Lady Afraid (3 page)

“Will they then let you live a normal life with your son?” Brill shrugged. His hands released the bird again. “I don’t know how normal it will be. But by that time I’ll have slammed so much law at them that they’re not going to be rambunctious. I’ll have yanked them into the juvenile division of the circuit court, demanding that they show where you consented in writing to the adoption. They can’t show that, because you say you never signed any such consent. Adoption is of purely statutory origin, and statute must be strictly complied with. The statutes of the State of Maine say the consent of parent is required except in the following cases: First, the parent is insane. Second, the parent is intemperate. It is the clear intent of the statute that there shall be no cutting off of parental relationship without consent. You weren’t insane, and you weren’t a drunk. In
habeas corpus
by mother, her moral fitness and financial ability cannot be questioned. That sinks them. They’re going to have a mess on their hands. Just so they’ll know it, I’m going to slap a damage suit in their faces too.”

“I don’t want their money.”

Brill smiled fiercely. “I do.”

She was silent, and shortly Brill added, “You want to keep in mind the two main points. These: You’re tricking Lineyacks into showing they’re the aggressors. The persecutors. And you’re also taking the child to establish mother-love in the eyes of the court. It’s been nearly two years since they took the kid away from you, and the judge is going to wonder why you waited.”

“But I did try to see him!” Sarah gasped.

“Uh-huh. So you’ve said.” Brill’s eyes flicked over her casually. “But two years sounds like a long time for a mother who really wanted to see her child.”

“Oh my God! Don’t you believe even that?” Sarah asked weakly. “I did try. They stopped me. At first they hid the boy—went away on a trip with him. And then old Ivan wouldn’t even see me. See his attorneys, he said. And the lawyers were so ugly to me. When I tried to go to the house—I did that three times—there was a man, a guard, who threatened me. And then Ivan’s lawyers called on me and told me I would be prosecuted if I didn’t stop.”

“The point is that you haven’t seen your son for those two years. We don’t want your reasons to sound so much like excuses.”

“But I believed they had legally—”

“Yeah, sure. They have got a legal adoption. You figured you had no chance. Okay, we’ll try to establish that too. But you’re doing this wild thing to set up an emotional situation that is going to influence the court more than just words would.”

Sarah nodded and said slowly, “The leave of absence from my job—I haven’t arranged that yet. But I will. This morning.”

“I was going to remind you of that, Mrs. Lineyack. You don’t want to just disappear off your job, because that wouldn’t look good. It would seem impulsive, and we don’t want them to get the notion you’ve been a bit impulsive. If they figure you’ve had foresight, good legal advice, made sure of your rights, they’re going to stop and look before they jump on you so hard.”

With tightening lips, a downward movement of chin, Sarah expressed bitterness.

“They’ll jump on me,” she said grimly. “The Lineyacks will see to that.”

Attorney Calvin Brandeis Brill crumpled his napkin and shot the soggy paper ball at the empty milk glass. It landed neatly in the glass. “We’ll knock them right off again if they do. I’m your attorney, and I’ll see to that. And don’t forget, the harder they jump on you, the more clear it’s going to be to the court that they’re stinkers and are persecuting you.”

His confidence—foxy, brash, overassured—did not impress her at all. At the moment in great need of solidarity, firm steppingstones, she resented both the man and his implication that old Ivan Spellman Lineyack was a pushover. She knew better. She knew, indeed, a considerable terror of old Lineyack.

“Don’t underestimate them, Mr. Brill,” Sarah said sharply. “They’re rather terrible people—where I’m concerned.”

“They don’t scare me, Mrs. Lineyack,” Brill said.

“You don’t know them the way I do.”

His eyes touched her a little insolently. “Maybe that’s a good thing, Mrs. Lineyack. If I knew them the way you do, I’d be scared of them, and a scared lawyer is a licked lawyer…. By the way, there’s an old saying that what a lawyer really needs is an honest client. I even know one young attorney who seriously considered investing in a lie-detector, just to use on his clients.”

Sarah’s head jerked up; she was not sure she caught the import of his words. Then she believed she did, and the feeling of anger, dull, flat, wooden, began coming into her cheeks. “Are you making a bad joke, Mr. Brill?” she asked.

“Not exactly—and take it easy,” the lawyer replied. “Let’s put it this way: Do you happen to know of anything about the setup that you haven’t told me?”

Sarah stared at him woodenly. “That sounds almost as if you were calling me a liar, Mr. Brill.”

“Mrs. Lineyack, when I call liar, people don’t have to guess.”

“Then what—”

Brill grinned thinly. “Look, I’ve never heard of a client yet who liked his lawyer. So I don’t strain myself to make mine like me…. Let’s put it still another way: You have narrated facts, very heart-wrenching facts, to the effect that you were married to the only son of a couple of neurotic, unstable parents. They did not like you—by they I mean Mr. and Mrs. Ivan Spellman Lineyack, your husband’s mother and father—”

“You call them both neurotic,” Sarah interrupted. “That’s wrong. They are nothing alike.”

“No? Old man Lineyack is a self-aggrandized, bullheaded, cold-blooded bigot. That right?”

“Yes, that would fit—”

“And Alice Mildred, his wife,
is
withdrawn and inward, a person who absolutely can’t be reached by friendliness or anything else. An old woman so unapproachable and vague that you look at her and you begin to think of a bleeding angel. Right again?”

“I’m not so sure about Alice Mildred—”

“They’re neurotic for my money,” Brill said. “Those two people aren’t alike, but I’m telling you they wouldn’t stand for anyone coming into their warped, shadowy world who was a normal person—but particularly they did not like you. Because you’re human as hell, Mrs. Lineyack. You’re lively, and you’ve got as many normal human emotions as Planters has peanuts. Those two old people would hate you. And specially they would hate you because you took their perpetual Christmas tree, their godlet, their only son, away from them. You married him. They would have hated the Virgin Mary herself for that, but they hated you specially for another reason: you weren’t like them. They didn’t even understand how to love you, but they did understand how to hurt you. So when your husband was killed in a car wreck and you got smashed up yourself, they got you stuck away in a hospital in the state of Massachusetts. Then, in the state of Maine, serving you by publication, they alleged you were a drunk and got the boy away from you. Being in Massachusetts, you never saw the published notice in the Maine paper. That’s a common gag, that notice by publication. You want to do something to somebody in court, so you make a statement their whereabouts is unknown, prove it by a letter you mailed to some address and got back marked addressee unknown, then you slap a two-inch legal notice in some jerk paper nobody ever reads. They do that. Then they make you think they got the boy legally—why not; they’ve got the legal paper now, big as anything—and they’ve never let you see him since, and you still thought it was legal until you met me—and I discovered what they did to you. And I know we can get that adoption hauled up for examination, and they’re going to have their hands full proving you were a drunk when you were in a hospital getting hospital care, and not for alcoholism, either…. That’s the story, Mrs. Lineyack, the facts as you’ve given them to me.”

“Yes, but—”

“No buts about it, Mrs. Lineyack,” Brill said. “Either that’s the facts or you’d better tell me otherwise.”

Sarah stared at the lawyer and the flames of her anger grew blue-tipped with heat. “You’ve investigated the records of the inquest over the automobile crash that caused my husband’s death! You should know the facts.”

His thin grin came, left. “The point is this: You take a baby from its nursery. You disappear. I’m your lawyer—moreover, I’m the one who advised you it was the thing to do, the quick way. Take the kid—let Mr. and Mrs. Ivan Spellman Lineyack do the yelling. You’ve put the monkey on their back. As your lawyer, I told you to grab the boy. I’m right. But I’m right only as far as you told me the truth, and if you didn’t tell me the truth, where do you think that puts me? Up the creek, that’s where. And I’d hate to tell you how far up that creek too.”

Despair in Sarah was a thin, high thing, like a harp string wailing. “I haven’t lied,” she gasped. “They have Jonnie, and he’s my son, my soul, the only thing I want—”

Coldly, emotionlessly, the lawyer put in, “Sure, I know it’s tough for you.”

He struck back his left coat cuff; there was a yellow gold watch held to his wrist by a gold-link band; he consulted it for the time.

“All right, I believe you,” he added. “You put it in the note that I’m your attorney. Put in my name, office address. Got it?”

“Yes, I will do that.”

Brill slid his chair from the table, arose. “Remember that Maurice and Black, the detectives, have got to case the Lineyack joint for you. So wait until I have their report. I’ll telephone you—probably sometime this afternoon.”

Now quite dry of words, Sarah nodded.

“I just wanted to point out to you, Mrs. Lineyack, that this can be just one of two things—either it’s legal or it’s not. And if it’s not, I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes.”

He went away then. He did not say good-by. He merely went away, his steps quick, his lean back slightly arched.

A hard, sly, and cruel man, Sarah thought, and her dislike of him stood unabated.

B
Y NOON THE STORM
had lost no force. The rain still came in endless volleys and the wind had backed itself several degrees, indicating further miserable weather. And at twelve-thirty Mr. Collins’s secretary, middle-aged Miss Fletching, dropped a telephone memorandum on Sarah’s desk.
Mr. Arbogast phoned to cancel his sail on
Vameric
today. He doesn’t like the weather.

“That,” said Miss Fletching, “means your honey of a boat doesn’t make her test run today.”

“Yes… I suppose so.”

“I hear you won’t be here for a few days. You’ll miss the trials entirely.”

“Yes. I—I’m taking a short vacation.”

Sarah sat still after Miss Fletching had gone. She slowly lighted a cigarette…. A day of ill omens, this, and she knew she was not waiting it out well.

Nervously she arose. At the window she stood frowning at the yard. She looked out past the woodworking shop, past two of the marine railways to the fitting dock, to
Vameric
lying there, held by spring lines and her shining mahogany hull protected by fenders.

Vameric
was a yacht, all sail, sixty-eight feet on the water line, built for outside cruising races. She had no engine to drive her. Only sail. But
Vameric
would, if the aerodynamic figures and the wind-tunnel experiments were any indication, finish first in every deepwater race in which she was entered, perhaps for years to come.

This was more than just a yacht. This was a culmination, a gathering together of all the skills of sailing ships.
Vameric
had a deep hard keel and sweet runs; she would leave an almost imperceptible wake, not dragging the entire ocean after her. She should have good manners when hove to. The rig of sails, a wishbone adaption of the staysail-ketch idea, was unusual: Sarah’s idea and a rather radical one. If
Vameric
lived up to expectations, Sarah, as the vessel’s architect, would suddenly be a name known wherever fine yachts were sailed. She would be eminent in a field where no woman had achieved much.

For long moments Sarah tried to take her stunned thoughts out of mid-air, wrap them around the lovely yacht, let them be warmed and cheered. It was futile.

She swung back listlessly to her desk. Her private office was somewhat like Sarah, neatly sufficient without frill. Not masculine, but not frothily feminine either. The desk stood uncluttered; the drawing board was not blotched; her instruments rested in geometrical precision. A bookcase held an excellent collection of works on sail, including items as widely varied as Manfred Curry on aerodynamics of sail curvature, Callahan’s popular how-to-dos, and Lubbock on the clipper ship. The office symbolized, as Sarah herself did, a great deal of achievement in a field almost without women. The office by itself was an odd eminence for a woman; not unaware of this, Sarah should have felt pride, but she could summon no special lift at this moment.

Gravely she fell to rechecking her plans for tonight…. She had packed the two suitcases yesterday; one held her things, and the other contained stuff she had bought for Jonnie. She did not know her son’s size. She knew only that he would be a little boy two and a half years old, brown-eyed, with freckles. She was guessing about the freckles, but Sarah herself had had them when she was little, and she’d seen baby pictures of Paul, and he’d been as freckled a child as a peppered biscuit. Oh, Jonnie would have freckles. But not knowing his size had made it difficult when she had tried to buy things for him. It had seemed so weird saying, “I want the size for a boy aged two and a half.” In the end she had left most of the things she had intended to get him for later.

Oh! There was one thing she’d overlooked. She seized the telephone directory, searched out the number of the Union Station, and made reservations—midnight train, drawing room, two adult tickets. Ordering two adult fares was a bit of cunning that smacked of Lawyer Brill—the police would be less likely to seize on such a clue. Sarah named New Orleans for a destination, because it was a city large enough to disappear into. She gave a phony name. Tickets for Mr. and Mrs. Winslow, she said.

The danger of traveler’s checks was one she’d already foreseen. They could be traced, she supposed. So she was carrying five hundred dollars in cash. Enough, for she planned no elaborate expenses. What she would seek would be a quiet place where she could get acquainted with her son.