They agreed to meet at the Lobster Shack at six-thirty. Meredith had suggested dining somewhere a bit fancier, but Caleb had said the Lobster Shack was fine. She considered offering to pick him up and drive him to the unpretentious seafood café, which stood on one of the wharfs where fishing boats docked at the end of their runs, but that would make this dinner seem like a date. And it wasn’t. There was nothing romantic going on between her and Caleb, nothing at all. She was simply doing what she could—what he would allow—so she could repay her debt to him.
That she found Caleb Solomon ridiculously attractive was irrelevant. He wasn’t her type. He was a lawyer, after all.
Every lawyer she’d ever known valued winning over the truth. It was all about winning, not about seeking justice. Of course there were noble lawyers, passionate and moral in their fight to protect the civil rights of citizens, to defend freedoms, to remove heinous villains from society so they could no longer hurt anyone. But most lawyers were like her father, her brother, and her brother-in-law, interested not in righting wrongs but in winning, winning, winning.
Winning was Caleb’s job, just as it was her father’s, her brother’s and her brother-in-law’s. She wasn’t about to fall in love with someone who considered winning more important than divining the truth.
For heaven’s sake, why was she even thinking about love?
She turned on her car’s stereo. The Dixie Chicks CD was still in the slot, and she let their sweet harmonies wash over her as she drove back to Brogan Heights. If she got tenure, she would sink her roots deeper in the area, perhaps buying a house. She currently rented a townhouse in the complex, choosing not to invest in local real estate on the chance that she would no longer be employed by the high school a year from now. Her unit was owned by an older couple who’d bought it with the intention of downsizing in a few years, when the youngest of their three children left for college. For now, they were happy to rent it to Meredith.
The Brogan Heights condominium complex had a few downsizing couples in residence, but most of Meredith’s neighbors were single. More accurately, most were divorced. The modest, appealingly landscaped community was where divorced women who couldn’t afford to maintain a house on their single income resided, and where divorced men whose ex-wives and children still lived in the area settled so they could visit their children easily. Since moving to her townhouse when she’d joined the high school faculty two years ago, Meredith had dated a couple of those men. After a few outings, she’d figured out why they were divorced. They were pleasant enough, she supposed, but self-centered, nursing grievances against their former wives, and pushy when it came to sex.
She’d made some girlfriends living here, at least. Leslie Shumway, two doors down, was a nurse at the community hospital and surprisingly bubbly, considering that she spent her days poking IV needles into patients and watching them suffer. Margie Carerra across the way was a bit older than Meredith, but she had a self-deprecating sense of humor and a lusty cougar spirit. If Meredith wound up single when she was forty, she could do worse than to have Margie as a role model.
If she was forty and single, of course, her parents would be disconsolate. But then, they were disconsolate about everything she did: her job, her unmarried state, her living in New England. “It’s so far away,” her mother would criticize. “And so cold!”
“I like snow,” she’d tell her mother. “And I love teaching.”
“You could have been a lawyer,” her mother would argue. “You had the grades. You could have gotten into any law school you wanted.”
“Instead, I’m a teacher,” Meredith would point out, doing her best not to lose her temper. If her parents were disappointed by the choices she’d made, so be it. They were good choices, the right choices for her.
Right now, Meredith wouldn’t have minded some of that icy snow New England was famous for. But the thermometer she’d hung outside her kitchen window read eighty-two degrees, so snow wasn’t likely. The Lobster Shack was not the sort of place for which you dressed up—most diners there wound up wearing plastic bibs with cartoons of smiling lobsters emblazoned on them—so once she’d cranked up her unit’s air conditioning, she climbed the stairs to her bedroom to take a quick shower and change into jeans. It was hot enough for shorts, but shorts seemed too casual for dinner with her lawyer. She didn’t want to expose that much leg.
Not that Caleb Solomon had any interest in her legs, exposed or otherwise. Not that this was anything more than her chance to thank him for getting rid of that stupid citation.
She wondered if he was divorced, if he lived in a condo a five-minute drive from his ex-wife and children. She wondered if he would spend their dinner whining to her about what a harridan his ex-wife was, how much money she’d taken him for, how difficult she was about letting him see his children. Caleb struck her as more of a fighter than a whiner. Even if all he cared about was winning, she’d prefer that to someone who nursed grudges and resentments.
Not that she had to like him. If he wanted to whine while they ate, it was nothing to her. Nothing more than a meal and a thank-you.
With a couple of hours to kill before her dinner with Caleb—just a dinner, not a dinner date—she settled at her kitchen table with her students’ The Things They Carried essays. For the most part, they were well-reasoned and well-written, addressing the novel’s wrenching view of the Vietnam War and the soldiers who fought it. She’d drilled her students well in how to organize and execute an analytical essay. If Stuart and the faculty council had any questions about whether she deserved tenure, they ought to read these essays and see how well she’d taught her students to write.
Rachel Stafford’s essay was excellent, of course. Rachel was the kind of student teachers dreamed about—diligent, disciplined, not afraid to question the status quo and make her opinions known. She would be heading to Columbia in the fall, and that fine Ivy League university would be lucky to have her. Meredith jotted a few notes on Rachel’s paper, a few lines of praise, and set it aside. The next paper on her stack was Matt Colson’s.
Unlike Rachel, Matt wasn’t a teacher’s dream. He was brilliant and funny, cute and cocky in his Hawaiian-print shirts and his Colby College cap, which he’d been wearing ever since he’d gotten his acceptance to that school. But he relied more on wit and charm than on his intelligence to achieve his goals. A lot of people managed to get quite far on their wit and charm, but she would rather see Matt rely on his brain instead of his dimpled smile. His attitude toward her was often almost flirtatious.
Did he have a crush on her? Stuart Kezerian’s implication about her supposed attractiveness in the eyes of impressionable teenage boys unsettled her. She didn’t want her students to be infatuated with her. She wanted them to learn, to develop their minds, and—for heaven’s sake—to get crushes on people their own age.
What if Matt did have a crush on her, though? What if he’d been at the town beach last Sunday? What if he’d seen her naked breasts? His classroom behavior hadn’t changed in the two days since that ridiculous incident. None of her students had mentioned it, and she assumed none of them were aware of it. Whoever had dumped ice on her back was probably a trouble-maker, and she didn’t have trouble-makers in her classes. At least, they didn’t make trouble around her.
But what if…? What if some of her students had seen her?
Forget it, she ordered herself. What was done was done. And thanks to Caleb Solomon, part of what was done had been undone. Time to move on.
Once her dinner with Caleb was done, her debt to him settled, she would.
***
Ed Nolan got off his shift at five-thirty, earlier than expected. Naturally, he headed directly to the Faulk Street Tavern to see Gus. He’d told her he would stop by around six, but he doubted she’d mind if he showed up earlier than expected.
She would be busy. The bar always started filling up around now, as the locals finished work and wandered in for a drink or two. Hell, he wanted her busy. Busy meant more money in her cash register. But he didn’t want her so busy he couldn’t grab a kiss when she wasn’t pouring wine or mixing a margarita in the blender.
Entering the tavern, he searched the bar and spotted her right away, placing a pitcher of beer and a platter of wings on a tray for one of her waitresses. Ed struggled to remember their names, but they were all a blur of young, energetic girls in tight black pants, white shirts and black aprons. They reminded him a little too much of his daughter Maeve, who was about their age but was somewhere in California. He hadn’t seen Maeve in years. She assured him she had a good job designing clothes or some such thing, but who knew? She could be working as a waitress in a bar, which wouldn’t be so bad. A hell of a lot better than pan-handling, or turning tricks, or God knew what.
In any case, a girl the age of his daughter was way too young for him to notice. He was more interested in women with a few years on them. One woman in particular.
Turning from the waitress, Gus spotted him and smiled. Busy or no, she seemed happy to see him.
He sauntered to the bar in time for her to place a Sam Adams draft in front of him. “You’re early.”
“I decided the station house could survive without me,” he said, leaning across the bar and touching his mouth to hers before he took a sip of beer.
“Slow day?”
“Pretty much.” Bar owners might welcome busy nights, but cops welcomed slow days. No crime. No accidents. No vandalism or drug busts, no shoplifters or cats stuck in trees. He settled on a stool and surveyed the room, his gaze journeying from a booth crowded with burly guys where the waitress had delivered the pitcher and wings to a booth with three women sipping mixed drinks, from there to the door, to the jukebox, and up the other side of the room.
He spotted Caleb Solomon. Damned good lawyer, which sometimes made Ed’s life harder. That was the way it went: cops arrested people, and lawyers got people off. Solomon was good at getting people off. As long as the bad guys wound up paying for what they’d done, it was a system Ed could live with.
He turned back to Gus. She was wiping down the counter behind the bar, an enigmatic smile curving her mouth. “What?” he asked.
“Nothing.” Her smile widened. “Just that when you think hard enough, your brain makes noise.”
He snorted. “I wasn’t thinking that hard.”
She nodded, but he could tell she didn’t believe him.
“That guy over there?” He gestured toward the table where Solomon sat with an attractive woman in a neat summer suit and Niall Mullen, a local boy made good. Niall had gone off to college, then Harvard Law School. He’d returned to his hometown to practice, and convinced two of his classmates to join him. Solomon was one. The woman was the other. Ed couldn’t remember her name. She handled mostly civil suits, so her path and Ed’s rarely crossed.
“What about him?”
“He’s a big shot, right?”
“He helped you arrest that drug dealer from Florida,” Gus recalled, tactfully not adding that Solomon had helped only because Ed had wrongly charged Solomon’s client with the crime.
“So, he comes into the station house first thing this morning to contest a public indecency citation.”
“Was there a riot and I missed it?” Gus asked.
Ed laughed. “Some lady flashed her tits on the beach on Sunday.”
“And she was cited?” Gus tossed her dishcloth aside and shook her head. “You cops don’t have anything better to do?”
“Sulkowski was there. He saw her running around with her chest hanging out. So he cited her. What was he supposed to do?”
“Toss a towel over her and tell her to cover up.”
“He did that, too.”
“My tax dollars at work,” Gus muttered.
“He couldn’t just ignore the situation. There were a lot of people on the beach. What got me was that she’d hire a big gun like Caleb Solomon to fight her infraction.”
Gus shrugged. “I guess she wanted the best.”
“Hmm.” Ed took another sip of beer, savoring the cold bite of the foam sliding down his throat. “Can’t blame her for that. I want the best, too.” He leaned across the bar and stole another kiss. “That’s why I’ve got you.”