Page 32 of Jethro

"We managed her money while she ran into burning buildings for forty-two thousand dollars a year," Missy said. "Don't you dare lecture me about children, Dustin." Dustin grinned.

"Point is, when that accounting lands, your girl calls a lawyer, her lawyer calls the district attorney, and you two need a lot more than our money to fix it."

"No judge will annul the marriage, and there's nothing to smear," Carter said, rubbing his eyes. "I had him looked at immediately after hanging up from her call. Marine, six tours. Paramedic. The man is clean."

Lawrence turned his glass slowly in his fingers.

"Then perhaps the problem isn't the marriage. Perhaps the problem is the husband."

Carter looked at his wife, waiting for her to object. Surely there was a line, even for her. But Missy only folded her hands and tilted her head, the way she did when a caterer was explaining a menu she had not yet decided to approve.

"Firemen have dangerous jobs," Lawrence went on. "Roofs collapse. Floors give way. And nobody asks questions when a hero dies doing what heroes do. They fold a flag and put his name on a plaque."

"You're talking about murder," Carter said.

"I'm talking about widowhood," Lawrence said. "A grieving young widow, desperately in need of her mother. So, tell me, Missy. Who handles the estate? Who sits beside that poor girl and helps her sign the papers she's too devastated to read?"

Missy was quiet for a long moment.

"Her mother does," she said slowly. She ignored her husband's stare. "And when she's ready to love again, in a year, maybe two, there would be a man waiting. A man who was always so kind to her. A man who understood."

Lawrence inclined his head.

"I am a very patient man."

Carter stood so abruptly that his bourbon sloshed across the phone screen.

"Listen to yourselves. That's my daughter's husband. That's a man's life."

Missy turned on him.

"And what happens to our lives, Carter? You go to prison. We lose the house, the club, the lake, every friend we have. Aurora keeps her millions and her fireman, and I wait for visiting day in an apartment off the interstate."

"She's our daughter." He repeated it, not even sure why he said it. He’d been every bit as cruel to her as Missy was. Yet something was nagging at him, telling him to back off.

"She stopped being our daughter the day she chose to go to a foreign country. The day she chose to be a lowly firefighter. The day she chose that man over her family." Missy's voice cracked, not with grief but with rage. "She called us from the venue, Carter. After it was done. After she'd already walked into that bank and taken every penny out of our hands.

"It has to come through the job," Missy said, wiping the bourbon from the phone with a cocktail napkin. "Something no one would question. He works out of the same station she does in Belle Fleur with her, on the same shift."

"Then she'd be there," Carter said. "Missy, she'd be standing right there when it happened."

"Then she would see for herself that it was an accident, wouldn't she?"

The calm in his wife's voice turned Carter's stomach. He thought of Aurora at seven, in a red plastic fire helmet, spraying the azaleas with the garden hose and shouting that she was saving them. He looked at the three people deciding her future over hotel bourbon while a piano played "Crazy" across the lobby, and he understood that he was the only one still thinking of her as a person at all.

"There is a gentler road first, for the squeamish," Lawrence said, looking at Carter. "Complaints at work. Whispers. An anonymous call suggesting a certain paramedic has been stealing painkillers from his ambulance. If he walks away on his own, no one has to get hurt."

"And if he doesn't walk away?" Dustin asked.

"Then we proceed."

"We try Lawrence's way first," Missy said, as if choosing between two shades of linen. "Carter, Bill Harmon still owes you for making his son's DUI disappear."

"I am not going to Bill Harmon and asking him to ruin an innocent man."

"You won't ask him for anything. You'll drive down to Belle Fleur, take the fire chief to lunch, and tell him you're worried sick about your little girl working beside a man like that. You're very good at sounding worried, darling."

"And my money in the meantime?" Dustin asked.