AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Not a fan?”
“I don’t know many people around here who are.”
“Knock yourself out and root for me,” I say. “Always good to have a dog in the fight.”
“Really?”
“Blame it on the trial,” I say again.
He demonstrates the injections I’ll need to give Rip, during which Rip barely even blinks in response. I can do this. And he tells me to get Rip as much exercise as I possibly can while loading me up with bags of the fluids and packets of needles and tubing. Then he asks what I’ve been feeding the dog. I tell him. He writes out a brand name and tells me to go buy him some at the pet store in Amagansett on my way home, or else.
“What does ‘or else’ mean, exactly?”
He grins. “I’ve always wondered that.”
He walks me to the car. After I have Rip and the box of extras in the back seat, he asks if I want to have dinner with him tonight after I finish at the courthouse.
To his surprise—and mine—I say yes.
“Well, I’m not gonna lie,” Dr. Ben says. “Didn’t see that coming.”
“Caught me at a weak moment.”
When I’m behind the wheel, and before I close the door, he leans down and says, “I always knew there was a dog lover inside you.”
“Don’t push it, Doc,” I say, and drive off.
Thirty-Three
I HONESTLY CAN’T REMEMBERthe last time I’ve had a real date. But I am having one tonight with Dr. Ben Kalinsky, eight thirty at the East Hampton Grill, later than he says he would have preferred but he had to perform an urgent late-afternoon surgery.
I am asking myself on the ride home from court why I agreed to go out with him. It’s not that I don’t enjoy his company. I do. But I also know he’ll be thinking of this as a first date all over again. And definitely not our last, if he has anything to say about it.
How will he feel if he knows that I’m in much worse shape than the dog?
But I’m not telling him, either. I don’t want his pity. What life I have left is going to be pity-free. I’ve decided that. Locked it in. I happen to have a perfect role model in my sister. Brigid doesn’t want anybody’s pity, either. She particularly doesn’t want it now that her doctors don’t like what they’ve seen on her most recent PET/CT scan, and are reviewing new treatment possibilities for her, more than five years after she was first diagnosed. It’s why I haven’t talked to her yet about what Claire Jacobson told me outside the courthouse. I’m giving my sister a pass on that for now, though certainly not forever. I’m still her sister. But I’m also Rob Jacobson’s lawyer.
So if she knows something about that night, I’m going to ask her why she hasn’t told me.
I walk Rip when I get home, shower, decide on a pair of white jeans that I know look good on me and a black cotton sweater, fuss with my hair more than I usually do, do amuchbetter job with makeup than I usually do. There’s still some time before Dr. Ben will pick me up. I decide to spend it productively, reading through a file on the Carson murders that Jimmy dropped off while I was on my way to court. We never close.
I spread out some pictures of the Carsons. Individual shots and group shots, taken by a professional photographer about six months before they all died.
I keep coming back to the girl.
I stare at her, thinking how pleased she must have been with how she looked, hair and lighting and even the outfits she chose. The pearls around her slender neck. Definitely Insta worthy, as the kids like to say.
I’ve had more than twice as much life as this kid had.
I think of Kathy Gates, and what might have been going on between her and Otis Miller, the sheriff of their neighborhood. And of the affair Claire Jacobson is almost certainly having with Gus Hennessy. Money and sex—still the most powerful motives in the world. I wonder what secrets Lily Carson might have died with. And who might have been motivated to have her die with those secrets.
I know Jimmy is fixed on Hank Carson, as he keeps going further and further down the rabbit hole of Carson’s gambling.
But what if Hank Carson wasn’t the target? I keep finding out more secrets about Rob Jacobson the longer the trial goes. What more are we going to learn about the Carsons of Garden City before we’re through?
For now, though, I put the file away and decide to focus on the fact that I am about to go out on an honest-to-God date. And be Jane the girl for a change, and not Jane the lawyer.
“Yeah, right,” I say to Rip the dog. “Fat chance.”
