LITMIR.BIZ

      BLAKE’S PRETRIAL HEARING went exactly as Juliet had predicted. James’s testimony was disallowed. The Cayman bank statements stood as evidence. The trial was confirmed to start on the morning of July twenty-third and expected to last a minimum of two weeks. She and Blake met a few more times over drinks. Now that Marcie was around, Juliet could get away in the evenings and things just seemed more relaxed for both of them in a bar than in either of their offices.

      As the weeks wore on and Blake’s tension grew, she was eager to relieve any of it that she could.

      Marcie finally landed a job in one of the larger San Diego studios, which lessened one of Juliet’s worries, freeing her up to focus more completely as she studied tax records, company records and bank records, and followed check trails, invoices, inventory, payables and receivables. She talked to every person on Schuster’s list—and Blake’s. Slowly, systematically, she was building a picture of the lives of Eaton James and Walter Ramsden. And to a lesser extent, Blake.

      All she could really do for him was build the world’s best character reference. There simply wasn’t any evidence of fraudulent activity between him and his father or Eaton James. He’d been working in Honduras—and a couple of other countries—rebuilding villages. She’d be flying a couple of key witnesses in for the trial and had taken teleconference depositions with many more who would testify to Blake’s activities.

      But none of that meant he hadn’t also been in communication with his father. She just couldn’t prove that he hadn’t been.

      Schuster couldn’t prove that he had been, either, she assured Blake one Thursday night in late June. They had bank statements but no matching check numbers—no way to prove where the money in the Cayman account had come from. However, as Blake quickly pointed out, with those bank statements hanging over him, complete with matching payments from Eaton James to Blake’s father, Schuster might not have to prove anything else.

      So far, nothing had turned up in any records anywhere to show monies leaving for the Cayman Islands. However, ironically, Juliet had found Ramsden contributions to a charity for homeless children in Honduras in amounts that perfectly matched the amounts of money—and pretty nearly the timing—of all the payments from Eaton James to Walter Ramsden.

      Also ironic, and not lost on Blake when she told him, was the fact that the money was doing exactly what the Eaton Estates investment was meant to do—feeding poor and disadvantaged children in Honduras.

      Blake had to cancel an appointment for drinks the last Tuesday in June. There’d been a fall at one of his sites and while the fault had clearly been a subcontractor’s not working to safety code, Blake had gone immediately to the hospital to sit with the young man’s pregnant wife.

      Arriving home a couple of hours earlier than planned to find what she’d expected to be an empty house blazing with lights, Juliet pulled the BMW into the carport and hurried inside. Other than Marcie’s morning sickness, life had been pretty glorious at the McNeil cottage now that school and Brownies were done, and Mary Jane could spend her days at home, at the studio with her aunt, at the office doing odd jobs for her mother and Duane Wilson, or with Donna Wilson.

      There were still moments when Mary Jane worried about her mother spending time with Blake Ramsden. Whenever the little girl knew Juliet had been with Blake, she’d crawled into bed with her mother that night. And Marcie had had some fairly alarming—to Juliet—moments of doubts about her decision to leave Maple Grove. Usually after a bad bout of throwing up. And Juliet—well, she was getting used to waiting out her own moments of doubt and guilt and secret longings, of which she was ashamed every time she came home to her single pregnant sister and sweet insecure daughter.

      But all things considered, the McNeil women living together was a successful arrangement.

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