Storm Tide (35 page)

“Then there are these really good-looking guys whose self-image sucks. No matter how much somebody loves them, they just don’t believe they’re good enough. And do you know the reason for that? Mr. Lynch? Are you laughing at me?”

“Well, there is a daub of yogurt right there on your nose.”

“Oh, you!” She licked it off with the tip of her tongue.

If any of the boys, Donkey or Abel, saw him eating lunch with a pretty girl in the front seat of his car, they’d never believe it was business. He’d only planned to familiarize Crystal with the river valley and the dike. She’d suggested the picnic. But the wind was up today, blowing sand in their eyes and forcing them back into the car.

“And the reason is the person’s mother,” she said, oblivious to the grandest view Saltash had to offer, the vast harbor bluer than heaven itself, then narrowing upriver of the dike into a placid stream. Aspen leaves shimmered like silver dollars. Seabirds wheeled overhead while Crystal, God bless her, rattled on about motherhood. “Between the ages of birth and five years old, that’s the window. That’s where you have your shot. If you really dedicate yourself to making that one little person feel special, then you’re giving the gift of lifelong confidence, and that’s as important as any college education.”

Johnny had hoped she would grasp the beauty of the place. But he might have known, since she’d never hunted or hiked and fished here as he did, that she was simply one of those people for whom the natural world was just scenery. No matter. A little naiveté could work in his favor.

“Mr. Lynch, are you listening to me?”

“Actually, I was applying what you said to my own boys. My wife did just that. Dedicated herself. With Jackie at least. By the time William came along, well, things had changed.”

“Parents aren’t perfect.” Crystal was lecturing him now like a little
schoolteacher. Maria said since David’s election, she was holding forth on everything from school budgets to dogs on the beaches. “Parents are people first. But no parent ever intentionally does anything to harm their child. Mrs. Lynch was sick. They didn’t understand things like depression back then.”

Johnny was uncomfortable now. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” He crumbled the bag on his lap. He’d told Crystal a great deal about himself, but he’d never mentioned Emily Ann. That was Maria’s doing. They chattered like hens. “Now for the reason we’re here, then.” He heard the coldness in his voice. Crystal jerked upright like a child reprimanded. “Do you see how the trees grow right up to the bank of the river? Those are gray birches.”

“They’re pretty trees,” she said. “This valley is beautiful.”

“Beautiful to us, dear. Home to countless of God’s creatures.”

Since the election, Johnny had a new plan to keep the dike in place. He’d give his adversaries a dose of their own medicine, raise a grand and public stink about the environment. There had been a causeway any storm surge could overrun and a rickety wooden bridge constructed forty years before he’d even heard the name of this town. Behind the bridge there had been a salt marsh and a tidal river useful only to a few shellfish scratchers. He had replaced the bridge with a proper dike, able to withstand hurricanes and ice pileup, protecting the new land behind it. There, the old marsh had been drained, filled and had grown up into meadows and woods. Since then an entire new habitat had been formed. He didn’t know all the technical details; Crystal had agreed to work overtime to come up with the proper language, interview a few biologists to get it straight. But he knew this much, and this was his line: if the dike was torn down and the saltwater of the harbor allowed to fill the valley, thousands of animals would be flooded out of their homes. Little red foxes. Innocent baby deer. Weasels, voles, opossum. Coyote would lose their food supply and begin gobbling kittens, mauling the family dog. The issue was environmentally arguable, and sentimental as a children’s tale. The timing couldn’t be better. It was the summer people who had influence with the legislature, over twenty thousand of them, from districts all over the state. If his luck held out, if time was on his side, he would take the issue of the dike right out of the selectmen’s hands and turn it over to the media and the State House.

After eating, they returned to the office in silence. He knew the girl’s feelings were hurt, but he didn’t know how to smooth things over. She had set herself up a desk in a back corner of the office by the copy machine, an area formerly used to store dead files. Only when the file
cabinets were moved did he realize they’d been blocking a window. Now there were plants in it. She had three pictures of her son on her desk, and one of David being sworn in by the town clerk. There was a teddy bear and a dish of hard candy, a coffee mug with red hearts. He made a few forays to the copy machine in hopes of thinking of something light to say, but the other girls were always around. As he was heading back to his office the last time, Crystal said, “Mr. Lynch, I finished those letters you asked me to write.”

She handed him three, each handwritten in her loopy feminine curlicues, each addressed to the editor of a different local paper and signed in her own name. They were each two paragraphs long, as he’d advised her, and quite good. “David won’t mind?”

“I have a right to protest the killing of innocent animals no matter what he thinks. He never asked
me
what to say in the election.”

Johnny hoped people would assume her opinions were David’s. But her relationship to the new selectman was too valuable to jeopardize. “I don’t want to cause any family problems.”

“Family …” Crystal repeated. She looked pleased at his choice of words. Then she looked down in embarrassment. “Mr. Lynch?”

“Oh, now.” He was afraid she was going to cry. Because he’d used the word “family” to describe her arrangement with David Greene?

“I didn’t mean to be sticking my nose into your private affairs. I mean about Mrs. Lynch and your children.”

“You mean William?” He rarely mentioned his second son to anyone in this town except, on occasion, Abel Smalley, who could obtain information about the California prison system. But Johnny had a hunch. “You’re about his age, aren’t you?”

“He was a nice boy,” Crystal said.

“I doubt if there are many around here who remember him that way, but thank you, dear.”

“He was nice to me. He took me to the junior prom, even though I was a sophomore.”

William had many girlfriends before he got involved with drugs. Had Crystal been one? He tried to figure out what she would have looked like at age fifteen. William had gone out with many pretty girls, but in Johnny’s memory, they blurred.

“Anyway, I’m very sorry.”

Those eyes, like an infant’s, that was the only way to describe them, so sad and vulnerable. Johnny looked away. “Crystal, you didn’t get yourself arrested for armed robbery. My William did.”

“I’m sure he just got in with a bad bunch. It happens, especially
when you’re away from home and off on your own. I understand that, Mr. Lynch.”

“We were talking about children. Which you know a great deal about. I only pray to God your boy doesn’t end up the way mine did, and that I have the strength to help William when he finally comes home.”

“You will,” she said, her hand hovering above his but not touching, not yet, he thought. She said “You’re the best boss in the world, Mr. Lynch. I see all the time how many people in town you help. People nobody else seems to care about. You don’t turn anybody down. You have the biggest, kindest heart in Saltash, Mr. Lynch.”

J
UDITH

    Every social worker in the county and every health worker knew Judith would take on those unpleasant cases of abuse, not only unsavory, but sometimes dangerous for the lawyer as well as the client. When a woman left an abusive man—or began to get ready to leave—she was in acute danger. Sometimes her lawyer too could come into the line of fire. But occasionally domestic troubles were plain bizarre.

She had two new cases. One was a bigamist. Betty Clausen and/or Sirucci had married Sirucci without getting divorced from Clausen. “But Sergio was ready to marry me. Dick wasn’t paying child support. He never paid his child support after the first two months. What could I do?” Betty was a slender nervous woman with dark brown hair cut very short, who hailed originally from northern Maine. Her children were being entertained in the outer office by Mattie, who was great with kids. She kept a supply of toys and games in a box.

“Divorce would have been a really good idea, Betty.”

“But that takes time. And Sergio was ready to marry me right then. How do I know he’d marry me in a year? I have two kids and he was willing to be their father. They never really had a father, not a loving one. Not a good man like Sergio. And I didn’t even have a current address for Dick.”

To Betty it all seemed logical. Her kids needed a father; here was a father. Ergo she had to marry him immediately. “But you’d told him you were married?”

“He’s such a sweetheart. Of course I told him I’d been married. How else did I get two kids? But I said their father was dead. In Sergio’s family, there’s no divorce. At least I could say I wasn’t a divorced woman, because I wasn’t. But if a man picks on you all the time and hits you and hits your kids and doesn’t pay a penny for them, how can that be marriage? So if you aren’t really married—”

“The law doesn’t distinguish between a good marriage and a lousy marriage, in that both are equally valid marriages and require a valid divorce to end them. Betty, there are places like the Dominican Republic where you can get a divorce overnight.”

“First, I don’t have the money to fly to the Caribbean. Second, how would I explain it to Sergio?”

“How are you explaining the situation now?”

“He’s very upset with me.” She began to cry. “I couldn’t take the chance on him not marrying us. We needed him. We were having trouble making it. This is a real marriage, not like my last one.”

Betty hoped if she could only explain to the judge how badly she wanted and needed Sergio, the judge would understand she had been obliged to marry him right away, and everything would be all right.

Judith had ten minutes before her next new client to make notes on the interview. Perhaps she should plea bargain and represent Betty as a devoted mother only trying to care for her children. That might go over. Sooner than put herself and her children on welfare, your honor, this mother of two …

The other new case was a reasonably straightforward divorce. The only question was why the woman had stayed so long with a man she described as abusive, unfaithful and often drunk. She was four years older than Betty and looked ten years older. “But where would I go?” she asked, as if she had never heard of a rental unit in her life. She had married out of high school, worked as a waitress, a salesperson in a teeshirt shop, a chambermaid. She had always worked and never made a living.

After that interview, Judith sat in her office feeling overcome with despair. The lives of women were often so grim and desolate and patched together. No wonder a woman like Crystal grabbed at a hardworking and affectionate man. She despised Crystal because Crystal had destroyed her best hope of a good relationship with David; Crystal must hate her for the same reason. They were in each other’s way. Pontificating about how good a woman Crystal was or wasn’t, was irrelevant.

She was having supper with David on the island, but meeting him here. Natasha was home for the interval between vet school and her summer internship, and tonight she was cooking. Natasha was a good cook, taught by Judith. At seven-thirty oyster stew and corn bread would await them. She needed the time alone with David before the family scene.

“Any progress?” she greeted him.

“I called Laramie’s father.” He told her the conversation. “I don’t know what to believe.”

She could not come down unreservedly on the side of Liam, as she would have liked. “You have to understand that his wife no doubt was listening to every word. The truth in these matters usually lies somewhere in the middle. It is likely they did actually live together for some period of time. It is likely that Crystal was more interested than he was, and didn’t believe in his attachment to his family. Most probably when
he learned she was pregnant and meant to have his child over his protests, he moved out. He may have hit her or just yelled enough to frighten her. We have no witnesses. Certainly he did not exhibit goodwill toward her once she announced her pregnancy.”

“You sound like a lawyer again.”

“I am a lawyer, David. I deal with desperate women every day, women who think they’re helpless and some who actually are. I look for remedies. I send them to counselors and social workers, I send them for medical assistance, I send them to safe houses. I go to court for them. But their desperation sometimes causes them to do foolish and self-destructive things …. What worries me most is Crystal’s penchant for getting pregnant as glue in a relationship. Have you straightened out the matter of a second child?”

“I’m dealing with that,” he said, his face and tone warning her, no further trespassing.