Evangeline by D W Buffa

Author:D W Buffa
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery & Detective, Trials, Legal, General, Legal Stories, Fiction
ISBN: 9781741148091
Publisher: CreateSpace
Published: 2005-01-01T18:30:00+00:00

A feeling was all it really was, and perhaps even less than that: an unsupported hope. He confessed that night at dinner that he did not think he had any choice, that he had to take a chance, throw away all the rules, all the tried and tested principles on which experienced courtroom lawyers depend for their success.

‘It started to crystallise itself in my mind while I was listening to the testimony of Samantha Wilcox, something she said about everything being in the hands of God.’

Summer Blaine put down the menu, wondering at the useless habit that made her glance at the list of dishes she had long since learned by heart. They had been coming to this same Filmore Street restaurant from almost the first time she had come into the city to spend an evening or a long weekend at the apartment in Pacific Heights. It was odd the way a habit could become a custom, a part of your practice, something that gave shape to your life. There was a strange fear that to give it up was to risk the unknown, that even the smallest change might, like the first crack in a foundation, lead to the destruction of everything else. The menu was a totem of her own invention, and she knew it, but that did not make it any easier to risk her luck.When she scrubbed for surgery, she always washed her right hand first.

‘There has to be some cause, some reason for the things that happen,’ Darnell went on, growing more animated as he spoke. ‘Especially when it is something truly awful. It was fascinating, what she said about why they drew lots to choose who would die: that it had to be left to chance to make sure it was God’s decision.What a powerful belief that is—that nothing happens by chance, that everything has a meaning, that everything is part of some larger design!’

With a last, almost surreptitious glance at the menu, Summer Blaine ordered what she usually did; and then, because he was too wrapped up in what he was saying to pay attention to what he wanted, she ordered, as she often did, for Darnell as well.

The small restaurant was quiet, nearly empty, the way it often was at the late hour they came. It had become a private joke, the familiar greeting repeated each time they walked in, that it must be almost time to close. That was part of the habit, too—the custom by which Darnell held himself to the rigour of the schedule in which he worked through the evening, took an hour or two for dinner, and then, while nearly everyone else was asleep, worked into the early hours of the morning. It might have killed a younger man, but he insisted, as he did about most of the things to which Summer Blaine objected, that it kept him alive.

‘Do you believe in God?’ he asked, bending his head to the side the way he did when he was particularly interested in the answer.

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