Still Water by Stuart Harrison Read Free Book Online Page B

and son. They lived near Salem now.
    “Alex is seven now. I’m hoping he’ll come up here in the fall for a visit.”
    Matt already knew that Ella had been married once and when he asked her about her ex-husband she seemed to talk about him easily enough, though there seemed little to tell. She’d married young and it had lasted for less than a year.
    “I don’t even know where he is any more,” Ella said. “Last I heard he was in Mexico.”
    “Kids make things more complicated,” Matt said. He was sure Kirstin would have been happy for him to drop out of her life entirely, but that wouldn’t happen, because of Alex. After a while the conversation came around to Paulie again, though Matt didn’t think he’d raised the subject this time.
    “Did you becoming a prosecutor have anything to with what happened to your brother?” Ella asked.
    “Why would you think that?”
    “I don’t know. Something about the way you sounded earlier. You were close weren’t you?”
    “I guess we were. He was your everyday all-round-athlete-cum-academic older brother. You know the type, good at everything. But I never felt as if I lived in his shadow, I looked up to him. I guess I was angry when he died. Becoming a prosecutor seemed like a way to hit back.”
    In fact Paulie’s death had consumed him for a long time. He found himself opening up to Ella, admitting that he’d buried himself in zealous, maybe obsessive, pursuit of his work, to the exclusion of almost everything else. He’d been on a mission to put the bad guys away and throw away the key. To avenge Paulie. In the end though, he lost his family, and one day he woke up and thought he hadn’t achieved anything with his life that was worthwhile.
    “I wanted to do some good,” he explained, ‘but I felt like I was banging my head against a wall sometimes. The system got to me. Lawyers cutting deals to get their clients a reduced charge on a plea bargain, or else they’d go to trial and convince a jury to believe whatever story they came up with: it was an accident, or self-defence or else the defendant had a lousy childhood so that was supposed to make it okay that he pushed his wife in front of a car. That happened by the way. The guy who did it was having an affair, but his wife had a drug problem and the defence claimed she was turning tricks to pay for her habit. The jury bought it and accepted the guy’s plea that it was temporary insanity because his mother was a hooker and had abandoned him as a kid, and that was why he went nuts and accidentally pushed his wife under a car. He walked.”
    Matt shook his head, aware that he’d started to sound bitter. He looked at his knuckles clenched tightly around his coffee cup and he put it down. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to get into this.”
    “No, it’s okay. Is that what happened to the man who shot your brother? Did he get off?”
    “They never caught him.”
    Ella was silent for a moment, contemplative. “Can I ask you something?” she said hesitantly. “I know what happened to your brother was terrible, but don’t you ever think that sometimes people do things that might seem awful, but if you knew everything about them, maybe things aren’t always the way they look? It doesn’t always mean they’re bad people does it?”
    “I suppose I’ve seen too many guilty people escape their responsibilities. People forget about the victims.”
    He’d seen himself as some kind of white knight, chasing down the bad guys. At first Kirstin hadn’t complained that he could’ve made more money working in some other branch of the law, even though when her car sometimes wouldn’t start in the supermarket parking lot she had to cope with a baby and bags of frozen groceries melting in the trunk. But she resented the fact that he was never home. There were fights, Alex crying in the background. When Alex had taken his first steps, it had taken
    Matt six days to notice. He remembered the stony silence when he