Sins of the Fathers by James Scott Bell Page A

this time. Mona gave him one. “And just crawl into a hole? No. Matthew needs us.”
    Brad winced and looked at the floor. His anguished look. Mona hated it. It was like an annoying screech entering her brain.
    “I can’t believe you’re not outraged by this, Brad. What are you thinking?”
    “Honey, I’m trying to keep myself sane. We can’t let this thing get to us.”
    “Why not? Maybe a little anger is just what we need. We have to keep it or we’ll lose.”
    “Anger will up and kill us if we don’t watch out.”
    Now he was moving into his Dr. Phil mode, and she hated that even worse than the manipulative looks he could put on. “Anger at things that deserve it doesn’t hurt anything. We need it. And she deserves it.” Mona nodded at the TV, even though the news program had cut back to one of the talking heads in the studio.
    “Lawyers have jobs to do.We’ll need to get used to that.”
    “It’s not her job to poison a jury by talking like that. I’m going to call Mr. Colby and—”
    “Don’t bother him, Mona. He knows what he’s doing.”
    Brad had on his parent look now, his I-know-what’s-best look. Mona turned away from it and looked at the TV. A Pepto-Bismol commercial had just started.
    “No, Brad. This isn’t just going to run its course. If you can’t see that, I don’t know what.”
    “If I don’t see it? You think I’m clueless or something?”
    “Maybe in denial.” Take that, Dr. Phil.
    “Me in denial? What about you?”
    She whipped him another look. “That’s a rotten thing to say. I’m the very opposite of denial.”
    “Mona—”
    “No. Rotten.” The thing inside took over—the junkyard fire, she had come to call it. Not a clean flame or a purifying blaze. No, this was the kind that burns garbage and sends toxins into the air. It was a poisonous flame, but it was no use trying to put it out. She didn’t even want to. It made her feel alive.
    She got up to leave the room, because walking away from Brad was the best thing when he got this way. Talking more would only make things worse. She wanted to crawl back in her space, the one with the walls that kept people out.
    Besides, she had work to do—stopping this lawyer from trampling on Matthew’s memory. And stop her she would.
    3.

    Cracks in the sidewalk pointed toward the dilapidated house. Made of forgotten clapboard and faded yellow paint, it tucked up against the San Gabriel Mountains in Sunland, about as far as you could get to the north of the San Fernando Valley without actually leaving. Sunland was like a desert community, where houses and trailers were divided by scrub brush and old fences, where the sun seemed to pound like a hammer before splashing into the cool Pacific an hour away.
    Lindy knocked on the screen door, which rattled in its loose hinges. It reminded her of one of those doors on an old farmhouse. But this was Los Angeles County, not Dorothy’s Kansas.
    She heard movement behind the wooden door. The creaking of the floor straining under weight. Then the noise hesitated, as if the person on the other side of the door was waiting for Lindy to do something else. Like leave.
    She knocked again, softly. No need to get anybody riled up.
    “Who is it?” came a deep, scratchy voice, a woman’s voice. From the hack that followed, Lindy guessed she was addressing an inveterate smoker.
    “My name is Lindy Field. I’m here about Darren.”
    There was a long pause. “I got nothing to say.”
    “I want to talk to Drake.”
    The interior door opened a crack, and Lindy could barely make out a face peering through the screen. “Drake ain’t here.”
    “I think he is.”
    “You a reporter?”
    “I’m a lawyer.”
    “Don’t believe you.”
    “You see any cameras on me? Any recording equipment? All I’ve got is what you see, and you can see it’s just me. So what are you going to do?”
    The woman opened the door a little wider. She wore a drab gray housedress. Her hair was streaked with