Sycamore Row

behind. I say we go through the house and look for papers, bank statements, maybe the will, anything that we might need to find. We’re the family and we’re in charge now. Nothing wrong with that, right?”
    Ian and Ramona were nodding, yes.
    Lettie was actually smiling. Mr. Seth had taken all his papers to his office and locked them in a file cabinet. Over the last month, he had meticulously cleaned out his desk and drawers and taken away everything of interest. And, he’d said to her, “Lettie, if something happens to me, all the good stuff is in my office, locked up tight. The lawyers will deal with it, not my kids.”
    He’d also said, “And I’m leaving a little something for you.”

5
    By noon Monday the entire bar association of Ford County was buzzing with the news of the suicide and, much more important, with the curiosity of which firm might be chosen to handle the probate. Most deaths caused similar ripples; a fatal car wreck, more so for obvious reasons. However, a garden-variety murder did not. Most murderers were of the lower classes and thus unable to fork over meaningful fees. When the day began, Jake had nothing—no murders, no car wrecks, and no promising wills to probate. By lunch, though, he was mentally spending some money.
    He could always find something to do across the street in the courthouse. The land records were on the second floor, in a long wide room with lined shelves of thick plat books dating back two hundred years. In his younger days, when totally bored or hiding from Lucien, he spent hours poring over old deeds and grants as if some big deal was in the works. Now, though, at the age of thirty-five and with ten years under his belt, he avoided the room when possible. He fancied himself a trial lawyer, not a title checker; a courtroom brawler, not some timid little lawyer content to live in the archives and push papers around a desk. Even so, and regardless of his dreams, there were times each year when Jake, along with every other lawyer in town, found it necessary to get lost for an hour or so in the county’s records.
    The room was crowded. The more prosperous firms used paralegals to do the research, and there were several there, lugging the books back and forth and frowning at the pages. Jake spoke to a couple of lawyers who were doing the same—football talk mainly because no one wanted to get caught snooping for the dirt on Seth Hubbard. Tokill time, he looked through the Index of Wills to see if any Hubbard of note had handed down land or assets to Seth, but found nothing in the past twenty years. He walked down the hall to the Chancery Clerk’s office with the thought of perusing old divorce files but other lawyers were sniffing around.
    He left the courthouse in search of a better source.

    It was no surprise that Seth Hubbard hated the lawyers in Clanton. Most litigants, divorce or otherwise, who ran afoul of Harry Rex Vonner were miserable for the rest of their lives and loathed everything about the legal profession. Seth wasn’t the first to commit suicide.
    Harry Rex extracted blood, along with money and land and everything else in sight. Divorce was his specialty, and the uglier the better. He relished the dirt, the gutter fighting, the hand-to-hand combat, the thrill of the secret phone recording or the surprise eight-by-ten snapshot of the girlfriend in her new convertible. His trials were trench warfare. His alimony settlements set records. For fun he blew up uncontested divorces and turned them into two-year death marches. He loved to sue ex-lovers for alienation of affection. If none of the dirty tricks in his bag worked, he invented more. With a near monopoly on the market, he controlled the docket and bullied the court clerks. Young lawyers ran from him, and old lawyers, already burned, kept their distance. He had few friends and those who remained loyal often struggled to do so.
    Among lawyers, Harry Rex trusted only Jake, and the trust was mutual. During the Hailey trial, when Jake was losing sleep and weight and focus and dodging bullets and death threats and certain he was about to blow the biggest case of his career, Harry Rex quietly stepped into Jake’s office. He stayed in the background, spending hours on the case without looking for a dime. He unloaded volumes of free advice and kept Jake sane.
    As always, on Mondays, Harry Rex was at his desk eating a hoagie for lunch. For divorce lawyers like him, Mondays were the worst days as