“Happy birthday.” Eldrin, her assistant, was waiting outside the elevator when the doors opened. Sam’s routine was so fixed that he could predict her movements down to the second.
“Thank you.” She let him take her briefcase, but not her purse.
He walked with her through the offices, doling out her schedule as he always did. “Your UXH meeting is at ten thirty in conference room six. You’ve got a phone call with Atlanta at three, but I told Laurens you have a hard out at five for a very important meeting.”
Sam smiled. She had birthday drinks scheduled with a friend.
He said, “There’s a bit of an urgent detail about the partner meeting next week. You need to nail down a point for them. I left the packet on your desk.”
“Thank you.” Sam stopped at the office kitchen. She didn’t expect Eldrin to fetch her tea every morning, but because of their routine, he’d been relegated to watching Sam prepare it.
She said, “I had an email from Curtis this morning.” She pulled a tea sachet from the tin on the counter. “I want to be in Atlanta next week for the Coca-Cola deposition.” Among other locales, Stehlik, Elton, Mallory and Sanders had satellite offices in Atlanta. Sam made monthly trips to the city, staying at the Four Seasons, walking the two blocks to the Peachtree Street offices, and ignoring the fact that Pikeville was a two-hour drive up the interstate.
“I’ll let travel know.” Eldrin retrieved a carton of milk from the refrigerator. “I can also ask if Grainger has—oh, no.” He was looking at the muted television in the corner. A graphic spun ominously onto the screen. SCHOOL SHOOTING.
As a victim of gun violence, Sam had always felt a particular horror when she learned of a mass shooting, but like most Americans, she had become somewhat acclimated to their almost monthly occurrence.
The screen showed a little girl’s photograph, obviously from a school yearbook. The name underneath read LUCY ALEXANDER.
Sam added milk to the tea. “I dated a boy in school named Peter Alexander.”
Eldrin raised his eyebrows as he followed her out of the kitchen. She wasn’t usually easy with details about her personal life.
Sam continued toward her office. Eldrin continued the rundown of the day’s itinerary, but she only listened with half an ear. She hadn’t thought about Peter Alexander in a long while. He had been a moody boy, given to long, tedious speeches about the torture inherent in being an artist. Sam had let him touch her breasts, but only because she had wanted to know what it felt like.
It felt sweaty, frankly, because Peter had no idea what he was doing.
Sam dropped her purse by her desk, a glass and steel chunk that anchored her sun-filled corner office. Her view, like most views in the Financial District, was the building directly across the way. There had been no rules regarding set-back when the Canyons of Wall Street had been erected. Twenty feet of sidewalk was all that separated most buildings from the street.
Eldrin finished his spiel as she placed her tea on a coaster beside her computer.
Sam waited for him to leave. She sat down in her chair. She found her reading glasses in her briefcase. She began the review of her notes for the ten thirty meeting.
Sam had understood when she decided on patent law as a career that the job was basically one of trying to sway the transfer of large sums of money: one incredibly wealthy corporation sued another incredibly wealthy corporation for using a similar set of stripes on their new athletic shoes, or co-opting a particular color from their brand, and very expensive lawyers had to argue in front of very bored judges about the percentages of cyan in a certain Pantone.
Long gone were the days of Newton and Leibniz battling for the right to be identified as the inventor of calculus. Most of Sam’s time was spent combing through the minutiae of design schematics and referencing patent applications that sometimes reached back to the early days of the industrial revolution.
She loved every single second of it.
She loved the melding of science and law, delighted in the fact that she had somehow managed to distill the single best parts of her mother and father into a rewarding life.
Eldrin knocked on her glass door. “I wanted to update you. Looks like that school shooting took place in North Georgia.”
Sam nodded. “North Georgia” was a nebulous catch-all for any area outside of Atlanta. “Do they know how many victims?”
“Only two.”
“Thanks.” Sam tried not to dwell on the “only,” because Eldrin was correct that two was a low body count. The story would probably roll off the news by tomorrow.
She turned to her computer. She pulled up a rough draft of a brief that she wanted to be conversant with for her ten thirty meeting. A second-year associate had taken a stab at a response to a summary motion made in the case of SaniLady, a division of UXH Financial Holdings, Ltd. v. LadyMate Corp, a division of Nippon Development Resources, Inc.
After six years of back and forth, two failed mediations and a screaming match that took place mostly in Japanese, the case was going to trial.
At issue was the design of a hinge that controlled the movement of the self-closing lid on a partition-mounted public restroom sanitary napkin and tampon disposal bin. The LadyMate Corporation produced several iterations of the ubiquitous container, from the FemyGeni to the original LadyMate to the strangely named Tough Guy.
Sam was the only person involved in the entire case who had actually used one of these bins. If she had been consulted during their design, she would’ve gone for truth in advertising and called them all the Motherfucker, because that was usually the first thing that came into a woman’s mind when she had to use one.
Sam also would have designed the spring-loaded piano hinge as two components for the extra .03 cent manufacturing cost rather than risk a single, integrated hinge that invited a patent infringement lawsuit that would result in millions of dollars in legal fees, not to mention the damages if Nippon lost the case.
If the brief on her computer had anything to do with it, UXH would not be seeing those damages. Patent law wasn’t the most baroque area of litigation, but the second-year associate who had drafted the brief wrote with the adroitness of a piece of sandpaper.
This was why Sam had taken a three-year detour into the Portland district attorney’s office. She had wanted to be able to speak the language of a courtroom.
Sam scrolled through the document, making notes, rewriting a long passage in an approximation of simple English, adding a modicum of flourish to the end because she knew that it would perturb her opposing counsel, a man who had, upon his first meeting with Sam, told her to fetch him a coffee, two sugars, and tell her boss that he did not like to wait.
Gamma had been right about so many things. Sam Quinn was given far more respect than Samantha Quinn could have ever hoped for.
At exactly ten thirty-four, Sam was the last person to enter the conference room. The tardiness was by design. She did not relish chastising stragglers.
She took her seat at the head of the table. She looked out at the sea of young, white men whose degrees from Michigan and Harvard and MIT gave them a bloated sense of their own self-importance. Or perhaps the bloat was warranted. They were sitting in the gleaming, glass-lined offices of one of the most important patent firms in the world. If they thought that they were captains of industry, it was likely because they soon would be.
But for now, they had to prove themselves to Sam. She listened to their updates, commented on their proposed strategies, and generally let them toss ideas back and forth until she felt that they were biting their own tails. Sam was notorious for running lean meetings. She asked for case law to be researched, a rewriting of briefs to be completed by tomorrow, the incorporation of a certain patent application from the 1960s to be integrated more deeply into their work product.
She stood from her chair, so everyone else did. She made an anodyne comment about looking forward to their results as she left the conference room.
They
followed her, keeping their distance, because they all worked on the same side of the building. Sam often felt like the long walk back to her office was akin to being stalked by a pack of geese. Invariably, one would push ahead, hoping to make his name known, or to prove to the others that he wasn’t afraid of her. A few peeled off for other meetings, wishing her happy birthday. Someone asked if she had enjoyed her recent trip to Europe. Another young man, a bit over-eager since word had spread that Sam would soon become a named partner, followed her all the way to her office door, relaying a long story that ended with the detail that his grandmother had been born in Denmark.
Sam’s husband had been born in Denmark.
Anton Mikkelsen was twenty-one years Sam’s senior, a professor at Stanford from whom she had taken a Technology in Society course entitled Engineering the Roman Empire Design. Anton’s passion for the subject had captivated Sam. She had always been drawn to people who were delighted by the world, who looked out rather than in.
For his part, Anton had been completely hands-off while Sam was his student, aloof even, so that she was convinced she had done something wrong. It wasn’t until after she had graduated, when she was in her second year at Northwestern, that Anton had reached out.
At Stanford, Sam had been one of only a handful of women studying in a male-dominated field. She had infrequently received emails from some of her professors. The subject lines tended to show a combination of desperation and a loose understanding of ellipsis: “I can’t get you out of my mind …” or, “… You have to … help me …” As if they were being driven mad by their desire and only Sam could alleviate the pain. Their collective insecurities had been one of the reasons she had applied to law school rather than pursue her Ph.D. The thought of any one of these pathetic, middle-aged lotharios being in charge of her thesis was untenable.
Anton had been well aware of his colleagues’ reputations when he first emailed Sam.
“I apologize if you find this contact unwanted,” he had written. “I waited three years to ensure that my professional authority has no overlap with, nor impact upon, your chosen field.”
He had retired early from Stanford. He had taken a job as a consultant for an overseas engineering firm. He had established his home base in New York so that he could be closer to her. They had married four years after Sam was named an associate at the firm.
Anton had opened up her life in ways that Sam had never fathomed.
Their first trip abroad was magical. Except for an ill-considered freshman jaunt to Tijuana, Sam had never before been outside of the United States. Anton had taken her to Ireland, where as a boy he had summered with his mother’s people. To Denmark, where he had learned to love design. To Rome to show her the ruins, to Florence to show her the Duomo, to Venice to show her love.
They had traveled extensively throughout their marriage, Anton taking jobs or Sam attending a conference with the sole purpose of being somewhere new. Dubai. Australia. Brazil. Singapore. Bora Bora. Every new country, every new foreign city that Sam set foot in, she thought of Gamma, the way her mother had urged Sam to leave, to see the world, to live anywhere but Pikeville.
That Sam had done this with a man whom she adored made each journey that much more rewarding.
Sam’s office phone rang.
She sat back in her chair. She glanced at the time. Her three o’clock call from Atlanta. She had lost herself in work again, skipping lunch, inexorably lost in a patent design for a narrow plated pintle hinge.
Laurens Van Loon was Dutch, living in Atlanta, and their in-house specialist on international patent law. He was calling about the UXH case, but like Sam, he was an enthusiastic traveler. Before they talked shop, he wanted to know all about the trip she had taken a few weeks ago, a ten-day tour through Italy and Ireland.
There had been a time in Sam’s life when she talked about foreign cities in terms of their culture, the architecture, the people, but money and the passage of time had made her more likely to talk about the hotels.
She told Laurens about her stay at the Merrion in Dublin, how the garden suite did not overlook a garden, but a rear alley. That the Aman on the Grand Canal was breathtaking, the service impeccable, the little courtyard where she drank her tea every morning one of the most tranquil spots in the city. In Florence there was the Westin Excelsior, which had a magnificent view of the Arno, but the noise from the roof-top bar had occasionally echoed down into her suite. In Rome, she told Laurens, she had stayed at the Cavalieri, for their baths and beautiful pools.
This last part was a lie.
Sam had booked a room at the Raffaello, because the budget hotel was the only place that she and Anton could afford during that first magical trip to Rome.
For Laurens’s benefit, Sam continued to prevaricate, recommending restaurants and museums from past journeys. She did not tell him that in Dublin, she had stood in the Long Room of the Old Library at Trinity College, looking up at the beautiful barrel-vaulted ceiling with tears in her eyes. Nor did Sam relay that in Florence, she had sat on one of the many benches inside the Galleria dell’Accademia, where Michelangelo’s David was displayed, and sobbed.
Rome had been filled with equal parts nostalgia and grief. The Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps, the Pantheon, the Colosseum, the Piazza Navona where Anton had proposed to her while they drank wine under the moonlight.
Sam had first seen all of these wonderful sites with her husband, and now that Anton was dead, she would never see them with the same pleasure again.
“Your trip sounds amazing,” Laurens said. “Ireland and Italy. So, that’s the ‘I’ countries, though I suppose you technically should have included India.”
“Iceland, Indonesia, Israel …” Sam smiled at his laughter. “I think we should probably stop discussing hotels and move onto the exciting world of sanitary napkin disposal.”
“Yes, of course,” Laurens said. “But may I ask you—I hope this is not intrusive?”
Sam braced herself for a question about Anton, because even a year later, people asked.
“This school shooting,” Laurens said.
Sam felt ashamed that she had forgotten about it. “Is this a bad time to speak?”
“No, no. Of course it’s terrible. But I saw this man on television. Russell Quinn, the attorney who is representing the suspect.”
Sam gripped the receiver so tightly that a tremor developed in her thumb. She had not connected the dots, but Rusty volunteering to defend someone who had shot and killed two people inside of a school should not have come as a surprise.
Laurens said, “I know that you’re from Georgia, so I wondered if there was a relation.” He added, “It seems this man is quite the liberal champion.”
Sam was at a loss for words. She finally managed, “It’s a common name.”
“It is?” Laurens was always eager to learn more about his adopted city.
“Yes. From before the Civil War.” Sam shook her head, because she could have come up with a better lie. All that she could do now was move on. “So, I heard from UXH’s in-house people that Nippon is about to have a shake-up in their corner suites.”
Laurens hesitated slightly before changing the conversation to work. Sam listened to him run down the rumors he had heard, but her attention strayed to her computer.
She opened the New York Times website. Lucy Alexander. The shooting had taken place at Pikeville Middle School.
Sam’s middle school.
She studied the child’s face, looking for a familiar shape of the eye, a curve of the lip, that might remind her of Peter Alexander, but she found nothing. Still, Pikeville was a very small town. The odds were strong that the girl was somehow related to Sam’s former beau.
She scanned down the article for details about the shooting. An eighteen-year-old girl had brought a weapon to school. She had started shooting right before the first bell. The gun was wrested away by an unnamed teacher, a highly decorated former Marine who now taught history to teenagers.
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Sam scrolled down to another photo, this one of the second victim.
Douglas Pinkman.
The phone slipped from Sam’s hand. She had to retrieve it from the floor. “I’m sorry,” she told Laurens, her voice somewhat unsteady. “Could we follow up on this tomorrow?”
Sam barely registered his consent. She could only stare at the photograph.
During her tenure at the school, Douglas Pinkman had coached both the football and track team. He had been Sam’s earliest champion, a man who believed that if she trained hard enough, pushed herself enough, she could win a scholarship to the college of her choice. Sam had known that her intellect could get her that and more, but she had been intrigued by the prospect of her body working at the same efficient levels as her mind. Running, too, was something that she really enjoyed. The open air. The sweat. The release of endorphins. The solitude.
And now, Sam was forced to use a cane on her bad days and Mr. Pinkman had been murdered outside his school office.
She scrolled down, searching for more details. Shot twice in the chest with hollow-point bullets. Pinkman’s death, anonymous sources reported, was instantaneous.
Sam clicked open the Huffington Post, knowing they would give more attention to the story than the Times. The entire front page was dedicated to the shooting. The banner read TRAGEDY IN NORTH GEORGIA. Photos of Lucy Alexander and Douglas Pinkman were placed side by side.
Sam skimmed the hyperlinks:
HERO MARINE PREFERS TO REMAIN ANONYMOUS
ATTORNEY FOR SUSPECT RELEASES STATEMENT
WHAT HAPPENED WHEN: A TIMELINE OF THE SHOOTING
PINKMAN WIFE WATCHED HUSBAND DIE
Sam did not want to see the attorney for the suspect. She clicked on the last link.
Her lips parted in surprise.
Mr. Pinkman had married Judith Heller.
What a strange world.
Sam had never met Miss Heller in person, but of course she knew the woman’s name. After Daniel Culpepper had shot Sam, after Zachariah had tried and failed to rape Charlie, Charlie had run to the Heller farm for help. While Miss Heller took care of her, the woman’s elderly father had sat on the front porch, armed to the teeth, in case one of the Culpeppers showed up before the police did.