Swan Dive

Chris, Hanna, and I walked out to his car, I wondered whether the temp-being-late line was the only white lie he’d fed me.

We drove east on Route 114, through the city of Salem , where witches were tried and burned, and past the state college. I rode in the backseat, listening to Chris and Hanna in the front. He was shooting disconnected questions rapidly; she was answering them as best she could. Based on what I knew about lawyer-client relations, most of the financial, custody, and even more personal topics Chris asked about should have been covered much earlier and without a third party like me present.
    Chris had scrawled some directions to Felicia Arnold’s office on a yellow legal pad, but once in downtown Marblehead itself, we got lost anyway. As Chris inched through the traffic patterns, the scenes out the windows supported my memories of Marblehead . One-way streets and narrow alleys, flanked by huge clapboard houses on postage-stamp lots.
    Once the home port of ship captains, the town was now headquarters for at least three distinct populations. One was the old-towners, enjoying substantial ancestral money and spectacular homes across the sheltered harbor on a spit of land called Marblehead Neck. The second group consisted of established, blue-collar families involved in commercial fishing or boat servicing. New-towners comprised the third population, mostly professionals who worked in Boston but had tired of city life and come to Marblehead to enjoy the sights and smells of a suburb on the sea. Word had it that some folks had done very well in the import business, specializing in a certain brown-green, vegetablelike substitute for tobacco.
    Chris finally found Arnold ’s address, a beautifully restored two-story mansion on a high hill overlooking the harbor. Outside the car, the sea breeze lifted the high, metallic singsong of the masts and stays of thousands of pleasure sailers moored below us. At an average length of twenty-four feet and an average cost of $15,000, there was probably more seaworthiness there than we lost at Pearl Harbor .
    A receptionist greeted us inside the heavy brass-knockered front door and led us upstairs. I was last in line, and as I reached the top of the steps, I saw off in a desk area to my right a svelte woman, fortyish with auburn hair clipped in a not-quite-punk style. She arched an eyebrow and smiled at me. A younger, lawyerlike man with tinted eyeglasses and a beard appeared beside her. She said something to him out of the side of her mouth while she watched me. I had the distinct feeling of being inspected and assessed as her smile became a smirk. The young man glared at me and turned away from her.
    ”Sir?” said the receptionist at my left.
    ”Yes?”
    ”The conference room is this way.”
    ”Yes, thank you.”
    She showed me into a lushly carpeted arena with a glass-walled vista of sails so bright I had to squint. Chris and Hanna were already seated. Chris had both hands in his battered briefcase, coaxing a slim file past a bulging one. Hanna fidgeted next to him.
    The receptionist said, ”Ms. Arnold will be with you shortly” and closed the door.
    Chris slapped a form in front of Hanna that had a slew of dollar figures in pencil, some of them with question marks and others crossed out and rewritten. ”This is your financial statement.”
    Hanna’s mind took a moment to click in. ”I’m sorry, what?”
    ”Your financial statement. Weekly expenses and stuff you need like we talked about on the phone. It’s just a draft, but we’ll be using it today and you gotta make sure it’s accurate.”
    Chris turned back to his file, madly flipping through it for something. Any fool could see that Hanna, who spent all of five seconds on the financial statement, was in no shape to verify anything, especially without her checkbook and bills for comparison. I also couldn’t believe that Chris intended to show an opponent the uncertainties the hand-scratched form suggested about Hanna’s, and Vickie’s, needs.
    There was a polite tap at the door, and my inspector/assessor came in. Up close, she seemed nearer to fifty and as carefully restored as her offices, with taut facial features, a glowing tan, and flattering highlights in the auburn hair that I somehow didn’t think came from the sun. She smiled at all of us, lingering on me before saying, ”Hello, Chris. And you must be Hanna. I’m Felicia Arnold.”
    Arnold extended her hand, with long, lacquered