Father was so grateful to see me, but there was always the parting a few days later.” The strain in her voice deepened. “I hadn’t spoken with him for a while before he died.”
What kind of man was her dad, Jared asked.
Erin went quiet for a time. “When I was very young, I wondered why he wasn’t a senator or the president. Maybe that’s how every girl feels about her father at that age, especially if he’s kind and gentle. Even without a mom, he tried hard to raise me like a daughter. When I went away to school, he never made me feel guilty.
“I always thought of him as this quiet, honest farmer and a war hero. He worked dawn to dusk, never complained, paid his bills. Treated people decently. When I was older, I knew that he had some rough times financially, but I never knew it growing up. That’s the kind of man I thought my father was.”
She paused, her face flat with an effort at composure. “But suddenly he’s gone, and I find this deposit slip. So what am I supposed to think now?”
No answer was expected, and Jared wouldn’t have shared the thought that came to mind anyway. He pressed on.
“Did your dad have any social life? People he spent time with?”
They used to belong to the Lutheran church, she explained, but after her mother died, they hardly went. There were the neighbors on the surrounding farms. He’d see them, help them out or get help in return on occasion. And he’d go to the Legion Hall sometimes. But few people came to the memorial service, and most of them she didn’t recognize.
“Any ideas about the money? Rich uncle pass away? Oil found on an old family plot? Thirty-year-old Apple shares surface?”
She rewarded him with a smile and a light laugh. “No. Nothing I know about. He didn’t have many relatives and fewer he kept in touch with. Just Aunt Karen—my mother’s sister.”
“No midnight calls from your dad three years ago talking about a windfall?”
“No.”
It was time to ask. “What do you want out of this lawsuit?”
It was the question that told the most about a client. Some groped for answers they thought their lawyer wanted to hear. Others told the truth, at least the truth of the moment. Even if they told the truth, clients’ desires from a lawsuit differed so much. Some wanted “justice”; others, just a chance to tell their story in court. Sometimes it was only about the money. And appetites evolved in a lawsuit. Jared had seen the meekest client morph into a Wall Street banker when it came to cash.
“I want to know what happened—where the deposit came from,” she answered, her voice growing stronger as she continued. “I want to know what it was all about. If the money was my father’s, I want it back. No matter what, I don’t want the bank to keep it.”
Her final statement came in a flat voice of resolve. It was a good answer, Jared thought, from a courtroom perspective. She didn’t claim she would fund an orphanage or try to end world hunger. He never trusted the self-righteous types—juries saw through them or they collapsed under cross-examination. There was no false bravado in Erin’s voice or face. Her goals were plain, believable, fair.
Juries were like sports fans: they wanted to pick sides. A jury would like Erin. It didn’t hurt that juries hated banks—almost as much as they despised insurance companies and lawyers.
Jared looked across the table at Erin, her hands wrapped around the cooling coffee mug. Her face said everything—the sad, small curve of her mouth and the mix of guilt and pain in her eyes. He understood her need to know about the source of the money.
“Where do you think the money came from?” he asked at last.
“I don’t know.” She shook her head slowly.
“You must have thought about it.”
Hesitation. “Yes, but I haven’t figured anything out.”
Jared glanced through the window at the car parked outside. “Someone thinks you don’t deserve the money.”
She grimaced. “The paper has an article a week about the suit, and they usually take the bank’s side. They make it sound like I’m trying to shut down the town. I never expected this kind of reaction. Not in Ashley.”
“Are you frightened?”
“No. At least . . . I wasn’t.”
“You know, apart from the harassment—there’s another risk if you keep going with the case now. You, or the estate, could get sanctioned if you lose.”
Erin shrugged.