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get involved in this. No way, not even a hint.”
    â€œGotcha,” he said. “He’ll have to be on the outside to post bail bond or something.” He stood and pulled on a raincoat that looked to be fifty years old. “I’ll be in touch.” Everything about him screamed slouch, even his amble to the door, but he delivered. That was what mattered, Bailey delivered.
    She wanted a long walk more than anything, she decided. There was nothing else she could do until she saw Martin and Binnie on Sunday, and called Krugman back on Monday or Tuesday. She thought uneasily about Bailey’s words, tangling it up with the INS and the DEA. But she had given Martin Nicholson’s message and if they were listening, they’d know that she had done her duty, as a good citizen should. She put away the remains of lunch, pulled on a jacket, and left to take her walk.
    That day the river was a restless palette of gray, black, and silver, with white lacy foam where rocks created ripples. High with spring runoff, the river seemed in a terrible hurry to reach the sea, a futile, never completed task, a goal as unreachable as the horizon.
    She walked briskly, and every time her mind switched to the ordeal of facing the McKenzie River, she forced herself to veer off to a different direction. Days after announcing that she and Mike Denisen were going to marry, she had lost him; the river had claimed him. She had not been back since the night that she waited for word.
    Binnie and Martin, she veered back to them, deserved something other than a Chicago attorney who so easily discounted the message left to Binnie by her dying mother. He was like a surgeon doing a tonsillectomy without noticing a knife in the patient’s back.
    Finding the right attorney might take some time, and they didn’t have time. That was the problem. Maybe the grandfather would come through for Binnie, she thought then, but without real hope. His emissary had judged Shala an imposter when she turned out to be pregnant. After he returned to Belize and made his report, no doubt Augustus Santos had believed his daughter was dead. But it was possible the emissary had told him the truth, that Shala was alive and pregnant. It was possible, she repeated more firmly. It was possible that he would embrace a grandchild.
    Two dazzling white egrets skimmed the surface of the racing water, a beautiful rare moment never captured in art. She stopped walking to watch them, and in her mind she heard Mike’s joyous laughter that last day.
    She began to walk again, more briskly than before. Another disquieting thought came to mind. Was she letting herself become involved with Binnie and Martin despite her lack of qualifications because they obviously were very deeply in love? Letting it become personal was always a mistake she knew. An attorney could not allow personal feelings to enter a case. But they always did, she added, and with this one more than usual.
    All right, she told herself sharply. Consult a specialist, but oversee it, manage it yourself. She damn well knew there was a knife in the patient’s back. Something was rotten about the whole affair that made it more than a simple illegal alien, immigration matter.
    When she returned home, she found a message from her father on the answering machine. Of course, he would have checked in with Patsy, and she would have told him Barbara had called. She thought for a moment before returning his call. She couldn’t go out there without seeing him. He would be furious and hurt, when he found out, and he would find out. And she had no intention of getting him involved with Martin and Binnie. She knew that he would tell her to turn them over to someone knowledgeable about immigration and butt out, that immigration played by its own rules and she knew diddly about what they were. Good advice that she would not heed. She dialed his number.
    â€œHi, Dad. Phone tag, my turn. I thought I might drop in