Sasha McCandless 02 - Inadvertent Disclosure

by Melissa F. Miller

  Craybill eyed her. “We don't have any health food places in town.”

  “How about a diner that serves breakfast all day?”

  He managed a small grin, like it was a struggle to remember how to smile. “Yeah, we got a diner.”

  He followed her out of the courtroom.

  CHAPTER 3

  The diner sat across the square from the courthouse. Craybill led her to a worn faux leather booth in the front window of the building.

  Through the streaked glass, she could see the late morning sun glinting off the statue of Lady Justice that stood atop the courthouse’s clock tower. She squinted at the clock’s hands.

  “We need to be back in court in forty-five minutes. Does this place have fast service?”

  He shrugged and looked around. “You see a crowd?”

  They were the only customers.

  A waitress appeared, pen already poised over her order pad. The name tag on her white shirt read “Marie.” She mumbled a hello and said, “What’ll it be?”

  Sasha looked at the tabletop. Napkin dispenser, salt and pepper shakers, and a plastic tower holding sugar packets were lined up under the windowsill. No menus.

  “Do you have menus?”

  Marie sighed and launched into a spiel she didn’t seem to relish. “No, honey, I’m afraid we don’t. Bob’s Diner is about to have new ownership. The Café on the Square is having menus printed to highlight our new, locally-sourced, farm-fresh cuisine.”

  Craybill barked out a laugh. A look from Marie cut it short.

  “Uh, okay,” Sasha said and took a shot at a dish she assumed every diner in America served. “I’ll have a feta and spinach omelet and whole wheat toast. A side of bacon.”

  Marie scribbled it all down. Sasha felt like she’d just aced an exam.

  “Drink?”

  “Coffee. And a glass of water.”

  Marie stopped writing. “You don’t want the water, honey.”

  “I don’t?”

  “No, you don’t. Our locally-sourced water is brown and tastes like crap.”

  Craybill swallowed another laugh.

  “Oh. Then, I guess I don’t,” Sasha agreed. “But, isn’t the coffee made with that water, too?”

  “Sure is. That tastes like crap, too, but at least it’s supposed to be brown. You want it?”

  She didn’t have much of a choice. If she didn’t get some more caffeine flowing through her bloodstream, she’d have a pounding headache within the hour.

  “I guess so.”

  Craybill clucked at her decision then told the waitress, “I’ll have oatmeal. Tell that inebriate in your kitchen to make it with milk, now. You hear? And an orange juice. A tall one. My lawyer’s paying.”

  Marie nodded her approval. “This little thing’s your lawyer, Jed? Who you suing?”

  “Nothing like that, Marie. Just a misunderstanding, but we’ve gotta be in front of Judge Paulson at eleven o’clock, so make sure our food comes out quick, you hear?”

  Marie tucked her order pad into her apron pocket, slid her pen behind her ear, and headed off to the kitchen without making any promises.

  “What’s wrong with the water?” Sasha said to her client.

  “What?”

  “The water. Why does a place called Clear Brook County have brown, foul-tasting water?”

  Craybill frowned. “Are we gonna talk about the water or this bullshit petition?”

  “Sure, okay.”

  She really did want to know about the water. Growing up, her father and brothers used to drive up from Pittsburgh every spring to fish in a lake outside of the town, while Sasha and her mother went to the ballet back in Pittsburgh. Her brothers would come home with coolers full of trout and pictures of water so blue it actually glittered. But, her client was right, they didn’t have time. She needed to walk through the petition with him—mainly so she could judge for herself if she thought he was mentally incapacitated, as the county’s department of aging services claimed in its papers. Sasha took out her legal pad and looked through her notes on the requirements to have a person declared incapacitated.

  “First off, do you understand what this petition is all about?”

  Craybill nodded, “Yeah, those rat bastards at Aging Services want to put me in a home.” He rapped his knuckles on the Formica tabletop for emphasis.

  Sasha shrugged. He wasn’t far off.

  “Well, the petition says you live alone and have no known heirs. Is that right?”

  “Yup,” he nodded, as Marie returned and placed a tall, hard plastic cup of orange juice on the table in front of him. A saucer holding a chipped white mug of coffee, steam rising off it, followed.

  Marie looked at Sasha. “You’re not going to want to take that black, hon.” She set a pitcher of cream down beside the mug. “I’ll be right back with your food.”

  Craybill took a long drink of his juice. Sasha contemplated her coffee; it looked like coffee. She picked it up and sniffed it cautiously. It smelled like coffee. She poured a liberal dose of cream into the mug, just in case.

  “So, no kids, no nieces or nephews, no one?” she said.

  “Right,” he confirmed. “My wife, Marla, died last year. We never had children. My brother Abe, rest his soul, he was, you know, queer. Marla has a sister, but they didn’t talk, because of Abe. I don’t know if she’s alive or dead or had any children, but as far as I’m concerned, she’s no one to me. No, it was just me and Marla.”

  He looked past her, out the window and smiled to himself. Sasha scribbled a note.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Who?” He turned back to her suddenly, like she’d startled him.

  She tried to keep the impatience out of her voice. “Marla’s sister.”

  “I just told you. She’s no one to me. If she’s even alive. Petty, small-minded witch that she was.”

  Sasha exhaled slowly. “Look, I understand why you and your wife cut off contact with her sister if she had a problem with your brother’s sexual orientation. But, the county’s required to list any known adult presumptive heirs, and they haven’t listed her. Now, did Marla cut her sister out of her will?”

  “Yup. That’s more or less an open secret round these parts.”

  “I assume she’s not named in your will?”

  “You got that right.”

  “Okay, then, I guess I don’t need to know her name, strictly speaking, but it could be useful to know if she’s out there somewhere.”

  She looked at him calmly, willing him to just tell her his sister-in-law’s name.

  He stared back at her.

  She took a sip of her coffee. It was hot and weak, like diner coffee usually was, but the cream hid anything beyond that.

  He thumped his hand against the table again. “Rebecca. Rebecca Plover.”

  She wrote it down.

  “Great. Thanks.”

  Marie was back, bearing a bowl of oatmeal in one hand and the omelet, toast, and bacon in the other. Sasha waited until the clatter of dishes had stopped then asked for some hot sauce.

  Marie pulled a small bottle out of her apron pocket and handed it to her, and then she slapped the bill face down in the table.

  “You all pay that whenever you want, but I sure don’t want to make you late for court.”

  Sasha watched her walk away while Craybill dug in to his oatmeal.

  She glanced back at the clock. Twenty-five minutes left to interview her client, eat, and prepare some kind of argument.

  Her stomach churned. There were attorneys who practiced this way. She wasn’t one of them.

  Until just a few months ago, she’d been practicing at Prescott & Talbott— one of the largest, oldest, most prestigious law firms in the state. Her experience was in complex litigation. Businesses suing each other over broken deals, companies being sued by shareholders or customers. Big, messy, complicated cases that took years to go to trial. She was good at that. Hell, she was great at that.

  In contrast
, she had no idea how to represent the alleged incapacitated person at a hearing in Orphan’s Court. Truth be told, she’d rather go into the kitchen and sling out breakfast orders. Which was saying something, considering she couldn’t scramble an egg.

  Fake it till you make it, her late mentor, Noah Peterson, used to tell her. His death was a large part of the reason that she’d left the firm and was now sitting across a sticky table in a run-down diner four hours from anywhere.

  She shook her head. No time for this now. She pushed thoughts of Noah and Prescott & Talbott from her mind.

  Craybill watched her, with a blob of congealing oatmeal clinging to his lower lip.

  She dabbed at her own lips with her paper napkin, but he didn’t take the hint.

  “You have a little, uh, oatmeal,” she said, pointing to her mouth.

  He narrowed his eyes and wiped his mouth.

  “So, what? Some oatmeal on my lip? Does that make me a drooling idiot?”

  She resisted the urge to massage her temples and smiled too brightly.

  “Of course not. I’d want you to tell me, though. Moving on. The petition says just after the first of this year, the Department of Aging Services received an anonymous report that you were unable to care for yourself. Any idea what that’s about?”

  He scowled. She waited while he rolled back through the months. It was early April now, so it’d been over three months since the report.

  “Well, shoot,” he finally said, “I did fall out back. Can’t say for sure when it was. There was snow on the ground. I was chopping firewood and . . .”

  She cut him off. “You chop your own firewood?”

  “Yeah.”

  She checked his address on the petition. Rural Route 2, Firetown.

  “You don’t live here in town?”

  “No. I have a place in Firetown.”

  He said it with a short final syllable—Firetin.

  It sounded remote.

  “You live alone out there?”

  “Since Marla died, yeah.”

  “Okay, so you fell . . .” she prompted him.

  “Uh-huh. Got distracted watching a truck bounce down the road that runs by my place, a water truck going way too fast for conditions. Anyway, I slid on a patch of ice, I reckon. Bruised my hip and twisted my wrist.”

  She took notes as fast as she could, in her own abbreviated style. She’d come up with it in law school and it had served her well in practice, too.

  “So, did you seek medical treatment?”

  He shrugged. “Not really. I mentioned it to Doc Spangler when I ran into her at the gas station. She took a quick look, out by the pumps, and said it was probably a sprain. I wrapped it in an ace bandage for a while and took some Tylenol for a few days, but that was it.”

  “Is Doctor Spangler your personal physician?”

  She chased the last bits of egg around her plate with a piece of toast while he explained.

  “She’s the only doctor right in town. I guess that makes her my doctor. But the last time I went to see her for a real appointment, was, I don’t know . . . four or five years back. I’m healthy as a horse. She took care of Marla, though.”

  Sasha looked down at her notes. She was willing to bet the doctor, as a mandatory reporter under state regulations, had felt she was required to report the fall to the Department of Aging Services. Aging Services. What a name, she thought. It sounded like they helped you get older.

  She looked up at the clock tower once more. Fifteen minutes until show time, and she had no sense of who her client was, what he wanted, or whether he was completely out of his gourd.

  “Okay, the way the statute works is the lawyer for the Department of Aging Services will explain to Judge Paulson why they think you aren’t competent to care for yourself. They have the burden of proof. Now, they’ve asked for plenary, or complete, guardianship, which would give them the right to make decisions about your finances, your health, everything. The statute prefers a limited guardianship, which means the Judge can appoint a guardian to help you out with specific issues, like money, if he thinks you need some assistance but aren’t completely incapacitated. Are you with me?”

  She watched his eyes, looking for comprehension, but all she saw was anger. And lots of it.

  “Listen, girlie. I don’t want any help. I want to be left alone. I want to die in my own goddamn house when it’s time. Are you with me?”

  Sasha nodded. She felt a swell of compassion for the old man, but she wasn’t going to make any promises.

  “We’ll see what we can do, Mr. Craybill.”

  She put a twenty down on top of the bill and started packing up.

  “Let’s go.”

  * * * * * * * * * *

  Five minutes before the hour, Sasha and Jed settled in at the same counsel table they’d vacated an hour earlier.

  Technically, Sasha should have moved to the defendant’s table across the room because she was no longer representing the moving party. The movant—the party with the burden of proof—customarily took the table closest to the jury box. It was one of those formalities that no one told young lawyers about until they unknowingly violated it.

  But, Jed had eased himself into the chair before she’d had a chance to explain the seating arrangement, and, from what she’d seen, practice in Springport seemed to be on the casual side. Not to mention, the breach of protocol might just get under opposing counsel’s skin. Always a plus.

  The courtroom door eased open, flooding the room with light and the sound of chatter from the hallway. A thin, tanned man with a neatly trimmed beard slipped through the doors. He wore a navy suit and a red and blue striped tie. His wire-rimmed glasses reminded her of a professor, which Sasha assumed was the intended effect.

  He stopped beside the table. His eyes flicked from Jed to Sasha and then back again.

  “Mr. Craybill,” he said, nodding at the old man.

  Jed ignored the greeting.

  Sasha stood and extended her hand. “I’m Sasha McCandless, Mr. Craybill’s court-appointed attorney.”

  He pumped her hand in a quick, firm shake.

  “Marty Braeburn,” he said. Then he gave her a little frown. “I wasn’t aware Judge Paulson appointed counsel.”

  Sasha smiled. “I was appointed this morning.”

  “Ah,” Braeburn nodded. “Where did you say you practice?”

  “I didn’t. My office is in Pittsburgh. I was before the judge this morning on a discovery motion in another case.”

  “Pittsburgh,” Braeburn repeated, clearly speaking to himself.

  He glanced up at the clock mounted above the bench and then said, “We have a few minutes before the hearing starts. Let’s step out into the hall, shall we?”

  He looked meaningfully at Jed, who had been glaring at him without blinking.

  Sasha whispered to Jed that she’d hear what Braeburn had to say and be right back.

  He shifted his eyes from the county attorney to hers and nodded. “But no deals,” he whispered back.

  Braeburn held open the gate separating the well from the gallery. As she passed by him, he said in a friendly voice, “Oh, by the way, I didn’t want to embarrass you in front of your client, but you’re sitting at the wrong table.”

  She allowed herself a small smile. The fact that Braeburn had bothered to mention it was proof it nettled him, and his tone told her he had decided she was inexperienced and inconsequential. Just the way she liked it.

  A scene from some Monty Python movie flashed into her mind. She’d briefly dated an insurance adjuster named Clay, or maybe it was Ken? Whichever. He was a huge fan of British comedy and acted like she’d told him she didn’t bathe regularly when she’d confessed to having never seen any of the Monty Python skits. So, of course, he showed up at her condo with a stack of videos. The only part that had stuck with her had been the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog skit, where the knights were terrified of a vicious monster that guarded a cave—she’d dozed off during the DVD and
had awoken to see the knights dismissing the creature as a threat because it turned out to be a rabbit. The rabbit then attacked and decapitated one of them, then killed two other knights. She still didn’t understand how the skits were even remotely funny, and the Anglophile insurance adjuster was barely even a memory. But, every once in a while, either in court or during a Krav Maga session, she thought of herself as that bunny. A ferocious, killer bunny.

  Out in the hallway, Braeburn led her over to the far wall and leaned against a large rectangular window with an arched top. The sill looked grimy, but the window itself was solid. Sasha would’ve wagered it was original to the building.

  Braeburn ducked his head and spoke in a soft voice, just above a whisper. “I’m not sure how these hearings are handled down in Allegheny County, but your role here is more or less a formality, for appearance’s sake.”

  Sasha raised a brow. “Oh, really?”

  He rushed to add, “You see, Judge Paulson just likes to be squeaky clean. You may not realize this, but the statute doesn’t mandate the appointment of counsel for the incapacitated person. That’s left to the court’s discretion. And, really, it isn’t usually necessary.”

  “Allegedly incapacitated person.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You just referred to my client as the incapacitated person. That’s not been determined. You’ve alleged it.”

  She smiled up at him and wondered if he saw her sharp bunny fangs for what they were. Probably not yet. But he would.

  Braeburn started to frown, then caught himself and smoothed his expression into something neutral, if not exactly pleasant.

  “See now, that’s what I’m saying. It is not customary in this county for an incapacitation hearing to be adversarial, Ms. McCandless. Our court-appointed attorneys generally understand that the Department of Aging Services always has the best interests of the allegedly incapacitated person firmly in mind. They recognize that these people are the experts. If you oppose this petition, you won’t be doing Mr. Craybill any favors. He’s a sick old man who needs help.”