Sycamore Row

all the rest. He walked past the troubled and padlocked office of an old pal named Mack Stafford, unseen and unheard from now for eight months after apparently fleeing in the middle of the night with money belonging to his clients. His wife and two daughters were still waiting, as was an indictment. Secretly, Jake hoped Mack was on a beach somewhere, sippingrum drinks and never coming back. He’d been an unhappy man in an unhappy marriage. “Keep running, Mack,” Jake said each morning as he touched the padlock without breaking stride.
    He passed the offices of
The Ford County Times
, the Tea Shoppe, which was only now coming to life, a haberdashery where he bought his suits on sale, a black-owned café called Claude’s where he ate every Friday with the other white liberals in town, an antiques store owned by a crook Jake had sued twice, a bank still holding the second mortgage on his home and tied up in the same lawsuit, and a county office building where the new district attorney worked when he was in town. The old one, Rufus Buckley, was gone, banished last year by the voters and permanently retired from elective office, or at least Jake and many others hoped so. He and Buckley had almost choked each other during the Hailey trial, and the hatred was still intense. Now the ex-DA was back in his hometown of Smithfield, in Polk County, where he was licking his wounds and scrambling to make a living on a Main Street crammed with other law offices.
    The loop was over, and Jake unlocked the front door to his own office, which was generally considered to be the finest in town. The building, along with many others on the square, had been built by the Wilbanks family a hundred years earlier, and for almost that long a Wilbanks had practiced law there. The streak ended when Lucien, the last remaining Wilbanks and no doubt the craziest, had been disbarred. He had just hired Jake, fresh out of law school and full of ideals. Lucien wanted to corrupt him, but before he had the chance the State Bar Association yanked his license for the last time. With Lucien gone and no other Wilbanks around, Jake inherited a magnificent suite of offices. He used only five of the ten rooms available. There was a large reception area downstairs where the current secretary did her work and greeted clients. Above it, in a splendid room thirty feet by thirty, Jake spent his days behind a massive oak desk that had been used by Lucien, his father, and grandfather. When he was bored, a common occurrence, he walked to the double French doors, opened them and stepped onto the terrace, where he had a fine view of the courthouse and the square.
    At 7:00 a.m., on schedule, he sat behind his desk and took a sip of coffee. He looked at his calendar for the day and admitted to himself that it did not look promising or profitable.

3
    The current secretary was a thirty-one-year-old mother of four who’d been hired by Jake only because he could find no one more suitable. When she began five months earlier he had been desperate, and she had been available. She went by Roxy, and on the plus side Roxy showed up for work each morning around 8:30, or a few minutes thereafter, and did a somewhat passable job of answering the phone, greeting the clients, chasing away the riffraff, typing, filing, and keeping her turf somewhat organized. On the negative, and heavier, side of the ledger, Roxy had little interest in the job, viewed it as only temporary until something better came along, smoked on the back porch and smelled like it, nagged about the low salary, made vague but loaded comments as to how she thought all lawyers were rich, and in general was an unpleasant person to be around. She was from Indiana, had been dragged south in an Army marriage, and like many from the North had little patience with the culture around her. She’d had a superior upbringing and was now living in a backward place. Though Jake did not inquire, he strongly suspected her marriage was less than fulfilling. Her husband had lost his job due to dereliction. She wanted Jake to sue on his behalf but Jake declined, and this was still festering. Plus, there was about $50 missing from petty cash, and Jake suspected the worst.
    He would have to fire her, something he hated to think about. Each morning during his quiet time, he said his daily prayer and asked God to give him the patience to coexist with this latest woman in his life.
    There had been so many. He had hired young ones because