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could be hearing it all, but being around alcohol had lost its appeal after life with Eddy. She could get the lowdown from Caroline tomorrow.
    Mother and daughter got into their nightclothes and curled up on the sofa. Germaine’s clean pink face shone in the lamplight. She leaned her wet head against her mother’s old terry-cloth bathrobe as Mercedes put her arm around her.
Little House on the Prairie
lay on Mercedes’s lap, opened to the page where they had left off the night before. She read aloud, her voice rising and falling, speeding up and slowing down with the gripping story of Pa’s encounter with a pack of wolves that had surrounded him and his terrified pony, Patty.
    They imagined they were living in a small log cabin on the bank of a peaceful creek—a cabin exposed to the wide expanse of prairie all around it, with no shutters on the solitary window and no door in the doorway. Their roof was the sheet of canvas that had covered their wagon on the journey west. They slept on a floor of dirt made smooth with a homemade broom. Their nearest neighbor was a bachelor, who lived in a cabin several miles away.
    They had no electricity. Nothing traveled faster than a horse. Food was grown or killed by those who ate it, and everything was made by hand. Out on the prairie, a child had no school or friends. Ma cooked on an open campfire, washing dishes and clothes with water hauled up from the creek in a tin tub. She spread the clean clothes on the prairie grass to dry. Her foremost desire was a clothesline, and Pa’s was a well.
    Suddenly, three loud cars roared around the corner near their house. One of the cars backfired. Or was it a gunshot? Germaine jumped at the sound. A neighbor’s front door slammed, and people were yelling on the sidewalk as the cars sped away. From the next block, police sirens sounded. Germaine and Mercedes looked at each other, and then at the dead bolt on their locked front door.

CHAPTER FIVE
January 1984
CAPTIVE AUDIENCE
    M ercedes and Simone worked together at the conference room table. Twelve black leather chairs surrounded it and a long credenza stood against the wall beneath a triptych of uninspiring abstract paintings.
    Simone was a pleasant older woman with short salt-and-pepper hair. She wore pointy black spectacles attached to a chain that dangled on either side of her face when she looked down. The two women were immersed in stacks of files, their heads bent together in quiet concentration. The overhead light shone on the mahogany table and picked up the metallic flecks in Mercedes’s sweater.
    “There’s news,” a voice announced. The two paralegals looked up to see Caroline striding into the room. “We’re going to have a new tenant,” she said.
    Why this news merited an interruption was lost on Mercedes, but an interruption was certainly welcome.
    “Is it someone we know?” Simone asked.
    “Someone we know
of
,” Caroline replied obliquely.
    “Richard Chamberlain? Sean Connery?” Mercedes mocked.
    “Very funny. But close. You remember the silver-tongued devil from the Fredericks trial, the one who made jurors cry?”
    “Indeed. How could I not?”
    “Jack Soutane is moving into the empty office,” Caroline said, pointing to the open door across the hall.
    Mercedes looked Caroline in the eye. “My, that does put a different spin on things.”
    “You know what Darrel says.” Caroline mimicked him, lowering her voice to the bottom of its register, “‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’ Evidently he offered Soutane a deal on a sublease to lure him here.”
    “When is he coming?” Simone asked.
    “At the end of the week.”
    “Do we know about his staff?” Simone, who was married to a doctor, wanted all the symptoms before making a diagnosis.
    “No, that’s all I’ve heard so far.”
    “Well, for the record, I don’t give a fig
who
moves into that office,” Mercedes stated.
    “Sure you don’t,” Caroline replied