The Deposit Slip

23





What did you say?” Jared asked.

The eighth day of depositions was finally nearing an end. The witness had gone to the bathroom along with the court reporter, leaving Jared and Whittier in the room alone. Through eight days of depositions, they had not conversed—had scarcely spoken to one another at all, apart from exchanges “on the record.”

“I said, are we having fun yet,” Whittier said from across the table, a superior smirk covering his face.

Jared recognized the look. He had seen it often in the halls, the library, the conference rooms at Paisley. It was a look of supreme confidence—borne of a certainty that life was going to take care of its bearer. It said that the fix was already in—through birthright, through station, but always in the background, through money.

Without even meaning for it, another memory of Clay resurfaced.

He’d snuck up on Jared in the Paisley library, startling him with a question.

“You’re looking at Nicholas Planter over there, aren’t you.”

Jared had wanted to deny it, but knew it was pointless.

“I’ve seen your fascination with Paisley drones like Nicholas over there,” Clay went on, looking past Jared’s shoulder in Planter’s direction. “They’re relentless. I like to call them our ‘strutters.’ I don’t know if it’s taught or genetic, but sons and daughters of fortune just have a knack for self-admiration, don’t they?”

Jared was surprised. Clay had seldom spoken in an “us-them” tone, as though he and Clay were part of a Paisley fraternity with only themselves as members.

“Don’t let them get to you, Jared. You don’t need what they have—or think they have. You don’t need to strut. Just take it out on their kind in the courtroom. With proper guidance, juries can see through them.” He had patted Jared’s shoulder again as he’d turned to leave. “You should too.”

The memory ended. Whittier’s gaze didn’t waver. The man truly believed this was wired: that it had been since day one with the resources of Paisley behind him. Because that’s how it always was. Now he was just waiting for Jared to admit it too. Throw in the towel and slink back to his office.

Jared wanted to feel indignation and fire, but no amount of zeal could make up for a vacuum of evidence. Still, he would not let his fatigue or discouragement show. Not now, not in the middle of a deposition, and not with Whittier smirking across the table.

“Get your witness, Frank,” Jared said as the court reporter stepped into the room. “I’m ready to start.”





The day’s depositions ended early. Dispirited, Jared couldn’t face eating alone again tonight and picked up the phone to call Jessie—before recalling that she was in Minneapolis for the day. He punched in the number for Erin and suggested dinner on the pretext of filling her in on the case. She said yes, but asked if he’d come out to the farm.

As he drove the county roads to the Larson farm, he noticed that autumn had now completely slipped away. He’d been so busy these past few months that the season had rolled past without registering. Trees stood bare; shaggy horses gathered in a paddock beside a leaning barn. The grip of winter would come soon. He wondered how many more seasons he’d miss, burdened by anxiety or lost in the fog of this or the next case.

During dinner that night, Jared unwound the day’s deposition while Erin sat quietly, nodding or asking a brief question. He tried to spin the status of the case, but realized he was doing a poor job hiding either his discouragement or the absence of positive news.

This had been a bad idea, he realized as they cleared the table. He could see it in Erin’s face and shoulders. No way he should have come out here feeling so low.

“I should get back and work on the documents,” Jared said, finally breaking the uncomfortable silence.

Erin looked at Jared for a long minute, then abruptly brushed past him, grabbing her jacket from a hook. “Come with me,” she said. Before Jared could ask why, she was out the kitchen door.

Jared gathered his own coat and followed, walking a few steps behind her rapid pace down the driveway. She disappeared through the barn door and he followed, instantly plunging into a heavy musk of hay and motor oil and dust kicked up by his shoes in the dim light. They walked toward the back of the building, surrounded by the debris of the vacant farm: horse tack in one corner, a few molding bales stacked in another.

In the shadows cast by the single overhead bulb, Jared saw Erin reach the back wall and bend over something stacked there. She picked it up and turned, holding it toward Jared at arm’s length.

It was a small window pane still in its frame. The glass was punctured with a round hole, several cracks extending outward from the puncture like arthritic fingers.

It took Jared a moment to realize that he was looking at the pattern of a bullet hole.

“It’s not the only one,” Erin said, holding it higher in the pale light. “I’ve got three more just like it.”





“I found them when I was cleaning out the barn a couple of months ago. They were probably shot out last winter and Dad changed them.”

They were back in the living room, sitting next to the empty fireplace. Erin was on the couch, Jared seated across from her.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Jared asked.

She shook her head. “Because I thought that no lawyer would take this case for anything but the money. If I started muddying things up with stories of threats . . . I thought it would just scare them off.”

“Threats against your father.”

“Yes. Somebody was threatening my dad about that deposit—to keep him quiet. Those holes in the windows prove it. Someone at the bank or somebody else was telling him to shut up about the money.”

Jared thought about the implications of her words for a moment. “So why are you telling me now?” he finally asked.

“Because you look like you’re about to drop the case. I can hear it in your voice.” She reached out and took Jared’s hands. “You asked me awhile ago why I moved back to Ashley. It was to help my attorney, like I said, but it also was because I couldn’t think about anything but Dad’s death. I lost my job over it. A boyfriend.”

She took a deep breath. “Jared, you can’t drop this case. I’ve got no one else to handle it. This isn’t about the money. Don’t get me wrong: if the bank has money they got from Dad, I want it before them. But you keep whatever you want. Just don’t leave my memory of Dad broken like this. Help me know where I lost him—and why.”

Her story ripped at him—but she would know that, wouldn’t she? It echoed of all he’d felt for so many years about his own father—feelings he thought were buried before this case.

He looked into her eyes. They were open and unveiled, and he wanted to believe that she was telling the truth about what she was going through, wanted to grab hold of that truth and feed off it to finish the fight. He heard Clay’s admonitions about knowing where the personal ended and the professional began. “You can’t save clients; you can only represent them,” he’d say. But if he refused to give up this war—if he actually won it—who would he really be saving?

Looking across at Erin, another thought crossed Jared’s mind, something he hadn’t pondered before seeing the windows in the barn.

“Do you think your father’s death was an accident?” he asked quietly.

Erin let go of his hands and folded her arms across her chest as she shook her head no.





Jared turned from the Larson driveway onto County Road 3. It was dark now and, immersed in thought, he drove nearly a mile before realizing he had forgotten to turn on his lights.

Erin had no real proof that her father’s death was intentional. When pressed, she could tell him nothing more than what he already knew—that her father had gone off the road two miles from home in a heavy snowstorm and hit a tree. Death had been immediate and there were no skid marks or signs of another car involved. Based on that, her conclusion was just more speculation—like everything else in this case so far.

It would have been easier if he could be sure that she was telling him the truth tonight—the whole truth. But as much as he wanted to think that—as strongly as he identified with what she was going through—he couldn’t blind himself to the gap in her explanation about the windows.

Jared dialed a number on his cell. Richard Towers’s soft voice answered.

“Richard, do you know anyone who can help get ahold of some phone records? Good. I want you to get phone records for Paul Larson’s home and cell for the month before he died.” He reminded the investigator of the date of the crash. “Yeah, all incoming and outgoing calls if you can get them.”

He set the phone down on the passenger seat as the investigator hung up. Erin seemed too certain that her father was being threatened to be relying on four old windows in the barn. Maybe it just reflected how badly she wanted it to be true—wanted her father to be under threat because he was trying to do the right thing about the money. But Jared also wondered if those panes of glass confirmed something that Paul Larson might have told her.

As he drove on toward town, Jared recalled his final thought as he’d left Erin at the farmhouse. He remembered his own father’s eyes the night of Samuel’s arrest. Seeing the pain that Erin was carrying tonight, he’d wanted to warn her that sometimes there were things much worse than knowing the truth.