Read Water's Edge for Free Online Page A

ahead. His friendship with Rick was stronger than any feelings he had for a girl who’d made him mad.
    For Rick and Tiffany the homecoming dance was the beginning of a relationship that culminated in marriage four years later. The couple didn’t have any children, but Tiffany had a barn full of champion American Saddlebred horses and a wood-paneled room in her home crammed with blue ribbons and three-foot-high trophies.
    Tom reached the city limits of Bethel, a line marked by a simple metal sign that read “Bethel Town Limit—Speed Limit 35 MPH Unless Otherwise Posted.” Beyond the sign was another that read “Bird Sanctuary.” The residential area on the east side of town contained modest wooden homes built during the heyday of the textile era. The condition of the homes varied greatly. Some were neat and tidy with well-kept yards and carefully trimmed bushes; others looked neglected and rundown with patchy grass and peeling paint.
    Near the center of town Tom passed a church whose educational wing was named in memory of Arthur Pelham’s mother. Just beyond the church was the Etowah County courthouse, a two-story redbrick building with an entrance framed by a pair of white columns. The courtroom in the Etowah County courthouse was the place where Tom decided to become a lawyer.
    As a boy, Tom loved visiting the empty courtroom with its dark wood floors, high ceiling, and ornate judicial bench. Tom would rock back and forth in the jury box chairs and swear himself in using a Bible whose cracked cover looked like it’d never been opened. Then he’d hop down and sit on the smooth wooden bench where prisoners waited to hear their fates. The only place off-limits was the judge’s chair. However, his heart pounding in his chest, Tom occasionally slipped into the high-backed black leather chair and surveyed the room. It was a view comparable to that of Zeus from Olympus. And in a town like Bethel, there was no greater power than a superior court judge seated on the bench. His judgments were thunderbolts, his orders sharp-tipped spears.
    The lawyers of Etowah County clustered around the courthouse like grapes on a vine. For years Tom’s father had rented an office in a one-story brick building a block away. Tom pulled into an empty parking space in front of the glass door with his father’s name stenciled on it. The black lettering was chipped around the edges. There were two sheets of paper stuck to the door. One gave the date, time, and place of his father’s funeral service. The other announced “All Clients Call the Office on Wednesday or Saturday between 9:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m.” It was signed “Mrs. Bernice Lawson,” his father’s longtime secretary.
    Through the glass door Tom could see the simple reception area with its cracked leather sofa to the left and three mismatched leather side chairs facing it. Bernice’s desk divided the room in half. The door to his father’s office was directly behind her desk.
    Tom had a key to the office, but he didn’t go inside. There would be plenty of time later to determine what needed to be done. He’d asked Bernice to contact as many of his father’s clients as she could and tell them they needed to hire another lawyer. Many of the files had already been copied and picked up. Rover barked. It had been a long ride for the dog. Tom returned to the car.
    “This isn’t the place for you to get out,” he said. “There are better trees for you to sniff at Elias’s house.”

chapter
FOUR
    E lias Crane lived three miles north of town in a 125-year-old white frame house. Tom passed fields filled with stubby brown stalks left after the year’s soybean harvest. It was hard to see Elias’s house from the road but easy to tell where it stood. A grove of massive trees surrounded the homeplace. The Crane family farm had shrunk over the years to a few acres around the house and a perpetual easement for the dirt driveway that led to it. Tom turned onto the driveway. A