Read Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller for Free Online Page B

were necessary: either he or Sophie would have to bend. He knew there were always alternatives to the way one lives. Not always easy ones … but they were there. And he had been looking for them.
    “Sophie—”
    She placed a finger on his lips. She led him off into the forest, spread the flowered cotton picnic sheet, and made love to him in the cool shifting shadows of the trees as the afternoon breeze began to blow. She took off his shirt and bit him lightly on his shoulders and chest, then began to suck his nipples. In the act of love she had no inhibition. She straddled him so that he felt the soil and pebbles and twigs dig into his back. He heard an owl and the trill of a hummingbird far away. Sophie’s catlike cries seemed to fill the forest. No bird or creature would dare intrude.
    The next afternoon he walked up the carpeted stairs to the offices of Karp & Ballard on the Hyman Avenue Mall in Aspen, not far from the gondola.
    “I’m going to marry a woman from Springhill,” Dennis said to Mickey Karp, his old friend from the United States Attorney’s Office in Manhattan. “Can you use a middle-aged trial lawyer to pick up paper clips and teach you guys about the real world?”
    Mickey Karp was a trim man in his early forties, with black hair and twinkling dark eyes. “Yes, we can definitely use the man you describe. But, Dennis, this is Aspen. Famous for its peace and quiet—its basic dullness. A New York criminal defense attorney…”
    Dennis waved away his past life with a flick of the hand. “I’m not in it for the money and the ego. This is for sanity. Anew life.”
    Mickey and his partner, Bill Ballard, took a day to work out a simple partnership arrangement. Dennis would need some time to clean up his caseload in New York, put his Westport house on the market, sell out, pack up for him and the children, say goodbyes. Change his life. Change his world.

Chapter 4
Memories of Dylan Thomas
    DENNIS’S EXODUS WAS delayed by a continuance in a drug case. He wouldn’t leave the children yet again, so he persuaded Sophie to fly East and spend Thanksgiving with them all. Brian was eight, Lucy six.
    At first she was quiet with the children, and they were shy. But within a day they were friends. She brought her violin and played for them. She fiddled Irish airs and Gypsy songs and danced around the carpet as she played, head bobbing, auburn hair flying. She laughed as she played. The children laughed too, and Lucy clapped her hands. Then Sophie played a movement from a Bach sonata. The children fell silent. After the Bach, Sophie stopped.
    “Will you show me around your town?” she asked them. “If you do that, one day I’ll show you around mine.”
    “Where do you live?” Brian asked.
    “In the mountains, high up near the sky. There are wonderful places in the forest there. A wonderful warm spring—the town is named after it. Avery special place. I’ll take you. I promise.”
    The next day all four drove the two hundred miles from Connecticut through the Catskills to Dennis’s parents’ home in Watkins Glen on Seneca Lake. Dennis’s two sisters, one from Greenwich and one from Rochester, joined them for the holiday dinner. His Aunt Jennie came down from Rochester as well; she was ninety-five years old and ailing.
    “Can she make the trip?” Dennis asked his sister.
    “It might be her last Thanksgiving. She wants to come.”
    The autumnal eruption of crimson and gold had faded more than a month ago. The trees were bare, and a raw wind blew across New York State. Dennis’s father was a former history professor at Ithaca College. Now that he was retired he kept a pair of old saddle horses, goats, pigs, a yard full of chickens, and a cow, and was realizing a lifelong ambition to write a book proving that Shakespeare’s Hamlet was a decisive young prince much maligned and misunderstood by scholars, theatrical producers, and filmmakers.
    In the living room, while Aunt Jennie napped and the others