Before my father’s death, my parents would drive out to parties with other couples to Riverdale, the Taylor plantation on the banks of the Mississippi about fifteen miles from town. Many nights in those years, Paul would spend the night in town at our house. Six feet tall in the ninth grade, Paul had girls eating out of his hand while the rest of us were still borrowing our daddies’ razors. After my father hanged himself in the state hospital, Paul never darkened our door again, and my mother never returned to Riverdale.

“He didn’t!” Lattice Bledsoe says urgently.

“Class is being framed!”

“Who does he think is framing him?” I ask, paying more attention by the second. The memory of my mother’s face when she learned that Oscar Taylor was foreclosing on the building my father had been buying registers in my brain like it was yesterday. Mother was trying to find a buyer for the pharmacy, but Oscar snatched the building away before she could sell it. It was the only time I ever heard her curse.

“He doesn’t know; maybe one of the other workers,” Mrs. Bledsoe says, her voice weary.

“Maybe it was Paul Taylor,” I suggest, but unable to believe it. I can’t imagine why he would do it. Not with all their money.

“Couldn’t he have planned with someone else to set up your husband?”

I would love to prove that in a court of law.

Mrs. Bledsoe shrugs. She obviously hasn’t made that leap yet.

“We wanted to know,” she says, her voice shy as she approaches the topic at hand, “how much you charge.”

It has barely been two months since I regularly commuted to the northwest part of the state for a rape trial. Though the publicity was worth it, I lost money on that case with all the traveling and being away from the office. Though I think I know, I ask, “How did you find out about me?”

“You were the lawyer for Dade Cunningham, and you used to live in Bear Creek. Lucy Cunningham recommended you.”