Undue Influence Read Online Free PDF Page B

pretend royalty tonight. She can change in the morning, before school.
    These days I worry what her teacher, or some of the mothers must think, when they see my daughter. Her clothes are clean but not pressed.
    Perhaps it is merciful that Sarah, who was born a clothes horse, has with her mother’s passing lost the fascination for things feminine. The dresses she used to wear, frilly things of pride to Nikki, now hang like listless ghosts in Sarah’s closet. My faculty for color coordination has never embraced my own tie rack. It is painful to the senses when applied to a little girl’s colored tights and tops. The braids and fine ponytails that seemed to take Nikki five minutes defy my thick fingers, so that most mornings Sarah’s bountiful hair now looks like hay in a Kansas windstorm. When we play games together these days it is not jump rope or jacks, but baseball, or tossing hoops in the yard, where I hold her up near the rim so she can do her own version of slam-dunk.
    When she trudges off to school each day, backpack slumping across her scrawny shoulders, I wonder if by yoking her affections to her widowed father’s wagon my daughter has doomed herself to life as a tomboy. I pull off her socks, cover her, a peck on the cheek, then flip on her night-light. Down the hall in my room I can hear her breathing in the child monitor on my nightstand. I rummaged through a dozen boxes in the garage to find this. Nikki had packed it away when Sarah turned three, when the worries of SIDS and other parental paranoia had passed. But in the weeks after Nikki’s death, Sarah suffered bouts of crying that tore at my soul. I would go to her in her room and hold her, cradled in my arms, while she asked questions I could not answer. Why her father, who could do all things, could not bring Mommy back? Where had she gone?
    Would we ever see her again? Staring down in her round baleful olive eyes, I soothed her with a litany of faith that her mother was with God, that she was happy, that from the clouds in heaven she watched over her little girl and that one day we would all be together again, forever.
    And in my soul of souls I hoped beyond all that I knew that this was true. Then Sarah would sleep, secure in the promise of a father’s wishes. In a daze I step into the shower tub. Cold water laps my legs to midcalf. I’d forgotten drawing Sarah a bath, hours ago now. As I pull the plug I hear the phone ringing on the bedside table. I run, wrapping a towel around my waist for fear the phone may wake Sarah. Who the hell can be calling at this hour? It cannot be good news. “Mr. Madriani.”
    “Yes.”
    “Gail Hemple here.”
    “What is it?”
    “I’m at Jack Vega’s house,” she says. “You’d better get over here as fast as you can.”
    “What’s wrong?”
    “The police are here,” she says. “I got a call an hour ago from Vega’s lawyer.” It hits me like an iced dagger in the cynical center of my lawyer’s brain Laurel and her temper. She has done some foolish act of harassment, broken a window, smashed a windshield, inscribed her initials with a key in the satin finish of Jack’s state-leased $80,000 Lexus. After the allegations of drugs in court, I knew I should have had her here in the house, overnight. I spent two hours before dinner grilling Julie and her mother on the charges. Each in her turn denied them roundly. “What did she do?” I say.
    There’s a stutter on the phone as Hemple regroups. She knows who I’m talking about. Clearly her client has done something. “I can’t talk now,” she says. “Don’t say anything more. I’m in my car, on the cellular. Just answer one question. Is she with you now?”
    “Laurel?” I ask.
    “Just yes or no,” she says.
    “No. She’s probably home.”
    “She’s not,” says Hemple.
    “Where are the kids?” I ask. “What the hell’s going on?”
    “Can’t talk. Get over here,” she says, “now.”
    “Sarah’s sleeping,” I say. “I’ll have to