Puppet (22 page)

Amanda is reminded of these facts the next morning when the taxi driver takes her to the wrong address.

“You say new City Hall,” the cabbie insists in heavily accented English.

“I said the new courthouse.”

“Courthouse in old City Hall.”

“That’s the
old
courthouse. I want the
new
courthouse.”

“New courthouse not here,” the man replies. He makes an illegal U-turn on Bay, heads back in the direction from which they came.

It’s my fault, Amanda thinks, leaning her still-throbbing forehead against the cab’s dirty side window, watching the dull parade of downtown buildings as they fade into the sickly gray sky. I should have been paying closer attention.

To a lot of things, she decides ruefully, thinking back on last night’s disaster. “How could I let that happen?”

“Something wrong, Mrs.?” the cabdriver asks warily. His dark, liquid eyes in the rearview mirror have narrowed, as if he suspects she is about to change her mind again.

Well, let’s see, Amanda thinks. My mother’s in jail. I have a horrible hangover. I slept with a virtual stranger. And my former husband thinks I’m a slut. Make that my
old
former husband, she thinks, stifling a laugh. As opposed to my
new
former husband. Who cares what he thinks anyway? “No,” she tells the cabbie. “No problem.”

She pulls back her shoulders and sits up straight, the dark green vinyl of the seat making noises of protest beneath her black coat. What right has Ben to judge her anyway? Doesn’t she have enough to deal with at the moment? So she was drunk. She’s entitled. Just as she’s entitled to sleep with whomever she wants. Even if she doesn’t really want to.

Damn you anyway, Ben Myers. Why’d you have to come over last night, like some white knight riding to the rescue on his antique steed? Who said I need rescuing anyway? “Do I look like I need rescuing?” she demands out loud, spooking the cabbie, who makes a sharp left
turn, causing Amanda to lose her balance and tumble over onto her side.

“New courthouse,” the driver says, pulling up in front of an attractive gray-stone building.

Amanda takes a moment to steady herself before climbing out of the car. “What am I doing here?” she asks, her words disappearing inside the collar of her coat. She wonders how Ben is going to react when he sees her and hopes it’s better than the way he reacted last night. Taking a deep gulp of bitterly cold air, she enters the building, checking the piece of paper in her purse for the number of the correct courtroom. “Courtroom 204,” she whispers under her breath, passing through the metal detector and mounting the escalator just inside the entrance, watching as the main floor recedes beneath her.

Stepping off the escalator, she walks right into the path of an icily attractive blonde wearing the flowing black robes that lawyers in Canada wear when arguing a case in court. Jennifer? she wonders, seeing flashes of the woman’s shapely calves beneath her robe as she strides confidently into Room 201. Is that you? And why weren’t you with Ben last night?

At least that way I wouldn’t feel so damn guilty about Jerrod Sugar. Although why I should feel guilty about Jerrod Sugar is a mystery to me. I can sleep with whomever I please. You can hardly accuse me of cheating on a man who hasn’t been my husband for eight years.

Okay. Well. Okay
, she hears Ben say, the door slamming behind him.

Amanda notices a middle-aged man looking lost and inconsolable on a bench outside one of the courtrooms and can’t help but remember the hapless look
that overwhelmed Jerrod Sugar’s face when he saw Ben standing at the foot of the bed. Her hand still pulsates with the beat of his heart as it raced against her open palm when she tried to hold him after Ben’s departure. He’d left minutes later, claiming he was too shook up to get back to sleep, and not even the promise of another round of lovemaking was enough of an enticement to persuade him to stay. He was sorry, he demurred, scrambling into his clothes, but he had a really full week ahead of him, he’d try to call her before he left town, maybe they could arrange to meet back in Florida, good-bye, it was great, thanks for thinking of me.

My pleasure, Amanda thinks, stomping some invisible snow off her boots and walking down the long corridor. Except it hadn’t been. Not really. Amanda tries to think of the last time she really enjoyed sex, stops when an image of Ben pushes itself back into her line of vision. “Oh, no. You are definitely not going down
that
road,” she castigates herself, pulling open the door to Courtroom 204 and stepping inside.

The courtroom is modern but unexceptional. A robed judge sits at the head of the room, surrounded by numerous court clerks, all looking somewhat bored with the proceedings. A policeman sits in the witness box, looking toward the empty jury box on his left. Several spectators sit on rows of wooden benches behind the lawyers’ tables. The assistant crown attorney, a dumpy young woman whose sallow complexion is framed by a bramble of unruly dark hair, makes an obvious show of rifling through a stack of papers. She wears the constipated expression on her face almost proudly, like a diamond necklace she never intends to take off. Amanda
shakes her head knowingly and sits down beside a middle-aged woman twisting a string of rosary beads through her shaking fingers. Amanda cranes her neck around the people in front of her, sees Ben whispering to a pretty young girl sitting beside him at the defense table. He pats the girl’s hand, then stretches, looking casually over his shoulder, his eyes stopping on Amanda.

What are you doing here? his eyes say.

I have something to tell you, Amanda answers silently, but Ben has already turned his attention back to the front of the courtroom where the prosecutor has risen to argue a point of law.

Her voice is nasal and unpleasant, and every time she glances at the pretty young woman who is the defendant, her eyes narrow with barely contained fury. What she is really saying beneath all her high-sounding legal phrases is
I’m going to show you. You, with your long, shiny hair and your expensive little dress on your perfect little body. You spoiled child of privilege who thinks life is nothing but a big bowl of ice cream to be devoured without consequence. Well, I’m here to burst that little bubble once and for all. I’m here to show you what life is really like.

Amanda tries to pay attention, but gives up after ten minutes of the prosecutor’s hopeless posturing, only snapping back to attention when Ben rises to make an objection. He looks almost as good in his lawyer’s robes as he did in that Irish knit sweater, she is thinking, as the judge sustains Ben’s objection. What might have happened between them had Jerrod Sugar not been in her bed last night?

What did she want to happen?

Nothing.

Been there, done that. Remember?

Amanda assures herself she is just feeling vulnerable because of the fact she is back in her hometown after a prolonged absence, forced by crazy circumstance into spending time with a man she once loved, into remembering long-repressed details of their shared past. Under such circumstances, it’s difficult not to feel familiar stirrings. Probably he’s feeling them too, and that’s why he rushed over last night when he could easily have phoned in his concern. Amanda closes her eyes, tries not to picture the look of shock and dismay on Ben’s face when he flipped on the light and saw Jerrod Sugar in her bed.

The judge announces an hour break for lunch, and Amanda glances at her watch, surprised to see it’s almost half past twelve. She rises as the judge sweeps dramatically from the courtroom, watching as Ben leaves the defendant’s side to approach the crown attorney. “Come on, Nancy,” she hears him cajole in his best Ben voice. “Why are you being so stubborn? She’s a good kid who got involved with the wrong guy. It’s a first offense. Let her do some community service.”

“You’re wasting your breath, Counsel,” comes the retort from dry, pinched lips.

“Community service, and everybody gets something out of the deal.”

The prosecutor’s response is to arch one bushy eyebrow and gather her papers together, then walk from the room.

“She’s a charmer,” Amanda states, listening to the clunk of the woman’s heavy shoes as they reverberate down the hall.

“What are you doing here?” Ben asks without looking at her.

“Your secretary said this is where you’d be.”

“Mr. Myers?” A woman approaches, clutching her rosary beads. “Is it all right if I take Selena out for lunch?”

“Mom, for God’s sake, put the beads away.”

“Make sure you have her back in an hour,” Ben tells her as the woman surrounds her daughter with her arms and leads her from the room.

“That’s got to be so hard,” Amanda says, watching them leave.

Ben says nothing.

“How about you?” Amanda ventures. “Can I take you to lunch?”

“I’m not very hungry. Thanks anyway.”

“Ben …”

He looks at her for the first time since he saw her come in. “Look, if this is about last night, you don’t have to apologize. What you do with your life is your own business.”

“I couldn’t agree more. I’m not here to apologize.”

He looks surprised, maybe even a little disappointed. “Why
are
you here?”

“Can you find out for me if John Mallins’s birthday is July the fourteenth?”

“Why would you want to know that?”

“Just a hunch.”

“That’s a pretty strange hunch, even for you.”

“It’s just that I was talking to this woman last night, and she said—”

“What woman last night?” His eyes narrow. Was there a woman in your bed too last night? they seem to ask.

Amanda quickly recounts the details of her meeting with Rachel Mallins, watching the expression on Ben’s
face ricochet between curiosity and disbelief, admiration and anger.

“Please tell me this is your idea of a joke,” he says when she’s through.

“I know I shouldn’t have gone there on my own. You don’t have to tell me that. But I really don’t think she was bullshitting me. I went to the reference library first thing this morning,” she continues before he can interject. “I spent almost an hour going through the records of everyone who died in Toronto in the last month, and there was nobody on that list by the name of Mallins.”

“Why should there be?”

“Because Hayley Mallins told me her husband was here to settle his mother’s estate.”

“Hayley
Mallins? When were you talking to Hayley Mallins?”

“I went to see her after you dropped me off at the hotel.”

Ben shakes his head, trying to keep up with the steady barrage of information. “You had a very busy night.”

“I didn’t plan any of it. Believe me. It just kind of evolved.”

“Exactly what evolved?”

Amanda describes her visit with Hayley Mallins.

“I can’t believe she agreed to talk to you.”

“I think I took her by surprise.”

“Yes, you have a way of doing that to people.” They stand facing one another for several seconds. “All right,” he says finally. “You can buy me lunch.”

They sit slurping hot cream of broccoli soup in the coffee shop of a nearby hotel. “That prosecutor seems like a
real bitch on wheels,” Amanda says, then laughs out loud, a distant memory jumping in front of her line of vision, like a pedestrian darting out from between two parked cars.

“What’s so funny?”

Amanda shakes her head, as if trying to shake the memory away, but it digs in its heels, refuses to budge. “When I was a little girl,” she begins reluctantly, “I remember my mother referring to one of the neighbors as a real ‘bitch on wheels.’ And from then on, I was absolutely terrified of the woman. I used to go to great lengths to avoid walking past her house, even if it meant I had to go all the way around the block. I mean, not only was this woman a bitch, but she was
on wheels.”
Amanda laughs at her childish naïveté.

Ben grins. “Nancy’s not that bad really.”

“She isn’t?”

“She’s just doing her job. You know prosecutors.”

Not as well as you do, Amanda thinks, trying to picture his friend Jennifer.

“They love nothing better than to see convictions on their records,” he continues.

“Convictions without convictions,” Amanda muses. “Is your client guilty?”

“Guilty of being young and stupid. It would be to everyone’s benefit to let her do fifty hours of community service instead of saddling her with a prison record.”

“That doesn’t seem to be an option.”

“Only because the powers-that-be are even more stupid than she is.”

“Think you have a chance?”

Ben laughs, bites into a warm roll. “It’s a slam dunk. I
have them on a technicality. As soon as I get the chance to present my case, she walks.”

“Ah, justice.”

“That’s what happens when people get greedy.”

Does Jennifer get greedy? Amanda wonders. “You look very attractive in your robe, by the way,” she says.

“So did you.” He smiles, the gentle curve of his lips dissipating any tension that remained between them. “Sorry about barging in on you that way last night. I guess it seemed rather proprietary.”

“Just a little. Anyway, I’m probably the one who should be apologizing to you.”

“I thought you weren’t here to apologize.”

“I’m not,” Amanda says. “I said I probably
should
be.”

He laughs. “I guess you just caught me off guard. I didn’t realize you knew anyone in the city anymore.”

“I don’t.”

“He’s someone else you met last night?”

“Actually I met him on the plane.”

Ben digests this latest tidbit along with the rest of his bun. “A little old for you, isn’t he?”

“I like older men.”

“I hadn’t realized that.”

“My second husband was an older man.”

“And what was he like?”

It’s Amanda’s turn to laugh. “I don’t know. I never really got to know him very well.”

“Why is that?”

Amanda rolls her eyes. She hadn’t meant to get into all this. “I guess I really didn’t want to. I mean, he was—
is
—a very handsome man. Wealthy. Cultured. Even nice. I guess that was enough for me at the time.”