Melissa sighed, retrieved the ticket from her windshield, and stuffed it unceremoniously into the pocket of her blazer. “This is Stone Creek, Arizona,” she said, knowing this was an argument she couldn’t possibly win but unable to avoid trying. She was, after all, a lawyer—and a card-carrying O’Ballivan. “Not the inner city.”
“Crime is everywhere,” Alice remarked, with a sniff. “If you ask me, the whole world’s going to hell in a handbasket. I shouldn’t have to tell you that, of all people.”
Melissa gave up, climbed into the sports car and set her bagged breakfast on the other seat, on top of her briefcase. She drove to the single-story courthouse, a brick building that also served as the local DMV, town jail and sheriff’s office, parked in her customary spot in the shade of a venerable old oak tree and hurried inside, juggling her purse, the briefcase, and her rapidly cooling sandwich.
Melissa’s official headquarters, barely larger than her assistant Andrea’s cubicle, opened off the same corridor as the single courtroom and the two small cells reserved for the rare prisoner.
Andrea, at nineteen, wore too much eye makeup and constantly chewed gum, but she could take messages and field phone calls well enough. Because those things comprised her entire job description, Melissa kept her opinions to herself.
Dashing past Andrea’s desk, Melissa elbowed open her office door, since both hands were full and her assistant showed no sign of coming to her aid, set the bag from the café-bakery on her desk and dropped her purse and briefcase onto the seat of the short couch under her framed diplomas and a whole slew of family photos. She ducked into her tiny private restroom to wash her hands and quickly returned, stomach grumbling, to consume the sandwich.
Andrea, popping her gum, slouched in the office doorway, a sheaf of pink message forms in one hand. Her fingernails were long and decorated with what looked, from a distance, like tiny skulls and crossbones. A sparkle indicated that the design might include itty-bitty rhinestones.
The girl wore her abundant reddish-brown hair short, with little spikes sticking straight up from her crown, and her outfit consisted of black jeans and a T-shirt with a motorcycle logo on the front.
Melissa sighed. “We really should talk about the way you dress, Andrea,” she said, plunking into her chair and rummaging in the paper bag for her wrapped sandwich and the accompanying wad of paper napkins.
“It’s Casual Friday,” Andrea reminded her, with a faintly petulant note in her voice, fanning herself with the messages and frowning. Her gaze moved over Melissa’s expensive slacks, blouse and blazer, and she shook her head once. “Remember?”
The sandwich, though nearly cold, still tasted like the best thing ever. “Is there coffee?” Melissa chanced to inquire, once she’d chewed and swallowed the first mouthful.
Andrea arched one pierced eyebrow, still fluttering the messages. “How should I know?” she asked. “When you hired me, you said it wasn’t my job to make coffee—just to file and answer the phone and make sure you got all your messages.”
Melissa rolled her eyes. “Speaking of messages?” she prompted.
Andrea sashayed across the span of floor between the door and the desk and laid the little pink sheets on Melissa’s blotter. “Just the usual boring stuff,” she said.
Melissa glanced at the messages, chewing.
There was one from her twin sister, Ashley. Ashley and her husband, Jack, were in Chicago, showing off their adorable two-year-old daughter at a family reunion.
Olivia, Ashley and Melissa’s older sister, was looking after Ashley’s cat, Mrs. Wiggins, but there were long-term guests—a group of elderly pals—staying at the B&B, and Ashley, who owned the establishment, was counting on her twin to stop by once a day to make sure the wild bunch were still kicking. Since one of them was a retired chef, they cooked for themselves.
The second message was from her dentist’s receptionist. She was due for a six-month checkup and a cleaning.
The third: the biography she’d ordered last week was waiting at the bookstore over in Indian Rock.
“Sometimes,” she joked dryly, losing her appetite halfway through the sandwich and dropping it back into the paper bag, which she promptly crumpled and tossed into the trash, “I wonder how I stand all the pressures of this job.”
Andrea looked blank. “Pressures?”
“Never mind,” Melissa said, resigned.
Just then, Judge Carpenter appeared behind Andrea, wearing a nifty summer suit some thirty years out of style and a wide grin. His hair was a wild gray nimbus around his face, and his blue eyes danced.
He’d always reminded Melissa of Hal Holbrook, doing his Mark Twain impersonation.
Andrea moseyed on out, and Melissa saw that J.P. was holding a steaming cup of coffee in each hand.
“God bless you,” Melissa said.
J.P. chuckled and advanced into the room, pushing the door shut with a jaunty thrust of one heel. He set a cup before Melissa and sipped from his own after pulling up a chair facing her desk.
“He’s here,” J.P. announced. He wasn’t much for preambles.
Melissa frowned, confused. “Who?” she asked, watching the judge over the rim of her cup.
J.P. leaned forward a little way, and dropped his voice to a confidential tone. “Steven Creed,” he said.
Melissa’s mind flashed on the drop-dead gorgeous man she’d encountered at the Sunflower that morning. He and the little boy were probably the only people in town she didn’t know, since she’d grown up on a ranch just outside of Stone Creek.
Except for college and law school, and then a stint in Phoenix, working for the Maricopa County prosecutor, she’d lived in the community all her life. So, by process of elimination...
“Oh,” she said. “Right. Steven Creed.”
Word had it that Creed was a distant cousin of the McKettrick clan, over at Indian Rock, and he was in the process of buying the old Emerson place, bordered by Stone Creek Ranch, the sprawling cattle operation that had been in Melissa’s own family for better than a century. Her brother, Brad, lived there now, with his wife, Meg, herself a McKettrick, and their rapidly growing family.
“He rented that space next door to the dry cleaners,” J.P. went on. “He’s a lawyer, you know. He’ll be hanging out a shingle any day now, I’m told.”
“Stone Creek could use a good attorney,” Melissa said, largely uninterested. Was this the reason J.P. had asked for a Friday morning meeting—because he wanted to shoot the breeze about Steven Creed? “Since Lou Spencer retired, folks have had to have their legal work done in Flagstaff or Indian Rock.”
J.P. took a loud sip from his coffee cup. “I hear Mr. Creed plans on working pro bono,” he added. “Championing the downtrodden, and all that.”
That caught Melissa’s full attention. Stone Creek wasn’t exactly a hotbed of litigation, but it had its share of potential plaintiffs as well as defendants, that was for sure. There were disputes over property lines and water rights, Sheriff Parker hauled in the occasional drunk driver, and some of the kids in town seemed to gravitate toward trouble.
“That’s interesting,” Melissa said, vaguely unsettled as some pertinent recollection niggled at the back of her brain, just out of reach. As for Mr. Creed, well, she tended to be suspicious of do-gooders—they usually had hidden agendas, in her experience—but she was also intrigued. Even a little pleased to