ALL THAT GLITTERS, chapter 1

chapter 12

Chapter 12

Lucky felt her friends slipping automatically into defensive formation around her: Michelle, somehow arriving earlier than expected, breezing up and tossing her curls in that casual flirty way that signaled she was ready to distract any attacker, and Sandy bracing with both hands in her pockets, as if, with her half-tinted hair and scattered sparkling piercings, she could tackle any fight that came her way. Time slowed down as Lucky savored how good it was to have friends who stood beside her, no matter what.

And in that extra-long fifteen seconds, as one of the two state troopers flipped through their stack of papers, looking for a warrant to take Lucky’s phone into evidence, the hyper-rational side of her rose up, away from being scared or flustered, into all the confidence that the start of a pre-law degree and years of reading crime books could provide. She spotted a third evidence bag with a black iPhone in it, dangling from the second trooper’s black leather glove, and in that instant she realized two things: It belonged to Jake, and if he was involved in something, even in scuzzy Sean’s pot plan, that phone shouldn’t go into the police files. Neither should her own, with its video footage that she’d downloaded from her dad’s security system.

Intense now, she whispered the single word “Davila” to Sandy, and bumped deliberately against, her, slipping her own phone into Sandy’s coat pocket. She saw from her friend’s widened eyes that Sandy felt the transfer and knew what to do. Michelle caught the whisper, and leaned toward Lucky for a moment – then executed a perfect jazz step on the slick hospital lobby floor, tumbling forward with a cry that utterly convinced the troopers, as well as the pink-smocked reception grandmother, that she’d at least torn some vital ligament, and maybe broken something.

Simultaneously, Sandy peeled off from the group and retreated to the breezeway by the hospital’s front doors, and while Lucky hoped wildly that the phone number for her mom’s new lawyer Anne Davila was near the top of the “Recent Calls” listing, she bent over Michelle and began a wild patter of anxious questions about ACL, ankles, knees, and more. The reception grammy called down to the emergency room. The stack of police papers, set carefully on a table nearby by the polite troopers, was easy to topple onto the floor as Lucky added as much chaos as possible to the little scene.

As she apologized and helped gather the pages back together, she spotted the phrasing she’d hoped was there: “Records for the cellular and landline telephones and other communication devices of the aforenamed four members of the Franklin family, viz. Robert Franklin, Claire Benedict, Felicity Franklin, and Jacob Franklin.” Records – not the actual phones!

From there on, things went as smoothly as if Lucky’d actually planned it all in detail: Sandy’s hand slipped the familiar weight of the cellphone into Lucky’s jacket pocket, Michelle accepted a wheelchair ride to the x-ray room with Sandy clucking her tongue, hovering next to her, and the two flustered troopers resumed their search for the warrant to prove they could take Lucky’s phone.

Except she knew now that they couldn’t. When the page came out of the stack and the trooper held out a hand to capture Lucky’s “communication device,” she did her best Michelle imitation, with the girlish little smile, and said, “Oh, I’m afraid this warrant is only for the records, not the actual phones, you know.”

Before the troopers had even placed a call to their barracks for clarification, the cold blast of wind from the front doors opening, then shutting, and the cheerful challenging voice of the red-haired lawyer sealed the moment. Lucky smothered a grin as girl power – and the letter of the law – won the battle.

As she and Anne Davila rode up in the escalator, with three re-captured Franklin family phones, Lucky took the next step that all her reading had taught her: “So, Ms. Davila, would you please represent me, as well as my mother? I have a few things I’d like to tell you.”

A dollar bill passed from her hand into the lawyer’s, and she began outlining the two possible lines she figured needed immediate follow-up: sleazy Sean’s marijuana mailing project at her mother’s store, and the valuable antique books at her father’s shop, with their politically prime ownership.

“Pretty fast work for less than twenty-four hours,” the feisty lawyer applauded. “Stay off the political part, would you? In this town, it’s too complicated. Stick with the routine drugs-and-money angle for now. Whoops, let’s hush – I can’t accept your father among my clients, so there’s no privacy for things we say in front of him.” With an immaculately polished deep red fingernail, the attorney pressed the “Close Doors” button on the elevator panel to gain an extra moment. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Got it,” Lucky confirmed. “Because my mom and my dad are, for the police anyway, on two different sides here.”

“Good grasp of the basics,” the lawyer agreed. She took her finger off and let the doors do their automatic widening. “And by the way – what are we going to find on these cell phones? I think we’d better check them out as soon as we can. Of course,” she added, looking meaningfully at Lucky, “I won’t be able to explore what’s on your father’s phone, will I?”

Quick as a stage magician, Lucky rotated the four phones in her hands, handing her own and her mother’s and Jake’s to the woman she was already calling “Aces Annie” in her thoughts. Her father’s cell phone went back into the jacket and Lucky said politely, “Will you excuse me a moment? I’m going to stop at the Ladies’ Room to wash up.”

With mutual nods of understanding, Lucky and the lawyer headed in opposite directions in the hospital hallway. Lucky dodged around a cart of covered supper dishes, into the small one-person rest room just down the hall. She latched the door carefully behind her, took out her father’s phone, and began forwarding records to her own number, as fast as she could.

She was almost done when the phone in her hands began to ring. The screen said “Private Number.”

“Hello?”

A deep gravelly voice responded. “Message for Rob Franklin. Tell him we’ll have to search his house for the missing items, if he can’t get them back to the bookstore before tomorrow morning.” Click.

Lucky pressed “Return call.” A mechanical voice reported that she couldn’t reach the number that way. As she pressed “End,” a photo arrived, displayed on the screen of her dad’s phone: a photo of her father, from the night before, obviously, because of the way the blood pooled around him on the bookshop floor.

Somebody wasn’t fooling.