Side by Side by John Ramsey Miller Page A

lobby Mr. Laughlin’s personal secretary, Rudy Spence, who was filling the receptionist’s chair, was looking down at a magazine at some pouty young man in a lime green shirt open to his belly button and a suit that looked like he had slept in it. What the boy in the ad was irked about wasn’t apparent, but Peanut thought maybe he’d gotten hold of some bad meth.
    Rudy said, “Mr. Laughlin is waiting for you in his office.”
    Rudy had a fancy college education and acted like he was a member of the royal family. He was a reed-thin boy-man who wore expensive clothes and slipper-looking shoes with soles hardly thicker than dog skin.
    Peanut strode down the wide hall whose walls were paneled in rosewood and decorated with ornately carved frames holding oil paintings of farmland, mountains, rivers, shiny-coated horses, and one of hunting dogs.
    Mr. Laughlin’s door was cracked open and Peanut saw the attorney sitting behind his desk shuffling papers. Peanut tapped on the door and Mr. Laughlin smiled and came around the desk to shake hands with him. Laughlin wore what appeared to be expensive golfing attire—a powder-blue shirt and yellow linen slacks with a crease you could peel an apple with. His white hair was combed straight back on the sides. He had bushy brows, which contrasted with the tidy mustache. The first time Peanut had met him, twenty years before, he’d told the lawyer that he looked just like the little rich guy on the Monopoly board game.
    Mr. Laughlin didn’t even glance at the valise in Peanut’s hand. The attorney always acted like the money was the last thing he cared about, and maybe it was.
    “Sit down,” Mr. Laughlin said. “I wanted to go over the latest figures with you before Sarnov and Randall get here.” He went around the desk and turned a computer printout around so Peanut could see the figures. Peanut was always amazed at how Mr. Laughlin changed their illegal profits into legitimate money with the swipe of his pen. That was a trick not every lawyer could perform. Mr. Laughlin was a legal magician.

11
     

    Winter Massey headed for I-85, and during the twenty-five-minute drive to Charlotte, he had time to reflect on Alexa Keen and their once-in-a-lifetime relationship, which had seemed until that morning like something that had happened in another lifetime altogether.
    At one point, around his third year in high school, Winter had desired Alexa Keen in the way only a young male with turbo-driven hormones can, but that had been the smallest part of his attraction to her. It was a fluke that he had gotten to know Alexa at all, much less that he had offered up to her his deepest secrets. Now he found himself wondering if he had ever been as emotionally honest about himself with anyone before or since.
    It all began with a twenty-nine-cent spiral notebook. Late for class, Winter had been hurrying down the empty hallway when he spotted the manila cardboard backing covered with dusty footprints near the row of lockers outside his biology classroom. He stooped and scooped it up and carried it in with him. The cover was red, and there was no name on the outside. He slipped it into his pack intending to drop it into the lost-and-found box when he passed the office. But he forgot.
    That night he went into the backpack and found the notebook. Out of curiosity he opened it. The handwriting was perfect and clean and easy to read. So he read a few lines and discovered that it was a journal. Since he didn’t know whose it was, he didn’t feel the least guilty about reading it. And an hour later, he was closing it, stunned by what he had read, and hungry for more.
    The journal covered a few months of a young girl’s life, and it was written in third person.
She was alone in a skin she didn’t fit into, but couldn’t get out of. She never asked the others circling around her about their lives, but she picked up bits here and there by listening to them. How could she learn about the others if