Gray Mountain: A Novel(26)

“No he won’t,” Annette said with an odd sense of confidence. Judging from Phoebe’s tears, looks of fear, and body language, Samantha agreed with her and suspected Randy might show up any moment and start trouble. Annette, though, seemed perfectly unbothered by that possibility.

She’s been here before a hundred times, Samantha thought.

Annette said, “Samantha, go online and check the court docket.” She rattled off the Web site for Noland County’s government listings, and the intern was quick to open her laptop, start the search, and for a moment ignore Phoebe and her emotions.

“I have to get a divorce,” Phoebe was saying. “There’s no way I’ll go back there.”

“Okay, we’ll file for divorce tomorrow and get an injunction to keep him away from you.”

“What’s an injunction?”

“It’s an order from the court, and if he violates it he’ll really anger the judge, who’ll throw him back in jail.”

This made her smile, but just for a second. She said, “I gotta leave town. I can’t stay here. He’ll get stoned again and forget the injunction and the judge and come after me. They gotta keep him locked up for a while. Can they do that?”

“What’s he charged with, Samantha?” Annette asked.

“Malicious wounding,” she said just as she found the case online. “Due in court this afternoon at 1:00. No bail has been set.”

“Malicious wounding? What did he hit you with?”

The tears poured instantly and Phoebe wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. “He had a gun, a pistol we keep in a drawer in the kitchen, unloaded because of the kids, but the bullets are on top of the refrigerator, just in case, you know. We were fighting and yelling and he pulled out the pistol like he was about to load it and I suppose finish me off. I tried to grab it and he hit me on the side of the head with the butt of it. Then it dropped to the floor and he slapped me around with his hands. I got out of the house, ran next door, and called the cops.”

Annette calmly raised a hand to stop her. “That’s the malicious part—the use of a weapon.” She looked at Phoebe and Samantha as she said this, to enlighten both of them. “In Virginia, the sentence can be from five to twenty years, depending on the circumstances—weapon, injury, etc.” Samantha was once again taking furious notes. She had heard some of this in law school, so many years ago.

Annette continued, “Now, Phoebe, we can expect your husband to say that you went for the gun first, that you hit him and so on, and he might even try to press charges against you. How would you respond to this?”

“This guy is eight inches taller and a hundred pounds heavier. No one in their right mind would believe I picked a fight with him. The cops, if they tell the truth, will say he was drunk and out of his mind. He even wrestled with them until they Tasered his big ass.”

Annette smiled, satisfied. She glanced at her watch, opened a file, and removed some paperwork. “I have to make a phone call in five minutes. Samantha, this is our divorce questionnaire. It’s pretty straightforward. Go through it with Phoebe and gather all the information you can. I’ll be back in half an hour.”

Samantha took the questionnaire as if she had handled dozens of them.

An hour later, alone and safe in her own makeshift office, Samantha closed her eyes and breathed deeply. The office appeared to be a former storage room, tiny and cramped with two unbalanced chairs and a round table with a vinyl covering. Mattie and Annette had apologized and promised an upgrade at some point in the future. One wall was dominated by a large window that looked out over the rear parking lot. Samantha was thankful for the light.

As small as it was, her space in New York had not been much larger. Against her wishes, her thoughts stayed on New York, the big firm and all its promises and horrors. She smiled when she realized she was not on the clock; gone was the unrelenting pressure to bill more hours, to make more money for the big boys at the top, to impress them with the goal of one day becoming just like them. She glanced at her watch. It was 11:00 and she had not billed a single minute, nor would she. The ancient phone rattled and she had no choice but to pick it up. “There’s a call on line two,” Barb said.

“Who is it?” Samantha asked nervously, her first phone call.

“Guy named Joe Duncan. Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“Why does he want to speak with me?”

“He didn’t say that. Said he needs a lawyer and at the moment Mattie and Annette are tied up. He’s yours by default.”

“What kind of case?” Samantha asked, glancing at her six skyscrapers standing together on top of an army surplus file cabinet.

“Social Security. Be careful. Line two.”

Barb worked part-time and ran the front. Samantha had spoken to her for only a few seconds early that morning as she was being introduced. The clinic also had a part-time paralegal named Claudelle. An all-girls show.

She punched line two and said, “Samantha Kofer.”

Mr. Duncan said hello and quizzed her to make sure she was really a lawyer. She assured him she was but at that moment had doubts. Soon he was off and running. He was going through a rough spell and really wanted to chat about it. All manner of misfortune had hit him and his family, and based on the first ten minutes of his narrative he had enough problems to keep a small law firm busy for several months. He was unemployed—had been wrongfully terminated but that would be yet another story—but his real problem was his health. He had ruptured a lower disk and couldn’t work. He had applied for disability status under Social Security, and had been denied. Now he was losing everything.