Lady Afraid Read Online Free

long time for a mother who really wanted to see her child.”
    “Oh my God! Don’t you believe even that?” Sarah asked weakly. “I did try. They stopped me. At first they hid the boy—went away on a trip with him. And then old Ivan wouldn’t even see me. See his attorneys, he said. And the lawyers were so ugly to me. When I tried to go to the house—I did that three times—there was a man, a guard, who threatened me. And then Ivan’s lawyers called on me and told me I would be prosecuted if I didn’t stop.”
    “The point is that you haven’t seen your son for those two years. We don’t want your reasons to sound so much like excuses.”
    “But I believed they had legally—”
    “Yeah, sure. They have got a legal adoption. You figured you had no chance. Okay, we’ll try to establish that too. But you’re doing this wild thing to set up an emotional situation that is going to influence the court more than just words would.”
    Sarah nodded and said slowly, “The leave of absence from my job—I haven’t arranged that yet. But I will. This morning.”
    “I was going to remind you of that, Mrs. Lineyack. You don’t want to just disappear off your job, because that wouldn’t look good. It would seem impulsive, and we don’t want them to get the notion you’ve been a bit impulsive. If they figure you’ve had foresight, good legal advice, made sure of your rights, they’re going to stop and look before they jump on you so hard.”
    With tightening lips, a downward movement of chin, Sarah expressed bitterness.
    “They’ll jump on me,” she said grimly. “The Lineyacks will see to that.”
    Attorney Calvin Brandeis Brill crumpled his napkin and shot the soggy paper ball at the empty milk glass. It landed neatly in the glass. “We’ll knock them right off again if they do. I’m your attorney, and I’ll see to that. And don’t forget, the harder they jump on you, the more clear it’s going to be to the court that they’re stinkers and are persecuting you.”
    His confidence—foxy, brash, overassured—did not impress her at all. At the moment in great need of solidarity, firm steppingstones, she resented both the man and his implication that old Ivan Spellman Lineyack was a pushover. She knew better. She knew, indeed, a considerable terror of old Lineyack.
    “Don’t underestimate them, Mr. Brill,” Sarah said sharply. “They’re rather terrible people—where I’m concerned.”
    “They don’t scare me, Mrs. Lineyack,” Brill said.
    “You don’t know them the way I do.”
    His eyes touched her a little insolently. “Maybe that’s a good thing, Mrs. Lineyack. If I knew them the way you do, I’d be scared of them, and a scared lawyer is a licked lawyer…. By the way, there’s an old saying that what a lawyer really needs is an honest client. I even know one young attorney who seriously considered investing in a lie-detector, just to use on his clients.”
    Sarah’s head jerked up; she was not sure she caught the import of his words. Then she believed she did, and the feeling of anger, dull, flat, wooden, began coming into her cheeks. “Are you making a bad joke, Mr. Brill?” she asked.
    “Not exactly—and take it easy,” the lawyer replied. “Let’s put it this way: Do you happen to know of anything about the setup that you haven’t told me?”
    Sarah stared at him woodenly. “That sounds almost as if you were calling me a liar, Mr. Brill.”
    “Mrs. Lineyack, when I call liar, people don’t have to guess.”
    “Then what—”
    Brill grinned thinly. “Look, I’ve never heard of a client yet who liked his lawyer. So I don’t strain myself to make mine like me…. Let’s put it still another way: You have narrated facts, very heart-wrenching facts, to the effect that you were married to the only son of a couple of neurotic, unstable parents. They did not like you—by they I mean Mr. and Mrs. Ivan Spellman Lineyack, your husband’s mother and father—”
    “You call