. If Patterson could have gotten in front of it, no one would have ever known.
But now the game had changed. Now the race for the detective and the newly assigned DA was to find out where the fibers had come from as well as to find any additional evidence that Rory actually killed her husband. She wasn’t sure how they would do either, but she certainly didn’t intend to wait around and see.
“Did you need to see Gerry?” Reba asked, drawing Rory back to the moment.
“Yes.” She wondered why the woman thought she was here if not to see Patterson. “I’m sure we have things to discuss.”
“Of course,” Reba agreed with that too-wide smile on her lips. She gestured to the chairs that lined the wall on the other sideof the small lobby. “Just have a seat, and I’ll let him know you’re here.”
