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.She’d expected a glut of magazines, most of them boring, that she would have to wade through until she found a People from her lifetime or a Vogue from the current season.Instead, there were magazines like Highlights—which she remembered from second and third grade—and Sports Illustrated for Kids and Teen People.There were books, too, some more dog-eared and pawed over than others.The Wind in the Willows.Stuart Little.A couple of Beverly Cleary paperbacks featuring Ramona.Moreover, the place was clearly an apartment—someone’s home, it looked like—with mahogany paneling on the walls and the kinds of furniture that Grandmother owned: lots of dark wood, and couches and chairs so plush it was like they belonged in a funhouse.The only difference was that the coffee table and end tables had long, deep scratch marks, which really didn’t surprise her since it was pretty clear that Dr.Warwick spent a lot of time with the Barbies and G.I.Joe playground crowd.She’d never visited Aunt Sara’s office in Vermont, but she knew it was part of a group practice.In her mind she had always seen it as a regular physician’s workplace: chairs with bony armrests, beige walls, a receptionist behind a sliding glass window.Now she wondered if her aunt’s reception area felt more like a living room than a waiting room, too.Actually, this place didn’t feel quite like a living room.Living rooms didn’t have a person who looked more like an au pair than a doctor’s receptionist sitting behind a delicate writing desk that seemed to belong in a museum.Charlotte guessed the young woman couldn’t be more than nineteen or twenty, and she was writing something on the jazziest computer monitor she’d ever seen: It looked as thin as a plastic place mat.Charlotte decided that she didn’t mind having to wait with a Teen People instead of a regular People (though she definitely preferred the more grown-up scoop in the normal edition), and she felt quite content.She was, after all, helping her dad with his lawsuit.Moreover, she really was no longer sure why she had fired Uncle John’s gun into the night.Maybe she would learn something.You never knew.Her mom had picked her up right after second period and was sitting on the couch beside her, reading the short papers she’d had her English literature students write that week.She had a blue Sharpie pen in her hand—blue, she always said, because she feared students brought too much baggage to red—and was scribbling away madly on some poor kid’s assignment.Finally a door opened and a woman Charlotte guessed was her mother’s age emerged, though Charlotte had once heard someone observe that heavy people were occasionally older than they looked.And this Dr.Warwick was heavy indeed, a series of round snowballs: midsized ones comprising her bottom and her breasts, a large one to serve as her torso and abdomen, and a smallish (at least in comparison to the rest of her body) one for her head.She was wearing black velvet pants and an ivory silk top that was a tad too clingy for someone so big.Still, this Dr.Warwick had the eyes and smile of a pixie and the most lovely blond spit curls clinging to the sides of her scalp.Charlotte liked her on sight.She and her mother stood simultaneously to greet the therapist, and after they had made their introductions all around—including the receptionist named Anya who, it turned out, was a psych major at Columbia when she wasn’t here three mornings a week—Dr.Warwick ushered her into another room.The doctor had her fingers pressed gently on her shoulder, and Charlotte decided that she liked the feel of this, too.KEENAN BARRETT studied Paige Sutherland.He wished he had something that resembled her charisma.He wished he exuded the sort of telegenic charm that mattered so much more these days than an ability to frame an argument soundly.Alas, he was anything but magnetic.He was mannered.deliberate.old school.All qualities, alas, that didn’t play well on CNN.The problem at the moment was that he feared Paige was about to make the kind of mistake that young charismatic lawyers often made: She’d convinced herself that she was so smooth and attractive that she could bluster and bluff her way through anything.He hoped he could disabuse her of this notion and persuade her to rethink her plans.“I just don’t see why it will be relevant,” Paige was saying in response to his concern.His office didn’t have the sort of small round conference table that Dominique’s had, though this was because he liked the way his massive mission desk made everyone with whom he met look small and inconsequential.Right now Paige and Spencer were sitting across from him in two straight-back mission chairs.“It will be relevant because they are going to want to know why John couldn’t extract the bullet,” he told her, referring to the writers and reporters who they hoped would be at the press conference next week.“And I’ll tell them we delivered the gun to the lab,” she answered.He glanced at Spencer, who was looking down at the fingers on his right hand.His arm was still in that sling, and since his return Keenan hadn’t seen him make any effort to take a single note with his left.Hadn’t even seen him pick up a pen.Keenan wasn’t completely sure he was listening now, or—if he was—whether he was following the nuances of their conversation.It was as if he’d been shot in the head, not the shoulder.He was so placid.So yielding.So serene.Keenan wondered if this was the result of his painkillers or whether the ache in his shoulder and back simply precluded him from concentrating on anything outside his body.Either way, this was a different Spencer from the one who had left for New Hampshire at the end of July, and Keenan wasn’t sure what he thought of him.The fellow was certainly more likable.But he wasn’t especially helpful.While the old Spencer would have had strong opinions on what they should and should not say at the press conference, this new one hadn’t offered more than a sentence or two in the last fifteen minutes.Keenan decided that he didn’t even like his associate’s new beard.He understood why Spencer was growing it, but the sad fact was that it made him look a little dim: He resembled the cavemen Keenan saw going to Ranger ice-hockey games at nearby Madison Square Garden, the beefy, lumpish, ancient-looking hominoids who painted their chests red and blue and then took off their shirts for the cameras.This troubled Keenan for a great many reasons, though the foremost right now was the reality that in four days Spencer was going to be the focal point of a press conference.“If that’s all you tell them,” he said, directing his response at both the other lawyer and Spencer so he could see if there was anyone home behind those whiskers, “then once the gun’s fundamental soundness is revealed—as it will be as soon as Adirondack inspects it—we will lose a sizable measure of our credibility and our message will be undermined.People will not be listening to what we have to say about hunting if they believe the legs have been cut away from beneath Spencer’s lawsuit.If the lawsuit appears groundless, we have no forum.”“I’m not going to say the rifle didn’t function the way it was meant to.We’re contending, pure and simple, that Adirondack has been manufacturing a dangerous product because a bullet remains in the chamber once you unload the magazine.If the extractor had been defective, that would have been a nice bonus—nothing more, nothing less.”“That isn’t my point.”“What is your point, Keenan?”“I believe it is in your client’s interest to acknowledge upfront—next Tuesday—that Mr.Seton’s weapon worked perfectly [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]