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drove her Vespa home, astonished that Tom Broussard was still making her life miserable.
    She was just taking her helmet off when she became aware of a letter protruding from the mailbox just beside her door at the top of the stairs.
    “This cannot be good news,” she whispered to herself
    She did not know why she felt that way.
    It’s just that there are good news days and bad news day, and this was one of the latter.
    She climbed the stairs, wishing they would collapse.
    Four steps away from the mailbox.
    Two steps away from the mailbox.
    And, just beside her hand now, there it was.
    The mailbox itself.
    It was one of the kind of letters she hated the most:   small, slender, official, white, and deadly.
    She sighed and took it gently between thumb and forefinger.
    “What in heaven’s name is this?”
    She unlocked the door, turned on the light, walked to the deck window, slid it open, ordered:
    “Unfurl!”
    She watched as her cat sauntered out; then she took a seat at the kitchen table.
    She looked at the letter. It was hand addressed to her.   The upper right hand corner bore the words.
    ASHCROFT, BENNETT, AND SEALY:   ATTORNEYS AT LAW
    She slipped an index finger into the corner of the envelope, and, gently, ripped it open.
    Then she opened the sheet of paper and saw two sentences, hand written:
          
           NINA,

    PLEASE COME BY THE OFFICE TOMORROW MORNING AS EARLY AS POSSIBLE.
    ARTHUR ROBINSON IS DEAD.

    SINCERELY,
    JACKSON BENNETT

    Then she took from her windbreaker pocket the letter that Allana Delafosse had given her, tore it up, and sprinkled the remnants in the wastebasket.
    “Oh damn,” she whispered to the blank table top before her.   “And I thought tonight was bad.”
    Then she went to bed.

CHAPTER THREE:   EXORCISM

    “Honest and peace loving people shun the courts and are prepared to suffer loss rather than fall into a lawyer’s clutches.”

    Peter de Noronka

    Downtown Bay St. Lucy was as nondescript as she had remembered it.   A few white limestone buildings, none over two stories high. Traffic lights at the junction of First and Main, the small and seldom used city park, a few coffee shops which seemed to change signs and owners every few years.
    So hard to believe she’d come down here frequently, always looking forward to it.
    Not that she dreaded it now; but there was simply no need, no reason.
    She stood in front of the old building, which had not changed at all. There was the sign, hanging where it had always been, swinging slightly in the ocean breeze.
          
    ASHCROFT, BENNETT AND SEALY

    They had offered to keep Frank’s name on it, and she could almost imagine the BANNISTER tacked on at the end.
    It was only right of them to offer to keep the name up there, of course, since Frank had founded the firm.
    And it was more than simple charity that made them offer:   the name Bannister was known around town, and, if the citizenry was well aware of the demise of the company’s founder, it still might keep memories of Frank’s integrity, his resourcefulness, his dependability.
    Keeping the name, in short, would be good for business.
    But she had declined.
    As Frank would have.
    She stood before the door, reached for the handle, and thought of Marley’s ghost appearing before Scrooge.
    “Marley was dead all right.”
    But Frank’s ghost did not appear, and she pushed open the door and walked up the same narrow stairway she had climbed all those years, when, home from teaching, she had bicycled downtown, swung by whatever coffee shop had stood on the corner, and taken two cups up to a struggling young attorney whose prospects seemed, at times, bleak indeed.
    The attorney she now visited had struggled, too, in his early years.
    Jackson Bennett. Who had learned in those first days that All-American football stardom did not necessarily translate into legal clients, and who might well have starved himself, a completely inexperienced African American attorney,