Trial of Passion Read Online Free

energetic hike through the university parkland. I’m happy. I’m tenured. I’m thirty-eight and I’m acting dean. I am back at work, in the library, content as a purring cat, reading the musty nineteenth-century cases I love. Enter Kimberley Martin. She says, “Promise to dance with me tonight?”
    Cut. Twenty-four hours later. Close-up of Jonathan Shaun O’Donnell’s fingers being pressed into an ink pad by a ham-fisted cop. Script by Franz Kafka. A Hitchcock production.
    Where did this damnable woman come from? The twilight zone? Straight from Satan’s stable?
    I sense you may be finding me a little disconnected. I am alone, but not alone in spirit, for I am celebrating the end of the worst year of my life with a half-empty friend by the name of Jameson. My father, to whom Bushmills was mother’s milk, would disown me — if hehad anything left to disown me with.
    I am sorry to have been so long getting this off to you. I needed the whole month of December to clear my poor twirling brain. Then I had exams to mark. Life allegedly goes on.
    You wanted some personal background. I think I shared my past with you many years and beers ago back in our student days. Do you remember when we argued that moot and I developed the hiccups? You were the only one who didn’t laugh. I’ve always liked you for that.
    A quick c.v. ofJonathan Shaun O’Donnell. Born in County Fermanagh, in Ulster, and raised in the family estate until I was nine. You are aware that I am not proud to be the son of Viscount Caraway. Not just because of his extremism, though His Lordship’s occasional column in the
Times
expresses a politics that makes mine seem flaming bloody red in comparison.
    Which it used to be, of course. You may recall that in our student days I was heavily into left-existential politics. A confused stew of Marx, Marcuse, and Sartre. When one is young, one hungers for utopias. As you get older, the shell around you hardens; you want its protection, you care less about the hungering masses. I presume that happened to me. Or do I bear the curse of my father’s DNA?
    The latter, I suspect, is my therapist’s pet theory. Dr. Jane Dix — the Faculty Association referred her to me. She’s a hot-tempered Adlerian. Lots of encounter, although she prefers to call it reality therapy. Yes, I’m off to the couch doctor once a week. Kimberley Martin has driven your punchy client halfway to the cackle factory. I’m on a diet of Valium and whisky. I can’t sleep. I found myself watching a rerun of “The Beverley Hillbillies” last night. At three a.m.
    Forgive me my digressions. Back to my family. My mother is only a year departed — but of course you were at the funeral. A sweet, frail woman who rescued herself — and me — from the tyrant of Lough Neagh Close. I hear the estate has been shut down now, all but the west wing — His Lordship is nearly on the rims. Skint, as they say over there. The grounds were cruelty, the settlement handsome. Mother took custody of me, but my older brother, Bob, stayed with him. Bob doesn’t inherit the title, by the way; Father is only a life peer — Maggie Thatcher decorated him for doing absolutely nothing to stop the Troubles as commander of the Royal Ulster Rifles. Mother never remarried, but she moved to Canada and sent me to the correct schools. St. Andrews in Toronto, UBC , Oxford, though she had some help from the late good-hearted Cecil Rhodes.
    You’ve seen my resume. It reads a little overinflated, doesn’t it? Top percentile, etc., etc., double masters in law and economics, a few years of appellate advocacy — I dreaded it, as I’m utterly traumatized by courtrooms — two years with the Securities Commission, and since then faculty at UBC . Acting dean since last year. Two politico-legal books under my belt, of which one bombed, the other caused a bit of commotion. I teach