One Good Turn

by Judith Arnold

  Jenny hadn’t exuded anything. She was what she was, neat and contained, nothing sticky or drippy or overly sweet about her. Undoubtedly Luke was biased, but he thought her brisk, concise approach was much more compelling.

  As soon as the physician was done testifying the judge admonished the jury to avoid reading the newspapers or watching newscasts on television and then adjourned for the day. Luke checked his watch: ten minutes to one. He stood aside as a small stream of people filed up the center aisle and out of the courtroom. When an artist passed by, Luke glimpsed the pastel sketch of Jenny on the top of her pad. It was almost a caricature—the profile rendering showed Jenny’s sharp little chin thrust forward pugnaciously and her gaze cool and relentless. For some reason, the stern demeanor captured in the sketch struck Luke as sexy.

  The crowd thinned, and he turned to see Jenny hunched over her table, scribbling something onto a lined legal pad. She closed her pen with an efficient snap, slid the pad into her briefcase and straightened up. After exchanging a few words and a handshake with the doctor who had testified, she pivoted—and spotted Luke.

  As she had yesterday, she appeared first shocked by the sight of him and then delighted. Swinging her briefcase from the table, she hurried up the aisle to him. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  Almost, he thought as he peered down at her. Her smile was natural and luminous—it almost brightened her eyes. If only...

  If only what? If only her eyes lit up he would gather her into his arms and kiss her?

  Where did that bizarre thought come from? He had promised Taylor he wasn’t going to fall for her again, and it was a wise promise. He and Jenny were friends, that was all.

  In answer to her question, he shrugged. “What am I doing here? I’m a citizen viewing a public trial.”

  “You aren’t a citizen of the Commonwealth,” she reminded him, beckoning him to follow her out of the courtroom.

  “Oh—is there a state residency requirement for watching a trial?”

  Jenny detected the teasing in his tone and chuckled. “If I had a choice between watching a Middlesex Superior Court trial and lolling on the beach on Cape Cod, I don’t think anyone would find me within fifty miles of the courthouse.”

  Luke nearly countered that she had had a choice. She could have chosen to become a teacher, with her summers relatively free for beachcombing. But the bustling sixth-floor hallway didn’t seem like the appropriate setting to probe Jenny’s psyche for clues as to what had led her to this place, this profession. After seeing her perform in court, he couldn’t dismiss the possibility that she’d made the right choice.

  “You were fantastic in there,” he said.

  She scoffed at what she apparently believed was a gross exaggeration. “Fantastic?”

  “Brilliant,” he insisted. “How do you think it went?”

  “I was adequate,” she said modestly.

  They started down the hallway, Luke careful to shorten his pace so she wouldn’t have to jog to keep up with him. “I’ve got to admit, one thing you did stymied me. You know those questions the defense attorney asked the doctor, about why she accepted the girl’s story that she’d been raped when there were no obvious injuries—isn’t that conjecture? I thought the doctor was only supposed to testify on medical evidence.”

  “Well, yes,” Jenny confirmed. “But I’ve found it’s better to save your objections until you really need them. You object too much over trivia and the jury gets suspicious. They think you’re panicking about the strength of your case. They sit there, wondering, ‘Why doesn’t she want us to hear this?’ I always try to save my objections until I absolutely need them.”

  He regarded her as they waited for the elevator. The doors slid open and they stepped inside. Once they were descending, he murmured, “You really are good at this, aren’t you.”

  Jenny laughed. “You really are good for my ego. I wish you were on the jury.”

  “I would have been disqualified—old friend of the prosecutor.”

  The elevator door opened and they emerged onto the second floor. Instead of heading to her office Jenny halted and studied Luke with the same bemusement with which he’d studied her. “Why did you come?” she asked.

  “To see you at work,” he admitted honestly. “I’m still having a little trouble thinking of you as an attorney. I’m having less trouble now that I’ve seen it with my own eyes, but...”

  “I’m glad you were there,” she said abruptly, then glanced away. “Maybe, if I had known you were watching, I would have done even better.” Her gaze shuttled from the elevator door to her briefcase, avoiding Luke. “I wish we could spend some more time together this afternoon, but I’ve got a ton of work to do.”

  “The court recessed early again, didn’t it.”

  “They usually recess by one o’clock,” she explained. “That gives everyone time to prep and oversee our other cases. And eat lunch, if we’ve got a minute to spare—which I don’t, I’m afraid.”

  “That’s all right. I’ve got to get back to the Cape, anyway. Taylor wants me to look at a restaurant in Yarmouth he’s thinking of buying.”

  “Oh.” She lifted her eyes to him. “Will you come again?”

  “To see you do your Clarence Darrow impersonation? Sure.”

  “Not Clarence Darrow—he was a defense attorney,” she pointed out.

  “But he was a great lawyer, and so are you. Yes, I’ll definitely come again.” He hesitated, then succumbed to impulse and bowed to kiss her cheek. Just a quick, light kiss, the kind of kiss given in friendship. A kiss because he was proud of her and awed by her, and—no matter how fantastic a lawyer she was—worried about her.

  Yes, he would come again, and again, until he broke down the wall she’d built around herself and found out what was behind it.

  Chapter Nine

  * * *

  HOW ODD—HE’D kissed her cheek and she’d survived.

  She wandered down the hall to her office, distracted and disoriented. It had been such a long time before she’d allowed her own parents to kiss her cheek. The few friends who knew about her breakdown respected the buffer she diligently maintained between herself and others.

  Yet Luke’s kiss hadn’t bothered her. It hadn’t caused her stomach to clench, hadn’t made her blood pressure rise, hadn’t made her want to shove him away or run for cover. As a matter of fact, it had felt kind of...nice.

  Maybe she was undergoing some sort of emotional transformation. Change might well be something she needed, but it was destabilizing. She wasn’t sure she was strong enough to handle it. Maybe in another year...or another decade...

  She sighed and shook her head. Too much self-analysis, she reproached herself. Too much self-consciousness. After a while it could exhaust a person.

  She entered the D.A.’s office and collected her messages from the receptionist. No mysterious ones, she noticed with relief as she thumbed through the slips of paper. After becoming so discombobulated by Luke’s friendly kiss, she didn’t think she could handle one of those spooky “no message” messages at the moment.

  Swinging around the partition, she entered the cubicle she shared with Willy Taggart. He sat in his chair—or, more accurately, reclined in it, with his spine nearly parallel to the floor and his feet propped up on his desk, pinning down a loose stack of papers. His jacket dangled precariously from the back of the chair and his shirt-sleeves were rolled up; he had one pen in his hand and another wedged behind his ear. A bag of potato chips lay open on his blotter, and he simultaneously munched on them and leafed through a folder of notes balanced on his thighs.

  At Jenny’s entrance, he glanced up from the dossier and grinned. Swinging his feet down, he straightened in his chair but didn’t bother standing. He and Jenny were equals, and they’d known each other since their days trying misdemeanors in Framingham. Etiquette wasn’t necessary.

  “What’s up?” she asked pleasantly as she strode directly to her own tidy desk.

 
; “I’m learning more than I ever wanted to know about chop-shops. You wouldn’t believe how sophisticated these operations are. I’ll tell you, the folks running them make a hell of a lot more money than we do.” He waved toward a brown paper bag resting atop his in-basket. “That’s for you,” he said.

  “For me?” Jenny set down her briefcase and phone messages and crossed to his desk. Opening the bag, she inspected its contents: a cellophane-wrapped submarine sandwich, a container of milk, a banana and an oversized chocolate-chip cookie. “What’s this?”

  “Lunch. My treat,” he said magnanimously.

  “Oh.” Confused, she smiled hesitantly. “Thank you, Willy.”

  “But...?” he prompted her.

  “Well—” she carried the bag to her own desk, frowning at its contents “—you know I usually just have a cup of yogurt for lunch.”

  “Steve assigned me to a new case: fattening you up.”

  Jenny rolled her eyes.

  “He says he thinks you’re looking thin. Here—you can have the rest of these, too,” he said, shoving the bag of chips toward her.

  It was a white package with the brand name written across it in thick block letters: Cape Cod Potato Chips. Cape Cod. She immediately thought of Luke.

  As if he’d read her mind, Willy said, “Steve also mentioned you had a gentleman caller yesterday.”

  “A gentleman caller?” Jenny snorted at the old-fashioned term.

  “A gentleman caller,” Willy reiterated. “Tall, good-looking, and according to Steve, he had a strong handshake. So, what are we talking, Perrin? Is it true love? Wedding bells are gonna chime?”

  “Oh, please,” she groaned, feeling her cheeks flame with color for no good reason. “He was an old friend who happened to catch me on the Channel 5 news and decided to look me up. What is with you guys, anyway? Haven’t you got anything better to do than meddle in other people’s lives?”

  Willy gave her an innocent shrug. “Hey, you can’t blame us. Steve thinks of you as the daughter he never had—”

  “He has a daughter.”

  “Yeah, but you’re the one he never had. As for me...” Leaning across his desk, he presented her with a woebegone look. “You know I’ve had a crush on you since the first day we met.”

  “You’ve had a crush on everyone since the day you were born,” Jenny pointed out with a laugh. “And the first day we met we practically came to blows over possession of the corner desk in the Framingham office.”

  “That desk was mine.”

  “I claimed it first.”

  “You stole it.” He joined her laughter for a moment, then grew sober. “Steve worries about more than your weight. He worries about how come you never go out with anyone. So do I.”

  “Jesus. What a pair of busybodies.” She occupied herself with the container of milk, opening it and jamming a straw into the spout so she wouldn’t have to look at Willy.

  “To our knowledge you haven’t dated anyone since Framingham. You were seeing that guy from your law school class for a while, and then it fizzled, and since then...nothing.”

  “How do you know I haven’t been seeing anyone since then?” she challenged. The instant she spoke she realized her stupidity in prolonging the discussion, but it was too late to retract the words.

  “You come to all the office parties alone.”

  “And you come to every office party with a different woman. You’re the one we ought to be worried about, Willy.”

  “I mean, celibacy might have been fashionable in the mid-eighties, but—”

  “Enough!” She held her hand up for emphasis. One thing she definitely did not wish to discuss with Willy Taggart was celibacy.

  He stared at her for a moment, and apparently decided he had needled her enough. “So, how’s the trial going?”

  “Fine.” Her irritation gradually ebbed. She forgave him. He meant no harm.

  “Good jury?”

  “I guess we’ll know when they hand down their verdict.”

  Noting her lack of interest in his potato chips, he spun the bag back to himself and helped himself to a handful, scattering crumbs across his auto thefts dossier. “You’ve got yourself a hot one, Jen. Any media types in the audience?”

  “Lots of folks taking notes. The Globe will probably cover it well, and you know the Herald drools like Pavlov’s dogs whenever there’s a rape story. That reporter from Channel 7 was front and center, too.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Willy seemed impressed. “Anyone else of note keeping an eye on the proceedings?”

  Yes, one person of very special note. But she wasn’t going to mention Luke to Willy. She wasn’t going to allow him to give her a hard time—or an unnaturally soft time, either. She wasn’t going to provide him and Steve with something new to gossip about by telling them that her “gentleman caller” had been at the trial.

  Luke was her friend. He was the only man she could imagine bringing with her to an office party, the only man she could imagine meeting after work, as she used to meet Mark Hawkins after work during her ill-fated attempt at a relationship when she’d first begun working at the district office in Framingham.

  Luke was the only man she could imagine kissing her on the cheek and not sending her into paroxysms of despair.

  What he sent her into was...uncertainty. Anxiety. A faint queasiness she wished was simply a reaction to the overstuffed, aromatic sandwich lying on her desk in front of her. The lunch Willy had so generously bought for her wasn’t what was causing her stomach to knot up, though. It was a belated aftershock from Luke’s kiss, accompanied by the keen, fearful understanding that if she did make room for him in her life, he might try to press beyond friendship, might try to kiss not her cheek but her lips. Might try to become her lover again.

  He was someone she had once loved, after all, someone she had considered marrying. He was a man who had swept her into the exhilarating vulnerability of romance—and already, without any apparent effort, he seemed to be eroding the defenses she had spent the last seven years constructing with the assistance of psychologists, aerobic training, meditation and judo.

  What if he broke through? What if he penetrated her carefully constructed emotional armor?

  She couldn’t let that happen. If only she could wrest a guarantee from him that he would never seek anything more than friendship from her, if only she could trust him...

  If only she could remember how to trust.

  * * *

  HER MISGIVINGS NOTWITHSTANDING, the first thing she did upon entering the courtroom the following morning was search the seats for Luke.

  He wasn’t there, and she tried to convince herself that it was just as well. She nodded to a couple of reporters she recognized, then moved forward to where her witnesses were seated: the campus security officer who had responded to the health center’s call; Trisha Vincent’s roommate, who had brought Trisha to the health center the night of the attack; and the rape crisis counselor who had accompanied Trisha through her physical examination and the collection of forensic evidence. As Jenny greeted her witnesses, reviewed the morning’s schedule and reassured Trisha’s roommate, who was nervous about participating in a criminal trial, her eyes frequently darted around the room, looking for Luke.

  She ought to be glad to know she wasn’t the center of his life. It was a sign of sanity on his part that he’d realized it would be more fun to spend his day baking in the sun at the beach rather than sitting in a windowless air-conditioned court chamber twelve stories above sea level. Maybe he’d decided to spend the day ogling the bikini-clad women sharing the beach with him, sizing them up as potential conquests. Perhaps he understood that nothing sexual could ever exist between him and Jenny—or perhaps the notion of something sexual with her had never even entered his mind.

  This was good. His absence was a good thing.

  Stewart Shaw entered the room with his sulky young client in tow. Jenny exchanged a few words across the aisle with him, then settled herself at the prosec
ution table. At exactly nine o’clock the judge took his seat and gaveled the court into session. Jenny’s first witness of the day was sworn in, and after skimming her notes she rose to begin her examination. As she strode forward, she allowed herself one final survey of the half-filled courtroom and swore to herself that she was pleased not to see Luke.

  An hour later, with Officer Seborg of campus security still on the stand, reviewing for the jury the contents of his written report on the incident, Jenny noticed the door at the rear of the courtroom inching open. She allowed herself the briefest glance toward the rear of the room, and her eyes met Luke’s.

  All her mental exhortations went forgotten as she experienced a rush of unadulterated joy.

  Not wanting to break the rhythm of her examination, she hastily dropped her gaze to her copy of the report. “You say here the victim was very upset, Officer Seborg,” she noted. “Can you be specific about what led you to that conclusion?”

  The security officer embarked on a description of Trisha Vincent’s tears, her shivering, her incoherence. Jenny nodded; she and Officer Seborg had reviewed his testimony several times before the trial, and she had already committed most of it to memory. Allowing her concentration to lapse momentarily, she thought of Luke taking his seat at the back of the room and shaped a small, private smile.

  He wouldn’t kiss her cheek today. She wouldn’t let him. Nor would she let his arrival at the court divert her. He was just a summer citizen of the Commonwealth observing a public trial. He was just her friend.

  She couldn’t deny it. For better or worse, he was her friend. And for better or worse, knowing he was nearby elated her.

  * * *

  HE WATCHED, ONCE again mesmerized by her confidence and skill. Unlike yesterday, today she knew he was present. She had looked straight at him when he’d stepped inside the courtroom, and the corners of her lips had twitched upward into an enchanting smile.