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about them, Gloria. I’ve got it covered.”
    She murmured something
encouraging, but he could feel her eyes, uncertain and anxious, following him
as he headed out for his pie.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER 4
     
    Sasha hurried to her car,
fueled by equal parts frustration and anxiety.
    Frustrated because she’d burned
the better part of the day representing a cranky old man. And instead of it
being a one-time appointment, it now appeared she had an ongoing relationship
with her newest client. She’d given Jed a business card and tried to get a
telephone number in return. He’d claimed not to have a phone. No land line, no
cell phone, no e-mail address for old Jed. So, not only would she have to come
back for yet another hearing, she’d have to drive back up here to meet with Jed
if she wanted to do any kind of preparation.
    Anxious because she had only
just gotten up to full speed. The first several months after leaving Prescott
& Talbott, she’d done all the things she’d sacrificed in her pursuit of
partnership. She’d slept in, taken long weekends, and had left her office at
midday to go skiing at Seven Springs. She’d helped out with the Valentine’s Day
party in her youngest niece’s preschool class. Caught up with girlfriends she
had literally not seen in years. And had thrown herself headlong into her new
relationship with Leo Connelly. It had been a glorious break. But it was over.
    She now had an active caseload
of matters that required her attention. As a one-woman shop she couldn’t afford
to divert her time from her corporate clients to research esoteric points of
elder law just to satisfy some judge’s curiosity. Especially not at the
princely sum of twenty bucks an hour—not while clients like VitaMight were
paying her three fifty an hour.
    What she needed was a
bright-eyed, eager-to-please young associate. Someone who would view a trip to
Springport as an adventure, not a giant time suck. Someone she could turn to
and say, “I need you to find a case that holds an allegedly incapacitated
person is not capable of providing informed consent to the appointment of a
guardian.” But, what she had was Winston, a virtual assistant who compiled her
invoices and sent them out to clients from somewhere in Nepal while she was
sleeping. It seemed unlikely he would be much help in this situation.
    She would love to hand the case
over to someone local, like Drew Showalter. She’d run into Showalter at the
court administrator’s office, while she was being instructed to fill out the
form in triplicate and not to bill for travel time.
    He’d been openly interested in
the incapacitation proceeding, asking her how she’d been appointed, when the
next hearing was, and whether she’d be back in town before then. She hadn’t
gotten a vibe that he’d been hitting on her, so she assumed he wanted to know
how to expand his practice in Orphan’s Court. She’d told him to try walking out
of court more slowly, but she wished she could have just handed him the file.
    She sighed and reached into her
bag to pull out her parking ticket as she neared the municipal lot. The sun had
disappeared behind a clot of heavy clouds and the air had gotten cool. It
wasn’t the kind of day that lent itself to loitering outdoors; so, the cluster
of people near her car, parked at the edge of the lot adjacent to a small park,
caught her eye.
    Drawing closer, she realized
they weren’t hanging out without a purpose; they were up to something. A tight
knot of two sign-waving, long-haired guys and two women with braids hanging
down their backs and flowing skirts was skirting the edge of the adjacent park
and chanting something about gas. Two more men were crouched beside the front
of her car. She saw a flash of silver in the smaller man’s hand.
    “Hey!” she yelled, walking
faster. “Get away from my car!”
    The smaller one started and
turned toward her.
    “Corporate whore!” one of the
women shouted from the fringe