A Reasonable Doubt by Susan Sloan (free novels .txt) 📕

aide in a hospital in Longview.  Her three children were going to white schools there.

That was it.  His mother never visited.  She had lost her license to drive years ago, and no one volunteered to bring her.  Jason didn’t want her to see him like this, anyway.  Besides, according to his uncle, she was pretty much in a drunken stupor all the time now.

His only other visitors were the lady lawyer and her bodyguard.  But they weren’t really visitors.  Lily Burns was just doing her job, coming by once a week or so, to see how he was, and to ask if he needed anything.  Needed anything?  He needed to get out of this place!  Sometimes, she brought him books and magazines, and when there weren’t any legal issues to discuss, she did her best to make polite conversation.

To say that Jason was surprised the first time the bodyguard appeared on the scene would be an understatement.  The only thing he knew about anything was what that guard Crandall had told him, sneering through the bars of Jason’s cell, suggesting that his lawyer had better quit his case, if she knew what was good for her.  But, when he asked her about it, she just brushed it aside, telling him it was nothing, and assuring him that she had no intention of quitting his case.  It was funny, and he’d never admit it, not to her, not to anyone, but hearing her say that actually made him feel better.

And then the bodyguard started showing up.

Jason liked John Dancer.  Not because he was part Indian -- well, okay, not only because he was part Indian.  He liked him because he stood in the background, watching, maybe even listening, but never intruding.  Not that there was much to intrude on.  And he never tried to make polite conversation.

“Do you like games?” Lily asked him one day, after the legal matters had been gone over, and his health issues had been discussed, and the polite conversation had run out, but the hour hadn’t.

“Games?” he replied.  “What do you mean games?”

“Oh, I don’t know – gin rummy, checkers, Monopoly, Scrabble?”

“Rummy’s okay, I guess,” he said.  Years ago, Barney Cosgrove had taught him to play.

Lily remembered.  The next time she showed up, with Dancer in tow, she brought a deck of cards with her, and they played gin rummy for half an hour.  She was pretty poor at it, he was pretty good.  Jason suspected that Dancer was very good at it, but the bodyguard said nothing when Jason let Lily win some of the time.  Yes, it would be fair to say that Jason liked John Dancer.  He liked John Dancer a lot.

He supposed that Lily Burns was all right, too, but he could tell that, except for setting him up with Parker, she was pretty much just doing whatever it was she had to do, just going through the motions, and that, as far as the mess he was in was concerned, she had already written him off.

The rest of the time he spent alone with his fears and his doubts.  He had killed a man, and he didn’t know why.  He couldn’t understand what had festered so deep inside of him that it would have erupted in such a violent manner.  Jason devoutly believed in living his own life and letting others live theirs.  He harbored no ill will toward anyone, not even the mean-spirited cop who had rousted him all those times and was now dead, presumably because of it.

Over and over again, he asked himself the same question -- what had happened that night?  Every time that Scott had rousted him, the situation, whatever it was, had been resolved in the cop’s favor, generally because Jason was unwilling to argue with a man with a gun.  In fact, Jason was generally unwilling to argue with anyone.  So what had been different that night?  And why couldn’t he remember?

. . .

Lily stretched out in the lounge chair in the back yard of Amanda Jansen’s weekend cottage.  It was Sunday, the end of the three-day July 4th holiday.  She and Dancer had taken her dad over to Whidbey Island to spend some time with his sister, and then she had sent Dancer on to Spokane for what would likely be his last break before his job in Port Hancock was done.

She had to admit she had gotten used to having him around.  Over the past couple of months, although the hate mail had kept up a fairly steady pace, there had been no further incidents involving red trucks and errant drivers.  She had become, if not exactly complacent, at least a bit less concerned about her physical safety.

It was a glorious spring that had turned into summer -- filled with blue skies and warm days.  And the fact that she had just prevailed in a rather thorny lawsuit didn’t exactly hurt, either.

Lily couldn’t remember the last time it had rained, but it was long enough ago that sprinklers were at work everywhere, and meteorologists were starting to talk about the prospect of forest fires, especially near the foothills.  Although, admittedly, there were probably few people around that were paying very much attention.  The old saying was true -- summer in the Pacific Northwest was what made the long dreary rest of the year bearable.

The cottage, which had been left to Amanda by her grandparents, was the perfect place to just hang out.  It sat on one side of a small lake, up in the foothills, surrounded by trees and shrubbery and just a couple of distant neighbors.  The two women could sleep in, go skinny-dipping, blast the stereo, or have an orgy, if they wanted to, and probably no one would notice.  Except maybe the squirrels and birds that kept them company.  Or the deer and raccoons and coyotes that ventured by, but rarely came that close.  Or the occasional private plane that flew out of the small regional airport west