Longhorn Law

by Dave Daren

  As I turned onto the street before the mouth of the neighborhood, I caught Evelyn looking at me from the corner of her eye. I raised an eyebrow as I remembered the same look on Trish’s face just a few hours before.

  “Is there something on my face?” I joked once again, but I couldn’t help but wonder about the veracity of that question. Maybe she was going to tell me that I should have shaved.

  “Do you tackle every case like this?” she asked.

  It wasn’t the sort of question I’d been expecting, and I’m sure my surprise registered across my face. I blinked and a small furrow formed between my knit eyebrows.

  “Like what?” I questioned and spared her as much of a glance as I dared without taking my eyes off of the road in front of us.

  “Like it’s the first case you’ve ever worked,” she said as she shifted her purse in her lap. It didn’t sound like an insult, but it certainly felt like one.

  I blinked and opened my mouth, then promptly closed it, then opened it to try again.

  “I’m not sure what that means,” I finally admitted with a small shake of my head.

  I slowed to a near-stop before I turned into the entrance to Piney Crest while I waited for an explanation.

  She gave a sigh, as if the fact she had to explain her borderline insulting statement was taxing somehow.

  “You don’t half-ass, Archer,” said Evelyn. “At least, I’ve not seen you do anything half-assed.”

  I still hadn’t smoothed the furrow between my brow as I drove slowly through the winding, cracked streets of the neighborhood. By the time I pulled into the Rietvalds’ driveway, I still hadn’t found an answer. I pushed the car into park and shifted in my seat to look at Evelyn.

  “Uh?” I managed in my ever-present eloquence. I couldn’t figure out the angle she was working at.

  Before I could shove my foot any further into my mouth, Evelyn huffed and swung open the passenger side door with a surprising amount of force.

  “Learn to take a compliment, Archer, for crying out loud,” she scolded and slammed the door shut with a resounding thump.

  I sat there for a moment to process what she’d said before a small smile worked its way onto my face. I wasn’t going to press her any further, but I couldn’t help but be pleased by her assessment of me. From someone like Evelyn, who’d been working in the field for probably longer than I’d been alive, it felt good.

  Evelyn had already made her way up to the Rietvalds’ front door. If I’d had any concern as to whether or not we’d arrived at the right house, it disappeared as soon as I caught sight of the clearly handmade sign of a large calligraphed ‘R’ hanging from the door like a wreath usually would.

  The house looked nearly indistinguishable from every other house on the street, but not because they all looked the same.

  No, the houses in Piney Crest didn’t have the same cookie-cutter sameness that houses in a newer subdivision might. They were all different shapes and heights with both narrow lawns and wide lawns, with brick houses alongside some with paneling.

  Instead, the thing that bound all of the houses together was the sort of sadness that had fallen over them. No amount of individual love and care the residents put into the property could change the fact that this wasn’t the place someone chose to live, it was a place they lived when they had no other choices.

  I jogged up the crooked walkway to meet Evelyn at the door and clicked my car locked via my key fob over my shoulder. I slipped my keys back into my pocket and smoothed out the front of my shirt with a sweep of my hand. Thankfully, my hair had dried without much fuss and was laying correctly out of my face, so I didn’t have to adjust that.

  Evelyn reached forward and pressed her finger into the little button of the doorbell, and I could faintly hear the sound of the chime echoing around the inside of the house. I rocked on my heels as I waited and waited and waited for someone to come to the door.

  Was everyone in Piney Crest incapable of answering their door in a timely manner? I think the only person who’d ever answered before I had to knock twice had been Clara.

  I was seconds away from raising my fist to rap on the door when I heard a lock unlatch from the inside, and seconds later, the door swung open.

  Immediately, I felt a bit bad for my annoyance at the delay. Adam Rietvald looked sick.

  He had fine, blond hair that looked nearly yellow in the dim lighting of the foyer, and eyes so dark-blue they could have been gray. In another life, he might have been a handsome man, but in this one, he looked worn down. The worst part was, he couldn’t have been much older than me.

  A smile broke out across his tired face, and he extended a hand to Evelyn first.

  “Hi,” he greeted. “I’m Adam. Thank you for driving out here. If Hannah wasn’t having a bad day, we would have met at your office.”

  Evelyn gave him a gracious smile in return and shook his hand.

  “Evelyn,” she said. “No need to apologize, sir. We were happy to drive to you.”

  She seemed substantially more polite than she’d ever been with me, and I tried to hide my surprised reaction before either Evelyn or Adam noticed.

  Adam turned to me next and extended his hand with the same smile. I smiled back and accepted his hand, and I noticed that it felt dry and almost weightless in mine.

  “And you must be Archer, then,” he said. “It’s nice to finally meet you in person.”

  He didn’t sound nearly as skittish as he had on the phone, or maybe it had been my own exhaustion at play. Or maybe I was still exhausted, because I could have sworn I heard a faint, rhythmic beeping coming from the house behind him.

  “I am,” I assured him with a brisk nod. “Could we come in?”

  I tilted my head toward the rest of the house behind him, and if I’d had Brody’s cowboy hat, I probably would have tipped it with two fingers.

  Adam gave a sheepish little smile, stepped out of the way of the entrance, and pulled the front door open wider so we could step inside. The wooden R clattered against the door with the motion.

  “Of course,” he said. “Head straight down the hall, the living room is on the left.”

  Evelyn marched inside before me and didn’t hesitate to follow his instructions. She started down the hall without even checking to see if I was behind her.

  I nodded to Adam as I wiped my shoes and then stepped inside. The house was surprisingly sparse, and the usual photos on the walls or random belongings that cluttered the flat surfaces were nowhere to be seen.

  Adam seemed to notice my observation and gave a tight-lipped smile that made his face go even paler.

  “We were in the process of moving,” he said without making an effort to hide the bitterness from his tone. “Hannah and I just got married.”

  I felt a pang of sadness in my chest for these people I hardly knew, and I gave an understanding nod as I turned into the living room. It was only then I realized that I hadn’t been imagining the beeping sound.

  A few unfamiliar machines sat littered in the living room, and despite the foreignness of them in a space like this, I could tell they were medical devices.

  A small machine, just barely bigger than my alarm clock was the source of the beeping, and a few numbers flashed across the screen that I couldn’t decipher. A long cord attached the machine to the woman that sat curled up on the couch, her legs tucked up into the cushion with a thick shawl wrapped around her shoulders. On her face, a clear cannula ran from her nose to a large, metal tank in the corner of the room.

  This, I presumed, was Hannah.

  If Adam looked frail, she looked positively ghostly. Her cheekbones jutted out from her sallow, brown skin in a way that looked too prominent to be healthy, and her full lips looked painfully chapped. Her head was shaved with only the faintest covering of dark fuzz.

  She smiled up at Adam as he walked into the room behind Evelyn and I.

  “You two can find somewhere to sit,” she said with a soft laugh creeping into her
tone.

  Her voice was low and husky and reminded me of an old jazz singer that I’d once heard crackling over a record player.

  I gave a small gesture for Evelyn to find a place to sit in the small living room. Aside from the couch, there was a matching brown loveseat and a small armchair in a deep burgundy.

  Evelyn smiled and nodded before she moved to sit on the edge of the armchair, perched like some sort of bird.

  As Adam moved to sit next to his wife, I took up my position on the loveseat and shifted as the cushions threatened to sag under my weight. Adam reached out to take Hannah’s thin-boned hand in his and the shiny rings on her left hand glinted in the light.

  I looked away because the gesture felt like one of those things that wasn’t meant for someone else to see, even if it was something so mundane. I couldn’t help but feel like I was intruding on their moment.

  The living room’s decor matched what I’d seen of the rest of the house, which was to say, it was sparse save for the medical equipment and the furniture itself. But despite the lack of decoration, it didn’t feel less like a home, and I knew that had more to do with the people living there than anything else.

  I cleared my throat once enough time had passed that I didn’t feel like I was intruding and looked back at the couple on the couch. I wasn’t even sure where to begin.

  “So, do you mind my asking why you changed your minds?” I asked after realizing there was no other place to start than the beginning.

  I’d been tossing around ideas on why they’d come back to our side since Adam had called that morning, but I hadn’t been able to figure out what might have changed their minds. I also hadn’t been able to stifle my curiosity about how much money Knox had actually offered the Rietvalds.

  Adam looked to Hannah as she started to shift on the couch to sit up a bit straighter. His face was dark with concern as he watched her, and he reached his free hand out to help steady her.

  It was obvious they’d been through this routine before, with Adam reaching out to steady Hannah, and Hannah looking amused and annoyed in equal measures at the gesture.

  It didn’t take much to see how much he loved her, hell, how much they loved each other, and I felt sick to my stomach at the thought of Knox Chemicals putting the newlyweds in harm’s way.

  Hannah took a shallow breath before she gave a simple, sweeping gesture toward herself.

  “Me,” she said with a very matter-of-factness about it all in her tone. “It’s cancer, if the lack of hair didn’t make it obvious.”

  It was clear that Hannah was trying to make a joke about it all as she ran her fragile palm over her shorn scalp.

  “What kind?” Evelyn asked.

  I turned my attention toward Evelyn for a moment because her voice sounded off in a way that I couldn’t quite place.

  The paralegal’s hands were tightly clasped around the handle of her purse, and her knuckles were practically white from how tight she was holding on. She shifted on the edge of the couch and straightened her already ramrod posture.

  Before Hannah could respond, she held her hand up with a graceful flick of her wrist as if telling us to hang on while she hacked out a painful-sounding cough.

  Adam used his free hand to rub his wife’s back as she worked through the rattle in her lungs. He glanced back over at us with a pained look in his eye.

  “Neuroendocrine lung cancer,” he explained with a set to his jaw. “Stage four by the time they discovered it.”

  Hannah squeezed his hand as she reclined back into her position on the couch after her coughing fit had settled.

  “Never smoked a day in my life,” she said with a thin, tight-lipped smile that didn’t quite meet her eyes. “But, sometimes we’re dealt shitty hands we don’t deserve, aren’t we?”

  It was clearly a question that didn’t need an answer, but to my right, I saw Evelyn give a nearly imperceptible nod of her head in what I thought was agreement.

  “And so your cancer led you to want to rejoin the lawsuit?” I asked as I tried to get a better grasp on the situation.

  Adam and Hannah exchanged a look, and a sort of silent conversation seemed to pass between them before they turned their attention back toward me.

  Adam licked his dried lips and cleared his throat. While it didn’t have as deeply concerning of a rattle as Hannah’s cough, he didn’t sound like he was doing too well, either.

  “We… don’t know if we want to rejoin the suit,” he said with a slow cadence to his words, like he was testing each one out before adding the next. “We don’t know what the right decision is, right now, and we were hoping you could explain some things for us.”

  It wasn’t as certain of an answer as I’d been hoping for, but it was something I could work with. At least they hadn’t told us to get lost and slammed the door in our faces. Hesitance was as good as agreement when you knew how to talk to someone.

  “Right,” I began. “So, you’re aware of the suit against Knox Chemicals and what it’s for?”

  I shifted forward on the loveseat to rest my elbows on my knees. It was easier to lean closer to the pair from that position, and also looked less menacing since I was now at their eye level.

  Hannah nodded, but Adam looked slightly more pensive and a little more hesitant to give an indication.

  “I mean, I know it’s something about the water,” he admitted with a small shrug of his shoulders. “About how it’s making people sick, but I don’t really know much more than that.”

  I appreciated his honesty and gave a small, genuine smile.

  “Nothing wrong with not knowing,” I assured him. “So, to break it down in the most linear way possible, my team and I were contacted by one of your neighbors, Clara Shepard, to try and sue Knox Chemicals. According to Ms. Shepard, the petrochemical plant had been dumping something in the water that was causing residents to get sick.”

  I paused to make sure that the Rietvalds were following me, and Adam gave a small nod while he squeezed Hannah’s hand again. His thumb smoothed over the tops of her too-sharp knuckles before he gave a small gesture with his free hand to continue on with the explanation.

  “And we’ve done some research of our own and agree with the conclusion she came to,” I said. “I don’t want to bore you with all of the details, because that doesn’t matter. What matters is people like you and your wife are sick because Knox Chemicals thought they could disregard the laws in place to keep people safe.”

  Trying to convince the Rietvalds to join our side felt like trying to convince a judge, jury, and executioner all at once. The entirety of our case rested on their backs, and I don’t think they even knew it.

  Hannah exhaled a soft breath and seemed to deflate further into herself as she looked toward her husband and then back at Evelyn and I.

  “We... the doctors have told us the cancer is bad,” she began with a shaking voice she seemed desperate to hide. “Like, ‘sell your house and take an extended vacation to the Bahamas while you still can’ bad. And Knox offered us twenty grand to back down.”

  She couldn’t quite meet my gaze as if she was ashamed of the fact they’d been so willing to take the money. I didn’t hold any sort of moral judgement over the couple, because I completely understood why they’d want to agree to something like that.

  Hannah swallowed before looking at me again, head on this time.

  “Clara, she’s the one who’s little girl has leukemia, isn’t she? Emily, right?” she asked as her wide, brown eyes bored into mine, like I had the answer to a question she wasn’t quite asking.

  “Emma,” I corrected with a nod of my head. “She’s a good kid, strong.” I adjusted my watch around my wrist just to give my hands something to do other than pick at the bandages around my knuckles.

  Adam nodded, and his eyes had dropped to his feet. He seemed to consider Emma’s fate for a moment, and then he looked back up.

  “I… I just, we started thinking about her,” he said with a softness to his t
one that hadn’t been there before. “Not specifically, but the kids. The other families. We never intended to live here this long, you know? We always said we were here until we could get married and move to a forever home, but…”

  Adam cleared his throat and brought his free hand up to swipe at his eyes. I pretended I didn’t see, but Evelyn stood up and made the short walk from the armchair to the couch.

  She held out a handkerchief to Adam with a little flick of her wrist. I was so jarred by the silent act of kindness that I nearly forgot to be surprised at the fact she carried around an honest to God handkerchief.

  Adam glanced up at Evelyn and didn’t say a word as he took the little cloth from her hand with a nod of what I clearly assumed to be gratitude.

  He dabbed at his eyes before he straightened his spine once again and offered the handkerchief back to Evelyn with a nod of his head. But, she simply shook her head and closed his hand around it.

  “Keep it,” she said as she patted his hand and then moved back to sit down in the armchair and resumed her perch on the edge of the seat.

  Hannah gingerly pulled her hand from her husband’s to smooth it over his back.

  “Thank you,” she said to Evelyn with a soft smile.

  “I understand how you feel,” Evelyn said with a solemn nod of her head. “Cancer is an ugly, ugly thing, but the only way to survive this is to not throw away any moment.”

  She said survive, and I knew somehow that she didn’t mean ‘live’. I think we all knew what she really meant.

  Survival didn’t always mean living through something, but being there in every moment until you could learn to live again. It was never easy, but like every hardship, the only way out was through.

  Hannah’s eyes glinted, and it could have been with tears or resolve.

  “We don’t want any regrets, and as good as a vacation in the Bahamas sounds,” she began with a watery laugh. “I don’t want to go out knowing I could have done something to help kids like Emma get better, or... or stop people like us from having to go through this, too.”

  Adam nodded, but he didn’t quite seem able to talk at the moment. His fist was balled in front of his mouth with Evelyn’s handkerchief still in his grasp, and his shoulders shook so faintly I almost didn’t notice as he tried to keep himself from going to pieces in front of us.